Tick Tock

A glorious Wisconsin sunrise turned to wind and rain and then back to sun again.  

We are twenty days from closing on our house sale.  Julia's brother Scott is arriving later today to manage our moving sale, which starts on Thursday.  His take is 25% of the proceeds.  Whatever he can convince people to take will be one less thing to donate, throw away or store.  The moving sale will take place over the course of three days, which coincides with our community's garage sale weekend.

We are pretty much done sorting and deciding what we will put into storage.  It's been an interesting and liberating process.  Once the decision is made to let go, it becomes pretty easy to let go and let go and let go.  

One of the easy choices for disposition is my book collection.  We have bookcases and bookcases of books:  fiction, non-fiction, law school textbooks.  Most of these, I haven't touched in ten years. To be honest, almost all of the books that I read are ebooks checked out from the library.  Yesterday, I started to reacquaint myself with Desert Solitaire by Edward Abbey.  Once I started reading, it was like sitting down with an old friend.  

Mexican Chicken

After about a month in Mazatlan, we're getting a little tired of seafood.  I never thought I would say this. But having fish, shrimp, octopus, and oysters every week makes me yearn for....chicken.

Fortunately, a couple of blocks from us, a family raises chickens and has a small stand on the side of the road.  Here, whole chickens are grilled over charcoal.  One chicken is more than enough for both of us for two meals.  

Simmering Beans

The chicken comes with rice, salad, tortillas and fresh salsa--for less than $10. Upon ordering a chicken, the woman in charge chops it up into easy to handle pieces and bags everything up to go.

All of the Chicken here is free range, which produces both delicious meat and beautiful yolks. Eggs are about $2.50/dozen at either the mercado or grocery store.

One thing that I'll never forget about Mazatlan are the sunsets and sunrises.  This week, shortly after sunset, we saw both Jupiter and Venus easily visible in the dusky sky.

 

 

This morning, the full moon was breathtaking just before dawn at 5:40 a.m. on my morning walk with Callie.

Looking north towards the Golden Zone

Twenty minutes later, and I could see the sun coming up on the other end of the beach.

Looking south towards Centro

A Day on the Island

We woke before dawn, got dressed and walked to the beach in the dark. By the time we made it to the fishing pier, we were rewarded.

We finished the day with over seven miles of beach walking.  At the other end of the beach was Bob Hall Pier.  In 2019, we ate and drank at Mikel May's, a restaurant/bar located at the beginning of the pier.  The pier was severely damaged during the 2020 hurricane and then demolished. Only the closed restaurant structure remains.

Between walks, we grocery shopped at a HEB Plus for the week.  We also stopped at Paul's Seafood and bought some fresh fillets of black drum, a local fish.

I really missed the taste of fresh saltwater fish.  The fillets were delicious, lightly pan-fried with a little olive oil.  With fresh asparagus and fresh bread, our meal tonight was better than any restaurant meal in recent memory and at a fraction of the cost.

Refreshing Morning

 

Dave's corn field

After last week's hot and humid weather, I was graced this morning with 58 degrees and a beautiful sky during the early morning walk.  The hardest-working-75-year-old-farmer that I know doesn't have the highest production corn field in the area, but it looks mighty pretty this morning. The bit of fog rising up is from a tributary of Spring Creek, which it meets in Lodi in another mile.