Captain Hook, Scarface and the greenhouse cum pool solar collector

Captain Hook looking very fly with his home made sling...

It's been a tough month of October, what with Barbi taking his passion for DIY and bricolage to a bloody extreme two weeks ago, and Lunes showing up with an L-shape cut on her cheek yesterday.

Lunes aka Scarface at the store, tied to her granny's desk. She had a barking fit when confronted with a large Buddha statue, but otherwise behaved sort of OK, within Lunes standards...

Both are doing fine now, Lunes all stapled up, and Barbi ready to undergo second reconstructive surgery and starting physical therapy soon, although far away from me, in Istanbul. Good thing his brother and doctor is there to help, so we know he's in the best hands.

On the home front, the greenhouse cum solar collector for the pool is all ready and waiting for the solar panel installation. There's been a delay of a few days, but by the end of next week I will be swimming in warm water. We measured the water temperature today, and it was 19 centigrade. My guess is that if the heating system works as stated, the temperature will soon climb up to soup levels, but we can adjust the flow of hot water to our taste. After all, I want it for swimming, so too hot is not good.

The black rubber panels will cover the metal sheet rooftop. I like the rural look of the structure.

Yesterday Zuluoaga and son came over to put the roof sheets on, and of course they brought Pelusa, to the delight of my male puppies. I guess compared with the big psycho tom boy bitch that is Lunes, the only female they know, the tiny and dainty and feminine Pelusa must be quite a novelty for them

Pelusa in all her splendor by the pool.

And while we're on the subject of OPDs, below is a picture of Blitzen. Peter and Nadine's dogs for some reason sleep covered with fleece blankets, it's quite a sight.

Saint Blitzen

Trying solar on the pool

So I could contain myself no longer when I came across what I have dubbed the "poor man´s solar collectors" and before I knew it I was on my way to a heated pool.

The "poor man´s" modifyer is because these etylene-propylene-polyetilene panels (don´t ask me the actual composition) cost about a third the cost of the other regular ones with glass and metal. Also they are made in the ROU - that´s the Oriental Republic of Uruguay...

Because panels have to be placed on some sort of inclined surface and I didn´t want to compromise my roof, we´ve been debating for months where we would place them, and what would serve as support. Container building was finally discarded in favor of possible future greenhouse, at savings of about 90%.


Finished structure pending metal sheet on roof and solar panel installation.

For the reasonable sum of $5,500 I now have the structure (wooden) for a greenhouse, measuring 12 meters by 3.5 meters and the solar panel installation for a heated pool. Not bad I think. The structure was erected by Zuluoaga and co. in one day. They didn´t finish the roof metal sheeting because I neglected to get the sheets on time. They also came along with Pelusa, a heartbreaker as Tulu and Oso can attest.



Zuluoaga and his gang, our dogs and guest star Pelusa (the tiny furry thing near the pool)

The panels are called Solarflex, by the way, and I´m heating a 3m x 14m pool with an area of solar collectors equal to 80% of the surface of the pool. I will buy a thermometer and report later on the water temperature...

Close-up of the collectors and pipes

Now let´s see how it works in the end. Thursday we will have the roof finished, and between Saturday and Monday the heating panels should be operating.

Spring!!! Gardening obsession!!!

The view of our yard from the road on Oct. 2. Notice the many many many leaves on the poplars!

The birds made such a racket this morning that I found myself touring the grounds with my faithful entourage, leaving behind a husband who mumbled "King of the bed, I'm king of the bed," his expression of joy at my leaving the bed before him.

Never mind him. Spring has exploded, everything is chirping or budding, and the sun comes up at around 6 or 6:10 AM. If only I had already installed my pool heating solar panels... but I'm not lamenting too much, because I am obsessed with gardening. It's not the first time. Any of my friends during my Jersey City gardening phase may remember as I forced them to pay attention to every single blade of grass, every new leaf on every new shrub as toll when they visited me. Now I mostly torture my husband when he comes back from work.

"Did you see the trays with the seeds? No, I mean, did you really look at the purple basil? It's like one inch tall now!"


Mustard on the right, in the herbs box. The left one is peppers and tomatos...


How many times a day do I go on gardening breaks? Good thing that the spring makes me productive, because otherwise the 85k word edit job would not get done in 4 days... I spray my seedlings every couple of hours, go visit my seedlings outside, go visit the fledgling vegetable patch, with all of 10 plants (3 green peas doing swell, 3 red peppers borderline dead, one oregano, two thyme, one mint all doing just fine), I try to thin the trays of oversown seedlings, etc., etc., etc.

Tomatos! Peppers!


Every couple of days there's a new batch of cut-off plastic bottles, a new bag of fertilized topsoil, new tools (those baby tools for seedlings made me scream at the supermarket) and I now am the proud owner of a probably China-made gardening stool, fully loaded with a gazillion pouches and pockets to store all the tools and a very handy handle for carrying it around like a purse. All for about $15.

Lunes curses the electric fence that keeps her from destroying my veg patch.

The ants needless to say have discovered the changes going on here, and have taken aim at my yard. I couldn't suppress a scream yesterday when I saw them having one of my oleanders for lunch... Good thing there's William, from Greenes del Este (with the "e" in greenes) ready for my 911 call. Containing the ants is part of our contract.

As for the dogs, they watch me in wonderment but in general welcome my increased time outside around them. Lunes the Destructor still tries to have her way with my precious seedlings (she got to one this morning, dumped a pot with topsoil a few days ago) but in general there have been no casualties.

William was shocked today to see the stairway nursery, after just two weeks of showing me how to do it, and declared there will be no room in the patch for all those plants. "I guess I will have to give them away" I told him. So I have to start potting tomato and pepper plants. So I need pots and I should order another truckload of topsoil to have handy for the patch expansion, which I'm planning to triple in size.


The stairway nursery has expanded.

Yeah, I know, all a bit manic, but that's the good thing about having such a big yard after all, having tons of dogs and tons of shrubs and trees and tons of own-grown vegetables and fruits, right?

Which brings me to the new additions: we have planted 5 guava trees on the new lot, because they are indigenous and beautiful and I loooove guava in various forms. And also because the new lot has a tiny "monte criollo" or indigenous forest (with a bit of wishful thinking on my part). It has two indigenous trees (a tala and a canelon) and a lot of espina de la cruz (a thorny bush with cross-like foliage) and now, 5 guava trees.

In addition, I have planted two quince trees and two pomegranate trees in two different spots of our yard (hedging my investment). Greatest problem may be that the strong winds may blow off the blooms in the spring and I may have no fruit, according to William, but if so, I will wrap them in something to protect them from the wind next year... this year it's no use.

The lady at the nursery, Frida, smartly refuses to close my tab because she knows I will be adding on to it...

The fierce guardians

The dogs are getting big, and a little bit fat too. We neutered/spayed Lunes and Tulu, and experienced none of the "one week of convalescence" I had been warned about. They were back to their crazy selves the day after. Oso weighs as much as a cow, impossible to lift him now. They all bark in unison, very threateningly, at any car slowing down, motorcycle approaching or, the worst offenders, bicycle or horseback riders. Very impressive until you notice their tails wagging...

Happy hunting days, Lunes always dying to trespass into La Carolina

We did a lot of long walks into the fields around here in the past couple of months, but I'm afraid that will have to stop now as the nasty snakes are waking up all stressed out, and these dummies want to eat them. They have brought me a dead eel, a dead snake and a dead field mouse in the last two weeks, so their sniffing expeditions are off for a while. Only the beach, which involves less risky terrain and mostly dead seafood, which they chomp on with great gusto and later puke.


The will be house that Barbi built for Lunes and Tulu. Tulu doesn't allow Oso to sleep with them, he growls nastily and sends him away.

But they all nap together

Arrancopelito expands

I can say that in a way we have renewed our commitment to Arrancopelito, with the purchase of one more lot adjacent to our house. In the image above, we have plots 2 and 3 (house and pool respectively, my original purchase way back in 2001) plus lot 1, which we bought in 2005, and now we have added lot 18, the long and narrow one below lot 1.

Although in itself it´s an ugly lot in our opinion (17.5x60 meters, too long and narrow for my taste) when added to the rest of the property it is a significant improvement, giving us greater flexibility in terms of siting if we ever decide to build on that side. Also, it brings our official total to 4600 m2 (unofficial 5000 with the plaza at the corner where the curve is which we have recently landscaped) which is a very respectable chunk of land to have with this proximity to the sea and the views we command.



In terms of investment, larger properties, at least in Punta del Este, carry increasing premiums, so there was no doubt that we "had" to buy it. Pricewise in relative terms it was no bargain. Let´s just say that it cost the same as the price we sold a much nicer lot closer to the sea a month ago. But because we made a huge profit on that one, I am satisfied that we just exchanged property of one for the other, after buying it for very little money in 2006.

Although we would love to continue expanding, we may be at the point where we are either priced out or no adjacent property is left for us to buy. Lots 4 and 5, which we coveted for a long time, are adamantly not for sale. Lot 6 already has a small house on it, which further raises the price and is not for sale. The others are for sale one day and not for sale the next, at rapidly increasing prices... But whatever the case, we are satisfied that our privacy is ensured, and so are our views and the possibility of one day building a B&B or restaurant or both. That's plan B for us.

Our dog life

Winter bbq dinner in the fireplace. Barbi is becoming quite the accomplished "asador"

Good thing now we have plants to care for and worry about, because since April, our life has centered around the dogs.

Now, if you have dogs, eventually your life brings you to ponder the issue of poop collection. I never had a dog in my years as an apartment dweller, not so much because of the cruelty of having the dog locked up all day, but because of the prospect of going out twice a day to collect steaming poop with a plastic bag.

Oso´s favorite passtime, getting all muddied up

Puddle fun


And yet now, despite the generous play-pen we have provided for Lunes, Tulu and Oso, we find that in no time it becomes a minefield to be walked at one´s own risk. So Barbi has taken up the chore of collecting the growing production on a once-a-week schedule, something to look forward to on his single day off from work. Although I do take them out for a long walk once a day, and they do their thing in the fields around the house, it turns out that our yield is up to 15 kgs, or 30 pounds a week of the stuff. Hence, Barbi has developed a device that I have named CacaCaddy (patent pending).

Beach fun

All inventions are incremental improvements on previous inventions, some argue. Well, our CacaCaddy takes the market cart to the other end of the eating process. Just change liners, and you go from food gathering to poop disposal... We are accepting orders. 19.95 with two sets of liners, spade and broome extra. Excellent for people with back problems, eliminates the need to bend down.

The CacaCaddy in service

Let the games begin...

About 25% of the stuff is on the ground here...

In a race against the clock, the weather and my almost exhausted patience, this Monday we finally saw the launch of the planting drive at Arrancopelito.

Sunday evening I freaked when Barbi said "Good news! Monday it will rain but the rest of the week will be fine." Well, not good news if we didn't get the topsoil in time, for example... Well, we did get the truckload of topsoil first thing in the morning, arriving minutes before the truck with the first load of trees and shrubs, and an "advance" team from the landscaper guy who was going to be doing the planting.

Our baby araucarias...

There was a bit of disappointment there, the guy, William, seemed to be shuttling back and forth all day between some other site and my place, the guys he left behind almost all day confessed they hated plants, they only liked lawns and they were actually in charge of tending to a private golf course. In short, they said they knew nothing about planting, but would make holes wherever we indicated and would place the plants in their planting location.

Since there are about 200 specimens to place (we ordered some more yesterday), my Mom decided to stay all day directing the proceedings, or I should say, helping me do the landscape design.

Then, at about 2pm, the pro team arrived, and proceeded to set a large number of plants in the ground before departing at 4 pm. A couple hours later all hell broke loose, but not before William showed up for the last time, and working in the dark, covered (as I had asked repeatedly) the topsoil mound and brought in the palm trees that the dogs were already chewing on because they were lying on the ground, still unplanted.

As seen from the road

Today it was a bit painful to watch all the baby trees and shrubs being pounded by the evil southern winds.

The waiting game

Well, the shrubs and trees were all chosen, the guys to plant them hired, the deposit money paid, and for a couple of weeks already we have been waiting on the weather.

The problem is that we need at least one truckload of topsoil (the soil here is clay, meaning it hardens like marble when dry, and it does not allow water to go in or drain out, so all plantings require plenty of soil substitution in order to live and prosper. But because it´s been raining every 3 days, topsoil at the topsoilery never dries out and the suppliers refuse to deliver it.

It´s soooo anticlimactic, I thought after such a push on my part, it would all have been planted by now. It's also exhausting, because wherever I go I don't just travel but rather my eyes and mind register EVERY single shrub and tree planted EVERYWHERE along our way. I may be chatting with my husband but actually I'm computing number of shrubs in a certain house, or distance between them, or size relative to distance from the sea, or age of a particular palm tree, etc. I hope once I have planted my own I will be able switch off the greenery calculator, because it's really draining...

Well, I´ve waited many years, so I guess I will survive a couple more days. Right now the "polar weather" as they say in the news, has turned windy, but the rain yesterday was not that intense, so who knows, maybe this week :-) For polar it's not that bad, I even managed my walk to the beach with the "kids" who really love the windy weather.

On other news, it was my birthday this week and Barbi gave me the most gorgeous painting by some Polish artist. I have to find out more details about this painting, but I fell in love with it at first sight at Whitebox, the new shop in La Barra owned by Stan the Pole and Theresa the Hong Konger a few months ago. I actually loved so many things there that I instructed Barbi to use it as a source of all gifts to me. But I had forgotten and so was very pleasantly surprised.

I don't know what it is but dem Pollacks seem to be everywhere around now. And they're not like Lech Walessa, but on the contrary, so urbane, charming, sophisticated, etc., that they make us look like a bunch of peasants. It was both hilarious and depressing at the same time when last week our other new Polish friends Tad and Lydia declared Uruguay to be "Like Poland 20 years ago." I always knew we had a "behind the iron curtain elan" but this statement is still quite a shocker for us.

The same day we had Nadine and Peter, the dogophiles, over, and gracious Nadine complimented me on the dogs. She claims I do well with them. But then yesterday my best friend, a Uruguayan, was shocked at how we spoil our dogs and "treat them like humans" which is something I never intended to do. I don't agree with her pronouncement :-).