Just another Monday

And Monday seems to be the slowest day of the week for us.  Maybe I can be disciplined enough to blog once a week.

We've had really rainy weather now for almost two weeks.  It is rainy season but that usually means wonderful, dramatic thunderstorms--almost always in the middle of the night or very early morning--and we wake up to bright sunny days with few if any clouds.  This rainy season has been very different.  It started off with high drama for a few evenings, but then things slowed down.  The forecast was for a drier rainy season this year, and that has pretty much proven true until the last couple of weeks, when we've had nonstop cloudy, rainy days.  It's always cool and pleasant during rainy season but this continued rainy, cloudy weather has kept the temps in the 60s some days.  We even turned on one of the gas fireplaces last week while we were reading.  Then we fell asleep over our Kindles because it was so toasty and warm.

Today, I prepped for my class Friday. I'm going to have two new observers who may decide to be teaching assistants for the class, so I want to make sure everybody has plenty to do.  Ros (Rosalind) is from England (by way of South Africa), and she and her husband have moved down here after driving all around Mexico for 4-5 months. It wasn't difficult for Gerald who just retired from Thomson Reuters as a GIS (huh?). "A geographic information system (GIS) is a system designed to capture, store, manipulate, analyze, manage, and present spatial or geographic data."  Coo!  I should have been one of those, except it didn't exist way back when.

Yesterday, we actually had a break in the weather with an absolutely perfect day.  Good thing because we had planned a lunch and game day for 8 of us.  What I had planned to be from about 1-5 actually didn't break up until nearly 8 when the light was beginning to fade. We learned a new word/phrase from Ros, who speaks Afrikaans from her days in South Africa.  She called yesterday  a leckker jol

Jol - Party/Piss-up/Rave. 
Lekker - Good/Excellent. 
An Afrikaans Phrase, usually meaning to go out and get trashed or going on a piss up!

"It was a leckker jol(I can't remember ANYTHING!)" 
"Thats gonna be a leckker jol!" 

It wasn't quite the "piss up" as described above--more like the "craic" Mel experienced in Ireland.

Saturday we got up and went to shul like good little Jews because the last time I missed (Bob was there), there were only 6 people.  So guilt got us out of bed and down the road to Riberas.  Afterward, we dashed to Walmart for some fresh veggies, to the Scandinavian bakery for yummy sourdough bread, and then to the deli (yes, we have a deli) for turkey, roast beef, and ham to have a make-your-own-sandwich lunch for yesterday.  Then we drove out to La Reserva to play bridge all afternoon with Helena and Jim and eat dinner at their house.

I'm working backwards in the week, trying to remember Friday.  Oh, I went to Jan's house and we had lunch and played Rummikub.  Friday night I think we stayed home.  Thursday I taught a class for a friend who's away in Mexico City, and then that evening we went to a fundraiser at Avocado Club (where we had brunch all together), yummy menu and jazz group from Guadalajara, who are really French and sang and played my favorite jazz manouche-style music.  And we danced. They're called Les Femmes de Serge. The woman in black at the microphone is blind.  Lovely voice. We're hoping to go see them again Guadalajara some time.

So, the sun is trying to come out but it's still mostly overcast.  Evidently, there's been a tropical storm sitting off the coast of Puerto Vallarta that has brought the rain, but we have no doubt the sun will come out again.

I'm going to go read some, and then we'll have more sandwiches for dinner.  We've found frozen GF baguettes at Superlake, so we buy more every time we're there to make sure he doesn't run out.  Tomorrow we're going to go to Tlaquepaque for the day with Shari and Rob.  Always love going there.  Such a pretty section of Guadalajara, with the brick pedestrian streets and beautiful shops and nice restaurants.

There's a little map in my head and I can see Susannah and John driving across the middle of the country right now.  Hope they're having fun.