I'm on to Plan B.

Plan A of ignoring the chest gunk and thinking I was getting better only worked for a few days and then I got worse.

So, Saturday I started taking the antibiotics again and that evening I went and got a chest xray. You won't believe how easy this is down here. I walked into the Hospiten (private hospital in Playa del Carmen) at about 6:30pm with no appointment and told them I wanted a chest xray to be read by my doctor. I filled out a short form, waited a minute or two and was taken back to a very modern xray and cat scan facility. I put on the usual paper gown, they took one picture, I waited while they checked to see if it was good, got dressed, was handed my xray in an envelope and went back to the lobby. It was that fast. I got my bill which was $330 pesos (about $30us), paid it and we were out the door in about a half hour.

Never, never look at your own xray if you don't know what you are looking at. They are spooky. I kind of hate seeing my insides anyway but this was creepy. First, I was all 'look at all that black, why is it all black?' Then, I spotted some white and that freaked me out even more. I put it back in the envelope and I'm not looking at it again.

I do feel better, just not great. So, Saturday night after we got home we went to Tulum to dinner with our friends Paula and Sandy. We all decided to go to the Argentine restaurant. All of us had been there before but either we'd never been for dinner or they have about doubled their prices for high season. I'm just not going to pay $250 pesos ($23.25us) for a steak dinner in Mexico at a nondescript restaurant in Tulum. Not and sit in plastic chairs next to the sidewalk while a soccer game plays on TV behind me. We waffled around and finally ordered mostly appetizers and pasta. I wasn't even thrilled with those, lesson learned. Don't assume that a place that is good and reasonable in October will be the same in February.

Tonight we had a lot of fun and a wonderful dinner at the home of 2 gay guys we just met. They own a 4 unit house here and have been coming here for years but we'd never met them. Last week a maid that used to work for me asked me to translate for her because her new employers didn't speak Spanish and she doesn't speak English. That's how I met these guys. It's all working out well and the best part is we really like them and hope to see a lot more of them.

While at the dinner party tonight, someone suggested that my getting this chest thing here every year could be mold in the AC. I'm going to check on it although I don't get it whenever I'm here but I do seem to get it once every year. We sleep with the AC on because I thought it would help dry out my lungs and because with 3 dogs on the bed it gets hot. I think I started getting sick while we were driving over here from Merida this time so it probably isn't related.

We've also been having a lot of problems with our satellite internet. First we got fap'd because our neighbors didn't realize they meter your downloads and they were using their slingbox in Canada to watch TV. We got that straightened out, they felt horrible but they didn't know. They were really nice and brought up a bottle of rum, love that!

But, now that we aren't fap'd, we are still dropping the connection every minute or so. The wind has been blowing a little but I don't think this has happened before with this much wind. I don't know. It's very frustrating as you have to wait for everything until the connection comes back up and then you get one page and it goes down again.

I'm sure it is going to take me forever to post this...