Muchacho Polaco

The journey home from the north is always especially nice this time of the year.

As it turns out the damage was perhaps not as bad as previously anticipated. Abe came up this weekend to help me tear things apart and put it back together again. “Help me”….my role was mostly to get the tools.

The drive shaft was removed from the transmission, so we had to remove it from the differential in order to re install it into the transmission. The initial fear was that the differential was damaged. As it turns out it doesn’t seem that’s the case. We took it for a drive this afternoon and all seems to be working well. I bought some parts I should receive this week and then I will take it down to Mexico to do final repairs and then have it painted.

After bidding on this vehicle in a couple auctions, I finally “won”. It turned out on the prior auctions, the reserve was not met. Which means they put it back up.

The damage is worse than anticipated. We will see. If I can get it to Mexico I should be fine. It only has 88k miles, which for Toyoya truck is rather quite low.

These are some agaves I’ve been propagating from the front. I have eight of various sizes. The one in this photo is the largest.

The ones in the front yard look like this:

They look terrible because we’ve not been getting water. But they produce a steady stream of offspring that look like:

Then I have another variety:

I have nine of these and they came from various places around the neighborhood. I have a large one in the front that looks like:

And finally I have 3 more of another variety I’ve propagated:

These are the newest and smallest of the bunch.. I have one smaller one growing in the front that I found in the neighborhood:

That’s a total of 21. At an average of $15-$30 each at the nursery (depending on type and size), that’s a rough savings of $315 to $630.

There was a Ford F150 that went for about five grand that I liked more than this toyota but I didn’t bid on it because I didn’t want to win two trucks. We will keep trying.

In a couple more hours this morning’s auction begins and we’ll see if we are victorious this week.

We purchased a pop up camper a couple weeks back and realized we need a truck to pull it. I was thinking our Honda Element would be sufficient, but the pop up is too heavy.

In the last auction, I lost a truck by $200.

We have to walk the dogs at 5am each morning because by 6 it is far too hot.

Scout was a natural swimmer – at least that’s how we got him. Berlin not so much, but he’s much more willing to learn than Rome. In that way he’s more like Scout and the other one much like Tila in that he seems to hate the water.

We went to caleb and morgan’s wedding on saturday. We’ve known caleb since he was about three years old.

They still have not killed each other.

So far the hydropronics have been going pretty well. I have been growing a variety of things. It is the bok choi that is doing the best. I believe it’s supposed to take around seven weeks to full maturity.