Gatos y Perros

When we lived in Iowa I remember hearing references to a "million dollar rain" to describe precipitation that arrived just in time to turn a mediocre harvest into a silo busting bumper crop.

We're having that kind of consequential rain in Puerto Vallarta right now, but the million dollars is a disappointing loss, not a windfall.

Vallarta lives on tourism, and the fat end of the fat season is right now, from around mid-December through the first couple of weeks of January. Foreigners and nationals alike save up for holiday vacations and spend them here.

Weather is a big part of what draws the crowds. The monsoon rains of July through September are long gone, as are the summer heat and humidity. Daytime temperatures peak in the balmy 80s, dropping into the 60s most nights.

Skies are blue day after day. The boats ply the bay, packed with whale watchers, snorkelers, parasailers, jet skiers and fishermen. Other fun lovers head by the truckload for zip lines, horseback rides, galleries, and the attractions of smaller towns in every direction. And still others browse the shops for souvenirs, local tequilas, silver, Indian beadwork etc.

They all return to their hotels, order drinks, put on the new tropical duds they've bought, and head out for dinner and views of the technicolor sunsets that make every winter evening special on the Bahia de Banderas.

After that, a lot of them hit the clubs and dance the night away to the booming house music that would keep us awake if we weren't already long asleep. Their wads of pesos at eight-plus to the dollar feel like play money, and they spread it around freely.

But for the past several days, a front has squatted over most of the state of Jalisco. It has been raining almost continuously, day and night.

You don't even see rain like this in Vallarta during the rainy season, when the days are still mostly sunny and the thunderstorms usually don't arrive until afternoon as brief, ferocious squalls. We haven't seen the sun since last week.

What must make it especially hard for local merchants is that they know their million dollars are right here, close enough to smell in the pockets of the disappointed tourists who sit stranded in their hotels or don't venture out any farther than one of the local Starbucks.

Those are all packed with damp and dispirited out-of-towners trying to self-sooth with the familiar menu and caffeine buzz. At least somebody's making a little hay while the sun doesn't shine.

We also see a few visitors now and then in dreary clumps on the sidewalks, trying not to get splashed by the buses and wondering where they can find a windbreaker or an umbrella, items that aren't easy to locate in these parts.

Our ceiling, freshly painted in anticipation of the new roof that we hope will stop the leaks before next summer, is now drizzling on us again and starting to bubble its way back to the scabrous state in which we found it in September.

At least it's an opportunity for me to try to practice my Spanish with fellow sufferers, but the conversations are short.

"¿Que piensas de estas lluvias?" I ask everyone I encounter as I go about my little bits of business.

"Es loco," they almost always reply, in a way that makes it clear the less said the better.

Scrambled Eggs

I understand that an expatriate needs to deal with the language barrier, but it would help if the barrier would stand still.

For example, you'd think that ordering a breakfast of fried eggs should be no great trick regardless of where in the world you might be. And even if it's not so easy the first time, you'd think you could get it right on the second or third.

Well, if that's all true, put us in the slow learners class. We've been coming to Mexico for more than eight years and living here the better part of the last two, but we're still having trouble getting waiters to bring us the sunny side up eggs we thought we asked for.

I finally asked an English speaking mesero how to order the dish he'd just brought me the next time I had breakfast in a Spanish-only establishment. He told me "huevos fritos" should do it.

Well of course it didn't. I knew very well that "huevos fritos" only means "fried eggs," which even a truck stop waitress in Omaha wouldn't automatically understand as eggs up. All the same, I tried it out at the next opportunity and wasn't too surprised when my eggs arrived over hard.

I described what I'd really wanted to the friendly girl who was refilling my coffee cup, and she said what I should have ordered was "huevos estrellados." That looked to me like eggs "starred," which made a kind of sense for what a pair of sunny side up eggs is supposed to look like. The sun is a star too, after all.

But when I ordered it in another restaurant a few weeks later, I was pretty sure I saw a blank look flit across my waitress's face. As often happens, she thought it best not to betray confusion or trouble me with questions. My eggs arrived over hard.

I checked Google Translate at this point. Google says "huevos estrellados" are just fried eggs.

But just a couple of days ago we sat down in a small cafe just across the street from the big Church of Our Lady of Guadalupe, a stone's throw from where we live. When I picked up the menu I saw what I thought was proof that both Google and my last waitress needed to brush up on their breakfast Spanish.

The menu was English on one side and Spanish on the other. The Spanish side offered "huevos estrellados." This appeared on the English side, plain as day, as "eggs sunny side up." I ordered them.

My eggs arrived over hard.

Baffled, we interrogated our waitress as to how we could have gone wrong by believing the translation on her restaurant's own published menu. The lady at the cash register got interested and joined the conversation.

They concluded that the reason I was eating the wrong kind of eggs wasn't anything to do with their menu. It was that I should have ordered "huevos tiernos."

Google plays this back as "tender eggs," which makes the same kind of sense that "starred eggs" did. I will certainly try it out next time, but I think the odds are no better than even that I won't get eggs over easy, closer but still no cigar.

I have noticed throughout that "huevos revueltos" is always and everywhere scrambled eggs. I may switch my preference just for the sake of certainty. Mornings are challenging enough without turning breakfast into a game show.

Parts Is Parts

We took Laurel's little papillon, Lula, to the vet this week for some dental work.

Nothing too remarkable about that, for two reasons. First off, high quality dental care in Puerto Vallarta is far less expensive than it is in the U.S. or Canada, roughly one third the cost of work I've priced in New Mexico and then had done here.

For a lot of people, dental care is the main reason for visiting. You can get a bridge or an implant in a spic-and-span, state-of-the-art office and then enjoy a tropical vacation with the savings. We figured the same should be true for dogs, and that turned out to be true.

The second reason Lula's trip to the dentist was all but inevitable is that her teeth were in terrible shape. 

Like many small breeds, papillons often lack sufficient jawline for the number of teeth Nature gives them. Some of the teeth end up misaligned. In Lula's case a few were so badly askew they pointed horizontally from the side of her mouth.

She also has an astonishing underbite, and her lower jaw is offset sideways, as if she were smoking a cigar like one of those dogs in the poker paintings. But she's fluffy and cute, and since her puppy days we've always found her deformities endearing.

Alas, she's now nearly eight years old, and by the time she and Laurel arrived here for the holidays it was clear after one look in her mouth and one sniff of her foul breath that it was past time for serious action.

Our buddy at the SPCA referred us to a good vet, and he pulled out the five teeth you can dimly make out in the little plastic bag pictured above. For once the soft focus and low resolution on my iPhone camera serve all of us well.

What startled me is that the teeth were available for photographing in the first place. The doc handed them over to me without comment along with his bill, apparently in the spirit of business as usual.

It reminded me very much of automotive or appliance repairs after which the defective parts that have been replaced are handed back to you. I'm never sure exactly why.

Because they're your trash and not the repairman's? 

Because you might want to try fixing them yourself? 

Because you might otherwise suspect that the parts weren't really defective or even that they weren't actually replaced?

None of those explanations make much sense for diseased body parts, though Pam did have a moment of doubt when she saw them.

"Hey, those teeth look pretty good," she said. "I thought they'd be black."

But Laurel says the proof is in Lula's post-op breath, which she says now smells like springtime. I'm taking her word for that.

Habitat For Humanity Only

I'm as big a fan of the animal kingdom as anybody, and our open-air existence facing the ocean gives us plenty of opportunity to enjoy it.

Squadrons of pelicans sail by regularly, when they're not collapsing their wings and plunging into the sea for snacks. Enormous fish which I think are dorado but might be marlin occasionally break completely free of the surface, who knows why, maybe just to test their hang time.

We see manta rays in great schools, sometimes in feeding or mating frenzies that roil the surface of the water. Swarms of smaller fish create their own patches of seething foam, puzzling behavior because it never fails to draw a matching crowd of predatory birds.

High overhead, frigate birds and turkey vultures wheel against a sky that sometimes includes a full daytime moon, or late in the day a gaudy sunset.

And of course in this season we're occasionally lucky enough to be looking when a humpback shows its flukes, or breaches and falls back in a blast of spray the size of a depth charge displacement.

Yes, we can all agree that wildlife is so awesome. But I like my place at the top of the food chain and my voyeur's eye view of nature red in tooth and claw. The lizards are welcome to stalk flies across my ceiling, but otherwise if I want a closer look that's why God made binoculars.

Thus we were not at all pleased several nights ago in pre-dawn darkness when a fluttering shadow passed across the moonlight streaming in through the folding glass doors to our bedroom balcony and disappeared into the hallway.

"What kind of bird was that," Pam asked. I said I thought it was a bat.

We went warily looking for it, but it seemed to have headed for the living room and then back outside. So we made coffee.

Then several hours later I was playing Candyland with Elizabeth on the coffee table when I happened to look up into the brick dome that makes up most of the living room ceiling. High up in the windowed cupola at the top a brown mass dangled.

I aimed a small pair of binoculars at it and saw two large eyes staring back at me. It was doing that Dracula's cape thing with its wings and seemed quite comfortable. We left it alone in hopes it would go out hunting again at sunset when we were planning to be away, and it did.

To keep it from coming back, we went out and bought some Christmas piñatas to hang in the center of each of our three open walls, and pulled the doors about halfway shut, believing this would look on sonar less like a cave.

My theory the following morning was that the piñatas on sonar resembled a greeting line of relatives. The bat came in again and startled us over our first cup of the day. I stood up to open the doors again, and the creature brushed by me as it took the hint.

Laurel is here for the holidays and briefed us frantically and chillingly on a PBS video she saw about bat-borne rabies.So the next night -- last night if you're reading this on Friday -- we closed the doors all the way.

This morning, we awoke at 5 a.m. to a thump that shook the balcony doors.

Is it sick? Is it drunk? Pam thinks it may have lived in the attic of the building just demolished a couple of blocks down the hill directly on the malecon, the seaside promenade. The top floors were all vacant, and there were big holes in the walls. So maybe it's just homeless.

There's no safe or reasonable way to find out. But I have done a little research and learned that the Spanish word for scarecrow is espantapajaros. Maybe they've got them at Costco.

It's the Thought That Counts

If you're thinking about sending us a little holiday something, please just tell us about your generous impulse and we'll give you immediate full credit for actually following through, with no further action required on your part. We'll even send you a thank-you note by return email if you want one.

No need to make any purchase. No gift wrapping. No tedious trip to the Post Office or Fedex. Just don't. Please.

In Mexico we have finally removed the hypocrisy from that sanctimonious old saw that claims it's more blessed to give than to receive. For us now, it really is, no kidding.

For starters, you can't really mail anything directly to us that you want us to get before hell freezes over. We don't have much experience with the national postal system here, but what we do have suggests it can take as much as three months for a letter to arrive from the U.S., if it gets here at all. No idea about packages, but it's probably at least as bad.

Of course we need to do a lot better than that for personal business such as bills we can't handle by bank draft, Social Security communications, health insurance advisories and the like. To get those, we've had our mail forwarded from New Mexico to a Miami post office box managed by Mailboxes Etc. Within a week a week or so it gets shipped here to the mailbox we rent from them.

It's not a cheap arrangement, but it's highly reliable and has generally worked well for us, as long as we're just talking about envelopes or the occasional AARP periodical.

But if I go to my box and find the laminated card that tells me I have a package waiting, it feels like drawing the Queen of Spades.

The pain comes in two flavors. First I have to pay Mailboxes Etc. by weight. My rent entitles me to delivery of 2 kilos of stuff per month. A single package can mean a surcharge almost as large as the monthly fee, or more.

And second, there are customs duties, which are based on the value of what's in the package. Last year we ordered a coffee/espresso maker for the New Mexico place that failed to reach us before we expatriated and therefore got forwarded via Mailboxes, more than doubling the cost of the machine, which makes good coffee but not nearly THAT good.

So rejoice, this is a win-win situation. The more expensive the gift you were thinking of sending us, the more you save by not actually sending it and the more truly grateful we are that you didn't.

¡Felices fiestas! (Roughly, happy holidays.)

Small Packages

We've got a new dog, a chihuahua mix that Pam adopted from the SPCA shelter here.

Street dogs are common in Mexico, many of them so filthy and emaciated that they've attracted a major share of the vast store of gringo do-good energy that's always looking for an outlet in places like Vallarta.

The SPCA shelter is the project of Janice Chatterton, a neighbor of ours who turned one of Richard Burton's former homes into an upscale boutique inn and restaurant just up the hill from where we live.

A committed dog lover, she gives her gang of white miniature poodle mixes the run of the place, and we see her staff out walking them from time to time.

Pam had also contacted Mexpups, the other big dog rescue operation in town, and they sent an interesting couple over to do a home visit so we could get on the eligible list.

She's a teacher and her companion is a non-denominational minister whose day job is conducting marriage ceremonies for Vallata Adventures. That's the biggest of the local businesses that provide boatloads of tourists with whale watching, zip lining, snorkeling, sunset dining and, I now realize, wedding services.

We were glad to meet them, but by the time they reached our house, Pam had already gone out to the shelter with Janice and come back with Chiquita.

She definitely looks like a chihuahua, but she's got the body type you see everywhere in Vallarta, very long torso and short legs. My theory is that some Austrian princeling with a dachsund came here with Emperor Maximillian, his horny pet got away from him to run riot through the countryside, and now every Mexican mutt is a weiner dog.

Chiquita is seven months old, they told us. She's sweet and affectionate in spite of her hard times on the street. She was starving when somebody turned her in to the shelter. She still looks like her own X-ray, so her name fits. It means something like "petite."

Laurel thinks we should rename her Queso, which means cheese, because of her color. We're trying it on. Elizabeth will probably be the one to decide. She makes all the big decisions around here.

The Roof Over Our Heads

This is our roof, and I'm not saying it isn't a nice one.

Panoramic Pacific views as far as the eye can see, and plenty of space for enjoying them with as much or as little company as you might want.

But the flatness that makes it such a swell place for taking in the natural beauty on all sides is also where serious trouble begins during every rainy season, starting in earnest in July and lasting well into October.

The monsoon falls in buckets, and when the plummeting water stops on our roof, gravity isn't quite done with it. Most of it heads straight for the drain and eventually for the ocean just down the hill. But not all.

Quite a bit of the water that doesn't reach the drain dives merrily through chips and cracks into an invisible labyrinth of plaster and concrete capillaries that bring it eventually to our ceiling directly underneath.

There are times when anybody who has made the decision to live in a tropical paradise, especially one in which building codes are written in a foreign language, needs to understand that one has consented by implication to certain terms and conditions.

Among them is that certain sections of the plaster and paint overhead will bubble and peel every year. We understood this going in, and we've been good sports. We have mastered the shrug, the knowing eye roll, the philosophical "Well, what do you expect, it's the tropics?"

But we cultivated this easygoing state of mind in the years when we weren't actually living here during the rainy season. We only saw the aftermath when we arrived for our high season vacations, and a half day of painting and plastering was all it took to make it disappear. Sometimes it was actually done before our plane landed.

To ease whatever residual pain we still might have felt, the cost of these annual restorations is shared with our half dozen fellow condo owners. The damage, after all, arises (or descends) from our common roof, even though only the two condos on the top floor are directly affected.

We also pay only our pro rata share of our owner association's annual attempts to prevent future leaks by trying to identify the flaws in the roof and patching them. To date a cavalcade of roofers has only succeeded in moving the problem a little bit this way or that. Every year, gravity is the winner and still champion.

Now though, we know we have to up our game. Because we wanted to get Elizabeth into La Casa Azul closer to the start of the 2013 school year, we came south at the end of September, when it was still raining almost every day.

When we opened the front door we found our sofa draped in plastic and pushed toward the center of the room. Against the wall where it usually stands, water glistened on the floor. Overhead, the ceiling and wall were their usual monsoon shambles, though much worse. Drops fell steadily into the puddles below, apparently from a squall earlier in the day.

Throughout October we deployed the plastic dozens of times. We stopped thinking of the living room as a part of the house, more like a high maintenance patio.

There are all kinds of roofs, tiled, timbered or shingled, flat or pitched, tent, igloo or wickiup, but they're all expected to meet a first minimum condition, which is that they keep inclement weather off your head. Anything that can't do that isn't a roof.

What now? Our track record with local roofers isn't encouraging. Many piecemeal efforts to stop the seepage have failed. Also, a few years after our building went up in the late 1990s, the original owners' group resurfaced the whole roof, installing a "membrane" of roofing felt under the tile. There are supposed to be several layers of felt, impregnated with tar. Done properly, this should waterproof even a flat roof.

Was the one on our building done improperly? Did tropical summer heat under the tile create bubbles between felt layers or breaches at the edges or seams? Did the roofers skimp on materials or damage the membrane as they replaced the tile surface? Could one of our periodic earth tremors have weakened or overstretched it?

Clearly the physics of failure require further study, and we don't have a lot of time. Our annual association meeting is in January. Our building manager says the advice he's getting from our most recent roofer is that nothing short of sealing the entire roof will do. Even though the self-serving prescription comes from a guy who would like to be given that big job, it's hard to argue he's wrong.

But if the expense seems too great or the work isn't backed by a reliable warranty, a majority of owners may not feel like making what would look to them like a risky bet. That will leave us in the market for another of the annual patchwork solutions that could stop the drips at lower cost but so far haven't.

Doing nothing is not an option. As we know from Pam's years in real estate and mine as president of a three-building 1,400-unit cooperative apartment complex, and as all our fellow owners here have acknowledged through years of determined efforts to solve this problem, it's a settled principle of collective ownership that if one owner has a leaky roof, everybody does until it's fixed.

Quick Turnaround

I just made my first trip to the U.S. using my brand new and hard earned "residente temporal" card.

It's easy to forget when you come to Mexico as a tourist as we've always done that one of the little pieces of paper they give you on the airplane coming down is actually a visa application. Once stamped, it proves you're in the country legally, but only for so long.

The tourist visa limit is six months. If you stay longer, you're an illegal alien. Six months is plenty of time for a vacation visit, but pretty soon it won't be long enough for us. Elizabeth goes to a pre-school with an academic year of nine months-plus, and the older she gets the more it matters.

The next step for us under recently restructured visa rules here is "residente temporal" status, which gives us a full year. After several years of renewal, we'll be eligible for "residente permanente" cards.

The application process for your first temporal card is long and sometimes frustrating. The Trail of Tears begins at any Mexican consulate in your home country. The new visa rules don't seem to be well understood yet, so it took us a while to find a consulate that knew them.

In El Paso, we were told we would need proof of income for assurance we would not become a burden on the Mexican government, and a good character reference from our local law enforcement agency in the U.S.

The local cops in Ruidoso said the best we could do on the latter requirement would be a criminal records check, but we'd have to write the New Mexico state police to get one. It took a couple of weeks, but the documents arrived.

We decided to take our completed applications to the consulate in Albuquerque since we were going there anyway. When we got there we heard a different story. There was zero interest in our empty rap sheets. And we learned that my most recent pension statement would not do for proof of income. They needed the last six months of bank statements reflecting that income.

Most troubling, however, was that we were told Elizabeth would not be eligible for any visa beyond tourist because her last name is different from ours. We showed the court order that made us her parents and the birth certificate naming us as mother and father. Sorry, the young vice consul told us. In Mexico it is "not normal" for parents and children to have different "appellidos".

We were pretty sure this was nonsense made up on the spot, but it was looking like we'd need a Mexican immigration lawyer to get the job done. Then on the drive south, Pam had the good idea we should try once more at the border consulate in Nogales AZ, where they might actually know what they were doing.

It cost us a half day, but we left Nogales with my passport endorsed for provisional residente temporal status. I had 30 days to complete my application at an immigration office in Puerto Vallarta. Pam and Elizabeth were told they would have to wait. Our proof of income applied only to me. They got tourist visas. But the vice consul told us Elizabeth's last name won't be a problem, as we suspected.

At the office in Vallarta I got an application form and instructions to register on a government website. I was also told I should go to any bank to pay the U.S.$300 fee and obtain an official receipt. Finally, I needed front and right profile photos in the very small or "infantil" size.

Notwithstanding my protests, the Walmart photo lady was sure right profile meant facing right, not right side of face. That was wrong and cost me an extra trip. But in the end after about two weeks I got my card.

Our visa quest is not over though. Now that I have mine, Pam and Elizabeth are eligible to apply for theirs as family members. To certify themselves as family, Pam needs our marriage license and Elizabeth needs a birth certificate, neither as simple as it sounds.

We don't have our marriage license here. I've had to write the Bexar County TX clerk's office for it. Then both documents will need to be apostilled, a special form of government-issued notarization recognized by treaty in other countries. Getting that by remote control from here will cost about U.S.$200 per document.

Not quite done. Once in our hands, each document must be copied in Spanish by a government-approved translator. Then and only then will we be ready to apply for the cards with fees, photos, fingerprints etc.

But I've got mine, and it arrived just in time for my very quick trip to New York last week for my scheduled follow-up MRI, front and side views of the "benign schwannoma" that scared us so badly last June.

Good news on that front. The tumor is still behaving like the non-toxic slacker the doctors had pegged it for. I don't have to go back for 18 months as long as it continues not to bother me. Maybe I should have mentioned this sooner. A newsroom editor might say I "buried the lede."

Now You See It, Now You Don't

I've never seen anybody work harder or faster in my life than the guys who have shown up twice now in our neighborhood to demolish old buildings where the property owners suddenly had new ideas about what should be occupying the space.

The first time was right next door, and we could watch them through our bedroom window. Now a bigger structure is being taken down directly between us and the ocean, so we track their progress from almost every room in the house without getting up from our seats.

In both cases the workers have done virtually the whole job with hand tools, nothing else but muscle and bone against thick pads and pillars of steel-reinforced concrete and walls of brick.

The work begins on the roof. They chisel the mortar away on the balustrades and dismantle them row by row, chipping the used bricks clean, stacking them and manhandling them to street level to be hauled away for reuse somewhere else.

Then they start swinging heavy sledges down on the concrete roof. Not much seems to happen with the first thumping blows. But then the chunks and dust begin to fly. You go away to run some errands and when you come back there's a yawning rectangle of exposed rebar with the floor underneath visible through the rusty steel grid.

Hour by hour, the hammers keep swinging and the chips keep flying. Soon the men are balancing on the concrete beams, the only place left to stand while they deliver the last licks before there's nothing left but the rebar to cut away.

You can see that other workers have already pulled down and carried away the walls on the floor below, where the sledges will be swinging again the next day.

It is incredibly brutal work, the kind that makes you stronger when you're young but starts wearing you down when you hit middle age, as many of the laborers on these jobs have done. They start early in the morning, and they keep going until it gets dark. Then sometimes they drape an extension cord and a naked light bulb over a beam and go on for several more hours.

But as crude and mindless as the work appears, there's a striking delicacy about it. No wrecking ball. No explosives. Just sledgehammers, chisels, shovels and wheelbarrows. Now and then a small jackhammer to loosen the concrete on the thickest pillars and beams. It's as if the building is being nibbled away in tiny bites.

Anybody who imagines that Mexico is the country of the three-hour siesta where everybody sings "Mañana" ought to come have a look.

One day as I stood at the bedroom window marveling at the discipline and stamina of the crew at work on the building next door I had the idea of going out to buy a case of cold Coronas and delivering them to the foreman at quitting time.

When I mentioned this to Pam her jaw dropped. Had I forgotten, she wondered aloud, that this work was a prelude to new construction that would soon close forever the window through which I was observing it?

Well, yes, for a little while I had forgotten all about that.

Through a Screen Darkly

I was pretty sure the Red Sox won the World Series last night, but I was watching the game in Spanish and couldn't be absolutely positive until I read it in the paper.

I'm exaggerating, but it's the truth that I didn't understand why the Sox lost Game 3 on that strange base path obstruction call until the Times spelled it out for me the next morning.

People in the grandstand manage to watch baseball without benefit of color commentary and technical exegesis, so I figured I could do the same this post season, the first for which we were already in Mexico and dependent on the local cable lineup.

We've got a few English language news and movie channels on the far end of the dial, but no sports or at least no baseball.

Not that I'm complaining. It actually seemed like an act of generosity on the part of Fox Sports to run out their video on Mexican channels, siphoning off Joe Buck and Tim McCarver and replacing them with some guys whose names I never did catch.

There were hardly any ads at all, other than a short and endlessly repeating string of promos for Fox coverage of NASCAR, the NFL and an assortment of "futbol" events staged by FIFA, UEFA, the League of Champions and the South American Cup. Lots of guys scoring goals while doing back flips and then ripping off their shirts. I now will never forget that Club Leon fans paint themselves an attractive shade of green for big matches. And I have memorized all of Fox's lurid blow-molded station break graphics.

Fox also mercilessly flogged its late night sports talk show "La Ultima Palabra," the "Last Word," an obvious falsehood since the program seems to have four hyperventilating hosts, none of whom ever stops talking.

I had hoped that there might be some good Spanish lessons in the Series for me, because I assumed that basically understanding what was going on just by watching would be the functional equivalent of subtitles.

But no, it didn't work that way. Actual game action turns out to be a small part of what you see on the screen. Fox panned the crowd for the benefit of its U.S. audience for celebrities whose names I couldn't remember and who my Spanish commentators ignored.

The intra-game dugout interviews with the managers got the same treatment. Instead, my guys talked about other stuff, which might or might not have been baseball related, so I was treated to the rare experience of missing two trains of thought at the same time.

When the ball was actually in play, my guys talked so fast I was lucky to catch one word in a dozen.

I plucked a few morsels from the stream. An inning is an "entrada," which is also the word you see for entrances to parking lots and grocery stores. A strikeout is a "ponche", which is also the word used around here for a flat tire. I learned that the hard way of course. Top of the first inning is "primera alta," and you substitute "baja" for the bottom and "mitad" (half) for middle.

Before this, I only knew the ordinal numbers up to "tercera" or third. Now I have them all the way to novena or ninth, but since the Sox and Cards never went into extra innings that's all I've got.

I had mastered this much baseball vocabulary by the middle of the ACLS. So when Pam asked me during the Series if I minded hitting the mute button, I didn't mind at all.

Oh, snap! It has just occurred to me that I could have streamed English audio for free online from ENPS, MLB or somebody. I used to do that in New York, where I preferred the Yankee radio commentators. But the audio arrives first, and the brain has to deal with the disorientation of an ear that's ahead of the eye.

It's clear from all of the above and especially the preceding paragraph, that my brain is already playing catch-up on many fronts, and losing. So it's probably just as well that I didn't try it. I might have hurt myself.

Horns of An Old Dilemma

Once again for us, the fall season in our putative Mexican paradise has opened with a gaudy episode of criminal violence that again has us recalibrating our risk tolerance.

Shortly after midnight Thursday, a couple of lawyers from suburban Guadalajara who came to town in that harmless looking white VW beetle above were cornered and slain in a manner that had all the hallmarks of a cartel assassination.

A third guy was with them, a neighbor and colleague who sounded as if he might have been a paralegal of some sort. He was still alive but badly wounded. They all worked for a notario in Guadalajara, according to Spanish language news accounts.

A notario in Mexico is much more than a notary public in the U.S., a person or firm with authority to provide essential help in completing real estate transactions, preparing, certifying and recording formal documents, and providing other quasi-legal services.

When police arrived at the grisly scene, they found briefcases containing documents indicating that the lawyers planned to serve an eviction notice and take possession of a hotel. They reportedly had tried to do it earlier Thursday but nobody answered their knock. If I understand correctly, they planned to return with a state police escort on Friday.

Along with the blood-spattered eviction papers there was Mexican currency totaling about $80,000, and more documents related to ownership changes on several other smaller properties. The money was said to be intended for making deposits on those transfers.

Either reporters or police, I couldn't decipher which, interviewed witnesses who said the VW was boxed in by two pickup trucks. Men in the truck beds armed with automatic rifles then pumped more than 40 rounds into the lawyers' car before fleeing.

Our property manager has an office and apartment not far from the carnage and heard the shooting. No dummy, he knew immediately what it was and stayed inside away from his windows.

We heard nothing, no surprise since we're a half mile from where it happened. And anyway, the nights down here still swelter so we sleep under noisy air conditioning. Earlier in the week there was a small earthquake in the area, and we missed that too.

But of course, as I've said before, lack of situational awareness is a crucial part of the expat lifestyle down here, aided where necessary by willful ignorance. The only English language news published locally concerns charity galas, restaurant openings and the doings of the widely admired gay mens chorus. Nobody complains.

When something as disturbing as a mob hose-down penetrates the collective gringo consciousness, denial antibodies are quickly deployed. In the current case, we soon saw Canadian bloggers dilating about a similar incident near Calgary. Coulda happened anywhere, eh?

The all-purpose incantation: (1) Bad people do bad things everywhere, and even if they didn't (2) the narcos only go after their business rivals or the cops, so (3) if you mind your own business, you are as safe in Mexico as you'd be back home, wherever that may be.

There. Just writing it makes me feel better.

What stake, if any, the local cartel might have had in a seedy hotel and some rundown housing remains a mystery. I plan to continue scrutinizing and decoding the follow-up coverage.

In the meantime, I've acquired some new Spanish slang, "Cuernos de Chivo." The phrase translates literally as "goat horns," but in this context it's the street name for the weapons that did this dirty work, the ever-popular and ever-available AK-47.

As I like to respond in my light-hearted way whenever a helpful national corrects my grammar, "Cada dia, una leccion de español."

Every day a Spanish lesson.

Hecho en Mexico

Back in the late 60s I spent a summer in Bologna, Italy, where my university had a satellite campus.

It was part of my international studies masters program. But it was such a low voltage academic experience that my fellow students and I pegged it as a boondoggle aimed at giving a couple of our professors a short paid sabbatical in the sun.

Education comes in many forms though, and the trip furnished some of us with our first glimpse of the weird ways of global merchandising. We were able to buy our beloved Marlboros at a fraction of the U.S. price. The fine print on the trademark red and white flip-top boxes said they were made in Mexico.

We noticed the first time we lit up that the cigarettes inside weren't actually Marlboros. They tasted odd, and the "tobacco" had a yellowish color. It appeared to include a far higher proportion of dried stems and floor sweepings than we were used to.

We didn't care. The smokes still served our purpose as fashion accessories. They tasted no worse and probably were no more lethal than actual Marlboros. We surmised that Phillip Morris had found it more profitable to license its name and package design to some sketchy plutocrat south of the border than trying to do it themselves.

So I should have been well prepared to become the owner of a kitchen full of not-quite-the-real-thing appliances here on the Bahia de Banderas.

Every morning I find the refrigerator has wet the floor in the wee hours like an incontinent tooth fairy. The dish washer leaves us puzzling daily over whether we forgot to turn it on; the state of the dishes inside is not much help.

The oven delivers heat that varies with each use, regardless of the selected temperature, and not in a consistent way that would let poor Pam adjust for the error. The microwave works okay but growls like a walrus.

The trade dress of these disappointing machines proclaims them to be products of Maytag and Whirlpool. I'm sure on some level they are, but unfortunately not on the level that determines quality and reliability.

It's not as if corners might have been cut with the aim of hitting price points more acceptable in a less prosperous market. Our appliances cost at least as much as their American cousins.

It's all a mystery to us. We console ourselves with the thought that at least our malfunctions provide regular employment to a squad of "technicos" who answer our calls for help.

As an added benefit, they allow us to model proper expatriate behavior for Elizabeth, who is paying close attention.

This morning I came upon her on the balcony outside our bedroom, the remote control to our iPod speakers pressed to her ear like a cell phone.

"Hello, could you come to our house," she was saying. "Our dishwasher is not washing our dishes. Thank you."