if these red sweetcorn things don’t poison us first… I’ve seen them used decoratively, but Drsita just picked up 6 from Lucky’s and 4 of them were red.

Wish us luck.

(Post-prandial EDIT)

They’re not as tasty as the yellow ones, but apparently according to several wise Mexican friends on flickr, they make great tortillas…

Abuela desde Guanatos sent me a whole myth about them, I’ve been translating all afternoon so while I’m in the mood…

It all happened before the Spanish arrived, when the earth belonged to those who worked on it, when nobody fought to live, because living was easy, and men were happy just to sleep, eat, love and grow.

In this particular year there was much happiness. The rains had fallen in abundance; the moon had illuminated the crops.

The Indians sowed the grains of sweetcorn, as white as a girl’s teeth on the well-ploughed earth

A few days later, the ground was covered with little green shoots which grew and grew as they drank up the water.

The goddess Sucuxi, so beautiful, so pure, so good, pondered the work of the Indians from the hill and wanted to reward their efforts by giving them the biggest harvest.

Susuxi came down from the hills to the sweetcorn fields, whose leaves blew in the wind. Thorns pierced the brown soles of Susuxi’s feet and from them fell red droplets of blood.

The goddess fled back to her house, dripping blood onto the kernels of a sweetcorn cob.

The kernels drank up the blood and turned red, as red as the blood they had drank.

Days passed… and the Indians harvested…

The strangest thing: They found a sweetcorn with red kernels.

Spanish source

The story lacks closure. Like then the next day the conquistadors arrived or something… and also maybe kernel’s not the right word, but I’ve been installing ubuntu all afternoon on my laptop…

Anyroad, there’s a blog post for you. They’ll be scarce again this week, no internets yet in Downey we’re told.

YouTube lets you annotate your videos now, but apparently the notes only show when you’re on their site. Click here for the annotated video.

to recommend this course to you in the Fall Autumn… Check out the last professor on the Faculty link too… Sign up now!.

Flickr’s your best bet for a rounded view of our adventures over the last week. Click on the ‘flight of microbrewed beers’ pic below for the Oregon set.

…and it looks like it’s going to be just the right weather for it, 97 degrees and scattered thunderstorms.

Normally I’d warn you that I’ll not be blogging much, but given recent posting rates you’ll probably not notice anything amiss.

Took the car for a checkup today. Should be ready any minute along with the bill for 360 bucks. Deciding whether to drive there or fly involved some complex maths with factors such as mileage, price per gallon, car rental, flights and schipperke boarding costs. We’re driving, staying with Sudarat and ‘Cus is coming with us, for the record. Email’ll be checked occasionally. See you in another ZIP code…

Yesterday we had an open house to try and find renters to take over our Alameda digs. About 15 couples passed through here and 10 of them left application forms so I’ve passed them on to the landlord and hopefully he won’t take long to choose one of them to take over the place come August.

Doctorcita took Atticus on a 3 hour walk in 95 degree heat (35ish celsius) while I was showing people around so that he wouldn’t try to strike up lasting friendships with any of the applicants. Atticus has also now been through a drive through car wash. I wanted to be there for that, but didn’t get to see it. You park in the middle of the machine while all kinds of jets and foam and detergents get blasted at you, everything goes dark… then after 8-10 minutes of craziness industrial dryers blast you with hot air and you’re good to go. Apparently as the first jet started Atticus jumped onto Sita’s lap and stayed there for the duration… Anyroad, all in all a very successful day.

The sunset was spectacular yesterday, it gave a gorgeous golden light and I took advantage and headed out with me camera. Here’re some of them on Flickr. I like the ones with the seagulls… If there’d been a few more clouds to the west it’d've been even better. Maybe this evening.

This week I’ve a few projects on still and there’s another visit to Santa Cruz, then some time next week we’re going to go house hunting in Portland. Anyone want to look after an American Eskimo/ Schipperke mutt for a few days?

…have to keep moving.

Thanks everyone for congrats for Dr. Sita, much appreciated. It’s been a busy little weekend and fun all the way, but today sees us back to work and trying to plan the Portland move, which involves working out whether to drive/fly in each direction, what to do with the dog, furniture, car… it’s like one of those puzzles where you have to ferry everyone from one side of the river to the other without the fox eating the chickens…

Anyroad, we need to find renters for 1010 1/2. I repurposed the site I had for selling our Mexican furniture and here it is for our house. Pending approval from the landlord, it’ll be on craigslist as of tomorrow.

While on google maps I noticed they’ve done the street view thing in Alameda. If you’d like to check out the ‘hood we’ll be leaving behind, there’s worse things to do.

Cheers for now, I’ll leave you with Sita’s flowers from Fionnula: