Although concentration on getting my house sold this year is paramount, I visited a house on the coast road that is up for sale by its Mexican owner. He is asking more than I am at the moment.
I shot a couple of façades of the house but I am not hired to shoot it nor am I involved in its sale. I did enjoy this little detail — a personal aside in the business of living.
I removed myself from my car not to far from Chetumal’s museum and marketplace. One direction offered a decent fruteria. The other took me to this fence where I could meet new friends, these figures holding on by sheer will and the winds of change blew Christmas away.
A picture from my garden as a post for today. Appropriate for Sunday.
We’ve been there to visit these gaseous giants. We, the race of humans, that is who sent out a robot spacecraft and sat back to await the pictures. NASA
provides such great images from Astronomy Pictue of the Day as well as the NASA site.
The Jupiter image is wonderful because of its 3D quality.
The Saturn pictue with its rings because the robot camera and its earth-based controllers didn’t just go the distance and send back a snapshot. The image reminds me of Steichen or Weston in its 
planes, muted color palette and “modern” composition. Wait! It is a NASA picture from space.
This is the quick visit to a nursery on the highway from Bacalar to Chetumal. There is a nonchalant elegance to the mash of tropical plants — some for sale and some growing prettily that come with a quizzical look. “Of course they are not for sale. They are growing. Yes. It is the only one we have.” So goes the business acumen of many. It is not a commercial society, not totally comfortable with the concept of capitalism.
A NEW GALLERY OF PICTURES FROM A RECENT TRIP TO A LOCAL NURSERY HAS BEEN POSTED.
This is the newly-painted barda (perimeter wall) with the steel gates (porton) that help to shield the house and property from the street.
It has been so long since I have been posting to this and to my other blogs and sites that it is hard to get over whatever block has kept me from it. One way is these short posts and pictures. The pictures are important to me and have become so much easier since I bought my first digital camera in September.
My velador — gardener/guard/assistant — pushing me to get out of the house more than I have been tempted me with a nursery in the jungle nearby. He wanted to do some planting in the “front” of the house facing the lagoon. The winds and slight salinity of the air may make it hard to grow things there but we chose bougainvillea (bugambilla in Spanish) for its sturdiness and beautiful blooms. We motored over to the newish nursery (vivero) and then creeped home with the Jetta laden with plants.
A gallery of the pictures is being readied or I will post some more here but, as a teaser, is the young son of the Mayan family who tend the plants. It is not mall-world in L.A. This lad was as fascinated by the pictures floating in the screen on the back of my Nikon D40x as he was by the old foreigner who spoke with an accent. Of course, this campesino Mayan family did not exactly speak the king’s Spanish either. Their local accent was thick. I collected some plants and some images.
Doesn’t that sound great? Apple could announce their new addition to the attempts to design the digital alternative to our beloved books, newspapers and magazines that are held in the lap, folded into subway squares and tossed away into the street, used to wrap fish or, trust the British, wrapped around fish and chips. But Steve Jobs hasn’t tackled the project. At least so far.
So I made my own.
Or, rather, I found something wonderful to do with my (now) slow iBook 900 ghz G3 computer. It was my first and stood up to my errors and ignorance when I first bought it in 2003. It still hums along minus its built-in 56K modem which was blown out by some power surge from the wondrous quality of Mexican utilities — CFE (the state electric company) or Telmex (Carlos Slim’s monopoly telecommunications giant). It has been replaced by the new MacBook Pro 2.16 Intel Core 2 Duo I bought last January which is even more perfect. The G3 seemed slow and its screen is both smaller and reproduces less well.
It was still too disloyal and wasteful to treat it as a doorstop but too foreign (Mexico is still enmeshed in Windows systems with HP and Dell high on the list of appliances in use) to sell here. So I was keeping it charged and its software up to date but not finding a lot to do with it that I wouldn’t rather do on the MacBook Pro.
Now that I upgraded its Panther system (10.3.9) to Tiger (10.4.11) it is even slower but much more useful. The recent Java updates made the screen images far more satisfying than I thought they could be. I began to look for what my old friend would do well that didn’t require blazing speed or state of the art technology.
Then I opened a pdf book and downloaded Adobe’s Digital Editions reader. They both work and require no massive speed. ITunes works fine and Apple has kept iTunes and QuickTime up to date for Panther and Tiger systems. So my old friend can show me books and present audio recordings (with headphones since the built-in speakers are laughably bad). It will even play a movie. The screen may not equal the MBP but it doesn’t have to to play, for instance, the free and legal downloads in the public domain from the Internet Archive.
It found its job and now hangs out on the table where a book used to be propped on something to be read when passing by or eating alone. Since my eyes have deteriorated badly in old age and both had cataracts removed in the past year, it does something all those lovely books can’t — changes text size at will. It can be set to show text at a height that I can read it from across the table, across the room. OK. It isn’t wireless (but neither is Mexico) and it is the model with a 14 inch screen. The 12“ would have been a bit better for this and fit more easily in the lap but it is the one I have.
An old Apple is not a bad Apple. Don’t contaminate the environment with old computers thrown out; put them to good use. Read a digital book today.
It is possible to find great uses for aging digital appliances.
