I stopped at the on my way home from work to buy raisins for the Cuban dish I was going to be making. I bought a cucumber, lettuce, spinach, a green pepper, Ruby Red, V8, a small container of ground cumin and some chicken breasts. But no raisins.

I’m reading Moby Dick. It’s for my book group. I’ve tried to read it a couple of times before and not been able to get by the archaic language and the shear volume of the volume. But now I’m finding it immensely entertaining and actually a pleasant, if not easy, read. This is good because I’ve been having trouble reading for several months now. Can’t concentrate long enough, just can’t sit still. Really can’t get motivated to do anything but play the guitar and even that’s been haphazard, with no real direction or growth to it. A lot going on lately. Nothing I really write publicly about, other than saying that the uncertainty of my job situation is making me nuts. Let me just say that I’m feeling better now.

I scheduled surgery on my left big toe for March 1. It’s felt like someone was driving a hot ten penny nail through it for about a year now. And no it’s not gout. They’re going to clean up the joint and “decompress” it, shave some bone away so it has more room to move up and down. Six weeks in a surgical boot. I’m glad it’s my left foot, so I can at least drive.

It seems that some alien force is sucking the hair out of the folicals on top of my head and forcing it out through my ears! Next they’ll be stealing my bodily fluids.

Last weeks mining disaster brought back memories for me. I may have told this story here before, but I’m going to tell in again. I graduated from College after Winter Quarter, having skipped two terms my senior year to do the European vagabond thing and come back to finish the following spring. My friend Bill had graduated on time and had been living up in the Twin Cities since. Bill was the son of a hard rock miner from Wallace Idaho in the Silver Valley of Idaho’s panhandle. Wallace at that time had the only stop light on I-90 from coast to coast. The Valley was so steep that it was the last place they’d managed to build the freeway. We decided that we would drive out and get high paying road construction jobs for the summer and then, well I don’t think we had any plan after that.

Wallace is quite a town. It’s main industry is silver mining, with a bit of logging thrown in. It’s on the South Fork of the Coeur d’Alene River, know in those days as the Lead Creek by the locals. It was a nasty leaden color from the mine tailings that flowed into it. It had about fifteen hundred people and five very public whore houses with neon signs. Gambling was winked at in the bars as well. If you took 90 west to Kellog, the next valley, the landscape went from beautiful pine forest to a moonscape, no vegetation grew because of the pollution caused by the huge smelter there. Kellog had a suburb called Smelterville, practically in the shadow of the plant. The children of Smelterville had dangerously high levels of lead in their systems. The smelter closed down years ago and Bill tells me the valley has come back nicely. But at that time, when you drove through you would get a taste copper in your mouth, like you were sucking on a penny.

So we set off to make our fortunes in the West. After driving all night we arrived in St. Regis, Montana, just on the other side of lookout pass from Idaho. As we walked into the restaurant, Bill froze. There in a newspaper rack was the headline, “93 Miners trapped in Sunshine Mine fire.” Bill’s dad worked at a different mine, but he was on the fire rescue team, so Bill knew his dad was down in the burning mine. We had our breakfast and drove over the pass, through Mullen and into Wallace. Bill’s mom greeted us at the door in tears. His dad had gone the work the day before, worked all day and then went down into the Sunshine and had not come home. No one really knew anything. The first thing Bill did was have his mother cut his long hair, so as not to cause any extra stress when his dad got home.

Mr. Benson, also Bill, got home, but 91 men died. The Silver Valley is a tightly knit cluster of communities in an area where flat land is scarce and every little valley is a town. A pall was draped over that valley that summer, it felt strange to be an outsider, I was probably the only one around who hadn’t lost a friend or relative. But then again, it was the most memorable summer of my life and looking back the people had an amazing resilience, life went on and was vibrant. We never got the construction jobs. We hooked up with a crazy Italian contractor, learned to build a stone walls, crashed around the mountains in various states of altered consciousness, played a form of basketball that involved navigating a curb at about the eight foot mark and brick window sills protruding at thigh height on the baseline, Bill broke his ankle, the contractor fired me immediately, I got a job with Smokey the Bear and Bill went down in the mine. And we played the grooves off Working Man’s Dead.

I went to a high school basketball game last night. When I bought my ticket they gave me the senior discount….without asking.

Shit.

Today I have to go back to work.

We just got back Mexico on Wednesday, and life has been pretty hectic around Casa Keller since, so I’m just now sitting down to write about the trip. We were in Cancun, we’d booked our trip before the Wilma and our hotel must have been one of the first to get back up and running. Most are not yet in business. Some of the bigger hotels are still in the process of being gutted, so they can be completely redone inside. I think only about 10 percent of the rooms are actually open. Which of course is killing the economy. Walking through downtown, past empty restaurants, you’re practically dragged into them by shills in front of every one. It was nice for us because it wasn’t crowded, but for the people, this must be a very tough time.

We stayed at the Imperial las Perlas, a three star hotel, the first hotel on hotel row before you get to downtown. It was clean, the people were friendly and helpful and most things worked. Our first room was absoutely the worst room in the place. In the back, on the first floor, our view consisted of the back of a pickup truck. On the second day we asked to be moved and got a bigger room, overlooking the beach. Once again the squeaking wheel gets lubed.

We were there for four days, we spent one day going to the ruins at Chichen Itza, a couple of hours inland, where the famous Mayan pyramid is. The Mayan’s motto must have been “A virgin a day keeps the Sun God at bay.” They felt that if they didn’t sacrifice a virgin every morning before the sun rose, it wouldn’t come up. Now these folks had a very sophisticated understanding of mathematics and astrology, wouldn’t you think they’d figure out that the sun would come up anyway? I guess it’s the same old story of religion keeping power over the masses. Not much different than forty percent of Americans not believing in evolution I guess.

Then we took the “Jungle Tour” which really wasn’t a jungle tour, but it still had a high fun factor. You get in these tiny fiberglass speed boats with 35 horse outboards (they’re really not as safety crazy in Mexico as we are) and buzz around the Lagoon for awhile and then take a channel through the mangrove swamp to a coral reef in the ocean, where you snorkel in a national park. We had a great time and Beck even overcame her fear of water to snorkel with us. We saw some wildly colored fish, some of which looked like argyle socks.

On Christmas day we had an amazing dining experience. I’m usually not into the audience participation thing, but these guys put on a show that gets everyone rockin’. We had so much fun. These people put on an amazing show, even though they were up until 5 am on Christmas Eve, their biggest night. They had several dwarves, one in a devil costume patrolling the floor and joking with the customers, and the waiters just wouldn’t let up with the joking around. It was such a hoot. Perico’s is the name of the place, don’t go if you’re looking for a quiet romantic dinner.

Random observations on Mexico, vacations in general and travelling with your family.
I’d like to blame the water or the food, but it started before we left, I was having a nasty flair up of Crohn’s disease the whole time down there. It didn’t keep me from having a good time overall, but it made me kind of crabby and weak at times. And nervous about finding a bathroom fast enough.

Speaking of bathrooms, I have a little bit of a hard time with the not flushing your toilet paper thing. As an American, if feel that I have the unalienable right to flush my toilet paper. Putting your dirty toilet paper in a waste basket next to the commode seems like a violation of my privacy.

Every vendor made their products themselves, they’re almost free for you today, and if that’s not cheap enough….how much do you want to pay?

On the plane ride back, there were lots of empty seats, so I took one in the exit row. I was wearing shorts and had my jeans in my backpack, ready for the cold weather. There was no one around me, so I moved to the window seat and quickly slipped off my shorts and into my jeans. My daughters were disgusted when I told them what I’d done. Lucia said, “Don’t ever do anything like that again. That’s such a creepy old man thing to do!” I was kind of proud of myself for pulling it off undetected.

Travelling in strange cities can be very stressfull. The first night we went downtown, we ended up unexpectedly in a place where we had to transfer busses to get where we wanted to go. After solving a communication problem with the bus driver, I figured out what we needed to do. No one believed me. They wanted to take a course of action that could have gotten us completely lost, and would have at least resulted in way more walking than I wanted to do. Even though I’d been downtown once already, had been to the place where we wanted to go, had corroborated my understanding with one more local, and was very sure of what we should do, they kept arguing with me. I popped a bolt. One of the passers by, “Senior, be nice to the lady, you’re on vacation!” The street vendor who I’d confirmed my directions with came over and calmed me down and backed up my side of the story. Ah vindication. Good thing we skipped our original destination and went to Perico’s right away.

On the first night, we found ourselves without cash, because of poor planning and a mistaken confidence about places accepting credit cards and the availability of ATMs. Long story short: we ended up eating at a buffet at another hotel, because they took credit cards. The food was mediocre at best. They charged us 250 pesos each, so about a hundred bucks total. Perico’s came in at less than a hundred, with drinks, great food and the amazing show! The next night we had a great dinner in a beautiful outdoor setting, including drinks and a flaming mango dessert for under forty dollars.

If you go to Cancun, go downtown. Get off the hotel strip and into the city. Some of the Anglos at the hotel were afraid of getting into a “bad nieghborhood” and I suppose that’s possible, but we never felt uneasy in the least.

For more pics from our trip click here.