It’s official, I’m an old man

Monday 8th June 2020
Off to Chedraui, the supermarket for some fresh bread and beer, pleased to see a good stock of my favorite Heineken there, but totally shocked to see that someone has taken 3 bottles out of the six pack.

This beggars belief, not only are those 3 bottles now stranded at some checkout till, but the remaining three bottles are also stuffed. I can only imagine the idiot who did this hasn’t been reading my blog lately. Some people are so irresponsible. And in these times of crisis. I only hope the staff manage to reunite them.

On a much more serious note I heard today that Patrick Childress has just passed away. I mentioned a ‘go fund me’ account for his treatment on our boats facebook page. This was very upsetting. I had been following his progress across the Indian ocean and along the coast of Eastern and Southern Africa with great interest. We will be following his route ourselves in the next few years, we have a lot in common with him and his wife Rebecca. We have similar boats, and try to live a simple life, and enjoy pottering along the seas enjoying as much of the local surroundings and people as we can. Patrick became ill with Covid-19 and although he was clear of the virus, and his lungs seemed to have almost fully recovered and was almost off the ventilator, the rest of his body suffered massively and despite good care in a South African hospital, he didn’t make it.
If Patrick, who seemed very healthy, fit and active can succumb to this virus, then so can anyone else in this marina, and may well do so if they don’t start taking things a bit more seriously.

Tuesday:
Guess what, it’s varnish time again. Seems like only a few weeks back I was slapping the varnish down, and that’s probably because it was only a few weeks back. I’m a bit dissapointed at how quickly the finish has dulled since I put the last coat on. I’m going to finish off this tin of Epifanes high gloss varnish and then start experimenting with some other longer lasting finishes. The rub rails have lost most of their varnish so they will be a good place to experiment on. Before it gets too hot I rub down all of the bowsprit / Platform and cap rails but by the time that’s done the temperature is in the 30s so way to hot for varnish. I plan to be up at first light on Wednesday to slap the varnish on.
Later my Spanish lesson is fun, but I can’t remember half of the previous days work, I think I probably learn 1 or 2 nouns or verbs each day. At this rate I should be able to put a sentance together in time for my 80th birthday.
The radio bursts to life in the morning with an enquiry to find the owner of a 30ft sailboat that has left its mooring and is now aground on the Magote shore. No one replies.

Ok, I need some help with a couple of simple questions here related to my recent plumbing activities:

Can you please answer the two polls below

[poll id=”3″]

And, secondly…

[poll id=”4″]

Wednesday:
Up early to varnish, it goes on easily and quickly just as the sun is rising, No dew which is great. By 9am it’s all done and I make some breakfast. Later a trip to Chedraui and then Spanish practice for the rest of the day.

Thursday:
Coding and documentation for the solar sites system. I spend most of the day on this, mostly sorting out notes and scraps of documentation which are all over the show. It’s a bit better organised, but I’m probably only 10% of the way in. I don’t get paid for the documentation bit. In the afternoon I write some PHP code, test it and deploy it to the live servers in Latvia, I do get paid for that, almost enough to buy a tin of epifanes varnish here 🙂 Tomorrow I have to design and code up in raw html/php a new user interface for part of the system. That’s a days wages so, several tins of varnish.

Arturo has me doing silly pronunciation exercises today, the result seems very subtle to me, but he thinks I’m sounding more Mexican each day!

Sometimes he says, ‘Quick run outside , find a local and repeat what you just said, they will be so confused as you will sound like a local but look like a gringo’. I think he is a good motivator, perhaps not 100% honest.

Perhaps the local birds are mistaking the baba for an aviary, this afternoon I had a hummingbird hanging out in the cockpit. The chaffinch, as Neil has helpfully identified for me, now pops into the main cabin most days to checkout the crumb situation. There’s a little video below

Friday:
A long bike ride, some groceries, Spanish lessons and bed. It was so hot today, it’s been 30-35 deg C all day and all night, that I wasnt up for anything very energetic.

Saturday:
For the last few days my wifi and cellular data connections have been playing up. It got me wondering what the dock ethernet was like, there’s an RJ45 Ethernet socket on the dock for each boat, next to the power hookup. You have to buy a cable from the chandlers with a proper Marine Connecter on it to be able to use this and I baulked at the price of $40. So instead I have been paying $50 a month for a data plan, which required me to buy a motorola phone to hack so I could get the hotspot to work. Not very clever logic.
So today I bought the cable, plugged in and found I was getting incredible speeds, broadband levels as good as I ever got back home. I’m very happy with that. I’m hoping to get my Pi computer visible on the internet soon so I can monitor the boat from afar. I’m now watching Mexican TV soap operas online to help with my learning, you kind of know the plot, you just need to know a few phrases, like ‘how did he find out’, ‘if I ever get my hands on him’, ‘your going down for this’, ‘he doesnt deserve you’, etc etc.
Once this was all up and running I jumped on my bike and cycled off to Ley Supermarket, I locked my bike to the railings and headed on in for some vegan burgers, being the only place I know that sells them. As you enter the supermarket, you have to wait while a member of staff squirts some antibacterial gel into your palm before you enter, sometimes they even take your temperature. Today the young lady looked kindly at me but didn’t offer the gel, she put her hand up to say I couldn’t enter then waved a security guard over. He asked if I was English, and could I speak Spanish in Spanish, which is something I can understand and reply with ‘poco’ , with a little bit of sincerity. he then pointed to a sign in Spanish that said ‘Seniors are only allowed in before 10AM’, this is a restriction they have implemented to restrict contact between Vulnerable people and the rest of us, or as I must now say, between us vulnerable pensioners and those young uns!
I was a little taken aback, especially as I had just cycled 5km, mostly uphill and didn’t think I looked that old. The humour of it won over and I laughed as I climbed on my bike and cycled off, except I forgot I had chained it to a rail and promptly fell of the bike. Perhaps they know more than me. Nurse Nurse.

The Present Subjunctive –
It is vital for the data to be precise
In the Present Subjunctive form
It is vital that the data be precise

If the above means something to you, I’m impressed, you probably understand the past subjunctive form as well and the problems of using was instead of were.
My problem is that some of the translations I do from the internet news posts in Spanish use the past subjunctive and present subjunctive forms and I have no idea what they are talking about. I didn’t do very well at English at school, woodwork and physics were my favorite, followed by maths. I still struggle with terms like adjective, personal pronouns, adverbs etc, I’m ok with nouns and verbs.
I think I’m going to have to skip this bit. In all I’m very pleased with my progress, I’m finding I can read over 50% of most things I see when out and about, some of the tweets I get are in Spanish and I’m enjoying working them out. It’s fascinating how the Mexicans can’t hear differences in pronunciation that I think are massive, like when I say the sound ‘ll’ it starts with a ya sound , as in Yazmin, Mexicans say it with more of a Ja sound as in Jasmin, I can say either and they don’t seem to hear any difference, same with Ba and Va, they only say Ba for both, if I say either they hear Ba . Most odd. Yet if I don’t get the rr in Carro right, it sounds like Caro, one is car and they other ‘expensive’ so an expensive car is ‘un caro carro’ .

Sunday:
I sit on the other side of the cockpit for my breakfast today, and my lady chaffinch arrives and seems put out because I’m sitting where she normally finds some breadcrumbs, in fact she flies around me a few times then proceeds to head straight inside to the cooker then breadboard. She’s getting a bit too familiar for my liking. I’m not very pleased with her anyway as I look around the cockpit and see little presents of bird shit she has left everywhere for me. I finish my toast, get the hose pipe and brush out and give the cockpit a good washdown. While I’m doing this I decide to try some of the magic pink cleaner that works so well on the stainless. It performs really well and the grey teak looks like new.

This gets me thinking that I could fix up the caulking that’s a bit rough, glue down the few planks that are lifting, give it a light sand and it will look fantastic. It’s quite worn, but in reality, it’s still thicker than you find on many new modern production boats. I did plan to have it all replaced when I get back to Thailand, but who knows when that will be.
So in a way, I’m grateful to my little fluffy friend for sending me down this path.

Next I pop off to the supermarket for bread and pick up some lovely fresh fish on the way back from my favorite fisherman just around the corner from me.

The rest of the day is spent coding, mostly making web pages, I hate it, HTML and CSS are two ‘languages’ that are all over the show. I started this solar monitoring web site nearly ten years ago, and it shows, I can’t make user interfaces to save my life, and add in my colour blindness and general bad graphical design taste and you end up with some very ugly screens. On the other hand, if you are a fan of 80’s computers, you will feel right at home.

I finish the day with a huge fish dinner in the cockpit while mosquitos devour my legs.

The latest Coronavirus news is that a lot of places start to open up tomorrow, beaches and national parks open, but with restricted numbers, restaurants with limited capacity etc.
Kathy’s flight back here was cancelled, that was meant to happen in about 4 weeks time, now we have to wait and see. There’s no point in rebooking yet, as flights advertised for July/August still risk being cancelled. Tempting as it is to think everything is getting better, I think in 2-3 weeks time we will have a much clearer idea of the impact of the lifting of restrictions. Until then, I will just have to grin and bear it in the constant sunshine out here. Please stay safe out there, as far as I’m aware the virus hasn’t heard of any changes and plans to carry on as before.

Paul Collister.