The Building Inspector

Buen Dia!



This is Senor's little corn patch. He is a Minnesota boy and thinks he can find a way to grow good sweet corn here in Mexico. I cannot help but laugh at that..........So far, he has planted four packages of corn seed that he smuggled across the border in his pants pockets.
He has ten plants.Yesterday morning was terribly hot. I stayed inside working on a glass project, but Senor was out in it all morning. We have a new thermometer and a rain guage. Senor kept coming in to give me temperature reports.
It just reached ninety..............but the humidity is only forty. It feels very dry...................................I went out only long enough to get some photos because our son called and said he wanted to see photos of the progress.....Hi Ian!!!!!! here are some photos!!!!!!



Below I am standing inside the bedroom door and looking east. This will be the farthest end of the portal. But there has been alot of progress here.



You can see the varro blancos which are called so many different names here. They all look the same to me, but these are the varro ones......they will go in a diagonal pattern between the vigas of the roof.



Out in the yard is a huge pile of these under a tarp. The delivery guy called those palo blancos, but they look the same. Those will become the fence.Here you can see the palo blancos in the background, beyond the person, who happens to be Senor, but looks like an escaped gorilla..............sometimes I will be taking a photo and Senor just walks right into the scene. He does not pay any attention to the fact that I was there first, just trying to take a nice photo.


As I said, alot of work has been going on at this end of the portal.



The pvc inside the rebar will carry the rain water off the roof and down into the pipe.Eventually the pipe will flow into a new cistern that will be dug below it.







If you walked straight ahead, west, and around the corner of the casa, you would see that the trench for laying the new pipes from inside the casa to the sewer system in the street has been dug.







Below the pipe and in the trench, is the little septic system box. All kinds of things float from the white pipe, out of the bathrooms, through this little cement holding area and then, through an even larger pipe out to the sewer pipe. Isn't that interesting?



Senor says that the septic box is very important. If I should accidentally flush a baby diaper or something down the toilet, he would be able to get into the box, stick a long stick up into the pipes there and push or pull the baby diaper farther out into the larger sewer pipe or retrieve it and throw it away in the garbage which is what should have been done in the first place...........see, that is interesting especially since we don't have any baby diapers around here to throw away or accidentally flush.



But Senor likes me to know these things.............just in case. That is just a little trickle of clean water flowing through the pipe in the photo below....in case you are wondering about that black smudgy looking thing. So, I just walked around and took pictures of things Ian might be interested in seeing......below I asked Senor to turn and smile for the camera, but he ignored me completely. Umberto is trying to get as far as he can into the hole where the pipes go into the casa. They would not let me take a photo of that and pretty much without saying it, told me to get lost.........



Around three, the sky darkened to the south and west, and the temperature dropped a little, so I stayed out and took a few more photos.



Below you can see, the floor beams have been laid for the portal floor. You can see the Hilton Garden Room and the door that leads to the kitchen, which as you know, is not really a kitchen.
Look! There is new old bike!!!!! And a very nice shot of the tinnaco. You can also see the storm coming from the south.

Where you see the bike and garden room............... that area will all be enclosed, but will open through windows and doors to the new portal. The wall between the garden room and the kitchen door will come down and so will the wall behind the garden room and another inside. That big space will all become one big sala!.............................eventually.

By now, the sky is very dark and there is no doubt we are in for a huge storm.

Senor sent Umberto home and got a good shot of Senor Rojo, his hair flying in the wind.

Then, suddenly the storm from the south slammed us with heavy wind and rain and a great light and sound show. Cookies ran to hide under a chair, but Ashes was caught out in it.

After an hour and a half, the yellow light came out and there was alot of standing water.

I was disappointed that it had stopped. But the temperature dropped into the eighties and there was still a good breeze.

So, I took more pictures.

A beautiful rainbow came out........every rainbow we see is in this same place, arching north to south.

But the sky was still dark and out of the west came a huge crack of thunder and a brand new storm, even more spectacular than the first one. Senor got caught inside for this one and his umbrella was outside. So I watched from the portal and he read his book in the bedroom. Cookies stayed under the chair and Ashes made it into the garden room, still wet from the first storm.

When it was done, we saw the sunset and another rainbow, but a double, in the same exact spot as the first rainbow.

Then, and I am not kidding, the storm came in again, this time from the north. We could see the lightning coming and could hear the thunder. This storm was quieter and never got too close, but we did get a gentle rain that continued to fall into the night hours.

Throughout the earlier heavy rains I thought several times about my new rain guage which was sitting on the table.

This morning is slightly overcast and Senor has poured a new concrete cover for the little septic system box.

Earlier he came in and said the building inspector had stopped by.

My heart sank. I did not think we had a building inspector here in Alamos.

In our Washington State county you could not say those two words without paying money.

The very last thing I want is to deal with a building inspector.

So, of course, I began probing Senor.......what did he look like..............what did he want........i did not know we had a building inspector...............ugh, is everything okay.............. did he fill out any papers?...............good grief, i hope he doesn't come back often...............







i got a picture of him........ said senor......................................... you can take a look.........................you took a picture of the building inspector, i said....................why?...................i took two, said senor.............two pictures, omg, of the building inspector?

ha ha...........said senor.

adios.......said linda lou.