Family news

Everyone is home and recovering from their trips (Ruby to Japan, Joy to a trade fair in the Middle East).

nest step: How do you get organic brown rice certified as Halal?

The court case about Lolo's will was postponed again until February. Oh well.

It doesn't affect me, since I am not in his will, but it does prevent the property from being sold out from under our feet or being kicked out of "his" home for disobeying his orders. (He can't legally kick us out of property owned by Lolo).

It is quite hot outside, and the downtown is being fixed up with holiday decorations. Here the big decoration is the Christmas star, a parol: but they also have tinsel and lights and often a sleigh with Santa. The stores start playing the Christmas songs (secular) in mid October.

Usually everything shuts down by mid December,  which is why I am not surprised the judge decided to take a holiday, but am a bit surprised he went this early.

What it also means is lots of traffic, since our street is one of the detours to go around the heavy traffic to the palenke, three blocks up. This makes it hard to take George, our killer lab, on a walk: He tends to jump and run after other dogs and sometimes schoolkids, and has pulled me over so I have fallen in the street several times.

The new mayor has continued to dig covered drainage ditches that go along the edge of the roads and can be used as sidewalks, so this helps. The reason I note this is because usually street improvements are ignored until a few months before the next election, which is why the previous mayor didn't get around to fixing the flooding in the palenke area until four months before the last election. So things are improving here.