The birthday barbeque was a lot of fun. The first thing Mimi did was go over in the side yard and fill a bunch of water balloons. There were 3 friends with Gemini birthdays close together and we celebrated them all.

I took a lot of pictures but the ones I took inside didn't come out, Noel and Valerie will be soooo disappointed. Valerie is a photographer and she hates having her picture taken, Noel is her husband and he hates it too but probably for different reasons. My guess is if you are married to a photographer you get really sick of a camera pointed at you all the time.

I'm also disappointed that the one picture of Gage and his grandpa Sky (one of the geminis) was blurry. With my old eyes it looked so good in the camera.

However, I got this one of Diane, another of the Geminis, and Gage. Diane was showing him the wonders of water balloons, he caught on quick.

Great food, good people and lots of laughter. All birthdays should be like that.

We had a couple of days last week where the temperatures were around 117°, that slows you right down. Not a lot got done those days except laying around in the pool and on the couch in the AC.

Since then it's back down to 106° and it feels nice and cool. I don't think Mimi and I have to worry about losing our 'thin blood' before we return to the Yucatan in August. Even though this is a "dry heat" I think we will be well prepared for the heat and humidity of the Yucatan in the summer. I always forget to take a jacket when I go shopping - come on, who can remember a coat when it is over 100° - and I freeze trying to get the groceries I need and get back outside where it's warm. It's painful standing in the deli section with the coolers around you and I never go into the freezer area. That's also because if I bought anything frozen I'd have to buy ice and get the cooler out to get it home. Yep, our jeep does not have AC. I'm a real desert rat driving around out here with the windows down, I rarely see another car that isn't buttoned up.

Here's a last shot from the party, my niece Poppy, Gage's mother. Just because she is looking so wonderful and it is so nice to have her healthy and happy.

It's starting to get a little hot here in the desert. It got up to about 112° this afternoon. I've discovered that I'm OK up to 110° and even enjoy it as long as there is shade and a pool for an occasional dip. Over that though, it's just hot.

I don't know if it is the water in the pond warming up or the stars or what but there has been manic fish sex going on. Actually, it's more like a series of gang rapes. Not the best entertainment for me.

We have one little Wakin goldfish, she's (now I know she is a she) got an especially crooked tail. It's almost as though she is wearing a corset, a very tight corset that doesn't let her wag her tail much for swimming. That's a decided disadvantage when you are being endlessly chased by horny suitors whose idea of foreplay is to butt you in the sides as hard as they can. Escape is futile if you can't swim very well.

At one point last week, she was floating up to the surface on her side, which made it easier to see she was also missing some scales from the encounters. I netted her and kept her in a basket in the pond so they couldn't get to her. After a day, everyone seemed to have calmed down and I let her go. A couple days later I found her in the prime pot for the pump. She'd managed to squeeze down the bottom drain, take the A ride through the pipes and was spinning under suction in the small filter before the pump. Sheez! This time she had a missing tip on one fin. I was not amused but I put her back in the basket at the corner of the pond and stopped feeding the rest of the fish. I was hoping they'd get hungry and forget about sex. Hah!

She stayed there a week, I only fed her not the rest of the gang. Yesterday I released her again. I sure hope this is all over.

Aside from kinky fish sex and hot weather, about all that is going on has been internet shopping. Yes, what do the tough do when it is too hot to do anything else? Get on the net and go shopping! We now have $180 worth of Crocs on order, lots of odds and ends for the new pond next door, new shorts and tank tops, some tropical vines and ginger plants. I love internet shopping. I think one of the main things I miss when in Mexico is being able to order stuff online and have it delivered in a day or three. I try to make up for this deprivation when I'm in the US.

Tomorrow is a big day, it's Mimi's 45th birthday! Whoa! She's getting old! She was just a kid when I met her and now she's older than I was then...or something like that. No special plans but maybe a barbeque this weekend. I didn't get her anything. The only thing she mentioned wanting was a scooter of some sort but then she seemed to change her mind. She's hard to get anything for, forget shoes or shorts or clothes, she is pickier than Paris Hilton. Almost 17 years together and I wouldn't dare try and buy her any shoes or a pair of shorts.

This beautiful flower is on a plant called the Carrion Plant. I should have put a dime next to it but trust me, it is huge. The buds look like big ballons before they open. I planted it next to the patio here before I knew what it was, I just loved the primordial look of the flowers. Then I looked it up and it got its name because it exudes a scent like rotting meat that attracts flies which pollinate it. I can't really say that I can smell it but it certainly works as it almost always has 4 or 5 large flies crawling around in it. I've got to move it away from the patio but I do love the look of it.

Blogging about being stuck seems to have helped, I finally got going on this financial stuff yesterday. Collecting all the documents for the refinance of the duplex here in the Cove and emailing or faxing them to the mortgage company.

Ilene asked in my comments if maybe I wasn't sure I wanted to buy the house in Merida. That's not it, in fact I've already bought the house. It's paid in full, this rearranging I'm doing now is partly to pay for the renovations and partly because the loan I have here is converting to an ARM in August and the interest rate will shoot up.

So, I need to do the refi anyway and selling the house in Petaluma is something I feel good about as well. We're selling it to the long time tenants there, they have been fantastic tenants and so I offered it to them. I'm selling it for a little less than I probably could get for it but I won't have to pay the real estate commission, I won't have to paint it and fix it and lose a couple months rent doing it and the market is such that it could take awhile to sell. So, I feel good about it and I think they do too. All around good karma.

It's just the sorting through papers and finding all the docs that gets me down. I do get a panic feeling sometimes that I am spending capitol but if I really look at it I am buying property in Mexico that so far has appreciated for me as well as the property I own in California. I've had the condo in Akumal for over 10 years and it is now worth about 2.5 times what I paid for it. I'm in Mexico more than I'm in California and it is where my interests are. So, moving some investments there makes sense. I have paid attention to the advice of my friend Bob, an ex-pat retired banker, not to invest more in Mexico than I could stand to lose. It would hurt a lot to lose what I've got there but it wouldn't wipe me out.

Of course, there are always expenses that you hadn't planned on that crop up. The transmission on our RV is one of those. Worst case scenario we will have to buy a new one for about $4500. Not good but we do have 97k miles on it and we have towed our jeep for almost all of them and every year we cross both the Rocky's and the Sierra Madre. Also we just got a big bill for title conversion on the condo in Akumal. I had planned to renovate the kitchen and bathroom and put new floor tiles there but now that will have to wait. I'm lucky that I do have the resources to do these things and so I'm thankful.

For us, the good news is that we don't have to sell a house we live in and pack and move all the stuff. We've lived in our RV now for almost 6 years, 3 years ago we made that big jump by getting rid of most of the stuff and selling the house that had been home. All we have now are rental properties, no emotional investment and no stuff to go through and get rid of or move. We don't even stay at our duplex when we are here in Cat City, we have an rv space on the lot next door to our closest friend Country but it belongs to her. I may do a lot of gardening here and pond building but it's not mine, that's a great feeling actually. I feel a little like Johnny Appleseed, spreading gardens and ponds around and leaving them behind.

I seem to be frozen, I can't seem to do anything I need to do. I think the main thing I did yesterday was charge my cell phone! The battery ran out 4 days ago and I just turned it off so I wouldn't have to hear the beep. OK, I did a few other things like go to the grocery store, make a meatloaf for dinner, make up some dog food, pick snails out of my pond, feed the fish, float in the pool, take a picture of this tropical lily bloom, worry about why I wasn't doing more...

It's getting financial stuff done that always freezes me in place. I know I want to do these things, I just panic at actually signing the papers or making the calls or mailing off the documents. What's up with that? I need to get over this.

We had some really heavy winds the last few days, gusts to 75mph the news said. Probably not that bad up here in the Cove but usually the winds don't effect the Cove much and this time the gusts were amazing. When it started, Mimi was gone and Diane was working next door and I just grabbed onto the edge of the awning and held on. There were calm spots between gusts that I could let go but it was about 15 minutes before Diane happened to walk over and I yelled for her to help me put the awning in.

At one point several of the big banana stalks fell over, one of them had bananas growing on it. Mimi and I tied up the other stalk that had bananas and it stayed up and seems to be fine.

I'm hoping I get more motivated soon, today I actually turned the phone on.... I haven't listened to the messages yet though so if are one of them, be patient.