CORONA VIRUS LIMBO IN LA CRUZ

May 4, 2020

Early Morning Marina

I started my week with a couple of laps around the marina. I had contemplated going to the supermarket, but ended up making do with as much as I could drag home from the butcher and Mario's grocery. I got chicken and hamburger, eggs, milk, butter, and produce. Soon, I would need to run out for orange juice and mineral water. I might eventually make a trip to the wholesale produce market. I could only carry so much at one time. The biggest problem with shopping locally wasn't that I couldn't get food. The problem was the absence of other products like batteries and tinfoil, a replacement for the step stool I had broken while painting, and disinfecting wipes which at least one of the supermarkets had finally begun to carry.

Palm Reflections at Dawn

The net was over quickly and, after a shower and breakfast, I spent the rest of the morning scrubbing the floor and scraping a lifetime of paint drips off the tile. Living on a dirt road with the windows open all the time, our floors got very dusty. No amount of sweeping could remove it all. Any liquid dripped on the floor resulted in muddy spots. I hadn't washed the floor in over a month and it showed. Because of the omnipresent dust, mopping did little good. The water turned filthy immediately and then the mop just spread the dirt around. The only way to get the floor clean was to wash it with a cloth and rinse the cloth in the sink every few square feet. That way, the wash water stayed clean.

I relaxed for a bit and scrolled through Facebook when I was done. Then I practiced the guitar and ate lunch before settling down to write. I spent most of the afternoon working on my blog. Once that was done, I made chicken curry for dinner. It was a nice change to eat something fresh after having eaten whatever was left in the larder for the previous few days. It was finally time to try the liqueur I had made from tequila and limes. It was good and tasted more like limoncello than I had expected it to taste. I called it “coroncello.” Limoncello is best kept in the freezer, but this froze when I left it there overnight. I had to take it out again, which was a shame because it tasted great chilled.

I watched some Netflix and practiced the guitar, again, before bed and then chatted with Matt a bit. The two hour time difference put us out of sync and often resulted in my staying up too late to chat. The alarm still went off at 6:00, no matter what time I went to bed, because I needed to exercise before the sun came up.

May 5, 2020

Landscaping Near El Tizate

Cinco de Mayo is not generally celebrated in Mexico, so it was just another day. Day 48 of captivity. I wouldn't say that I was staying in because I was afraid or even because I had been told to do so, but more as an experiment to see how I handled it. It was interesting to see all the changes in how things got done. More and more of the musicians around town were publishing videos and appearing in livestreams. The creative milieu of La Cruz lived on in isolation.

Beach Access in Bucerias

I ran to Los Amores in Bucerias and back. I saw a couple of other runners out in the cool morning. I explored some of the streets below the lateral on the north side of Bucerias. It was very quiet. Most of the condos were empty.

I practiced the guitar after breakfast, pondered Facebook for an hour or two and chatted with friends until lunchtime. After lunch, I sat down to write.

I spent the majority of the afternoon watching Netflix while taking in a blouse that was too large. When that project was done, I worked on my painting a little bit and then ate dinner and practiced the guitar some more.

New corona virus statistics for the day showed a big drop in new cases (down to 1,120 from a peak of 1,515 on Friday) but the most deaths, so far, at 236. Nayarit was still holding fairly steady with small numbers, mostly in Tepic, but there had been five more deaths since Sunday for a total of seventeen in the state. The experts were saying that the curve had leveled off, but I was afraid to believe in that too strongly. Only time would tell.

May 6, 2020

Day 50 of quarantine. Wednesday marked the beginning of the eighth week. I desperately needed a change. The beaches were closed, but I walked down the highway to La Manzanilla and then back to the marina via the beach before taking one turn around the marina and then stopping at Mario's for mineral water, orange juice, and bananas on my way home. The beach was deserted and the town quiet. It was a little longer walk than usual, about five miles, but I still got back in time for the net.

Coconut on La Manzanilla Beach

Road to La Manzanilla Beach

I dived right into guitar practice after breakfast. I was using an application called Yousician that forced me to play sorts of music I would never normally choose. It challenged me to use techniques that I had always avoided. Sometimes, this made my left hand hurt, but it seemed to be getting stronger. I was forcing myself to use my semi-useless little finger when suggested. I had trigger finger in my pinky and sometimes it just refused to respond to commands. I figured if Django Reinhart could play with two marginally useless fingers, I could get by with one. I wasn't performing, due to social distancing, so was using the time to improve my technique, rather than learn new repetoire.

I had no sooner lain down for a nap than my friend, Don, called. He had been in La Cruz for a week or so but was due to leave for Guaymas the following day. I wished him fair winds. No one knew how arriving boats would be received in Baja. Some anchorages were closed and others seemed to change daily. Even his destination was uncertain as it was unclear whether or not the marina would be allowed to remain open.  I contemplated going along, but didn't want to get stuck in Guaymas if we couldn't get across the border.  I wasn't ready to leave.

I was awake after that conversation, so texted with Matt for a bit and then ate lunch. I wrote for a short while after lunch and then settled down for another practice session. The day passed quickly without doing much of anything. It was so easy to get sucked into the internet, play games, or chat with friends. I finally did take a two hour nap just before dinner.

I ate the last of the chicken curry for dinner and then watched a movie. That was only the second actual movie I had watched since the quarantine began. Even with nowhere to go, sitting still for two hours seemed like a waste of time.

Hard as I tried to go to bed at 11:00, the two hour time difference between Mexico and California always seemed to result in someone wanting to chat about the time I wanted to sleep. It was a good thing I was able to nap in the afternoon when I didn't get enough sleep. It was after midnight before I was able to get to sleep.

Despite numbers of new cases having been down for the previous five days, Wednesday saw the highest number of new cases yet at 1,609. The expected peak was approaching and I wondered if that, too, would turn out to be wishful thinking. Nayarit remained fairly free of virus cases, which was reassuring as we waited to see if restrictions would be eased on May 18^th or not.

May 7, 2020

Shower Tile Before & After

I didn't get up to run at 6:00. I was tired and sore and rolled over and went back to sleep until nearly 8:00. After breakfast and the net, I decided to wipe down the walls of my shower and chip off the paint drips. In doing so, I realized that there was a lifetime of soap scum and lime scale on those tiles that none of our housekeepers had ever been able to remove using normal methods. I resorted to scraping it off with a putty knife. This worked fine, but was strenuous and time consuming. I labored over it until noon and only managed to clean about forty percent of it.

I broke for lunch at noon and texted with Matt and a girlfriend in California while I ate. Then I practiced for an hour and swept the rear and side patios. No matter how often I swept, there were always more leaves, flowers,and dust. It made us look like lazy housekeepers and was discouraging. No sweeping job stayed clean long enough to finish. The rain of debris was constant. After sweeping, I baked a pan of cornbread and then sat down to write. Later, I returned to scraping limescale off my shower walls. It was such a hot and sweaty job that I had to give up after cleaning just one row of (large) tiles.

About 17:00, I realized that I had intended to make chili for dinner. There was no way the beans would be soft enough to eat by dinnertime, but I started the chili and made tacos out of part of the hamburger I had thawed for the chili. When the chili was done, I put part of it in the refrigerator and froze the rest so that I didn't need to eat chili for days. Our freezer worked fine, but our refrigerator was no longer keeping things cold. Something needed to be done. I suspected defrosting was the answer, but hadn't felt like devoting the time to do it.

I spent a long time chatting with Matt after dinner and then practiced the guitar just before bed. I made sure to get to bed well before midnight so I would feel like getting up to run the next day.

May 8, 2020

Beach at Dawn

I got up and went for a run around the marina. I felt a little sluggish, but convinced myself to run the full seven kilometers. When I got back, I was already hot and sweaty, so I cleaned another row of tile in my shower before bathing. Then it was laundry time.

I hadn't really realized how much I missed human interaction until I noticed that I had spent the rest of the morning just hanging out with Cherie and John when they came home.

La Cruz Breakwater

John hypothesized that the reason our refrigerator wasn't cold was that the ducts that transferred cold air from the freezer to the refrigerator were clogged with ice. After he and Cherie left to go shopping, I loaded all the items from the freezer into a cooler and set about defrosting the freezer. While all the visible ice was melting, I cleaned the freezer. Then I removed the back panel and discovered quite a bit more ice on the coils and encasing the thermostat. I thought that might have been the problem until I stuck my finger up the ducts and encountered a solid wall of ice.

Ice on the Coils

I unplugged the refrigerator and left it to sit with the freezer door open. When all the ice in the freezer compartment had melted, the ducts were still solid ice. I filled coffee cups with boiling water and positioned them directly under the ducts. After about forty-five minutes of that, the ducts were ice free. I plugged the fridge back in and hoped. After an hour, the freezer was cold enough to return our food. The refrigerator section took longer but, after a couple of hours, items in the back were actually cold. All my effort had paid off.

I practiced the guitar, made myself a cold nonalcoholic michelada, and sat down to write. I wrote until dinner, when I had some of the chili I had made the night before. The mango and jicama salad I had made had already gone moldy, thanks to the non-functional refrigerator. Fortunately, the chili was okay.

After dinner, I returned to practicing the guitar.  I texted a bit, did some more writing, and settled down to watch an hour of Netflix before bed. Corona virus cases in Mexico had reached 31,522 with 3,160 deaths but there were rumors that there were actually as many as three times as many deaths as reported in Mexico City. California had twice as many cases, roughly the same number of new cases for the day, but fewer deaths. Nearly half the deaths in California were of Latinos, leading me to believe that it was lifestyle and culture, not the health care system, that led to a higher death rate in Mexico.

May 9, 2020

Saturday was the day I planned to make a big expedition to the supermarket in Bucerias. It was about four miles one way. I left before it got light and arrived about 8:00. There were not a lot of people in the store. I had made the trip because I needed some items I couldn't find in La Cruz. Unfortunately, because the small businesses had complained that it was unfair that they had been forced to close while the big stores were allowed to sell the same products, all the product categories deemed “non-essential” were now cordoned off.

Empty Bucerias

The elastic in two out of three of my pairs of running shorts had given up the ghost and I desperately needed replacements. I was not allowed to buy clothing. Linens, electronics, alcohol, and furniture were also off limits. It was possible to buy kitchen implements, air conditioners, and toys, but not makeup or nail polish. Since I couldn't go to the nail salon, I had been doing my own nails in an attempt to keep them long enough to play the guitar. I was not supposed to be able to buy nail polish remover. I lost it at the nail polish remover. I reached through the caution tape and dropped a bottle in my cart. The cashier rung it up without comment. A friend had done the same with lip balm.

View Towards La Cruz

I didn't want to buy much because I had to carry it four miles back to La Cruz, but I did pick up a few light, non-perishable food items, like rice cakes, that I couldn't obtain in the village. I started my trek back just before 9:00. It was already warm. Bucerias suddenly seemed like a big city after six weeks confined to La Cruz. There were few people on the streets, but it seemed quite busy after the ghost town that La Cruz had become. There was a lot of traffic and the noise was deafening.

I stopped at a corner coffee stand just before I left downtown Bucerias and bought a frappucino. It was the first coffee I had had in two months. I savored the coffee but was surprised at how delightful it was to talk to the smiling young man who made it for me. I hadn't spoken to a stranger in weeks. His cheerful attitude made my morning.

It was after 10:00 by the time I reached my house. I was already hot and sweaty, so took the opportunity to work on scraping the lime scale off my shower walls before taking my daily shower. I had purchased some metal scrubbers after failing to find any sort of cleaning product that would remove hard water deposits. Dry, they worked very well to polish soap scum off the tiles with only a thin coating. In the areas closer to the shower head, I had to return to the putty knife. In the worst areas, the scale came off in flakes.

I had always assumed that the floor tiles under the shower head, which were stained with rust, had been scrubbed so much that they had lost their finish. Upon closer inspection, I realized that they were just crusted with about an eighth of an inch of rust-stained lime. I dug at it with a corner of the putty knife and managed to burrow through to the actual tile. It was a project for another day, but it seemed like, one day, my shower would be pristine again.

It was nearly noon before I was finally dressed and ready for breakfast. Breakfast ran into lunch as I looked for something to eat that had not gone off in the warm refrigerator. I had brought home rice cakes, but all my spreadable cheeses were moldy. I had to settle for peanut butter on pan tostado.

After lunch, I played with my phone and chatted with Cherie while a couple of hours fled by. Then I sat down to write. I wrote for a while, practiced the guitar and wasted more time with my phone. There was leftover chili and cornbread for dinner and then I watched some Netflix, read, and went to sleep reasonably early.

May 10, 2020

Mangoes from Neighboring Tree

I woke up with cramps in my legs and ankles a few times during the night as a result of my long walk the previous morning. I got up, drank electrolytes, and went back to sleep, but was still grateful to be able to sleep in on Sunday morning. When I finally did get up, my first task was to scrape the lime scale off another section of shower wall. I had worked my way up to the area close to the shower head and the deposits were so thick that I could chisel the material off in flakes. It was actually easier to remove where it was thickest. The deposits were so rust-stained that it was quite easy to see which areas were clean.

Cherie and John borrowed a pole from the neighbors and picked a basket of mangoes from the tree behind our wall.  They weren't ripe yet, but seemed to be mature enough to ripen eventually.

I had intended to go out to buy fruit, but somehow never got around to it. I spent a very lazy day, doing little but text with Matt and practice the guitar. Finally, around 17:00, I drank a diet coke (blissfully cold thanks to our now functional refrigerator) to wake up. Then I wrote a bit and sat down for another practice session when Cherie and John went out.

Dinner was tacos made from leftover hamburger. All my salsa had gone bad when the refrigerator wasn't working, but I still had beans, cheese, and Huichol hot sauce to add. I read and watched Netflix after dinner. Despite the afternoon caffeine, I was still sleepy and went to bed by 23:00.

Nayarit had declared that restrictions would not be eased before the end of May.  Mexico ended the week with 35,022 cases and 3,465 deaths.  We might have reached the peak, but we certainly had not started down the back side of the curve yet.