Please Vote For Beto For Rey Feo

The last time I posted I mentioned that one of our neighbors, Beto is a candidate for Rey Feo (ugly king) for Carnaval this year.  We have been watching the site where you can vote and we have of course cast our votes for him.  Yesterday he was ahead and this morning he is slightly behind.

I am hoping that some of you who read this blog will go over to the site, Guaymas Carnaval Blog and vote for him.  The voting poll is on the right hand bar and all you have to do is click in the little circle beside his name: Jesús Alberto Acosta Langure /PLATA

We are really hoping that he can win, he is a great young man and would make a wonderful Rey Feo.

The street on the north side of our apartment had a perpetual water leak, and it just never seemed to get fixed.  Tropical Storm Jimena also gouged out a ravine on one side of it that hadn't been repaired either.  The ravine didn't matter to us; but it was beginning to collect lots of garbage in it that was unsightly.  Our landlady enlisted the help of her brother, he managed to get some action from the city and the other day the water company (CEA) appeared.  They dug up a deep trench, put in new water pipes and then filled in the trench again.  All the digging and filling also filled in the storm gouged ravine so all is repaired.  Yah, Pancho.

Men on the job.

Young Diego and our landlady watching the action.  Diego of course loved the machine.

What We Have Been Doing

It seems like we have been busy; but haven't got much to show for it really.
It is time to renew our FM3's so we got together the documents that we thought we needed and headed to immigration. This year they told us that we needed a rental contract. This is our third year for our FM3's and we have never needed to provide that before, so home we came. We chatted with our landlord about it and we typed up a document, signed it and took it back to the office. The lady looked at it and said, "no sirve", in other words, no doggone good. lol. Back home we came and chatted again with the landlord. At this point Tropical Storm Jimena intervened and things came to a standstill for awhile. The landlord said he was talking to a notario or a licenciado but nothing was happening, so we explained that we needed this to happen quickly. After we explained the circumstances more completely things started to happen and Saturday morning we went with them to an office of a licenciado and after hanging around for awhile we were presented with the stamped documents ready to sign. We got them photocopied and presented them to immigration on Monday morning and hopefully our FM3's will be ready in a month or so.......
A month or so ago the landlord was getting his air conditioners (mini splits) cleaned and recharged so we had them do ours too. Ever since then both of them have been spitting out water droplets to the point that it was extremely annoying and messy, along with that the bedroom one developed a horrible sound in the fan. So yesterday we got the name of a fellow from my Spanish teacher and she phoned him for us while we were chatting to her. He showed up in the afternoon and looked at them and said he would return in the afternoon when his worker finished his job on the shrimp boat. Sure enough later on they returned. He looked at them and decided that the post holding the fan in the bedroom one was broken, probably from being forced on by the previous guys. At first they were going to replace it with a used one; but found out that the used one that they had was smaller than ours, so no go with that. He then said that they could either try and glue the post back in or we could buy a new fan. We chose to have them try and fix it. They disappeared and reappeared with some crazy glue and baking soda lol. They put the post in glued it, sprinkled it with the baking soda and voila it was in there hard as a rock. Too funny and ingenious. Back into the mini split it went and quiet as a mouse it works. The one in the living room they decided that the previous guys had cleaned the exterior of the coils but not the inside and so the water was not draining properly. He had a small pressurized hand sprayer and re cleaned it. Put it all back together, had a glass of coke with us and chatted about the price of shrimp while we waited to see if there was any water coming out, nada (none). Asked him what the bill was and he rubbed his head and thought for a minute, mumbling to himself about what they had done (they were here about 2 hrs.). After some deliberation he decided that the charge was 500 pesos. No problem, we paid and they left. This morning both air conditioners are still working fine, thank goodness. Before anyone asks me for this guys phone number, remember that neither of them speaks any English, so be prepared to do business in Spanish.
A big surprise this morning, a front end loader appeared and began to repair the damage to our street. I didn't expect this to happen for a long time as there are many areas in the city that are in much worse shape. We actually didn't mind as there was no traffic and it was nice and quiet. Anyway he fixed it up and it is drivable again.

Repairing The Street

After Tropical Storm Julio went through here on about August 24th this summer our road was in a bit of a mess. I had posted some pictures of it here.
Compared to some of the streets in Guaymas though it was in pretty good shape so it wasn't looked at by the city for immediate repair. Two of the landlords sons had filled in the ditch left on our street by the water and traffic resumed. The street to the north of us had a very deep ditch dug into the side of it and some people had to jump this ditch to get to their homes and couldn't park their cars there safely.
Roy and I wondered about what would happen when the grader would come as our water supply line from the cities water supply to the house and apartment was lying on top of the road, as you can see in the photo below, it is the blue line. We could see a broken waterline in our future.


Yesterday morning a grader showed up along with a fellow whose job it seemed was to supervise. Our landlord explained to them about the waterline and the grader man very carefully covered it up with no breakage. He certainly is good at manoeuvring his machine.


Working at covering the waterline.





While they were here our landlady asked them to cut down the height of our parking area to the street, so for a small renumeration they did this also.
When they got our street looking good, they headed up the street behind us to survey the damage. After looking at it for awhile they called for a couple of truck loads of gravel and the grader operator proceeded with the repairs.


Apparently they decided that if they cleaned off part of the incline on the hill side of the street it might help the flow of run off in later storms. So the grader proceeded to clean it up a bit, you can see how much he cut the hill beside the road.
Below, one of our neighbors goofing off for the camera.

He did a nice job of cleaning it up and then they were gone for the day leaving a couple of piles of debris to be picked up. This morning a front end loader and truck came along and they proceeded to load up the piles from yesterday.

Result, two streets that look much better and are easier for the cars to drive on. Mission accomplished.
Grader working on cutting the hillside a bit.