It's a Flanperfect day

buen dia!
Ah, it is so beautiful here this morning. Wish you could be here!
The temperature is already rising, but we still have very little humidity, so a ninety degree day like we had yesterday only seems like it is eighty. The sky is slightly overcast and it is just very pleasant.

I just came back from my trip to the track, where there were quite a few folks walking or jogging. I always enjoy my track conversations with the Mexican women and men and their dogs.

When I returned home, I found this little fellow, dead on the table top. Cookies spends most of the night out now, and I imagine he threw this up in the air, thought he could catch it, and it landed on the table top and Cookies lost interest.

So we asked Umberto about it. It is a little thing, only about eight inches long, and skinny. Umberto called it a name and pointed to his arm and pantomined that a bite from that means a trip to the hospital and a shot in the rear end. Umberto solves alot of problems, I think, with a trip to the hospital for a shot in the rear end.

Grippe? shot. Nail in foot? shot. Scorpion bite? shot. Fall off ladder? shot.

So I hope this guy's mother or father is not around nearby. I would imagine they would be a bit larger.

I rode to the Panteon the other day. Here is Jesus' grave and some plastic flowers I left for him. The marker says he died April 9, but the weekend I returned from Texas, the seventeenth, someone old with white hair was back in the casa watching a boxing match on tv. I even commented to Senor.........wow, Jesus really has the volume on his tv turned up.

Senor says he drove by the sister's house just yesterday and there was a new old man sitting out front in the chair that I had photographed. So we are confused, well I am confused. Senor says he is not the confusable type. But so far, the little casa remains empty and we do not even see any signs of Jesus' cat, the white one.

I went next door to learn to make flan. I have always had a recipe for it, but it's one of those things that is better done with a person who has done it before. So, I had the opportunity to do that.

I don't blog recipes or food too much, mainly because I have difficulty even following recipes.

But this one was worth it. i think you can make it easily.

You need:

8 eggs

2 cans sweetened condensed milk

2 cans water (use the milk cans for measurement)

1 1/2 cups sugar and 1/3 cup water

2 T kahlua

1 t vanilla

and you need a flan pan, a round baking dish with a hole in the middle

Over low heat, toss the sugar in a pan, add 1/3 cup water. Stir this Forever! It will get dry. It will get lumpy. It will get clumpy. You will think you need to add more water. Don't. You are just carmelizing the sugar and it will take forever. Eventually it will get dark dark brown and bubbly. When it does this, pour it into the flan pan and coat the pan and sides.Tony, our flan instructor, asks me if I washed my 8 eggs. Wash the eggs....... i said...........i never wash my eggs. He tells me I have to always wash my eggs, so I wash my 8 eggs. We crack them into a bowl and add the milk and the 2 cans of water. He says his favorite dessert is condensed milk on crackers. I tell him that when I worked at DIF some of the women there drank the condensed milk right from the can.........yum, he says.

We add kahlua and vanilla and beat all of this with the mixer. It gets too foamy so Tony holds the mixer just under the surface of the liquid and it gets creamy again. After a few minutes we pour the mixture into the coated flan pan.

The flan pan then is put into a larger pan, filled halfway with water and put into the oven for 1 1/2 hours at 350 degrees. More water is added during the cooking time to keep this water bath halfway up the flan pan.

The flan comes out of the oven and sits on the counter for several hours while Tony shops and my friends and I go off to buy art supplies at an art sale in someone's home.

At the art sale, I hear that La Victoria, which is Carroll O'Connor's Alamos home, has been sold, along with eight other proerties in town. Baby boomers are coming, says someone.

Indeed, on the way home, the front door of La Victoria is open and I snap a few photos. La Victoria needs a lot of love and care, so I am glad someone has bought it. I want to ask if I can go inside, but there are workers milling around and the flan is waiting on the countertop.

The flan is ready to come out of the pan. A knife is run around the edges and then, the pan sits in another water bath, this one warm with tap water. Tony jiggles the flan until it starts to move around in the pan.
Then in a very swift move, the pan is turned upside down.




And, we have flan. Isn't that pretty?

Gotta run, need to be over on Loma Gudalupe by ten o'clock. I am doing some custom glass tiles for someone there and we need to discuss the plan.

Que le vaya bien!......which when translated, means roughly, may you have an interesting life or may all things turn out well for you. Linda Lou

Too Much Whiskey and Bad Knees

Buenos tardes!
Yesterday's evening sky was almost completely without color, just a huge bright sun obscured momentarily by the clouds. Then during the night the sky turned a dark luminous red and it has been overcast and very windy all day. Senor got the pump back. The bearings had gone out and the man who drives the little red train fixed the pump for less than five dollars. While we were without the pump I had to fill buckets with cistern water and hand water all of the plants. So naturally I was very excited when Senor returned with the pump and reinstalled it. It meant the hoses would work.

However Senor was also excited to get the pump back and he decided he would water. He spent around two hours doing this, after dinner, well into the dark. As we went to bed a thought occured to me.

I said, as he was dozing off.......................you watered all the planter pots, too, right? you know, roses, petunias, geraniums, palms............? No................i forgot about those...........he said, as he fell asleep.

I had to get up and go outside and water all of those in the dark. Only a little problemo. The next morning I did tell him he is no longer allowed to be the water person.

If you recall, the original Jesus seemed to think I was his water person. He had some moments of great thirst, I guess.

Something big was going on back at his place several days ago.

His sister and her son came into his little casa and removed many things. My guess is these were Jesus' things that became new old Jesus' things. Then her husband came and removed many more things.

Soon it looked like everything that had been in new old Jesus' casa was out in the yard.
I was a little worried.

Then the husband and son came and pulled down his tv antennae and put it and all the other stuff into the back of a pick up and drove off.
I was very worried then because Jesus loves his television. He listens to his telenovas and boxing every afternoon and well into the night.

Yesterday our friend, Ramon, confirmed what we suspected. New old Jesus has died.

I was compelled to photograph what I can see that still remains at this little casa, which was originally inhabited by the first Jesus.

Below, the tv antennae is gone.


Through the coyote fence the door is slightly ajar.

His favorite chair is still on the porch.

This is his old toilet, surrounded by plastic flapping in the wind.

I feel sadness about it.

Of course, I felt that way when I first realized a new old Jesus was living in old Jesus' casa. I wondered what happened to the first Jesus. I still don't know. But Ramon says that new old Jesus went into the Panteon very quickly.

When I turned away from the coyote fence I thought about how dark and quiet it will be back there now. No sounds of men boxing, no women crying over lost lovers, no six pm national anthem.

So looking back to our casa and our ongoing projects, there is much racket. The tile saw is grinding away at adobe bricks, Senor is screwing something into the wall and Umberto is slapping mortar on the new wall. So much activity. In two months the rains will come and the yard will be emerald green and lush with unwanted plants and vines. We will not need to water.

Manana I am going with friends to the Panteon. They are going to adopt a grave and I have the list of names that are available.

I also plan to take a bouquet of plastic flowers and a candle and look for a fresh dirt covered grave.

Ramon says his nickname was Charro and he died of too much whiskey and bad knees.

The Pantheon

Buen Dia.
It is very hot out, something over a hundred. We are now through working for the day and hibernating in the back room with the mini split.

Senor is getting very good lately about taking photos. I do have to delete some of them because they are out of focus. Sometimes he accidentally takes a video instead and it is usually of his shoes, but he really seems to enjoy looking for the camera and taking a picture now and then.


He took the beautiful sunset below and the first lily bloom. I cannot recall the name of our lilies, but they are night blooming only and live just through the dark. Most are pale white with maroon centers and light streaks of pink on the petals.

Year of the Gun was a bust. The dvd would not even load. Nothing. Nada. Zip.

So we sat out in the dark, in the garden room and listened to the crickets chirp.

This morning I was up at five and on new old bike for a ride out to the Pantheon, which is the cemetery. I detoured through town to check the water level in La Aduana Arroyo and there was a little trickle. The ride took about half an hour because of the detour.

Below are the gates to the main entrance of the Pantheon. I rode all around the cemetery until I found a smaller open gate and went in with new old bike. It became crowded very quickly and as I turned to go put new old bike outside, the caretaker came up to me.

He said something very quickly in Spanish and I said I did not understand and could he speak more slowly. He pantomimed a scene about my bike by shoving something imaginary way above his head and pretending to walk off. I finally realized he was telling me to leave my bike with him to watch because otherwise someone would lift it up and walk away with it.

I shook my head and he followed me outside, where I locked up my bike to the lamp post. He stood over me and watched what I was doing. When I was done he said........tiene usted llave.....do you have the key..............i said, si, senor, tengo llave.....yes, sir, i have the key....................bueno, he replied.

I followed him back through the gate and he started talking and waving his hand through the air. I think he was telling me something about the graves, but I am not sure. He may have been inviting me to sit down for desayuna (breakfast) because he sat down on a grave where he had earlier laid out his tortillas and a little plastic baggie of salsa. He also had a bottle of juice which he offered to me. I do not generally like to decline gifts, but I did.

I said gracias and started walking around the Pantheon.

After a while of looking at graves and names and dates, I came around a rather large stone grave and he was standing right there. I just about jumped out of my skin. It scared me to death. I was already scared because I had seen two large gravesite holes about eight feet deep with nothing in them.

He smiled and asked me something. It was difficult to understand him. He didn't have any teeth, but I think he was asking me who I was looking for. I asked him where the foreign graves were located. He walked ahead of me, through alot of tall grass, to the opposite side of the Pantheon. We went up a slight incline and near the top he turned and smiled a very toothless smile and said................aqui. Then he turned and left me alone.

I was fascinated by what I saw and read. I counted at least fifteen gravesites with what I will call American names since I don't know the true heritage of any of the names. Even more fascinating were the dates of birth. Many of those birthdates were from the late 1800's and the deaths ranged from the 1960's to the 1980's.

Some of the graves had names that are still familiar here in Alamos, where relatives still live. And there are probably even more gravesites of foreigners that I did not see.

A very popular club here in Alamos, is the History Club. I believe I have read that they have all of the facts for all of the graves. I think it would be very interesting to know more. While looking at some of the graves, I could only imagine what it must have been like here in Alamos, when they were alive. There are a number of books on life as it was here years ago. I will definately have to read some of those.

I brushed against a tree branch while I was walking and a swarm of little honey bees came out of the branch. I scooted away as fast as I could, waved goodbye to the caretaker and went and unlocked new old bike.

When I rode away I couldn't help but think about the graves in the Pantheon. Last year's Day of the Dead came on the heels of Hurricane Norbert. We went to the Pantheon for a short while one night. Very few people were sitting with their departed loved ones. There was very little celebration.

I think people were still in shock and in awe of what Norbert had done. Maybe this year's Day of the Dead will be a merrier, happier time for the town and the Pantheon residents as well.