Hooks, chicken and an iguana escape artist

Today was full of adventure–both sanguine and disappointing.

We began the day carefully measuring and positioning our towel bars, paper holders and robe hooks in the two bathrooms. As many of you know, Lea and I are very obsessive when it comes to the visual order of our domestic sanctuary. We are this way about the rest of the world too but we learned many decades ago that, short of moving to Scandinavia, we had to let it pass. So, we carefully tested the hook heights with our robes; towel bars with our towels and even positioned the paper holder precisely (you can fill in the blanks on this one.)  During this positioning exercise we discovered an iguana asleep in the shower. He sprang to action when we awakened him. To our surprise he (or she–I am not too skilled at sexing an iguana on the run) scurried to the front part of our bathroom and bolted into a small hole left by the cabinet installers in the corner of our cabinets. He disappeared. And, the cabinets do not have a removable lower panel. Needless to say our contractor has a new item the construction close out list (punch list.) Glad we discovered this now.

After our work was done, Lea headed back to the rental house to rest. (She got some bad fish two nights ago and is just now recuperating.) I ventured to the local market to buy dinner. Since we were both hankering for some protein, I decided it was time to check out the chicken lady. Normally, we would be getting a chicken that would be shrink wrapped in plastic with several paragraphs of disclosures. In this case, you get what you see. My challenge was to figure out how to say, “remove the legs and head.” I think I got it right: “Por favor corte la cabeza y los pies” since she proceeded to whack away. It is in the oven roasting as I post this.

The big D (disappointment) was our venture to the northern suburbs to “check out the shops.” No real need to go back there. Too scarily like the US: overpriced, sanitized, packaged and full of over weight people wandering like zombies around the shops. Let me have the local chicken lady any day.