Why My House Smells Like Pot

So I love my quiet neighborhood here in Cancun. Lots of families, very clean, everyone says hello, etc etc etc.

And then there’s my next door neighbor. A pretty normal-looking, average guy who isn’t at all friendly, but doesn’t really bother anyone either.

Yesterday I came home from work and I saw his dogs tied up to the window in the front yard. I figured, “Oh, they must be doing some work in the backyard.” I walked into my kitchen and was overwhelmed by the smell of pot in the air. I whined about it on Twitter, then went about my day since this is a pretty frequent occurence. (Our houses share a wall, so smells and noises frequently make their way over to our place.)

I sat on the couch and noticed some of my neighbor’s friends enter his house. Minutes later, I heard chanting in some unknown language coming from his backyard. I was about to go peek into his backyard from my upstairs window when the chanting was suddenly accompanied by what sounded like hammering. Confused and more than a little weirded out, I decided to stay put.

The chanting and banging eventually stopped and the men all came back out into the front yard. Jorge got home just then, and I heard them ask him a question and he responded cheerily.

When Jorge came into the living room, I said “What did they ask you?”

“They wanted me to check if their pigeon had flown into our backyard.”

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…

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I really hope that pigeon made it to safety.

Mayan Animal Art and Other Surprises

So I have a 3-day weekend coming up, and it is going to be epic.

Spring Break is going strong in Cancun, so we might swing by Party Center one evening to see all the craziness. There will also be a wedding and at least two beach trips. I can’t wait!

The most exciting part is our Trash The Dress photo shoot this weekend at a surprise location. (Can’t say where it is just yet… but rest assured it’s STUNNING and I’ve been working on my tan.) If you want to follow along with my photo shoot this Sunday, I’ll be live tweeting, so follow me on Twitter at @CancunGringa.

I’ll leave you for the weekend with some pics of some new wall decor we hung in our living room last week. We bought these little critters on our trip to Ek Balam back in 2010, and we’re just now getting around to hanging them.

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I have a penchant for small reptiles, as well as brightly colored animal figurines. (It occurs to me that y’all have yet to see my alebrije collection! Soon!)

Kitchen Mini-Makeover

**For anyone who has ever wanted to see Jorge figure skating, check out my sister Sarah’s blog, Nerdy and I Know It! She recently had a photoshop contest, and I won. 🙂

 

The last few months, we’ve been doing a lot of changes to the house we’re renting. (About time, too… we’ve been there almost 2 years!) We finally have the furniture we need in the living room, so now we can spend most of our time downstairs instead of upstairs.

This week, we got shelves in our kitchen, and it is AMAZING. We have a teeny tiny, one-sided galley kitchen with minimal storage space and only 1 small square of counter space. Since we had nowhere to put our toaster oven, canisters, juicer and blender, they were all kind of stacked on top of eachother on the counter, cutting my tiny counter in half.

Now my counter space has gone from impossibly small to kind of small, and I’m so excited! We also had hooks put in under the shelves, so now all my pretty hot pads are on display (2 years after I got them), and our pans don’t have to be stored in the oven anymore.

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Our Backyard Makeover: Before and After

So waaaay back in August I told ya’ll that we were going to redo the backyard, which we did! I hadn’t gotten around to taking pictures of it until this weekend, mainly because I am stuck in the office during daylight hours. But now I finally have the “After” shots! Here goes…

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Unfortunately, the grass was damaged by the recent “Backyard Pool” incident. Then again, it wasn’t growing in well to begin with! If anyone has advice on growing grass, I’m all ears.

We’d also like to paint the walls white, and eventually remove the potted tree and potted bush. We’re still thinking that one over, though… we really hate that tree, but it does provide good shade. We’d replace the tree with my new orchid tree. After my last post on it, a reader (Thanks, Pauline!) identified it as an orchid tree, not a plant, which is very exciting! No shade from that baby for a few more years, though. 😦

The total cost for this makeover, including palm plants, grass, dirt and patio, was somewhere around $300 US. Not bad, eh?

Dear Chaac, Thanks a Lot.

After a week of lovely weather, Saturday afternoon was suddenly filled with ridiculous amounts of rain. Strange, since rainy season is now over. (Here in the Yucatan Peninsula, we like to attribute these shenanigans to Chaac, the Mayan god of rain.)

Luckily our house doesn’t flood, but several hours of non-stop heavy rain did cause my backyard to look like a pond:

Aaah, paradise.

Luckily the rain cleared out by Saturday evening. We had to cancel our plans of going to a nightclub in the Hotel Zone because of flooding, but we did get to go to one of my favorite downtown spots, Ora Si! Mariscos y Chan Chan (horribly long name, great place).

With the sun shining and the birds singing, on Sunday Jorge and I toured the Hotel Zone a little (our new Sunday tradition), then went to his aunt’s house for fried fish, pico de gallo and tacos.

In the end, a potentially wasted weekend was saved by sunshine once again!

My New Orchid

I was excited to walk out the door this morning to see that my new orchid plant finally has its first bloom! I’ve always been a bit of a “black thumb”, so it’s nice to know I didn’t screw this plant up.

We put it in the planter in our front patio because that spot gets some sun during the day.

Would anyone judge me if I said I really want a pair of heels in this print?

The leaves might be my favorite part! We’ve discovered that they open during the day (as you see in the photos) and fold perfectly in half when it gets dark. Very cool.

The leaves are a little lighter than they should be, which has me worried. Maybe if I lift it up a bit with some string so the sun hits it better?

In this shot, you can see that the plant has tons of buds on it... can't wait to see what it looks like in a few days!

We got it from a local plant shop that some guy runs out of his house (gotta love Mexico!). He had several huge versions of this plant in his front yard, and I fell in love!

If anyone can help me identify this plant, I’d really appreciate it! Right now, the only descriptive words I have are “orchid” and “pretty”.

My Three Day Weekend

So my 3-day weekend for Mexican Independence Day was busy, busy, busy! I’ll do a quick run-through for ya 🙂

Thursday

To celebrate Independence Day, we played it simple this year… tacos and potatoes at a friend’s pool. Just a calm evening sitting around and talking while listening to fireworks in the distance. Ended the night around 5 am, I think.

We really need to hang out with this group of friends more often. They’re friends of Jorge from high school, and we always have a great time with them.

Friday

Also a low-key day. We ordered the plants we want for the backyard, then went to Jorge’s cousin’s 3rd birthday party where we had tortas and raspados. Then we went home and took a long nap!

In the evening, we went to my suegros house for some pasta from Cheester.

Me and Jorge at Sofia's bday party

Saturday

My brother-in-law scored a dozen free passes to Xcaret. Since Jorge’s cousins were in town visiting, we went with them for the day. I’ll do a more detailed post later this week, but here’s a teaser photo for ya…

Sunday

On Sunday morning, we (and by “we”, I mean Jorge) planted some mini palm trees in our up-and-coming backyard, and laid some some dirt. I’ll post the full makeover later this week, so you can check out our little patio, palm trees, fancy grass and orchid (whaaaaat??)!

Here’s a preview shot of Jorge hard at work while I supervised (and by “supervised”, I mean ate cereal, took pictures, played with the dogs and decided where the palm trees should go).

I think we can all agree that Jorge is the best husband ever.

The grass and orchid plant came today, but won’t be installed until tomorrow. Boo.

Immediately afterwards, my suegros came and picked us up to go to the pool. My brother-in-law’s girlfriend’s parents (confusing, I know) own a piece of land out in the middle of the jungle where they’ve built a little private pool and garden, complete with hammock area and bathroom. We spent the rest of the afternoon there. I would have taken pictures, but I was too busy swimming, eating Domino’s pizza and napping in hammocks. Life is so hard sometimes.

Afterwards we did laundry at my suegros house, like we do every Sunday. Meanwhile, I caught up on reality TV online… Project Runway, new season of Survivor (hurray!) and America’s Next Top Model All Stars (go Allison and Laura!). Then Jorge and I went home and watched the first episode of Jersey Shore Italy. (Oh Mike, you scoundrel!)

So that’s it for my 3-day weekend. What did you do this weekend?

 

Dear Neighbors… Seriously?

So our house has been consistently invaded by animals this year, but I can’t figure out if they’re drawn to us out of love or hatred. Either way, they love hanging out there.

First there were the cockroaches and slugs (still there, but in much smaller quantities). Then, there were the evil cats (who no longer poop in our planter, thanks for all the tips!). I also saw a teeny tiny frog in the kitchen last week, but at least he was cute. Now… ok, I seriously can’t even explain this one. My Facebook and Twitter friends already know that one of our neighbors a few houses down has acquired a rooster.

A ROOSTER.

A ROOSTER THAT CROWS.

A ROOSTER THAT HAS LEARNED TO CLIMB NOT ONE, BUT SEVERAL BACKYARD WALLS.

Apparently our house is a Mecca for Yucatan wildlife.

What animal do you think will be next? Place your bets!

Around the House

Jorge and I have been spending the last few weeks trying to get the house together so we can finally actually USE the house instead of spending most of the time watching TV upstairs.

Currently our living room has our nice new sofas pushed face-forward against the wall because the dogs are home alone during the day and we don’t want them jumping on there. We also had our coffee table recently finished… it’s STUNNING! (and currently residing in our back room where all our storage stuff is) I’ll try to remember to post pictures of it soon.

In order to reclaim our living room from the dogs, we have to spruce up our backyard to make it liveable for them so they can stay there during the day. Luckily our backyard already has nice shade from a small tree whose branches spread out over most of the yard. Right now it’s half gravel, half dirt… we plan on changing it to half patio, half grass, with some nice plants thrown in there. We also desperately need to paint the walls.

As you can see, it needs work. Hopefully by the end of this weekend, it will be a miniature doggy paradise (or next weekend, depending on if we can find someone to lay the floor by… today)

So that’s the plan for the next few days: create incredible backyard for the dogs, reclaim living room, live happily ever after.

Oh, and my neighbor across the street gave us a plant in a hanging coconut. It’s the cutest thing ever! We hung it from the tree in our front patio and it’s started to bloom:

So that’s what’s going on around our house. Do you have any house projects right now?

Operation Chile Cat Part 2

Two weeks ago, Jorge began Operation Chile Cat to rid our front tree planter of cat poop. With just one night of chile powder set around the ledges of the planter, it seems we were partially successful. As it turns out, we had TWO neighborhood cats pooping in our planter, and now that number has been reduced to ONE.  *evil grin*

Saturday night we heard about 10 minutes of yowling from outside, and I just chalked it up to some “naughty business” going on with the neighborhood cats. Jorge looked out our front window to see 3 cats sitting outside our front gate, looking at our house and yowling. I think they’re on to us.

At the recommendation of my reader Johanna, we decided to kick it up a notch by using coffee grounds. Last night, Jorge poured chile powder and coffee grounds around the planter, then sprinkled some in the dirt.

Game on.