Utilities at our Mexican house

There is a lot to learn when you buy or rent a house in Mexico, and utilities can present challenges. Here's how we currently stand:

WATER: Our realtor took my husband Kelly to the place in our town where you pay the water bill, and by presenting several documents, Kelly managed to get the bill in his name. He also learned there was almost a 50% discount if you paid in advance for a year, and in our case that was around $100 US for the year for unmetered water. He paid it. With lots of gardens and a swimming pool, we will be using more water than we did in Colorado, though over time we will make the gardens more ecological.

We have since found out that in our town (San Juan Cosala, by Lake Chapala) the town water is not available 24/7. Lately it's been more like 8 to 10 hours a day, often morning to late afternoon. Yesterday I read in El Ojo del Lago, a monthly free magazine in English, that "the town of San Juan Cosala is dealing with water distribution problems related to plugged-up or broken pipes and hoses. While the overall plan is to switch from hoses to more durable pipes, for now the community has periods of time when water is not available."

Luckily, we have two water storage tanks on the property.

ELECTRICITY: We still haven't succeeded in getting this in our names, but we know where the office is in the nearby town of Jocotepec. They need a copy of our multi-page deed to the house, which we got last week, and we need to mark a form with those little circles that look like the meter.

The power goes out from time to time, and local people tell us it happens more when it rains. We had a lovely rain last weekend, and sure enough the power went out at 7:30 PM on Saturday night. We happened to have the phone number to report outages, and a very courteous woman took our report about an hour after the outage.

The power was still out the next morning, when we set off to walk to the hot spring about a mile from here. One of our Mexican neighbors, who hadn't spoken to us much before then, pleaded with us to make a fuss with the federal commission for electricity, or CFE, which administers the power. He said they would listen to us where they wouldn't listen to them, ordinary Mexicans. He had wanted to watch a movie on TV the night before and was unhappy to have missed it. He was even unhappier that a scorpion had bitten his thumb in the dark night when he hadn't been able to see it. (When I walk from our bed to the bathroom in the night, I use a flashlight! We've found two scorpions in the house so far. One this morning was in two parts and our cat was playing with the parts. She may well have killed it.)

When we got back from the hot springs, the power was on.

GARBAGE: The truck supposedly goes by every day but don't hold your breath. Or you may want to hold your breath when you go down the street when the truck hasn't been around for a few days! Garbage collection is free, paid for by property taxes, but tipping the garbage men now and then is recommended. We will when we get a chance.

PROPANE: Hard to miss on this one. A private company, Zeta Gas, has trucks roaming the neighborhoods from very early in the morning. Each truck is equiped with a loudspeaker which blares out the sound of car horn and ZETA GA-A-A-A-S! on and on. The propane comes in tall cylinders which cost about $30 US, and they take your old tank. We have two tanks but a lot of local people have one and so they are out of propane til the truck comes by.

BOTTLED DRINKING WATER: There are trucks from different companies that deliver this in roughly 5-gallon bottles. We've made an arrangement with a little store around the corner. The husband or hardworking 16-year-old son (NOT an oxymoron in Mexico!) brings us the water as needed. We like getting to know this family. A significant percentage of the bottled water sold in Mexico is sold by the Coca-Cola company, the Victoria brand of water.

TELEPHONE: Telmex, the phone company for land lines, told me none were available here. I've since heard stories where sometimes they are available for Mexicans more easily than foreigners. We are happy enough without a monthly bill and with a Mexican cellphone. Our US Verizon cellphone with the North American plan is what we call out on... the Mexican number is just so local people can call us.

INTERNET: We have our own satellite system that travels on our motorhome or at present is in the backyard. I wonder what we would do without that and without a landline phone: a friend in that situation in another part of Mexico got a Mexican satellite system much like ours.

TELEVISON: We brought our US satellite setup down with us, but it doesn't work this far south. So we cancelled it and now have a Canadian setup which we got here in the Lake Chapala area and are greatly enjoying. Most American shows we want (like the Daily Show) are available. We are figure skating fans, and last week appreciated the much more extensive Canadian coverage of the world championships.

Photos of Mexico

For some mysterious reason, the blogging software that I use, blogger, isn't letting me upload photos while I am working from my husband's computer. It's one of those computer mysteries that isn't important enough to solve since my new laptop is supposed to arrive this week. (Will blog about it and what we're choosing when it's here). So in the meantime, I'm making do with a lot of computer compromises.

For those of you who love photos, take a look at Kelly's photos of Mexico that he has uploaded to flickr recently. There are a bunch of new ones besides the Fat Tuesday ones I mentioned recently.
The more recent uploads (a few of which have already been here in this blog!) are on the page that link takes you to. Scroll down it and also go to page 2. Near the bottom of page 2, it gets into the Mardi Gras ones you may have already seen. But poke around more... there are lots! One of my favorites is a "street animation" he did last year in Guanajuato. It shows best as a slide show.

Living in Mexico: How It's Feeling

Yesterday I received two emails from readers of this blog. Among other things, they asked:

"Now that you are done with the decision to sell your house in the U.S......how are you feeling about it all?" and "Do you still think that you made a good decision about locating there? Settling in well?"

It's still a mixed bag for me here. There are parts I love and parts that are difficult. Of course, we each have our own lives to live and lessons to learn, so some of the things that are hard for me probably wouldn't be for others.

I first came to Mexico for the summer with my family when I was almost ten. My stepmother almost died from typhoid and amoebic dysentery in Acapulco, and had to be flown to Mexico City for better medical care... I have vivid memories of taking care of her while she was delirious and my father was out trying to find a doctor. I also remember him, distraught, driving like a maniac in a downpour through the mountains near Taxco, getting to Mexico City as fast as possible. Combine that with his taking us to the famous Diego Rivera murals of the Spanish torturing the Aztecs, and it's no wonder that my subconscious mind decided that Mexico was a highly dangerous place.

Every subsequent trip as an adult, I would get sick myself, until a few trips ago. The change is due to two things, I think: better public health here in Mexico and my own personal growth, coming to terms with many of the fears from my childhood.

I kept coming back to Mexico from time to time over the years because there is so much I love here, especially the warmth and friendliness of the people.

So how is it going? I'd say Kelly is more wholeheartedly happy here than I am. Mexican traffic can still unnerve me, but thanks to a technique called EFT, I've greatly reduced the stress I feel in the daytime. Coming home at dusk the other evening, I realized I have more work to do with EFT, as in the dim light, I was more fearful. EFT is a simple but incredibly powerful self-help method of releasing limiting emotions through tapping on energy meridians. Here's a website on EFT, with a free ebook that shows you how to do the method. I've had a lot of gradual success and some dramatic success with it. The most recent dramatic success was tapping on the energy meridians on behalf of our cat Misty, who was spending almost all her time under the bed. That very day, for the first time, she began to hang out ON the bed.

So to continue answering the questions: it was hard for me to reach the point of selling our house in Colorado, but once I got clear on doing it, I have not really missed the house very often. This place here near Lake Chapala is such a dear little house, and the yard so lovely (not to mention that I'm feeling way more fit from doing water aerobics a lot in our very own pool!) that it makes up for any sadness I may sometimes feel at selling the other place. It is extremely pleasant to not have a mortgage.

I have not really let go of the little town in Colorado that we came from, and in fact before we left, I was extremely joyous that we bought a very nice little piece of land there. The door is still open to our being there, at least part of the time. (The winters there are darn cold.) It's a unique community that we've been part of for almost a decade.

We weren't planning to buy this place, but when we were looking at lakeside real estate in a casual way, we jumped on this as both a good investment in an era when we think more Americans will come to Mexico, and as a good way for us to experiment with what it's like here.

We recently drained our swimming pool to clean it. It's slowly filling up today. To use the well-worn metaphor of the glass being half empty or half full... the pool is about 1/4 full and slowly filling. And so am I.

The Odd Culture... Make that Couple

Kelly and I went out yesterday afternoon to Ajijic, a nearby town and the center of English-language activies around Lake Chapala. We went to see a performance of Neil Simon's play, The Odd Couple, in its female version (and in English). It's essentially about a couple of women friends, one divorced and one newly separated, who find that sharing an apartment drives them nuts.

While it was well performed and had a lot of witty lines, for the most part neither one of us enjoyed it. Listening to long arguments isn't our idea of entertainment. There was one section we did like, where one of the women invites a couple of Spanish brothers to dinner, and there were some very funny bits.

But as we walked away from the theater, I was relieved to be back in my own life and in a country where arguments are less of an art form.

Kelly took Cando over to a hardware store to get a wheelbarrow (the reason we hadn't taken the bus), while I took advantage of having wheels to do a big grocery shopping. On my way to the store, I passed a little restaurant we've eaten at. It's one that caters to foreigners, and there was a large table of Americans and Canadians, where a stout balding man and a gray-haired woman were carrying on a loud drunken argument. Had I left the theater yet?

Of course, every culture has its own way of dealing with things. Here are a couple of odd bits of Mexican culture from the afternoon:

• The play was in a hotel we hadn't been to before, and as we walked in, Kelly was a ways behind me. In Spanish, I asked a 50-ish Mexican man, clearly the proprietor, where to get tickets for the play. He answered me, with "que guapa estas" in the middle of what he said. That translates as "how cute you are" and we still aren't sure if he knew that Kelly was with me or not!
• While we were out, someone stole Kelly's cheap old hand drill from our locked patio de servicio, which is a covered porch on the side of the house, where our washing machine, garbage can, etc., reside. This is not the first time pilfering has occurred from this place. The other time was when we were away for a few days, and the loot that time was smaller. We have a pretty good idea who did it, but confronting him would make him lose face, and it's important in the Mexican culture not to make people lose face. When our fence is finished, it will be a lot harder to get in.
  

Oh well, so I guess every culture is odd. Come to think of it, so is every couple!

Tales from the Cat House

Animal-loving Americans and Canadians living in Mexico, or traveling here, may need to come to terms with the sufferings of many Mexican dogs and cats. Whether you do it by becoming philosophical, jaded, judgemental, or something else, it's an issue that comes up again and again.

In the Lake Chapala area, there are several programs in which foreigners are very active, both as volunteers and with financial support. The Animal Shelter is on the highway in Riberas del Pilar, between Ajijic and Chapala. Kelly and I made yesterday a day of errands, and my dentist is in that area too.

Now I don't normally go into animal shelters, as there is too much risk I'd come out with a new family member. But this one is also an extremely well-stocked pet supply store, and we needed several things for our dog and cat, so we stopped. It was a bit easier to do because I knew that the dogs were in another building on the other side of the highway. Still, there was a talkative deep orange cat who fixed me with his bright eyes. I momentarily thought how cute he'd look with Misty, who is a pale orange, before I came to my senses.

But I did come home with a small paperback that isn't available on Amazon (I just looked) and is probably just available locally here. Tales from the Cat House: A Collection of True Stories, by Barbara Hess, "The Cat Lady" shows one way of reacting to the condition of Mexican cats.

With devoted love which translates into action.

Barbara Hess has done this.

Story after story tells of the cats who have come to the Animal Shelter, sometimes brought in by people, sometimes dumped on the doorstep at night. With the help of a remarkable duo of Mexican veterinarians whose clinic is next door, cats with many terrible health conditions have been saved. The shelter has an amazing cattery right in the middle of it, where you can watch the cats living their daily lives, in a group or in individual cages nearby. You are welcome to go in and visit the cats, which you do through a chain-link entry into a tiny space and then another such entry into the main cat area. There is a warning sign: escape artists present, so close one door before opening another!

It's a great setup for adopting a cat, and often people come back time and again before deciding on a particular cat. Many times, the cat has already chosen those particular people.

I read the book in one sitting and learned a lot about the Animal Shelter and its denizens. I was inspired by the love radiating from this woman and the others involved with the cats. Maybe I'll go help out a little next week, when more dental appointments will take me back to the area.

Water tank 1, Dentist 0

Living in Mexico does call for a fair amount of flexibility. Sometimes things go surprisingly well, and that happened yesterday with the installation of our new water tank, a 660-gallon black plastic tank to replace a very old and slightly leaky 550-gallon tank which we had assumed was cement but then learned it was asbestos too.

The crew who've been working on our fence took on this job as well as the fence. They poured a cement slab just the right size, on neighboring undeveloped land right by the fence-to-be. (Did they ask anyone's permission? Ya gotta be kidding!) After it had cured for a few days, and with the old tank completely drained, nine strong guys from teenagers to maybe their 40s gathered around the tank and heaved it onto said undeveloped land. As so often happens in Mexico, a use was found for it. They were going to break it up (ugh, and likely breathe some asbestos fibers) in order to take it to the dump in their truck when a guy came along and said he could use it as is. They warned him it had a small leak but he was going to use it for gardening and didn't care, so off it went. I didn't hear the details of how he got it away.

UPDATE: Now we see our water tank whenever we go to Ajijic, as it ended up at a nursery beside the highway. It's lying on its side still, not yet in use.

Then they put the cement slab in place and put our new water lightweight water tank on it. All but two plumbers left. They have both worked in the US and Kelly said they did a US-quality job of plumbing... he was keeping a pretty close eye on it.

So within three hours, the job was done, and very nicely.

Water tank, 1.

Today I had a dental appointment at 2:00 PM at a place near the highway that runs along beside Lake Chapala. I left the house a little before 1:00 PM, to be sure I would be on time. As I walked down toward the carretera (highway), I saw a bus go by in the direction I was going. Hmm, could be bad news. But within about ten minutes another one came along, a small bus.

Now there are "big buses" and "small buses" that run along the highway from Jocotepec to Chapala, or some of them go to Guadalajara without going through the town of Chapala. The big buses are higher and more comfortable, a typical Mexican second class bus, and the small buses are more like school buses (not minivans). They cost the same (well under a dollar for anywhere I've gone lakeside), but the small ones leave the highway in Ajijic and again in San Antonio Tlayacapan, to meander around the town streets and stop for passengers frequently.

Since I was in good time, it didn't bother me to be on a small bus. I got a good seat on the side where I could gaze out at Lake Chapala quite a lot, and the time passed pleasantly. When I got to the dentist's office, I was early so I went to a nearby shop and while I was there, the power went out.

The dentist was without power too. He was chatting with some other people and explained to me that he couldn't really do anything without power, not even raise or lower his chair. I pointed into another office where the lights were on and said that the power was back. "In there but not in my part of the building," he replied. The power had been out for three hours the day before, he said, adding that the electric company had been notified again today.

The anticipation before a dental visit isn't that much fun, so I kept hoping that the power would come back on. But after waiting around a while, I took his advice to reschedule and he found me an appointment for tomorrow at about the same time. I caught a big bus back home, noticing that the ride took about half the time of the small bus.

Dentist, 0.

My computer goes bad in Mexico

A few days ago I was working at my computer when it made a few clicking sounds and stopped. I couldn't get back into it when I tried. Did I have a CD to start from? Nope, though I have usually had them or floppies, this time I didn't. When was the last time I had backed up my data? Ummm... about a month ago. This wasn't as bad as it sounded, as we've been so busy with moving into our new house here in Mexico, and with the trip to Bernal, that my computer activities have mostly been this blog and my email, both online activities. ( I use myfastmail.com for my email, and have for years. I really like not having my email dependent on any one computer and once again I was grateful for this.)

I knew someone here whose hard drive had died a slow death and he'd been able to extract most of the data from it, so I called him and he referred me to the computer guy who had helped him. He said he was brilliant and not cheap. The next morning I called Israel, owner of the new Izzy's internet cafe in Riberas del Pilar, which is between San Antonio Tlayacapan, where we lived for two months, and the small city of Chapala. (Just a half block east of Clinica Maskaras on the same side of the street, for anyone local reading this.) He said to come on over with the computer, so I hopped on a bus which goes along the lakeside highway.

On the bus, I got into a conversation with a delightful Canadian couple who have traveled to 37 different countries, typically staying a month or so to get the flavor of the place, as they were doing here.

Izzy looked at my laptop within 10 minutes of my arrival and let me sit in his workshop and watch him. (This is typical of the kind of response we've gotten from so many different kinds of service here in Mexico. In the US, I'd have left the computer and gotten a call eventually.) It turned out to be a motherboard problem, and he described my options. I could order a new motherboard from Dell but with shipping costs and Mexican import customs costs, it would cost nearly what a new basic Dell would be. It just so happened that a big Dell exposition was going on right now in Guadalajara, so I could go there the next day and order just exactly what I wanted. Mexican Dells can be ordered with English keyboards and versions of Windows, but I'd have to wait about a month for it to be built in Panama and then shipped to my doorstep via UPS, Fedex, or (reputed to be the best here) DHL.

"So I have to get a new computer!" I exclaimed happily. I do love computers!

Izzy extracted my hard drive. I left my laptop with him in case I decided to revive it. If not, he could have it for parts. As for being "not cheap" I didn't think 500 pesos (about $45 US) was bad for over an hour of skilled diagnostics, done virtually immediately after I contacted him. I told him I'd post a link to an interesting site he has on real estate in the Lake Chapala area.

Yesterday my friend whose hard drive had died helped me to extract what I could from mine, using a little case he put my hard drive into which had USB connections. I got all the most important recent files before the hard drive itself died too. (I've blogged before about the "good bad luck" Kelly and I seem to have.)

Was it the fluctuating Mexican power, even though we use surge protectors and Kelly had created a grounded circuit? Didn't seem to be. Destiny has decreed it's time for me to get a new computer.

After some time online, I decided not to go into the Guadalajara expo. Kelly has a widescreen Toshiba that I've been jealous of since he got it last year. I could get one locally but it would cost over twice what one costs in the US, as there are steep customs duties. I'm still considering my options. For now, it's back to sharing a laptop with Kelly. We did this last year without murdering each other, and here's a cute photo of Kelly to prove it.

San Juan Cosala Fat Tuesday photos

As we drove into our town on Fat Tuesday, we passed a little parade. As soon as we got home, Kelly grabbed his camera and ran down to get some photos. He's just put up a group of those pictures at Flickr. Here's the link for Fat Tuesday parade by Lake Chapala. Umm, just in case you wonder, those gorgeous gals are guys!

Starting to live in Mexican is not all a piece of cake

I'm in the mood to point out that living in any other country is a challenge. Interesting, yes, worthwhile, yes, but not entirely bliss! Mexican culture grows out of a tremendously different historical past than ours, and there are numerous opportunities for misunderstandings between "us" and "them." This comment isn't based on any particular event I've experienced; it's more a warning to people who are dreaming of how great life would be if they left their home in the US (or Canada or anywhere else) and settled in warm, sunny, cheap Mexico where the people (as I often say) are so friendly.

Often Kelly and I do feel that our lives are great. We sit eating a meal on our verandah, overlooking our swimming pool and tropical gardens, in perfect shirt-sleeve weather with few bugs, and we are very content. We've even been known to gloat!

BUT there are challenges aplenty. The numbers of dead dogs that we saw beside the highway on our recent trip still haunt me. I'm getting more at ease with how Mexicans drive, but it's still very daunting to me at times. Already more fluent than many foreigners, I wonder if I will ever reach a level of proficiency in Spanish where I feel satisfied. The slowness of Mexican bureaucracy is amazing at times. I miss friends at home. And just because I'm living in another country doesn't mean I'm free of concerns for my own country and our planet.

Buying this house in Mexico is an experiment. Will we live here for many years? Off and on, with a home also in our town in Colorado? With this our only home (as it is at present), just visiting in the US? Or will we end up back in the US after an interlude here? There's no way to know yet. For now, it's a matter of doing my best to live each day fully. Now that we have all our essential furniture (and a washing machine we got yesterday, tra la), we can begin to get back to doing some real work, on our websites and otherwise. That will get me a bit more centered, I'm sure. It's been close to a year since I've been able to do as much writing as I want to.

Of course, we still have to figure out how to maintain a swimming pool and give it a good scrubbing or hire someone to do that, change the electric bill to our names, figure out where we can get snail mail, consider whether to buy a car in Mexico or wait till our next trip to the US, and on and on. For now, I'd better try to catch up on my email. The fencing guys are doing some welding and we can't use our computers when they are doing that as the welding crashes our surge protectors. They've gone off to lunch, so I have a while!

Meeting Mexicans in San Juan Cosala

Recently we've begun to meet more Mexicans in the town where we've bought a house, San Juan Cosala, a few kilometers west of Ajijic by Lake Chapala. It feels good to be getting much more of a sense of what people are like here, specially since some of the people we met here at first were in a feud with each other.

Now, we're meeting friendly, hard-working people with the characteristic warmth we find in Mexicans everywhere. Their English tends to be better here than in many parts of the country, I imagine because it's an advantage in an area where many expats are living and hire a variety of things done.

We met Sergio, who has good English and like Kelly is an inventive thinker. We've hired him and his crew to install a chain-link fence along the two sides of our property that don't have high rock walls. This is partly to keep our dog in -- he's run off more than once and we are now keeping our eyes on him -- and also for privacy and security. Kelly noticed an attractive fence going in down the block, where Sergio was using a cane-like material called carizo to create a visual barrier. Yesterday Sergio showed us some bits of wood from a mill, the rounded ends that can't be used for lumber, and suggested they would be more durable, private, and attractive. We agreed, and this morning he's gone off into the mountains to get some at a mill while his crew is installing fence posts.

He also pointed out that our old water storage tank for the house is part asbestos instead of the solid cement we thought it was! So we will either hire him or get a referral from him for someone who can replace that before the fence goes on that part of the land.

I asked Sergio where I could get my hair cut here, and he told me to go see Maria who lives just this side of a place that sells plants on the carretera or highway that runs through town. One morning I set out but by the time I came to a farmacia I thought I had gone too far. So I asked there and the woman said, no, it's a little further on. She looked around till she could show me a red-brown color and said that was the color of Maria's door. I walked on and stopped in front of a door. The woman from the farmacia was out in front of it checking on my progress and she called out to go further. When I found the plant place and a red-brown door, I guessed I had it and knocked. A woman answered and I asked if this was the place where hair cut itself. (Literal translation from my Spanish.) She said no, that was her sister-in-law next door, down a walkway. She hollered for Maria who came out and said she could cut my hair right then. Maria and I spoke entirely in Spanish.

I followed her down the walkway to her kitchen-living room- hair salon, where two of her kids were eating at the table and things were simmering on the stove. She showed me a book of many hair styles, all of them on people under thirty years old. I put the book aside and just said that I'd like my hair to have the same cut it had now but as of two months ago. I have naturally curly hair and it's pretty forgiving of anything. What I ended up with was shorter than it's ever been cut on the sides and left longer on top.

I loved chatting with her. She's a very nice person and we talked about all sorts of things. She used one saying I liked, "Querer es poder," which could be translated "desire gives power" or "to want is to be able to," something like that.

Later, when I showed Sergio my new hairdo and said she'd done a good job, he said, "And she's a good person." Mexicans will often say this of someone, or as we learned recently, they will also say the reverse when they think it's called for! In a discussion of this with a Mexican friend one day, I quoted a saying I've liked for years, "The path of good and evil runs through every human heart." He agreed with me -- Mexicans are polite -- but I don't know if I convinced him of anything.

I could tell you at length about Jose, the friendly waiter at his family restaurant a few blocks from here who speaks pretty good English and wants to do an English-Spanish conversation exchange, or about Alicia, the helpful woman who told us about the bus system when we took a bus yesterday, but I've rambled on long enough for now! There is still a little bit more unpacking to do, and the second-hand futon-type sofa we bought in Ajijic yesterday will be delivered soon. I also need to figure out the Mexican cellphone we got yesterday... our American Verizon cellphone with a North American plan works great for calling out but we needed something for people here to reach us on without calling to the US.

Moving in to our Mexican house

We've been busy getting set up in our tiny new house... the interior space is something under 600 square feet. We have a kitchen/dining room and a bedroom/two offices space, as well as a bathroom. Our living room will be mostly the front veranda. Here our dog Larry is guarding a new acquisition, a bookcase in the inexpensive "rustic" style widely available. We left it on the front porch while we went to Bernal to get everything, as it had just been stained and was pretty smelly.


Here's my desk in the same style, with our closets to the right and a dresser we had from Bernal next to it. Toilet paper is in the background because the bathroom door is open.

Kelly provided a moment of humor in the chaos of getting set up by putting this wooden snake on my laptop drawer:


When we got back from Bernal, we had a heavy bed to carry uphill to the house and we needed something in the kitchen. We went back to the same local furniture store. I was thinking of a sideboard, but they didn't have one. We decided a slightly smaller bookcase would do the job... we will paint it later. Our friends at the store agreed to deliver it within a few hours, to move the other bookcase inside, and to move in our bed. Hard workers, they were sweating by the time they were done. So the big stuff is mostly in place. Little stuff is still strewn about... back to work I go! At least I've found the cable that connects my camera to my laptop or you wouldn't be seeing these.

When you have a lemon tree, make lemon cake!

We have a small lemon tree in our yard and it is dropping at least one lemon a day on the ground. When we got back from our recent five-day trip, there were 15 lemons on the ground! We've been making lemonade, but can't keep up that way. Marmalade is on my list of good intentions. This evening I decided to test the oven in our stove by making lemon cake. So I went online and found this recipe:

http://www.joyofbaking.com/LemonFrostedLemonCake.html

But my directions read quite differently from theirs. Here's how you do it a la Rosana:

• Realize you can't print the recipe from your computer because printer is newly attached to husband's computer and doesn't recognize yours yet. Kick husband off his email with bribe of cake to come and print recipe.
• Light the pilot light with flimsy Mexican matches and discover that the temperatures on the oven dial are celcius not Fahrenheit. Not to worry, this recipe tells you that 350 F is 180 celcius. Resolve to make a little chart to put on the newly-installed kitchen bulletin board.
  
• Instead of room-temperature butter, use refrigerator-temperature canola oil. Instead of carefully mixing as the directions say, throw the oil, sugar, and eggs in together and beat with a fork till bored.
• No vanilla in the house, forget it. Lots of lemon zest but don't notice this and leave it out of the recipe.
• In the absense of a sifter, dump the flour, baking powder, and salt into a sieve and stir with a spoon. When you see how long it will take for it all to go through the rather fine sieve, just dump it all in the bowl. Add the lemon juice and beat.
• Thoroughly grease the only pot you have that will go in the oven, your cast-iron frying pan. Put baking dishes on master shopping list on newly installed bulletin board, with a question mark in case the oven is no good.
• Fill the frying pan with the batter. Decide it's a little too much and might overflow so spoon some back into the mixing bowl. Taste the batter and decide it's not good enough that way to finish eating it.
• While the cake is baking, notice that the wall behind is getting hot. Call Kelly, who points out that there is nothing flammable there, just tiles and masonry. Also make the topping, but instead of one cup of confectioners' sugar and 2 T of fresh lemon juice, double the lemon juice and halve the sugar, using regular sugar. A little tart contrast will be nice.
• After 40 minutes, remove cake from oven and put it on a plate with the topping, which soaks in nicely.

Don't wait one minute for your first helping. Sit by the window with your sweetheart, enjoying the gentle breeze and the birdsongs, even if it's too dark to see the view.

The taste? Sublime! The texture? Heavenly. The color? Far more yellow than the picture at the original site.