Swollen Feet

Today I did very little, and by "very little" I pretty much mean "nothing".

By the early afternoon my previously cute little ankles had swollen up, surpassing the descriptive noun "cankle" to achieve "two massive slabs of fatty meat". So I spent the remainder of the day on the couch with my feet up and on ice. I said I was "watching" the store for my mother-in-law, but luckily no one wanted to buy anything from me, because I really wasn't keen on getting up. Not to sell a comb for two pesos.

I'm hoping this means the baby's coming soon, because, while willing to sacrifice a lot for this kid, I would like my ankles back soon.

More on Mice and Rats

So the neighbors have a trash heap in their yard, basically all the trash they can’t burn, like an old toilet and a wire rack. This is cool, because it makes for a terrific breeding ground for rats, and we all love rats. Love them.

A couple of days ago Hernan killed one in the morning, and then three more that afternoon. Huge suckers. And my mother-in-law set out some poison, and, judging by the lingering smell, took down a few more.

I think this has been a fun experience for my visiting mother. She asked whether there wasn’t a local agency we could report our neighbors to. Ha!

The grossest part is that then the neighbors had a birthday party in their backyard, but the poisoned rats are still buried somewhere in the trash heap, stinking up the place. Foul.

On a side note, I wasn’t able to kill the cockroach I found in the kitchen this morning. It scurried away. I’m a wus.

Yucky.

5:30 AM Rockets

5:30 in the morning. There are rockets going off outside. Really, really loud rockets.

This is part of the festivities - It's time to celebrate San Juan Cosalá with a week and a half of revelry.

I'm all for revelry. I'm not for 5:30 AM rockets outside my house.

Early morning explosions (to wake people for mass?) are my new reality through the 24th.

BANG!

Mice and Rats

Mice and Rats, like cockroaches, scorpions, and gas truck jingles, are an unavoidable part of life in our neighborhood. Since my in-laws’ place is open to the outside, they just come scurrying in from the street or the neighbor’s yard. There’s nothing to stop them. It doesn’t matter whether the house is clean or not; they just come right in, to see what’s shaking, I guess.

Last night we had a little mouse in the shop my mother-in-law runs out of the front of the house. Hernan is the family’s designated rodent killer, but last night it was my mother-in-law who got it. The mouse came in from the street and ran right at her, she jumped and landed right on top of it, killing the mouse, and causing the two of us to squeal for the next five minutes. Yep, like little school girls.

We made Hernan carry the dead mouse away, though.

Me. Vs. Lead

Sometimes I think the US takes safety regulations a little too far. I sometimes laugh at plastic coffee lid warnings that the contents may be hot or at the declaration that plastic bags are not toys. Sometimes I wonder if we’re squeezing out personal responsibility. I remember riding a train in Hungary and being astonished that the train door was ajar while we went speeding through the countryside. After registering my initial culturally based shock, I decided that, really, if you’re going to run up to the open door of a rapidly moving train you can’t blame anyone else if you then fall out.

Mexican safety standards are a whole ‘nother bag of fish, though, an almost empty bag it sometimes seems. I like that people are expected to have a little common sense, and that they have to take some responsibility, but I think the lack of safety standards goes way beyond a question of responsibility.

Who isn’t taking responsibility, or course, is everyone who gets away with creating hazards for everyone else, and that bums me out. Living here has made me realize how much I appreciate a lot of the safety regs we have up North, especially the environmental ones. It turns out I’m a big fan of vehicle emissions regulation, hazardous material dumping prohibitions, and product ingredient labeling laws, and, not to be overlooked, the enforcement of all of these.

This brings me to my ongoing battle against lead, just one of the many funks I face down here. Lead, see, can cause brain damage and other health problems and is particularly nasty to the developing brains of fetuses, babies, and children. At least that’s the way I’ve heard it told. You might understand, then, why I’m not a big fan of, say, lead paint, which, while it still exists in the US, is no longer legal to sell. Down here, though, no such prohibition exists. Lead paint, varnishes, sealers, and the like are everywhere.

This has been an ongoing battle because, building a house as we are, we’ve had need to purchase a lot of paints, varnishes, and other house-building-materials-that-could-harm-the-spawn. I try to be careful, but it’s a difficult battle sometimes.

I once asked a vendor for help finding a lead-free wood varnish. He tried to talk me into buying the lead-based option, big and obviously pregnaz as I was… even after I explained that the health risk is both high enough and well documented enough to have made it banned in the US since the 90s.

“But this one will work so much better” didn’t win me over, so I left with the crappy water-based varnish that, it’s true, doesn’t work great, but (I hope) doesn’t harm our health.

What makes avoiding lead paint so much more difficult is that a lot of products don’t contain any kind of ingredient information on the labels. I’ve also found that I can’t just look up this information online, because many Mexican manufacturers don’t even have websites. Finally, the average person doesn’t seem to think it’s a big deal, so I get no sympathy or help, except from Hernan, who, it seems, is pretty much the only one who believes me.

The lead-battle is just the one we fight the most often. There are other battles, like asbestos roofs and water tanks, but they come up less frequently.

Consumer education would be a great thing.

Now, the US is far from a model of product safety, but, by comparison…I guess it kind of is. I suppose I’m pretty pro-regulation.

Laundry

Sometimes I like to blog about my exciting jet set lifestyle. I like the whole world to know how adventurous and interesting I am. I like to make you all envious. I like to make you all exclaim “She sure seizes the day!”

Yesterday I seized the day by washing seven loads of laundry.

“Seven loads!” you might vociferate, “that’s sheer craziness!” Some might say the nesting instinct finally got me, but I disagree (because the rest of the house is still a mess). I think I was just lazy for a really long time, and then got stuck waiting for a sawdust-free day.

We’ve been building a wooden deck (and by “we”, I mean Hernan), and there’s been a good deal of sanding going on. The result is that we’ve been living for some time now in a world of sawdust. This is a better smelling world than we normally live in (I'll take sawdust smell over burning plastic smell any day), but it’s not a great world for hanging up the wash.

Hanging our clothes to dry isn’t so bad. Besides using no electricity, it’s convenient because the clothes usually dry rather quickly, except at night or when it’s raining. The downside is that everything comes off the line smelling like car exhaust and dust, because we live right on the highway. And if you drop any item, it becomes immediately filthy. And occasionally a bird will poop on something. But mostly it’s pretty convenient, so long as I remind Hernan and his brother not to cover the clothes with sawdust, concrete, paint, or whatever it is they’re using that day.

That’s the news from here. Thanks for tuning in.

Parking Garage Coolness

Today we borrowed a car and drove up to Guadalajara for a doctor appointment. (All's well, by the by.) We also wanted to drive out to the birth center again to refresh our memories on how to get there. I told Hernan that I'm not interested in getting lost in Guadalajara (as we always do) while I'm pushing a big old baby out. It just wouldn't be cool. So we had a few errands to run.

BUT, the coolest discovery today was made after parking the car in a garage downtown. Walking out of the garage, we discovered you can get down to lower levels via POLE!

Yes, my friends, fireman poles, in a parking garage. Too cool.

The poles are right next to the spiral staircase you could take instead (as if!). Not only are poles more fun than stairs, they make for a quick escape, which can be useful when one is being chased through a parking garage by anything that would have trouble going down a pole, like bears on unicycles, or alligators, or armless pod people.

Zombie monkeys would probably get you, though.

Still, how fun is that?

Home Sweet Jungle Gym

The construction site that is my home has returned to its former chaotic state after a brief reprieve. While Hernan had work outside of the home for a few weeks, the place got tidied up a bit, but now he’s back in full force building a wooden deck and trying to get it done before my mother arrives… and before the baby arrives. That’s right: the race is on! How many fix-up project can we start and finish before jr. jumps on the scene? Bets?

So now, when I leave my little upstairs apartment to go downstairs to my in-laws’ place, I have to traverse an obstacle course of beams, wooden planks and scraps, power tools, cords, saws, nails, screws, levels, and other sundry objects of constructiony charm. I’m just a nine month pregnaz acrobat.

Let me see if I can explain. So, we’re building on top of my in-laws' place, a little casita of our own. This is because I’m American, and I want my “own” place. While our little casita isn’t as removed as my preference would have it (say, down the street), it's made my life a lot more comfortable as we have been able to build it.

We still really do live with my in-laws. I get in “trouble” if I don’t spend enough time downstairs, for example, and we eat all our meals downstairs with the family. Rather than saying we have our "own" place, it's more like an extra-fancy upstairs bedroom with it’s own bathroom and kitchenette.

When exiting our place, we had to immediately take four (nowhere near up to code) steps down to the slopey roof that has been our “patio”. Then we would walk a few feet across the slopey roof to the steep, metal “staircase” (ladder) that takes us downstairs. To get to Hernan’s little brother’s bedroom, which is also upstairs, we would go down those first steps, up and across the slopey roof, and then up one big step to the not-slopey roof and enter his bedroom through a door there. So his room is at almost the same level as our place, but you have to do some up and down work to get there.

Since my mother is coming out to visit next week and will be staying in my brother-in-law’s bedroom, and because it would be chill to have a non-sloping patio, Hernan felt it was really important to make a level patio over the slopey roof, such that the ups and downs and tricky dance moves that are currently required would be reduced to maybe an easy step or two.

SO, the construction site has returned. It's a good challenge. If I should ever be on one of those physical challenge shows, in which the contestants have to scale walls and jump across slippery, floating foam pads, and other ridiculousness, and all the contestants are preggers, I'll totally win.