An Oriole feeding in a tree here at the park. It's amazing the number of birds here, it's truly a beautiful oasis on the edge of the city.

We got a lot done today, made appointments with my doctor, the job boss at the house, the vet. We took Cuba in and got her cast off, she has been more miserable lately -it's really bugging her. She stands in front of us and just holds it out with the most pitiful look on her face. Plus, she is up and down all night and can't get comfortable. Tomorrow we take her back and they are taking some xrays to look again for a break. She's still limping with the cast off, I don't know if that's because it has been immobilized for 2 weeks or if it means it is still damaged. How in the world could she have hurt herself this bad just jumping up on the bed? It's a puzzle.

For years Mimi has been trying to get some good pictures of a Mot Mot. It's a gorgeous bird that often nests in the cenotes or caves with water in the Yucatan. They are also here at the park and today she got about a dozen pics of 4 of them. They are called Clock Birds in English, they pluck some of the feathers on their tails and are known for swinging their tails back and forth like a metronome.

We're leaving Wednesday to return to the beach for several weeks. I'm always a little sad to leave Merida, how attached I've become to this city. It will be nice to see our friends in Akumal though and I'm really excited about seeing my son. I'm a little excited about the new laptop he's bringing too! I got a Mac Powerbook Pro 15". It will run windows XP both in emulation and it will boot into it. That means my programs can be installed on the XP partition and I won't have to use this Mac mail program that I have resisted learning. I think I'll dump the Mac browser Safari as well, I've been using Firefox on Mimi's mac and it works fine. It's just a better browser for me.

This has been an unusual winter and spring, we're now on Norte #40 - these are cold storms that blow through bringing some rain and cooling the temps a lot. It's still warm here, in the high 70's (F) to low 80's but the over 100 degree temps that are normal for this time have not lasted more than a couple days. This is the first time I've paid attention to the weather reports and the storm numbers but I read that a normal winter has about 5 numbered nortes. All the papers say this means that May and June will be records for heat. The nortes have created some beautiful sunsets.