Let's see: processed white flour bread, cheese, egg, steak, ham, bacon - chivito al pan. When you get it al plato, they skip the bun and dump the whole mess atop a mountain of french fries (chips, papas fritas, pommes frites, Freedom Fries [in case anyone mentally challenged is reading this]). Yum, yum, acrylamides. And then there are the little 'fat bombs' called empanadas, and dulce de leche....

I've learned in restaurants that you can skip the fries and order salad instead if they have it. The good news about food in Uruguay lies in its produce, which is fresh, local, and largely uncontaminated as far as I can tell, and you can find delicious salads in many restaurants.

Which makes it a little easier to follow the diet of my number one recommendation: Eat to Live, by Dr Joel Fuhrman. I'm rereading it, remembering how following it a few years ago left me looking like this:


Not exactly compatible with a chivito diet. I would summarize the Eat to Live diet, but the book is so rich in eye-opening observations that to do so would be a disservice to you to do so. If you want to lose weight, have more energy, and live longer, read the book.

I've always been a fan of some sort of daily workout, and no fan of gyms or equipment. Here's my daily workout/stretching routine, which runs 10-15 minutes almost every morning.

1) The "Five Tibetan Rites." I've been doing these almost daily for 20+ years now. They involve getting on the floor, so they don't always travel well.

2) The Miracle 7 "Tiger Move" exercises. You can download an abridged version via torrent, or if you're not into that sent me a message with a RealSpace email address and I'll email you the file. These strength training exercises don't involve getting on the floor (other than standing on it).

3) After a few minutes stretching and warming up, it's *fun* to add the four-minute hell of Tabata - any exercise you choose. I like to do the Miracle Seven, using the eighth rep to repeat whatever my favorite is that day. You can find free stopwatch programs online for whatever OS you use.

I hope this is useful stuff for you - try the Miracle 7 for a week and let me know how you feel!


* the distinctions I heard about Mexico while living there: highest per capita soft drink consumption in the world; one of the lowest per capita book-reading countries...appears that every supermarket in this part of Uruguay has a book section, one of many refreshing changes.

There are no problems apart from the mind – Krishnamurti

Based upon Krishnamurti’s “There are no problems apart from the mind”, all problems can be healed only within the mind, yet since our ego mind thinks that it is our only mind, it tells us that it has the answer. Yet it is the mind which created the problem in the first place. Talk about the blind leading the blind. ~ Mary Croft

Most of our problems disappear simply by the process of living life. – Werner Erhard

We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them. - Einstein

Since the part of our entire existence, of which we are conscious, is a dream, if something goes wrong, as it often does in our dreams, do we go back into our dream the following night to fix what went wrong? No, we carry on. Trying to correct something that never happened is a waste of our energy, not to mention our
time, which we never had in the first place.

* If you have a constant need to help other people, notice how you must keep them helpless.
* Hope is what keeps all suffering in place.
* Feelings of inferiority and superiority are the same. They both come from fear.


Check out this free ebook by Mary Croft.

Never forget that to forgive yourself is to release trapped energy that could be doing good work in the world. Self-prosecution is never noble; it does no one a service. – D. Patrick Miller

When I was kid in Connecticut, I remember frogs - lots of frogs. In North Carolina (left in 2005) a few. I've read that amphibians are very sensitive to environmental pollution, so it wouldn't surprise me that I haven't seen them because their numbers are down.

Here, now, you step outside to hear a high pitched "mew - mew - mew" - which is what the local Uruguayan frogs say. Every ditch, even puddles....

Before our mini-swimming pool got revived to blue from murky green, I transplanted the frog that had made its home in the kiddie pool to a nearby marsh.

Today, riding my bike back to the shop to send to get yet more repairs on a brand-new-piece-of-shit Chinese product, I was startled as I rode through a puddle to realize it was alive.




Yes, a puddle along the side of the road...



...full of tadpoles!

Now I'm going to be worried if it doesn't rain for a few days.  collected some as a kid and watched them grow legs and become frogs - but I don't remember how long that takes.....

........

--- Pack 4runner. Drive with friend to San Miguel de Allende, 7 hour round trip, to drop stuff to be shipped to Neuvo Laredo, Mexican side of the Laredo border (and one of those places with lots of drug violence).
--- Drive to Laredo with us and dog and packed 4Runner.
--- Pick up 8-foot Uhaul trailer.
--- Check into La Quinta.
--- Unload 4Runner, load everything into trailer.
--- Leave trailer at La Quinta, drive back across border to retrieve shipped goods (despite imagining I could accomplish this easily, it ended up taking three days because of Mexican Independence Day).
--- Drive to Austin; check into hotel, rejoin son flying in from Portland, OR, collected at airport and entertained a couple days by brother in law.
--- Drive goods to Houston to deliver to shipper.
--- Fly to Montevideo.
--- Move into house.

--- Wait.

Remate (ray-MAH-tay) means auction. They seem to be a regular thing around here; second-hand places have furniture and all kinds of stuff you can buy any day, but at auction maybe you can get some good deals. So I went with a couple friends this morning to check one out (pre-auction) that they'd never been too. We had all heard the motor bike with huge loudspeakers announcing it with great enthusiasm.

We were all rather appalled by what we saw - but they assure me this was not a normal remate.



Everything, it seemed, was pure shit. Look at the condition of the electric fan lying on the ground!



Or this guitar - seriously, somebody's going to give money for that thing? I guess it took me a while to get in the spirit of the thing...let's be a little less critical, please.



For the tech-savvy, here's a mighty fine keyboard.



For the traveler, how about this nifty suitcase? OK, so it's a little moldy, it looks as though you get a nifty backpack to boot!



Near the 'HQ' of the operation, you find the better stuff they need to keep an eye on. Nothing here that wouldn't probably look or work just fine after a month or two of steel wool and Naval Jelly.



They also like to keep an eye on the little treasures. Amazing they don't have this stuff behind a glass case, eh?



Here's a cauldron for sale - to help convince you it's authentic and workable, they left the last owner's grease in it. Ready to go!



here's another cauldron on a stand. Look carefully - it has a hole in the bottom. Wait - before you draw conclusions, remember the Tao Te Ching says:

We turn clay to make a vessel;

But it is on the space where there is nothing

that the usefulness of the vessel depends.

So this should fetch a higher price, because not only does the space in the center have nothing, so does the bottom.



You can see that special care has been taken to make bathroom appliances attractive.



But even more attractive were the high-tension lines running directly overhead.



Here's a real gem - home made roller. A little hard to see in this photo, but the tongue is a mess of wire, the third roller from the left is missing a significant amount of concrete because, to save money, whoever made it filled much of the mold with a single rock, which is of course cheaper than concrete any day. The piece of wood before the last roller? A spacer, I guess - this concept of 'planning' seems at times as remote in Uruguay as in México.

The green table in the background was one of the few things that actually wasn't in totally shitty condition. Somehow that didn't make it any more desirable to us.



Cesar thought this piece particularly useless, until he recognized its potential as a barbell. Go buddy go!



Syd found this delightful piece of artwork - OK, a little bit missing on the left and just a little faded from sitting in the sun, but you know it might have turned out to be a lost piece from a master. Gotta keep your mind open to the infinite possibilities, namean?



When he found this shirt, he acted as if it had his name on it, but we reminded him his name is Syd, Not "Cos Cob Rotary." And thus, with no small amount of effort we convinced him to leave before the auction began.

I must say, though, if they announce one here again, I will be tempted to see if anyone - and who - actually buys this shit.

Pushes the bounds of credibility, no?

Friday, we were supposed to go to Montevideo to do the next (final) step in getting our residence established. I dressed for hot weather, and suddenly the weather turned foul - fast. Neighbors said later the wind speed was 100-140 km/hour (60-85mph). Rain was coming down in horizontal buckets; at one point we found ourselves in a white squall - looking out the windows all you could see was white.

And then, after an hour or so, it calmed.

I noticed the kitchen window was cracked. Amongst all the noise and thunder, we hadn't noticed this.



I stepped outside and noticed a dove had sought refuge; just before I took this picture it was sitting patiently with three streams of water from the roof pouring over it. A moment later it flew away.



And then I noticed the debris...



...which used to be the top to the roof water tank. One of our first moves here was to bypass the gravity feed and connect to city water. Not sure what to do with the tank...especially now.



A few roof panels had disappeared...pieces of the old asbestos material all over the yard.



My son and I ventured out - the street in front of our house had become a river.





Look closer and you notice a pine has fallen across the road a block away - only one of many, it would turn out.





These two fell on someone's house.



Particularly sad scene in a country where this used car is worth 5-10 times what it would be in the USA.



I took all of these photos within a few blocks of our house.

Meanwhile, at least ten inches of rain fell in an hour or so - our pool ended up overflowing.



A nearby street became a river.



But hey, at least we still had a street. A significant chunk of the Rambla in Atlántida simply went away. (Note: two days later, the road is almost operational again...it appears this has happened before.

...

Award Winners named for World No Tobacco Day in the Americas

SOURCE

And of course, the joke goes, it's a good thing he wasn't a gynecologist...

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Not so long ago, no doubt in preparation for the tourist season, a seriously destroyed Chevy Meriva appeared parked on the main drag in Atlántida, our little seaside town in Uruguay.



I'm sure there are others parked about, to remind visitors of the dangers of partying and driving. Or just being stupid under the influence of the sun.

However, there's a little subtlety here that I find amusing. You have to understand that, although this part of the world - Uruguay, with its gorgeous beaches - the Porteños (Buenos Aires, Argentina) and Brazilians and assorted Europeans are mostly tolerated for their 'summer' money (summer's coming very soon), all is not sweetness and light. The Argentinians in particular seem to leave a bad taste in the mouth of the Uruguayans.



So, when you look at this vehicle from another angle, you notice it's got an Argentinian license plate.

Nice....

This is the bike I bought yesterday. Six speeds, US$140 or so. More than in the land of the Untied Snakes, but not bad. Or maybe just that buying a $70 bike for $140 doesn't seem as odious as buying a  $15,000 vehicle for $30,000.

Anyway, here it is 24 hours later, at the repair shop associated with the place we bought it. When we bought it, it had a flat tire and they replaced an inner tube - pumping it up by hand - and managed to overinflate so it had a hella bulge that rubbed, on every revolution, against the frame. The front tire also had a bubble.

I had a hard time, in fact, riding it 16 blocks to the repair shop.

After a half hour or so, the problem was addressed - as was an incorrectly routed wire for headlight and taillight that rubbed in the tire and would have broken shortly.

After smiles and waves, I rode away, only to realize the rear wheel was totally out of round - thump thump thunp.

I took it back. Today's Tuesday. He wants me to come back Saturday. Why not tomorrow? Thursday? Friday?

Here, you don't ask. You buy shit, it's expected to break. And you're expected to wait patiently for it to be repaired. And not get so uptight about wheels that go thump thump thump.

That's maybe a small price to pay to be free of the subliminally broadcast fear in the land of the Untied Snakes, and the slightly more vouchable fear in South'o'border land, where the narcos are better armed than the local police, who are inevitably corrupt in any case.

Who knows?


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Dead stuff...







You never know what you're going to find.

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