So. A quick story to keep you amused...

One day the cats kept forcing themselves into the guest bedroom. Eventually I stuck Duke in there and closed the door. I figured he'd start whining to get out in 5 or so minutes... 20 minutes later he's still in there, not making a peep. "Strange" thought I, so I go in to check it out. He's sitting near the window, staring at something near the closet. Big black thing... with 8 legs.. and hairy.

I didn't charge him for the stay, but I sent him on his way.

Pictures of the Day

Guest Room Spider Booooo!

The site went away for a little while. It's back for now. Hopefully I'll add some nice pictures and talk a bit about life in Chile and whatnot in a little while.

In otherwords, back to our regular scheduled programming.

When I lived in Richmond, I would walk down the street each day. In a certain location there was written in spray-paint, "This too shall pass". This always struck me as profoundly deep. Whether the graffiti was talking of the moment, the sidewalk, the feeling, the city, or even humanity, it was still true. One of the teachings of Buddhism is that nothing is permanant. Monks will devote days of work creating intricate mandalas out of sand, only to sweep it up soon after it is done.

Why bring this up now? Lap Lizard (better know as Liz) passed on to a better place last Monday, after thirteen years of enriching my life. We had taken her to the vet for an infection on her chin three weeks ago. The vet gave her some simple medication to take for 14 days. After about a week, I found Liz sitting on the floor and breathing really heavily, so I took her down to the vet. After a week of tests, the vet diagnosed her with chronic kidney failure - during this period (or perhaps slightly before), Liz had lost her eye sight as well. This appeared to be from the buildup of toxins in her system due to the non-functioning kidneys. Anyway, last weekend we brought her home to relax and de-stress, hoping to get her to eat food especially for cats with kidney failure. Unfortunately, her condition kept deteriorating. She would only eat a mouthful of food at a time, and by the time we took her down to the vet the last time, she was no longer even meowing.

I miss her terribly, though I know it was for the best.

The other eulogies are for our living room/dining room floor and the termites. For the former, all that is left is a large pile of concrete and a small pile of ashes in our driveway. For the later, some are ashes, some have been chemically murdered, and the rest are most likely living in the fill underneath the new concrete floor, and will soon die from starvation.

Now that we've torn up the floor, I'm sure the former owners knew about the termite problem. The termites had completely destroyed wood beams that were set in the concrete subfloor - there's no way they could have done that in only a year. Vero wants to go yell at the estate agent. I've been dropping hints with our neighbor about the situation, since our he is the son of the former owners. There's nothing we can do about it now, but... it still would have been nice to know.

Pictures of the Day

Camino Los Vilches Pictures from a day trip that Vero and I took to the mountains.	Mountains, Camino los Vilches One of the more lovelier views to present itself to us along the trip to Los Vilches.
Descabazdo Grande This is one of our local volcanoes, a little closer than we normally see it. This picture was taken along the road to Argentina, Pase Pehuenche.	Pase Pehuenche Some mountains along the side of the Pase Pehuenche
Jeepin' A friend from my time in England, Brian, and one of his friends Ting came to visit us last weekend. I took them for a trip to the coast to eat some nice seafood and hang out on the beach. One of the cooler things is that you can drive on the beach.	The gang From left to right, Brian, Ting, Myself... (I'll leave you to figure out which is the Jeep).
Strike a pose Ting and Brian posing...	Deteriorated Wood beams This is an example of where the wood beams sat. The termites completely destroyed these beams and had started on the floor and mouldings.
Living room, after removing the flooring This is the living room after removing the infested flooring and beams and burning them.	Dining Room with no flooring The dining room after the destruction.
No concrete The maestro took a look at what was left of the concrete and decided it all had to go, so... this is what's underneath the concrete. Somewhere in there is probably a huge termite nest.	Dining room, no concrete and the dining room..
Compacted The next stage is to compact the fill material in preparation for leveling.	Dining room, compacted The maestro, in the dining room, with the compactor.
Leveling, compacting The next stage of the process is to level things out with gravel and get ready to pour the concrete.	Dining room, ready for concrete The dining room ready for the concrete now.
A floor! And now, finally, a concrete floor! The maestro removed the wood beams and back filled so there is nothing for the damn termites to eat. Starve babies, starve!	Dining room with concrete Another 3 - 4 days of curing, and then ready for the tiling.

Ah yes, I was crooning about how I had just turned in my thesis, last we spoke. Well, things have been moving along steadily - my examiners have been selected. We had a potential date of January 14th for the defense, but that fell through so now it's looking like it will be after Easter (late March). So I wait. Having the viva in March will present some problems with my teaching then, but hopefully if I know enough ahead of time, I can work around it.

What else? The Jeep has been overheating recently, which is bad since it's now high summer and hot hot hot (32 celsius during the days). I finally gave in a took it down to be fixed - $300 later, the water pump and radiator have been repaired and are no longer leaking and the Jeep is running better than ever. Expensive but worth it, especially if it will continue running for another couple years.

And, in the process of setting up the Christmas tree, we discovered that the wood living room floor was infested with termites. Obviously, this didn't make us very happy. We called out the exterminator who informed of us of our options -- $500 to gas the suckers (and we'd have to leave the house for 5 days) or rip out the floor and fumigate with liquid. We've decided to take the second option -- $100 for the liquid fumigation. The estimates for removing the wood floor and putting down tile (like the rest of the house) appear to be around $400 all total. So for the same price we can put in new floor and make sure they don't come back... But still, after having the Jeep repaired, paying for trips to the US to see family, and other assorted Christmas time costs, we're feeling rather poor.

The animals are doing lovely -- Duke is a fully grown fat cat now. He's been on a diet in preparation to be "fixed". Trying to keep him on his diet, while keeping the other cats fed is hard. Liz is a broswer and she doesn't eat a lot at a time -- which is incompatible with feeding the cats only at specific times and removing the food bowls after. We're still working on the solution -- so far we've been supplementing the ladies' meals with canned cat food (much to Liz's delight).

Daisy is growing rapidly, eating everything she can get her muzzle on, and generally causing trouble. She stole a carton from chicken wings off the edge of the BBQ (Mr. Beef!) causing a plate to fall and break, and the next morning, got in to the neighbor's garbage and scattering it all over the front lawn. Also, she had this habit of "stealing" an empty flowerpot from off the brick flowerbeds near the front door. I tried everything to break her of this habit to no avail, until I finally put hot pepper sauce around the edge of the flowerpot one morning. Later that day I was in the computer room working and I hear a loud series of whimpers -- and think to myself "Ahh, she found the flowerpot." Upon investigation I find that was indeed the case. She hasn't touched it since.

Tomorrow, we head off to Santiago for Christmas celebrations with Vero's parents and sister. We're fasting today and tomorrow to prepare for the celebration on Monday (Christmas here is celebrated the night of the 24th).

And that's all the news that's fit to print.

Pictures of the Day

Termites! We pulled the couch away from the wall to find this... disturbing!	Cat ornament We paused while setting up the tree to go and find our lights (which we never did find). When we came back we found our tree already decorated!
Perritos The dogs complained that they were not receiving equal exposure. On the left is Daisy, and on the right is Rex. Not shown, Pepa.

Two entries in a week.. shhh.. somebody might think I'm alive!

Allow me to tell a story about a naive man wanting to buy a computer. This certain soul, that shall remain nameless, realized that a computer that would cost the equivalent of $1800 USD here in Chile could be bought for $1000 USD in the U.S. Since our protagonist had family in the states, he figured that he could ship it to them, and as long as it didn't cost almost double to get it here, he'd save a bit of money (at the expense of some time).

So Mr. Naive goes ahead and orders said computer. It gets to his family's house, is checked over to verify everything works, and is sent on to Chile. For $400. So the total cost of computer is now $1400. No problem, thinks our hero, import duties are only 20% of $1000, so.. yes. still a savings of $200. What he hasn't realized is that any item that costs over $500 needs a "customs agent" to clear it through customs. And that the cost of this agent is approximately, $200 ...

Our hero and his loving wife (okay.. yeah, I admit it. It was me..) heads to Santiago to pick up said package when notice arrives. They try to get it out of customs ourselves... no way. So they rush to find an agent, helpfully located a half mile walk away, pay him, he does his magic, and the package appears.

But the fun's not over.. of course, we had to park somewhere. We chose the nearest place that said "Estacionamiento" and parked - the name of the establishment was "Republic Parking". When we finally retrieve the package and head out of the parking lot we were stopped by a helpful man that said that this was private parking for the embassies, and they were wondering all afternoon why there was this strange red Jeep parked there. Whoops! Luckily I must have seemed foreign enough to get away with it..

So moral of the story? Don't try to save a buck. It causes time and hassle...

Pictures of the Day

New guts So yeah, here's what I bought. For the geek: Intel Quad Core processor (Q6600), 4gb Gskill RAM, 750GB SATA Seagate hard drive, Zalman heatsink/fan, and XFX NVidia 8600GT 256 MB Video card. For the non-geek: Blinkin' fast, lots of memory, gobs of storage space, runs cool, pretty pictures.	Roses I tried to get some macros of the roses... so here are some slightly more "artistic" shots.
White roses These roses run along the edge of our property. It was lovely seeing them all in full bloom!	Pink roses? I think these are roses, but not sure. These are on the other side of the house, near the main bedroom.