The great chain of cacophony meets the green-zone

First of all, for you chronoastes, we're at DAY31 as of this writing. Friday, Feb 8th, 2019. Yes, a full lunar cycle has spun overhead as we mark the halfway point of the second temp lodgings, our upper Obraje exile, as it were. Will we, at long last, actually be in our you've-got-to-be-shittin'-me-it's-still-not-habitable-yet home this time next week? What happened with the stuff from NY in exile jail-break? Did the perdido-en-espacio appliances ever make it in from Liverpool? Hold your caballos for we'll get to the week's achievements, disappointments, and (I know, they shouldn't be by now) surprises in a bit, but first we thought we'd introduce you to a very peculiar sonic rhythm that Jackie has oh so perceptively discovered here on at the corner of Juan Jose' Torres Landa and the empty lot with the tiny bodega that always has a baby wandering around at the rear.

Let's begin at bedtime. After snuggling-up on the most uncomfortable couch in the western hemisphere in front of my laptop to watch the latest parcelled-out installment of Victoria followed by at least three eps of Brooklyn 99, we know it's time to retire to the upstairs rear bedroom when a cadre of local teens begin their voluble socialization directly beneath the living room window, usually around 11:00pm. As we snuggle into our pushed-together twins for some possible i-reading followed by hoped-for brief oblivion, the first chorus strikes up from a couple of the local canine population as they  begin their almost asthmatic stichomythia from the rubble-ized empty lot. The duet is soon joined by others of their almost comically mixed bred ilk farther afield but still within the colonia and definitely our earshot. Soon their call and response routine melds into the drowsy night background until one unfortunately confused rooster decides, by damn it's dawn at about 1:30am. He finally gets the picture by 2:00am when there is no response from any other rooster in the state of Guanajuato and finally relative quiet and blessed sleep descends. The properly socialized roosters start in earnest, however, about 5:30am soon followed by San Miguel's famed church bell arithmetic the following hour. Finally, it's time to wipe the too little sleep from our eyes and the plugs from our ears and greet another impossibly beautiful high desert mid-winter morning, however, when the mice in the bedroom ceiling start their own insistently scratchy ablutions.

It's taken a solid week, but we found our place in the upper Obraje's sonic chain of being. Upon coming down to the rental kitchen every rodent dancing morning, I open the shutters to the Juan Jose Torres Landa street below and fire-up BBC Radio Three on my portable bluetooth speaker and grace my temporary neighbors with a bit of Elgar as they wend their way to school from the empty-lot with baby bodega. Im sure they'll miss us after next Friday. Or maybe not.

OK, you may now loosen the reigns on Trigger as I will now attempt to share some much anticipated, I hate to call it, progress on our project cum adventure cum what doesn't kill you, makes you bla, bla, late middle age experience. First of all, I got a haircut finally. 30 pesos. That's approx a buck fifty for my estudounidense amigos. I figure that price is perfectly commensurate with the amount of actual pelo I have that needs corte, so I guess, psychically speaking, I'm in the right place after all. Secondly, we managed to get a full tank of gas at the Pemex on Carretera a Dolores Hidalgo with only about a fifteen minute wait, so it seems the new president's anti-hijacking of petrol pipeline gas crisis has finally abated here. In the one-step-forward and two back category, unfortunately, was today's development that after having barged into CIBanco earlier this week to demand and finally get (yes!) a checkbook and an activated debit card to my peso account, I was informed that the account and the two thousand pesos in it were frozen because, yes, let's all say it together, HQ didn't believe my signature. I don't know. It's like some bizarre revenge from Sister Rita who could never get me to care about my penmanship in the fourth grade. You guys got any ideas on how to solve this Groundhog's day dilemma, I'm open to suggestions. Just don't ask me to write you a check in pesos for your help.

Wait, what? These are not the hotly pressing plot-lines of our adventure to which you were looking for resolution in this post? Ok, yes, we managed to spirit away the entire NY possession cache from Magic Marcos' pit-bull and Nicaraguan guarded storage bodega on Monday and deposit the entire haul in the not-quite-completed-but-completed-enough studio of our Casa 9. It's amazing what sticky problems a couple of hundred bucks and two bueys with a moving truck can accomplish here. We had earlier convinced Valente to finally put the locks we bought at Don Pedro's on the front door and the door to the studio that only about three dozen underpaid and overworked workmen have duplicate keys to, so we're good. Finally! Victory! Of course, there's still the issue of the missing items from the move that Jackie and Marcos have continued to battle over via What's App. Stay-tuned for further developments on that front but I suppose the big plot-twist this week was the unannounced and completely arbitrary establishment of El Rincon's  Green-Zone and how its overnight appearance set-up a long anticipated face-to-face show-down between The Shade and X-Acto tomorrow morning at the construction sight.

You see, it seems that the rest of El Rincon's alter cocker denizens were none-too-happy when their street was opened up to extend access to our supposed to be finished by now and is pretty close so what's the big deal house as it also opened them up to a view of the truly chaotic construction site of the other six, supposed to be only three, houses and complained to El Jefe Arqitecto. As a matter of fact our construction contract has us being shielded from just this mess too so you can imagine our shock n awe early one morning as we were stopped outside a towering, padlocked and barbed-wired fence at the edge of our house. It was like Fallujah and we were outside the green zone. This really meant WAR! We demanded an audience with Luis "X-Acto" Sanchez Renero who had stopped communicating with us in September, once we found out that he had decided to build three more houses directly adjacent to ours. That was three more than was specified in our agreement. Anyway, stay-tuned for the results of  our Saturday morning massacre.

In the meantime, dear bloggerphiles, don't for a minute think that all these villainous machinations has slowed The Source-er's unremitting pursuit of design dominance. Her achievements in the midst of ridiculous odds and a cobblestone induced fall this afternoon has been nothing short of miraculous:
-The Fridge and Washer/dryer was tracked-down and plucked from Liverpool purgatory and delivered.
-A one-of-a kind hand-crafted parota wood dining table is waiting to be delivered in a week.
-A Jackie-designed all wood pedestal table for the kitchen is being fabricated for delivery early next month
-A negotiated Sofi's chaise for the living room to be delivered on the 15th
-A Namuh futon-like couch for the studio is being delivered on Monday
-Six metal and rush dinning chairs and two pvc woven patio lounge chairs are being delivered on Tuesday
-Oh yeah, and I managed to find a smart TV at Liverpool that should be ready for pick-up tomorrow.
-And we've interviewed a great landscaper, a terrific property manager and have massages line-up for Valentine's Day!
And we haven't even started our language lessons yet!

So don't cry for us yet, Argentina. Keep a stiff upper lip, use SPF 52 and burn all the copies of your college yearbooks and with any luck, you'll all be our guests in insanely beautiful if infuriatingly difficult to get our yankee arms around SMA.



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