20% Chance of Rain

Yesterday was a beautiful HOT AND HUMID sunny day, bright blue skies, perfect for the pool or beach.  The weather forecast predicted a 20% chance of rain...we haven't had any rain at all lately, so I figured chances were slim.  The plants will tell you how little rain we've had so far this rainy season.

Then the clouds built up out of what seemed like nowhere. It was lightning and thundering and it started to rain.  The way it does during a big clash of cloud systems, causing the rain to beat down sideways from all directions.  We closed the necessary doors, laid down the sand bags (towels) and watched.  The mountain guys were freaked out, asking, "Is this a normal rain storm here?" 

"Pretty much, during rainy season."  What can I say? When it rains here it pours.  Literally. It was indeed the most incredible lightning storm we've had this year.  After the doors and windows were secured, I lay in my hammock watching the sky.  It was fascinating.  A couple of the strikes were VERY close. We lost power briefly. Then we lost water.  How you can lose water in a rainstorm I am not sure, but it was back in an hour or so.  We had not overused our water supply yesterday; in fact, there was less usage than on a normal day.  People were just lying around listless in the blistering heat.

I ran around looking for flashlights and candles.  Damn, I forgot to get D batteries!  But I was ready for the big blackout.  It never happened. I eventually fell asleep to the sound of the rain after the wild electrical phase ended.  I know the pool overflowed, I saw that happen while there was still light, but I forgot about the street flooding.  Below is what I found when I woke up today.  I took these photos at about 10am.  The guys who deliver my water said they thought they were in a hurricane.  There is a lot of flooding around the city.

Looking from the kitchen door toward the front gate and street....the water is still standing and is loaded with black dirt.  Is this the dirt I painstakingly added to my Zen Garden...spending hours pulling weeds and rearranging all the plants one day last week?  Or is this floodwater dirt that seeped in underneath the front gate?  Since there is doubt, it must go.  Although you'd never know it, this area is tiled and is thoroughly cleaned once weekly!

Here is another angle of the state of the carport today.

Then I went out into the street.  The corner is still in nearly a foot of standing water.  It's getting washed away slowly by traffic, but I wouldn't count on the drain system, even after its recent "improvements".

And I walked down to see how the other corner looked....it is still flooded halfway up the block.

I am on slightly higher ground and all I have is flood debris. 

Today's forecast, PARTLY CLOUDY this afternoon with a 30% chance of rain tonight.  I am hustling to wash/dry the sand bags for a new outburst!  And trying to get some clothes washed and dried while there is still a breeze....before the clouds build up. Living in the tropics, it's all in the timing.

So How's That Mosquito Plague Going?

We have had afternoon sprinkles, showers, downpours or blinding rainstorms every day for a month.  The ground is saturated.  Last week we were bombarded by mosquitoes.  I wrote about it.

The mosquitoes have gotten worse.  So much worse that they made Diario headlines three days in a row and the city is (supposedly) working the fumigation trucks around the clock.  Until I moved into this blast-into-the-past-time-machine called Mérida, I hadn't seen, heard or smelled a mosquito fog truck since I was a kid in Toledo in the 60's.  I haven't heard one this past week, but that doesn't mean it hasn't passed by. We can't hear street noise in the back bedoom.  I have no issue filling the air with certain toxic chemicals out of necessity. It's full of them already, so what's a little more toxicity if it avoids us all coming down with dengue?

The city also hired hundreds of men to assist with backpack fumigation.  The biggest worry now is August.  The officials are worried about an impending rise of dengue, and have seen 270 cases of hemorraghic cases thus far. As wet as our environment is, it's very difficult to avoid mosquito breeding areas.  At home, we actively seek potential breeding grounds, clear them - and then the bastards appear somewhere else.  My house is surrounded by three overgrown abandoned properties.  I wonder if there's any standing water or breeding grounds over there? 

The mosquitoes also got BIGGER.  There were two photos in the Diario of wasp-sized (ok, slight exaggeration) GIANT MOSQUITOS.  They are as big as flies at least. They're all over the peninsula.  Luckily the Jurassic Park Breed doesn't carry dengue- so they say.  There was no mention how their bites compare to the smaller striped anopheles bastards, that I constantly fight myself to NOT SCRATCH.  Hopefully the bigger the mossie doesn't mean a worse bite!

I HEAR the Zap Racquets in Mérida sold out and I KNOW there is NO REPELLENT anywhere...the shelves are all empty.  All that's left are coils and Baygon to spray entire rooms.  We "zen ourselves" into believing the Raid coils are lavender incense by necessity.  The racquet is the greatest, even if we do look like lunatics flinging them around the house and patio all the time. Playing air tennis.  You get to LOVE that zap sound!  The good news is the cats have become accustomed to our new bizarre behavior and don't freak out at the sight of our new weapons anymore.

 My house is reasonably waterproofed....compared to others I have seen....so I do continue to enjoy the afternoon rain squalls.  I spend a lot of time on the weather sites.  Whether we see as many tropical storms as were predicted this hurricane season remains to be seen, but it's safe to say so far we are having a much rainier rainy season than the past two summers.

Rain Brings Mosquito Plague to Yucatán

Above is a photo of yesterday's front page news.  The 'plagas' or plagues from the rains they report about are mosquitos and "baches", which I learned from the article are 'potholes' in the streets.

These problems are the result of the incredible amount of rain we have had lately.  I wrote a post the other day called, "Will It Ever Stop?" about the rain, but as I finished writing it, it did stop, so I didn't post it.  The heavy downpours let up for about a day and a half.

The weather has been strange since the last week in June.  That is when Alex, yet unnamed, was twirling about in the Western Caribbean, causing lots of showers to drift over our way.  As the storm moved northwest, slowly, we had several days of what I might call Seattle weather, gray skies for days and days.  Adding convection heating to the peninsula's already saturated ground, we were in for heavy tropical rains every afternoon.

As the first system moved through, the second tropical depression had already begun to head our way.  It never took on a name, even though it almost became Bonnie as it crossed the Yucatán on its path from the southeast. Eventually TD2 (tropical depression 2) was born in the Southeastern Gulf of Mexico, just west of us, where it picked up more moisture and is currently plaguing northeastern Mexico and deep southern Texas with more rain than they need.

These storms brought with them other plagues.  Some folks have blogged about them, Debi's is good...She talks about the night we had flying fornicating ants.  They had it worse at their house, oddly enough, just a few blocks away, as we only found a handful of them the day after.  We had more of the flying termites the night before the flying fornicating ants....the wings covered everything.  But those were one time events.

The plaga began two days ago.  MOSQUITOS.  We have mosquitoes around year round, I won't deny that.  This week I felt like I was being eaten alive and tortured.  As hot and humid as it is, 100% even when it is not raining, I put on long pants and a long sleeved shirt to avoid the mossies.  That didn't work. They bit right through the hammock and Bali pants and I had bites all over my ass.  We have an armada of weaponry to fight mosquitoes.  We usually start with the Raid Lavender Mosquito Coils.  I call them Mexican incense.  The locals call them 'killers'.  They HELP but do not solve the problem. 

We have bigger guns to break out.  Slightly off topic, in the photo a few paragraphs below on the left is ANT POISON POWDER.  That is lethal stuff and we don't use it often because of the cats.  They don't sell anything like it in the US.  (They use muriatic acid like it was Joy! and lots of other toxic materials here.)  We basically have an ant invasion every day before a rainstorm.  They come in through the electrical outlets, from tiny crawl spaces in the window jams, or parade in proudly through little side routes in the doors.  I probably kill ants fifty times a day in the kitchen, maybe a few, maybe a big parade. I have other weapons I use before the ant powder and I apologize for not taking a photo of them.

On the floor I use medicated talcum powder, or whatever talc I can find during an invasion.  It confuses the ants,  and the only problem with this method is the floors become super slippery.  And of course it looks like someone spilled flour or cocaine all over the floor and left it there. Another remedy is vinegar.  For a while I had a spray bottle of vinegar on the counter, that also confuses them, and in my case drowns them.  But I don't always want to smell vinegar.  So I replaced it...and the spray bottle now has undiluted Ajax Expel.  That kills 'em dead!  So much for the ants.  They didn't make the front page.

Sometimes we have to vacate and spray entire rooms with one of the two bug sprays in the center of the photo.  These are also used against ant invasions, the occasional palmetto bug that flies in, or other critters that people find unacceptable.  I don't think these sprays kill all the mossies, maybe they are becoming resistent to our current killers.

And on the right is the trusty spray repellent. I am not crazy about spraying that toxic crap all over me, but I can be driven to it - often enough that I want a full can sitting there at all times.  I really hate being eaten alive, and it's happened to me too many times to count.  We won't get into the crazy situations I was in to be eaten alive; that would take a long time.  I'd rather mention that it is important to kill these mosquitoes because there is a threat of dengue fever, transmitted by these particular mosquitoes' bites.  According to the Diario, in the Yucatán there have been 600 cases reported in the past couple of weeks, and 40 of those were hemorrhagic. They might not call it malaria, but it can be as deadly!  

This past week someone mentioned to me that ZAP RACQUETS were available here. I think I saw one at my neighbors' house a long time ago, but I never gave it a second thought.  I remember Maxine had one in Hawaii, and it worked great! When we were invaded this week, I went straight to Win Fa Chinese Restaurant, across from Santa Ana Park, an picked up two of these raquetas.

After the initial charge, I decided to see how many mosquitoes there were in the house.  After sweeping through the house like a desperate housewife in a fantasy tennis tournament, I had killed dozens of the little buggers.  But I was only getting started.  I pulled chairs away from tables, and underneath...ZAPx3. I went into the closet and ruffled the clothing...ZAP x100. I went into the bathroom. They seem to come up from the drains...ZAPx50. I went outside and ruffled leaves on the ground, ZAPx30 per ruffle. I was on a roll. I killed flies, fleas, ants, a stink bug, and a tiny centipede.  When Pablo sat at his desk and was immediately surrounded by blood thirsty mossies, he gave his racquet a try, and ZAPx25.  We both took on mosquito zapping as a sport, and the house was bug free for several hours.  Until the next rain when the whole thing started over again.  But the improvement was drastic and quite noticeable.  THIS IS THE BIG GUN!  The racquet.  Unfortunately the racquet scares the cats, but they will have to get used to it.  I would NEVER have been able to concentrate enough to finish this post without my tool, because the two coils I have burning near my feet are not doing the job this afternoon.

Below is a photo of me in position for a thunderstorm.  Often I will sit more upright and use the time to write, but other times I just like to turn off the lights and watch the lightning in the sky.  If we get a late afternoon rain worth hitting the hammock for, that is where I usually end up for the rest of the day, whether it continues to rain or not.  When I tire of reading or writing I find the remote control.

Tuesday this week, the Mérida Weather Underground forecast called for a 90% chance of 59mm of rain.  That is 2.32 inches.  I think we got more than two inches.  The photos below are the street in front of my house that USED TO flood all the time.  Recently the city cleaned the drains or drilled more or new ones....they did something, and there was no River 75 for at least three weeks!  But since there is no sewer system(click for a link to Mikey's sad but true story about Merida's "system"), the new drains were unable to stop flooding this week.  The accumulative amounts of rainfall have been impressive. 

The waves sloshed into our carport underneath the gate, but you can see some of the folks across the street took in some serious water.  Everyone is used to this sight during the rainy season, but it never ceases to fascinate me.  If I have to blog about the rain again, maybe I will explain the complicated system of keeping water out of the house as the sideways driving rain gushes in through tiny little openings unseen in drier times by the naked eye.....

 

After the Rains

These are yesterday's beautiful desert roses.

This is the stinky sludge leftover in the carport. 

The Diario del Yucatán reports we had up to 90 mm of rain (3.5 inches) in that one or two hour downpour.  The entire city flooded.  The centro was a disorganized mess; the buses moved a lot of water, making the waves that entered the houses practically surfable.  My friend told me Garcia Generes was inundated like he'd never seen before.  He watched guys pushing stalled cars, but the cars were floating and going with the current instead of the intended direction.

For a good story about the rain, check out this post:   Where's Noah When You Need Him?

I may have been wondering if the friends on the corner took in water due to waves generated by the cross streets.   But they have pretty good protectors....and their boat may have held tight.....However, there are other folks whose houses were on my mind when the rains came.  I am not sure if you read my post about architects, but the gist of it was that I don't have much confidence in a couple of the TRENDY ones about town. 

I have a friend whose house has a roofless dining room.  Not a cupula or light colored glass, just a big 6x6 ft square (I am guessing and probably exaggerating the size) hole in the ceiling/roof.  The idea was to allow air flow through the house, since it is long, narrow and has no windows except for the two small rooms facing the street and the kitchen facing the patio. A good number of the houses in the centro are attached at the walls. They were built a foot thick to keep out Merida's intense heat.    I ask myself, did the architect forget about the tropical rains when he designed the roofless dining room? Or was he new in town and not know about the three month rainy season?  The floor in that room is gravel with tiles laid on top....but could it withstand four inches of rain in an hour?  I have this picture in my mind of water oozing out in all directions, but maybe I got that picture from the oozing I saw at my own house!  Then I remembered all the fruit trees in her patio....picturing piles of guavas on the ground and leaves of all kinds everywhere. We got lucky with the leaves:  the mamey dropped the last of its leaves last week. Our back patio doesn't look too war torn. The good news about my friend's house is that her street didn't flood, so at least she didn't have to fight water coming in from the front.

There is a wet weather front west of us in the Gulf of Mexico, and some instability on the Caribbean side of the peninsula.  They are predicting 50% chance of rain every day for the rest of the week.  For Saturday night the projected "heat index" is 56°C.  132.8°F.  I am hoping that is a misprint. 

I am constantly amazed how life can change from one day to the next.  This was just a rainstorm, with no major damage done, but for me it was a wake up call for the upcoming hurricane season and a reminder about how quirky life can be.  Mother Nature is on a rampage it seems, so it is time to beef up the hurricane kit. 

Surprise Tropical Downpour

In the morning I took some photos of the patio.  The new desert roses caught my eye.

I photographed the growth of the succulent garden. It is coming along nicely, no?  This garden is roofed and has a reasonably clean YELLOW pasta tile floor.

Today started off like any Mérida day with  a bright blue sky in the morning. I was in the mood to photograph flowers in the gardens and cats and stuff.  In the early afternoon I noticed some stormy clouds in the distance as I was hanging laundry upstairs, but they seemed far away.  When I saw the clouds getting heavier and heading our way I managed to get all the dried clothes safely inside and filed away. 

Our tenant Nacho and a few of his friends were hanging out in the pool with the stereo blaring from the bodega's open windows when the rains came.  I got out to the bodega to bring in the speakers but it was too late, they were dripping wet as well as the cds below. I purposely went out and stood in the rain, but that is another story about a promise I made to myself.  I will blog about it one of these days. Anyhow, the group partied in the covered patio area behind the pool until it became unbearable.   The winds were crazy and blew the sheets of rain in every direction.  There was no escaping WET with this storm. 

It clouded up quickly.  The rain started innocently enough, but then the sky broke loose.  It was the strongest rain I have experienced here since my arrival in 2007.  As a weather freak, I got excited and flew upstairs with the camera to see if I could capture the sheets of rain as they fell, with the pool overflowing and the patio filling up like a lagoon.  I did get a few good photos. 

Rain fell in sheets, it rained so hard and so fast and SO MUCH! It-s amazing to watch. I ran around the house and closed the necessary doors.  Today it was ALL THE DOORS.  I even remembered the side door in our bedroom and the wide open window.  And I kept on shooting pictures.

In my excitement of trying to capture the feeling of a tropical downpour on video and in photos, I failed to notice that the patio had flooded higher than ever before.  The kitchen was a lake with the water flowing in under and around the sides of the big iron doors.  We swept most of it back outside and sandbagged the doors with beach towels.  Water was gushing into my bedroom also.  Weasel was sitting on a cushion that was completely soaked, and the water was heading toward the new bed cushion that is on the floor, awaiting its new base....so down went the last of the bath towels and even newspapers to soak up the water.  Water was insistent upon entering the house today.  I imagine I am not the only one who feels this way right now.

A downpour from 2008 looked like a light rain compared to today..I am used to seeing our street flood up to the sidewalk.  There have been some rains that sent little waves into this area, but nothing like this.  I can hear myself telling someone,"OH NO, water doesn-t ever come into the house, the gate blocks most of it and just a few little waves come in. The kitchen is set so far back from the street......"   Yeah, right.

Then we made a big mistake.  Since the pool party was moved inside one of the guys decided to trudge through a foot of water in the street to the beer store. A storm called for more beer.  The mistake was opening the FLOOD GATES.  When we opened that front gate, of course everyone went outside in awe of the high water, cars stalling, guys pushing their motorcycles and bikes, and the waves lapping up against my neighbors' houses.  My friends on the corner endure the joining of the 66th St River with the 75th St River, causing the confused water to pound against their house.  They have some necessarily elaborate rubber rain retainers, and I was wondering if those worked today. 

Opening the gate allowed much more water from the street in, and the already flooded parking area and garden experienced a little tsunami.  For the first time, water rushed into the front living rooms.  The door has a rubber strip on the bottom, but the door was wide open.  Out came the mops and the squeegies and more clean up began. 

After the worst of the rain stopped, the carport looked like this:

The water is subsiding but look at the dirt it left behind. Flood water is ugly, dirty, disgusting stuff.

75th Street River

I liked the effects in this photo and decided to share. The reflections of the holes in the water inside the patio.  The distinct water line where the floor is dry.

After a good hour or more of serious downpour, a softer rain continued for several hours.  The water slowly receded leaving behind just the dirt and trash the flood water carried in.  I walk with slow calculated steps so as to not slip in the remaining puddles.  It was an exciting first storm of the season and I just had to post it.  I hope that it is somewhat coherent since I am writing in the middle of the night.

Mierda! It's Hot in Mérida!

It is nearly 8pm, I just got out of the pool, showered and I feel refreshed and comfortable.  We started our EVENING SWIMS again.  From Mon thru Fri at 6pm we open the gates. If you have read previous blogs, you know it's not a large or grand pool, it is the only pool around.  The morning exerciser(s) come back in the evening just to cool down the body temp, and others come to move around a bit and then relax.  Our evening hour is more laid back than the morning hour, at 8am, when we really walk around in circles a lot, and everyone has his/her own exercise agenda.  Oh yeah, I am happy to have the evening swims again. 

The Mérida summer heat has set in for real. The outside temperature is still 96.8°.  The fans are blasting hot air.  We are using the big guns, the helicopter fans.  Big loud round fans with names like CYCLONE, etc. They are noisy but move plenty of air.  Unfortunately they don't cool the air they just move around the hot stuff.  But at least it's air.  When the humidity is high and the air is so thick it's practically liquid, it's refreshing to have dry air blowing on you. When you are sweating profusely the fan cools you as it dries the dripping perspiration. Maybe it doesn't sound that appealing, but it sure feels great.

You change your drinking habits when it is this hot because you are always thirsty.  Never leave home without a bottle of drinking water; in my case I don't leave the kitchen without at least a big cup of ice water.  I make six trays of ice twice a day because I like my beverages cold.  That idiosyncracy is left over from my living on a boat for three months without refrigeration, just an empty cooler longing for ice, in the tropics, crossing the equator. Since then, 1990, I admit to being a little anal about having ice in the freezer.  I am willing to maintain a big zip bag of it and I am generous with it.  All I care about is I feel like a new person chugging an ice cold Coke.  Oh, I mean water.  Speaking of ice, ten minutes ago I filled a glass with ice and water.  I sucked up the water in two gulps and the ice is almost gone.  Ten minutes.  After a couple weeks I will be bored with water and move on to iced tea, try this year's new flavors of Tang, make fresh lemonade, and who knows what.  This year the Tang flavors are from all the countries in the world cup....El Mundial, which is coming up soon.  I've already tasted the surprisingly refreshing plum flavor from Argentina, and something wickedly (too) sweet from Brazil. 

If you are planning to EAT on a day like today, you have to plan for that early.  I finally understand why in Fiji (the first place I exprienced this) the women cooked dinner early in the morning, right after serving breakfast.  By mid-day it is too bloody hot to be considering using a hot stove. On the days I decide to cook, I often opt for the crock pot because it causes the least external heat... so we eat lots of Wodarski stews.  They could be anything.  Other days I prepare food that we can eat later, but cold, like potato salad and roasted chicken.  Of course because we are human we also occasionally do use the stove when it is 100° during the hottest part of the evening.  Tonight Pablo made us dinner so he's recuperating with the helicopter fan on high for a spell.  Like I said, I am still refreshed from the pool!

Deciding late in the day to prepare dinner is no problem in this climate.  A package of meat will thaw in less than an hour at room temp, but you have to stay on top of that one, because no one wants ecoli.  Another issue is salt.  We lose a lot of salt when we sweat.  Remember the days people who sweat a lot took salt pills?  When you find you are craving salted nuts or chips, eat'em because you need'em.  We like to use sea salt because I have convinced myself it is actually GOOD for me. 

By evening, it seems that everything you touch feels cuddly warm.  Not that you are looking for CUDDLY warm, au contraire!  The bed seems to generate its own heat at night after a long hot day.  Therefore
this is the time of year it is more comfortable to sleep in the hammock, as the air flow helps you reach a comfortable temperature allowing you to sleep.  There is a short period of time just before dawn when I want a sheet, and just after dawn I wake up when Buster pulls my hair to let me know I am late serving breakfast in the cat world.  At that time, around 6:30ish, it is already at least 80°.  So by the time we get into the pool at 8am, it's starting to warm up for the day.  The pool is maintaining an 85°F average, and I swear that morning swim, using the term loosely, is the best way to start the day.  I am such a wuss when the air is cold and the pool isn't mid80s that I am happy for the heat.

I Hate Winter

Siberia, Ohio, Hawaii, Mexico....it's all the same to me when it comes to winter.  I know a Siberian (i.e. Ohio) winter can not be compared to winter in the tropics.  But Siberia and Ohio are prepared for freezing shitty gray weather half the year.  Houses in the tropical zones are built to stay cool in the intense heat for most of the year.  We don't have insulation, heaters, fireplaces, or wardrobes for every season.  It isn't often Old Man Winter kicks us in the ass like he did this year.  Instead of our usual 20 cold fronts per season, over 60 colder fronts passed through.  The cold kicked in during October and it's already the end of March when we are finally seeing some hot and sunny days.

I've been giving this some serious thought.  Why do I function so poorly when the temperature is cold?  What is it I hate about winter?  Here goes:

The days are way too short once we mess with the clock in October.  They get even shorter before they get longer again, five months later.  Daylight in the tropics doesn't last that long to begin with.  In the middle of summer it's dark by 7:30pm on the longest day.  When the darkness of winter nights sets in at 4:30pm - it's just not enough daylight for me.  I consider dark as time for dinner, hammock and probably TV. 

The nights are too cold.  The temperature is reported in Centigrade which makes it sound worse.  9°C sounds pretty cold, doesn't it?  It is!  It's 44°F.  Even though some days warm up to 70-80°F, by nightfall I am digging out sweats, socks and afghans.  It's hard for these old bones to handle the radical temperature changes from hot days to freezing nights. 

I must confess that I don't like to close doors or windows.  I need air, light, and I like to be able to see "outside".  I'd rather put on a 2nd sweatshirt and complain than close the doors or windows.  So I COULD really make it warmer in the house....but I would feel so closed in!

I finally found an exercise I will actually DO: swimming.  We heated the pool so we could swim all winter.  But even with the water at 80°F, I can't get into the pool when it's 50°F outside.  I spent two days in the pool last week, after only looking AT it for nearly five months, but then a couple more cold fronts came through and sent me back into my lazy funk, back to the farm, so to speak.

I generally have a 4 month panic attack from January until my birthday in April passes.  My head fills with self-doubt, occasional self-loathing, I worry I've got some illness or my teeth are going to fall out.  With the cold nights my body aches in the chill of the morning and I feel lousy.  Usually once I've survived another birthday I feel just fine.  An added plus is that the temp is usually high in Mérida by April.  That puts me in the pool where I get all sorts of things accomplished.  I like to write and read in the pool.  When I feel too warm I get wet, move around the pool a bit to loosen up, then sit in the shade on a float and work. 

I have other gripes about the winter season, but I think this has been long enough of a rant.  I am sitting outside with my miles of piles today.  It's hot and I am sweating  perspiring and planning a dip in the pool.  I keep having to move my chair to stay in the shade of the mamey tree.  The sun feels hot, and the sky is clear blue.  I think today I can finally vent my winter months' frustrations because I believe it's over.  Spring officially began five days ago during the (hopefully) last cold front of the year. 

It Is Too Cold

When you read this morning's rant, just remember I am not one of the bloggers who whined about the heat this summer.  It is 7:20 am and 57°F.  The coldest hour was in the middle of the night.  That means it dipped way below 14°C, as it reads now.   We usually swim at 8am.  The swimming pool is holding tough during these cold nights, even with the ground cooling, it's maintaining 79°F. 

It was too cold even for Mikey, who swam in the 75°F pool  last year, when we were just learning the solar energy system. Today he is waiting until the sun is shining and we can warm up the pool before jumping in.  For me it is just impossible when it is 20 degrees colder outside than inside the pool.  When I weighed in at 162 I could have done it, but at 115 I don't have enough body fat to keep me warm.  Nor do I have a wetsuit.

What you folks up in the REAL cold weather need to consider when we whine about the cold, is to ask yourself this question:  Do you keep your house at 50°F all winter? 

No.  The heaters go on and the houses remain around 78°F, a temperature which seems to suit everyone.  So imagine you are sleeping in your light nightie, with a summer comforter and a sheet, and your heat goes off.  The temperature is dropping outside and inside.  You put on your "warmies", socks, sweats, etc., to stay warm.  The floor is cold, the toilet seat....forget about it.

Feels like 147.2°F!

We are not enjoying a normal rainy summer. It wants to rain but the clouds seem to dissipate. We get a good soaking now and again, but it is supposed to be raining every afternoon. Lightning and thunder and a tropical downpour. Anyhow, this isn't the first time I posted about the weather. The last time I thought it was a mistake when the forecast said it would feel like fifty something °C, and I thought it was funny. Just to let you know, it wasn't funny, it was stifling hot. Much like yesterday and today.


Today on Weather Underground, Merida, Mexico, it says: Today there is a 60% chance of rain. The heat index: 64°C. That translates into IT WILL FEEL LIKE 147.2°F. I will let you know what it feels like if we end up sitting around in a pool of boiling sweat.


The good news: today is opening Sunday for NFL FOOTBALL! The family has a pool again this year, with a few new players, and in just two hours Pablo and I will be hammock bound watching every game we can find. We'll put out the two helicopter fans, and a few others, and get horizontal for the better part of the day. The entire neighborhood will be able to hear the crowds roar and announcers shout; the volume turned way up to overpower the loud fans. I will roast chicken and veggies; if the oven is on it only makes the kitchen FEEL LIKE 130°C - so that won't be noticeable.


Lately I have been more addicted to this computer than the television, but my favorite shows are returning so that may change. Every Sunday through December is now Football Sunday.


I am excited about the fourth season of LATIN AMERICAN IDOL. I discovered it in season two. The contestants are from Mexico, the Caribbean, Central and South America. The celebrities who work with the kids each week are singers unknown to me, so I can really learn a lot about Latin music watching this show.


I am anxious to see the new season of AMAZING RACE. This year it airs on the Discovery Channel. It is a Latin American Amazing Race, and it's going to be good. The show premiers on Sept 20th (probably during a football game). This is the first time they have produced this show with Latinos all around Latin America.


Well, ok, we are also taking a little trip to Panama....to the Caribbean side, but that is a good story for another day. Have fun baking in the Sauna City today!

You Could Say It Is Hot Here

This is the forecast for Friday August 28th from the Mérida, México page on Weather Underground. I couldn't load the graphics, but there is one thing worth noting here....

Thunderstorm. High: 38 °C . Wind SW 14 km/h . Chance of precipitation 80% (water equivalent of 6.15 mm). Heat Index: 58 °C .

Tell me that is a mistake. Tell me it is not going to "feel like" it is 136.4° F tomorrow.

Ok, so most days lately it has felt like it is almost that hot. Like right now, it is 10:45am and I am holding my swimsuit....I have decided to write IN THE POOL. Catch you up later.

Wow! What Weather!

It happened so fast. At 2:45pm Saturday it was 36°C (96.8°F), sunny and hot. Pablo was teaching a class and in the pool. I looked at the sky and saw clouds in the distance so I went to the computer to check the weather satellites and the cloud cover looked dense. I went upstairs to rescue the laundry before the rain, and saw big black clouds marching toward us. As I collected our clothes the wind picked up. It picked up the mats, the balls, and the pool toys and flew them around the patio. It tossed big tree branches into the back yard.

Then the rains came. By 2:55pm it was 25°C (77°F). The temperature had dropped over 20°F in just ten minutes. It poured down hard, sideways…directly into the living room, bypassing the door’s double rain guards, gushing in at the corners of the door creating a lake in two rooms. It rained hard for about half an hour, accompanied by sharp lightning and earth rattling thunder. The rain lightened up but it continued to rain steadily for at least an hour. It’s the longest hardest rain we’ve experienced this year. The streets were flooded, as usual. It was the first time the entire back yard became a swimming pool. I’ll admit we have one trouble spot in the yard where rainwater collects for a while after a heavy rain, but the ground was saturated yesterday and the water had NO place to go. The swimming pool is nearly full to the brim. I would venture to say we received nearly four inches of rain in less than an hour.

At 4pm the 24 hour temperature low was recorded at 21.5°C (70.7°F). This is a typical low temperature for us IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT. Not in the middle of the afternoon. The rainy season, adrenaline fodder.

Weather Check

The rainy season is approaching. We have had a few freak afternoon rains the past two weeks blasting us with just a taste of the upcoming tropical rains. The storms have rolled in quickly, turning a bright blue sky into blackish gray clouds in minutes, followed by tornado like winds and a heavy sideways downpour. The patio has already flooded a few times, but the true gauge that this is just a glimpse into the near future is there have been no lake effects in the street. The afternoon rains often flood 75th Steet in front of my house. There are little waves that wash into the driveway. A small row boat would be practical for negotiating Mérida´s numerous flooded streets.

Our first tropical wave is passing over the Yucatán Peninsula as I write this. It had the potential to intensify as it crossed the land and threatened to form into a tropical storm when it entered the Gulf of México west of us. Conditions have changed. Our forecast of 80% chance of rain yesterday fizzled into a few passing black clouds, distant thunder, some high humidity, and a slight drop in temperature. But we had no rain. Current conditions are such that we could see light fluffy clouds pass over all day, or they could become heavy cumulo-nimbus reaching far up into the sky and we could find ourselves in another major downpour. Or not.

Hurricane season has begun. The seas around the Caribbean and Gulf of México are quite warm, and there is a lot of unstable air aloft. I am a weather watcher and thought I would share with you my favorite weather sites. Many of them are formattable to provide the forecast in your area of México, if you are not in Mérida.

For the regional map from Weatehr Underground, go to: http://www.wunderground.com/global/Region/CA/IRSatellite.html

For the specific Mérida forecast and details, go to:
http://www.wunderground.com/global/stations/76644.html

Direct link to the National Hurricane Center from the National Weather Service
http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/index.shtml

My favorite satellite pics, through the University of Hawaii meteorology site. I like to see the bigger pictures and these are great satellites.
http://weather.hawaii.edu/satellite/index.cgi?thumbs=on&satgroup=tropatl&banner=uhmet



And last this is Hurricane 2008! (it probably says 2009 by now) from Accuweather.
http://hurricane.accuweather.com/hurricane/satellite.asp?partner=accuweather&traveler=0&basin=atlantic&anim=1

Ok, one last thing. The curent list of hurricane names for the season.


Atlantic names 2009

Ana
Bill
Claudette
Danny
Erika
Fred
Grace
Henri
Ida
Joaquin
Kate
Larry
Mindy
Nicholas
Odette
Peter
Rose
Sam
Teresa
Victor
Wanda

Pacific names 09
Andres
Blanca
Carlos
Dolores
Enrique
Felicia
Guillermo
Hilda
Ignacio
Jimena
Kevin
Linda
Marty
Nora
Olaf
Patricia
Rick
Sandra
Terry
Vivian
Waldo
Xina
York
Zelda

I Don't Trust Ike

Being a weather freak and the operator of a small school involving an outdoor swimming pool, I keep my eye on the weather. I spend hours here at the computer watching these giant rain balls spinning around the Caribbean, and afternoon storms brewing, trying to figure out how many of our classes we will be able to provide on any given day in the rainy or hurricane season. So far we have not had any hurricane scares here in the Yucatán.

As I write this, Hurricane Ike is pounding Cuba. The predictions so far have been that this storm is going to turn northwest and head straight to New Orleans. So far Ike has barreled due west, slowing down a little to whack things in its path, like islands, buildings, boats, and people and then flaring up again. Yesterday I felt that Ike was not headed northwest, but it looked like he wanted to keep on truckin' west. Today he is still truckin' west. He crossed Cuba and is now in the warmest part of the Caribbean Sea. I understand that the meteorologists have much more information about the conditions in the upper atmosphere blah blah blah....but they admit they cannot actually predict exactly what any of these hurricanes will do. I have a sinking feeling that Ike does not want to go northwest. Only once before did a storm on Ike's current path pass through the Yucatán, with Hurricane Hilda in 1955. And I could only find that on one of the weather sites' statistics. I am left a little confused. Did a drug cartel in Cancún pay off the meteorologists to just pretend we are in no danger, so as to avoid a negative impact on tourism? The recent rolling headless bodies have done tourism some harm and perhaps "they" just don't want any more trouble.

The 2pm report today still insists this storm is going to head northwest....now on the south side of Cuba instead of the north side.....and head straight to New Orleans. Nothing like traumatizing the residents of New Orleans before necessary. Wow, we all know they f***ed up with Katrina, and need to try to make things right with the folks there, but is this the way?

What has me concerned is that "they" (whoever they are) are so convinced that Ike is heading to New Orleans that they have not even mentioned a WATCH to us, let alone a warning. The western tip of Cuba is not that far from the east coast of the Yucatán. My map shows this giant ball rolling its way due west and heading straight into the satellite shot of the Yucatán. I for one am going to keep my eyes open and believe what mother nature dictates, and not the CNN reporters who are happily blowing away in the wind in the eyes of the storms.

Weathering Time

If you know me at all, you know I am obsessed with weather. When I lived in Hawaii, prior to everyone owning their own computers, I was the only person who had a weather radio. If a storm was heading toward Hawaii from anywhere I had the coordinates, I had my hurricane tracker and sharp pencils. I managed to lose myself watching the weather even in those times. Friends would call me to find out what was really happening since the television “meteorologists” only gave weather reports that tourists want to hear, and only for the island of Oahu, several hundred miles away from where we lived on the Big Island. Our weather was often different since the Hawaiian Islands have tendencies to create their own weather patterns.

Now this obsession is reaching dangerous levels. I am now in the Yucatán and there is lots more weather to watch! I moved my work space to another room so I could get up and “go to work” (writing), and as soon as I did the first tropical storms of the season were born. I have not figured out how to transfer files from one computer to another unless I actually send myself a document via email. If I send myself one document at a time I won’t be able to watch any storms. So my desk has TWO computers open on it. That allows me to go directly to the National Weather Service on one computer and to several other sites on the other. The result, another ‘pinche’ excuse for not writing. Today I am very upset with myself and my usage of time. This is a little exercise my multiple personalities and I go through from time to time, falling into the “I am lazy and worthless” category, all of us. If I can stop the self pity long enough to look at the big picture, I can see that I have done a lot and come a long way from one or two years back. But as usual, it is not enough to have satisfied me.

What have I learned of the weather in these past few days? It has been raining in Colombia nonstop since April. There are mudslides and all kinds of havoc there. The first tropical storm of the season, in the Eastern Pacific, was named Alma. Alma formed off the west coast of Costa Rica. I read that has not happened before. Alma headed northeast into Nicaragua (I am glad I did not buy the houseboat on the lake in western Nicaragua I was looking at!), Costa Rica, Honduras and El Salvador. It dissipated into a tropical depresión crossing land but left behind several flooded areas and lots of “damnificados”, or folks with damage. Once it crossed the Isthmus of Panama it reformed in the southern Caribbean and became tropical depression Arthur, increasing for a short time to tropical storm. It sat off the coast of Belize and Chetumal, Mexico for a day or so before heading west. It accumulated lots more rain. It is now just a low pressure system heading across the Yucatan Peninsula and toward the south-southwest dumping huge amounts of rain in its path.

Meanwhile, all the tropical moisture lingers in the area. Invest 91 is a new low located in approximately the same place Alma was born. The prediction models do not know whether it will continue its cyclonic formation, and it is being watched. What is interesting is that if it does form it may head north to the Gulf of Mexico. Oh oh, I think it is time for an updated satellite map. Time to go.