Housepets

I'm totally over-posting today. I just couldn't leave for a week without mentioning our new pet. We found him (her?) while packing. Inside the house. Already comfortably moved in.

Fortunately, our new pet is not of the "large hairy spider" or "sneaky rodent" variety. Elmer is a monstrously large snail. (He's kind of sticky, so I'm naming him after the glue. I'm pretty terrible about naming things in general. You must all hope that Keating gets to name our future children so that they don't end up with idiotic descriptive names like "Female" (pronounced fee-mah-lay, of course. It's Italian.) or "Lumpy Loudmouth.") Elmer apparently climbed in through our window from our neighbor's garden and was comfortably chilling in the spare room. We have moved him to the garden, since chucking him out the window back into the neighbor's garden seems cruel. We'll have to wait and see if he's still with us when we get back from Cancun.

Losing weight

In honor of leaving on vacation tomorrow, I decided it was time to lose some weight. After getting home from work and kissing dear Keating, I marched myself down to the salon on the corner and got my first haircut in over 7 months. The end result: the best $2.80 haircut EVER! (And no, there was no sale. That was regular price.)

Vacation!

Mexico City pretty much closes down for Holy Week as people flee the city for the beaches/mountains/non-urban anything. Keating and decided, however, to bank that time off and use it this coming week when my parents will be in Cancun. Like the completely grateful moochers that we are, we will be happily crashing in my parents' suite with them for a week of sunshine and beaches. (And we've begged them to bring us more Swiss Miss. Fortunately, they still love us!)

Have a wonderful week and enjoy a couple of photos my mom sent me from their visit last month:

Us with our new friend the Aztec death god. He is pretty seriously creepy looking and could use a sandwich or something. Just look at those ribs! This creepy fellow lives at the National Anthropology Museum.

Built in the 16th century, thus church in Coyoacan's main plaza features incredible art. The plaza itself turns into a sort of gathering place and street fair every weekend.

And finally, a totally gratuitous shot of my baby (Asher). He has been living with my parents, and I miss him terribly. We would bring him down here, but something in his previous life as a stray has left him absolutely terrified of being crated, making it very difficult to safely move him here.

Grillin' in the garden OR More trouble with fire

Last night, I asked Keating to grill up some spicy sausages for dinner while I made up some spaghetti. Thanks to genetics, Keating is blessed with awesome grilling skills -- I'm pretty sure that a little bit of charcoal and lighter fluid runs through the veins in his family.

Our new apartment came with a small grill, so Keating happily set up shop in the garden while I went to work cutting tomatoes for the sauce. A few minutes later, I hear muffled obscenities floating in from the garden. Keating dashed into the kitchen, looked around quickly with a flustered look on his face, and ran back out. I don't enjoy cutting vegetables nearly enough to not wander over to see what all the fuss was about. As I nonchalantly rounded the corner, prepared to ask if I could help him with anything, I glanced out the garden door. And froze. The garden was quite clearly on fire, with bright little flames jumping up from the grass. I quickly grabbed a pot of water, but Keating had used his previously unknown (by me) locker-room-style towel whipping to put out the blaze before I could get back. (I lamely pored the water where the fire had been.)

It turns out that Keating had been having trouble getting the charcoal to light. This may seem odd, even disgraceful, for a member of his family, but he had a pretty decent excuse: the charcoal was Mexican-style, or untreated. When he tried to put some more lighter gel on the charcoal (couldn't find lighter fluid at the store and didn't want to siphon gas out of a neighbor's car), the gel lit. The problem was that it wasn't just the gel on the charcoal that went up in flames, but also the gel on/in the container. Keating's attempt to put out the gel fire only ended up spraying flaming gel across the garden and igniting a seat cushion and a large patch of grass.

Needless to say, the sausages were cooked on the stove and we are working on figuring out where to get the vinyl seat cushion reupholstered. On the plus side, dinner came out well and we were able to have a long laugh over it all... after a bottle of wine, anyway!

Ovens are still evil.

I whined several weeks ago about doing battle with my oven in an attempt to bake celebratory brownies. Little did I know the true terror of a Mexican oven! I made brownies again, this time to celebrate our move to the new apartment. Thanks to the resulting fireball, I singed off some arm hair and some hair from the left side of my head (you know those frizzies that never go away? Gone.), and my eyelashes on the left side are now half the length of those on the right. Part of what really sucks about singeing your eyelashes is that the burnt ends curl up and work like little velcro bits until they give up and break off, so I had about 24 hours of my upper and lower eyelashes sticking closed when I tried to open my eye.

Keating kindly pointed out that the brownies still came out great and I didn't burn any skin, so all is apparently still well with the world. I think it will be his turn to light the f-ing oven next time.