We've been watching this mother hummingbird sit on her nest outside Country's patio for a couple weeks. Mimi finally got this pic of mom and baby in the nest.

Lots of bird activity, spring is sprung. We're really loving the new (last fall) camera with the 12x zoom, she couldn't have gotten any of these pics with the old camera.

The day after that first pic, the baby finally flew the nest. He landed on the ground and mom buzzed him angrily until he got it together and flew up into the tree. Once up there, she fed him.

When we arrived here from LA, we stopped down by the highway to get propane before coming up the hill. Mimi said she heard a noise from the engine. I just don't hear the stuff she hears, this happens all the time with us. She'll say "can't you hear that ping?" No, I can never hear the ping. Anyway, on the way up the hill by herself - I was driving the jeep - it got worse and she said she thought it was something with the transmission. I guess I just didn't want to hear about it so I didn't ask anymore. Well, a few days ago she mentions that we are going to have to move out of the RV, into Country's guest room (which BTW is being renovated and isn't yet habitable), get a tow truck for the RV...WTF!!!!?? I had a small fit. I just did not get that we were looking at a new transmission or a very expensive repair and having to have it towed to get this done.

I do have a bad habit of shooting the messenger, in the end I had to take myself off to Linen's and Things and go sheet shopping. Retail therapy. Then I had a couple rum and cokes. Then I got used to the idea and decided that while it is a big drag, it is not all that serious in the grand scheme of life.

So, we're looking forward to moving out of Tortuga for an unknown number of days (NOT) and possibly many thousands of dollars. I was thinking the other night that if I have to pack my stuff I'd really rather be getting on a plane. I tried to convince Mimi that this would be a perfect time to go to Buenas Aires for a week. She was not buying it. At least I got new sheets out of all this, probably that will be the best part of the whole experience.

Here'a a picture of a Kestrel that has been hunting around the yard. He has the Mockingbird in a complete dither and the Mockingbird chases the Kestrel constantly, must be a nest nearby.

We're now looking at buying a small enclosed cargo trailer and towing it south in August, leaving the Jeep up at our duplex here. That opens up a lot of ideas about what to take now and what should wait. I'm going to look for a storage unit in Mérida when we get there so I can keep some stuff until it is needed. We also have to stop on the way south to pick up the light fixtures I bought in Guadalajara and the copper sink in Michoacán. Who knows, if I had a trailer to fill, I could really do some shopping. Nah! I think I'll buy a transmission instead.

The weather has been wonderful, hot days and warm nights. I love sitting by the pond at night with the underwater lights, especially since it is in the 80's. Not a lot else to report, we've had lots of dinners with friends, lots of laying around in the pool or in the shade, a little work on the pond and garden... lazy days.

It's been ponds, ponds, ponds this week in Cat City. I've cleaned up the big pond and we tore out the little pond over at Country's.

Diane is renovating Country's guest room and bath and digging up the pond in her patio in her 'spare' time. Getting the preform pond out was big, all the plants had to be potted and moved, the fish put in a temporary home, the dirt dug out, the form lifted and moved and now more digging.

I have a plan in my head for the new pond and Diane understands me so we're zooming along. I think it will be more of a tiled fountain with fish, Country has a lot of beautiful mexican tiles over in the workshop that we're going to use.

The other exciting thing that happened is that the architect in Mérida sent me preliminary plans for the house. They are really basic with no detail like dimensions and wiring and stuff but it is wonderful to see a plan and to see how it flows. I'm sending off a list of things to change, I'm trying to keep it simple and not overwhelm him. But, you know, you just can't have a master bathroom that can only be accessed by walking through the closet. So, there will be some changes even at this level.

If you want to see them I've got them up briefly. This is the downstairs and this is the upstairs, you can click the image to enlarge it. The original building is from the street through the kitchen. The terrace and all of the upstairs is new construction.

We finally got going out of Petaluma and headed down highway 101. In my youth, there was no interstate 5 running north/south in the central valley of California. All traffic went up and down the state on 101. Santa Barbara, my home town, is on 101. LA is on 101. San Francisco is on 101. So, a thousand years ago when I was a bartender at Maud's in the Haight Ashbury of SF, I had to write a short autobiography for an anniversary party. Mine was "I've lived my life on highway 101". In those days I not only lived in cities along that wondrous road but I spent a huge amount of time traveling back and forth on it. It did sometimes feel like I lived on that highway. Now, I-5 is so much faster that we rarely take 101. It's a trip down memory lane for me when we do. I remember when the road north of King City was lined with huge eucalyptus trees as a windbreak. I was amazed to see that many of them are still standing, some with trunks 5'- 6' in diameter.

Our first stop was another trip back in time. Last winter while I was in Akumal I got an email from a long ago friend, Rachel. It was wonderful to hear from her and we have been emailing since. She now lives with her husband Bill in Paso Robles - along highway 101!

We pulled into the local WalMart and Rachel came down for a visit. It was so great, she is still beautiful, still funny and happy and full of great stories. We had a good time, she was amazed that RVers can stay at WalMart's. The next morning we went to breakfast with her and her husband Bill and then went up to see their house on a hill overlooking town. Beautiful house, they are doing some remodeling and it is going to be even more beautiful. Rachel weaves and works in fabric and yarn making incredible hats and clothes and art. Bill is a painter and his pictures are really wonderful as well. What a joy to reconnect with your past and it is even better.

From old friends to new friends. We left Paso Robles and drove on down to Camarillo to see our new friends Linda and Mando. We met them at the 50th anniversary rally for our type of RV, Lazy Daze, in Cheyenne, Wyoming last summer. We really enjoyed them and didn't want to lose contact. We parked at a little dog park right below their house. We had a great dinner, lots of talk and got to meet their darling grandkids and their parents. Mando made us waffles in the morning and we got a pic of him with his granddaughter Emily, Linda was not having any pics taken in the morning! I can relate.

From Camarillo we drove a couple hours into LA to meet my son and his wife for a Mother's Day lunch. Pretty clever of me, eh? Show up on Mother's Day! We parked the rig in front of Dupre's office right at the 405 and the 10, which was easy to get to and easy for us to get on the 10 afterwards to head to Cathedral City. Plus, I got to see his office with his name over the door, makes a mom proud!

It was a neat office, I like the industrial, loft look and they had fantastic desks and tables made from huge cable channel with glass on top. Very high tech, which is suitable as they are a high tech company.

We met Ginny at a Brasilian restaurant and had a great meal and lots of talk. They showed me pics from their recent trip to our condo in Akumal. I think they finally realize what a great perk it is to have a caribbean condo always available to them. I've been trying to tell them to go down there more often, I think it worked this time.

Ginny's parents live in England and a lot of their travel has been over there to see her family. She says she is going to check on flights from London to Cancun and see if they can't meet at the condo. She's not only an incredible athlete, she's smart too.

Have I told you Internet, that my DIL Ginny came in 8th in her age bracket at a recent huge triathalon in central Calif? There were 8000 competitors total. She's amazing. Dupre said that she would swim the entire width of the bay in front of our condo over and over every day. Awesome!

Sunday evening we were back at our spot in Cathedral City, we call it Baddog Parking. I got up on Monday and spent the day in the pond. We're finally warm, temps are perfect right now, about 100* in the afternoon but cool at night. I'm still sleeping with the down comforter but we either have to get up by 8am or turn on the AC since our bed is right under a hatch and we have no shade. The last 2 nights I vowed to just get up when it got warm in the morning but the lazy part of me turned on the AC and slept another couple hours. Maybe tomorrow...

Odd considering that I'm sicker than I've been in 2 years, but yesterday I passed my annual physical with good numbers. First the sick part, I got the flu while we were in Stockton and it settled in my chest and I've been coughing and hacking and snorfling for a week. I'm drinking lots of water, boiling more water and breathing the fumes, taking the expectorant pills 3 times a day and the super knock-you-on-your-ass cough syrup at night. Still, I'm not sleeping well or long. I start coughing and can't stop until I get up and breathe steam or pace around or something. Another variation is I cough and it sends a hot knife into my sinus in my head and then I can't sleep from the pain until I get up and breathe steam. The new cough syrup puts me to sleep but it also makes me slightly nauseous all day.

I had used the call back doctor when we first got to Petaluma and he called in some light weight cough syrup but when I saw my doctor on Thursday he gave me the big guns. He also sent me off for the usual blood and fluids tests, pounded, listened, etc. My blood pressure remains good to low, 90 over 50 something, my cholesterol is 98, all the other numbers are good. Yeah, I'm healthy. Argh! I feel like shit!

So, I've been napping during the day and getting up for an hour or so several times a night. Even the dogs are confused. They like the nap in the daytime bit but they also like to sleep straight through the night, I'm exhausting them.

Even with all these distractions, we have been getting a lot done. Mimi's Mac powerbook died while we were in Akumal, well to be more precise, the hard drive died and (shhhhh) I had no backup less than a year old. So, I took it off to the Apple store in Corte Madera and bought an external hard drive, hooked it up right there at the genius bar and they booted it from one of their machines. I got most everything copied off of it and then turned it in to them. They called the next day! and it was done. It has a new hard drive, new operating system and everything else needs to be replaced. During one of my middle of the night ramble and steam sessions, I started moving things and when it wanted to update portions of the operating system I clicked OK without even thinking. Wrong! We got FAPPED!!

Hughes (from now on called the Huge Corporation from Hell or HCH) is the company that we get our satellite internet from and they have a wonderful little tool which enables them to sell high and buy low by not allowing their customers to use very much of their internet thus they can buy very little bandwidth from the expensive satellites and sell that little bit to the starving customers for a whole lot. No one in their right mind would use satellite internet if they had any reasonable alternative, thus all of their customers are starving for bandwidth. They call this nifty program FAP, and in true double speak that stands for Fair Access Policy. The other ingenious part of this policy is that they do not reveal the workings of it so you can't predict when you will get fap'd and you can't predict when the fap'ing will go away. It's truly diabolical. So, for perhaps 24 hours my connection slowed to speeds well below an old 300 baud modem. Do I know how long this continued? Of course not, I am not allowed access to such secret workings, I only know that I was FAP'd, that it took 5 minutes to download one email without pictures and that at some point over 24 hours later the speed picked up a little. By then of course, it seemed quite peppy but in fact it was not back to "normal" speeds and my FAPing was only dwindling, not gone.

As Pavlov proved many years ago, if you don't know when you will get hit and you don't know how bad it will be and you only know it will happen if you actually use the service you are paying for, you start to cut way back on the use in the hopes of avoiding the next electrical shock treatment. Perfect! Now the customers police themselves and don't use even the measly amount they are allotted because the 24+ hours of shock treatment are so horrible. So, I haven't been online for a day or so.

Back to good news... we need to sell the house we own in Petaluma to finance the renovation in Merida. We have the best tenants the world has ever known living there and so we went to see them the other night and offered to sell the house to them if they wanted it. They want it. Yay! That means we only have to agree on a price and get a lawyer to draw it all up. We even agree on a lawyer as many years ago when we were looking for tenants a lawyer friend of ours recommended this couple. So, we are all friends of this lawyer, we all trust her and we agreed to pay her to do the work. All that is up in the air is will she accept this great job.

So, in spite of being sick I've been declared healthy, the house has sold itself and we don't have to go through months of painting and listing and open houses, the Mac has a new brain and all was not lost, and once we see the tax lady we will be free to leave. Of course, it finally warmed up a bit today after a week of rain, cold winds, fog, clouds, and blood sucking insects. Some of you may remember how much I love finding ticks anywhere around me. A few nights ago I found one busy attaching itself to the top of my head. A lot of trauma resulted. Loud voices, tweezers, gagging sounds, flinging of all clothes and bedding... all this was the result. So far, no more have been discovered but no one - including the 4 legged ones who luckily enough have a liquid spread on their necks so the blood sucking creatures don't attach to them - is allowed to venture behind the RV into the green and beautiful field. I want to know if I can have the liquid applied to my neck if I swear never to shower again, it might be worth it.