Moving House

A new dawn will start for us this Friday when we move to our 'new' home with new friends and neighbours. They say one of the biggest upheavals in anyone's life is to have a death in the family, a divorce or moving house but Peter and I have been for the past two weeks gradually moving there and not in one go as most people tend to do, this has made the task easier and pleasant. I have already moved the most delicate things like my china cupboard with all my precious Lladro figurines and my Wedgewood dinner set plus the Venecian chandellier which had to be disasembled piece by piece from our present ceiling and then I carefully washed each individual piece and delicately packed it, then it was transported over there and the electrician assembled it again and hunged at our new home, it took a whole day but it was worth it, as it looks simply marvellous. The new beds are also there, so today I will go to make the beds with the new bed linen and place the curtain poles in the bedrooms. Some clothes and furniture have already been transported there, so we can say we are half way done as we can comfortably stay there as it is right now. We are lucky in the sense that there will be more space at the new home than we have here right. The only hicup his been British Telecom who have already transferred my private line to the new house, or at least is in limbo as is neither here nor there since the telephones have not yet been connected at the new house so I'm incomunicado until the beginning of May. We have been promised by BT that we can retain the same telephone numbers so I hope that goes through alright as I have no desire to remember another set of three different telephone numbers. I think we will be very happy there as we already have friends and the last time we went to our new home we were made welcomed by a really nice group of ladies with whom we shared a joke and a laugh and we were informed that there will be a street party to celebrate the Royal Wedding in front of our home! I feel so happy to hear about this, as I have never been to a street party before. Everything here seems to be so unreal and happy. The town is self-sufficient as everything seems to be either in front of our home, along the road, behind our home (like the doctor's surgery) or around the corner. It is simply fantastic! this lovely market town is located at the foot of a castle where the views are of outstanding natural beauty. It also has a small museum where you can see the inside of a real house and how it used to be furnished long ago, with interesting memorabilia of the people who has lived there over the centuries and how life used to be then. The museum is run by volunteers. There are so many things to do as they have a calendar with lots of activities throughout the whole year and I can learn to do things I always wanted to do, like grow strawberries and cucumbers in an alotment for fun. There are cinema days where for a couple of pounds you can see a film and just across the road a new French restaurant has just opened too. The owner is French and he has a good reputation as a cheff since he owns another restaurant at a nearby town so this is very good news. Visitors come here every summer and I over-heard a lady saying: 'There aren't very many towns like this one left. It is such a pretty and quaint town that I wish I could live here' I just felt doubly lucky that we are going to move there this Friday, only two days to go! I'm so excited and the weather has turned sunny and pretty today with limpid blue skies. I can't believe our good luck!

My ADVENTURES IN MEXICO

Have you ever gone through the feeling that this might be your last day alive ? Well, that happened to us on the way to Merida. When I saw that we were going to board a small airplane on a pitch dark tarmac taxiway as we walked towards this plane, I said to Peter: ' haven't I told a thousand times that I hate small planes ? “ He didn't answer me. When we boarded, I noticed there weren't any lights inside this plane, just in the pilot's cabin and I counted 20 passengers in the dim light that came from the runway lights outside. We took off alright, the weather was very bad, furious winds and rain battered the small plane and at one point it felt like if the plane was going to flip upside down as it had already flipped sideways as
I could tell we were not flying straight; we had to hold on to the seat in front in order not to slip out of our seats and the wings of the plane were tilted sideways. When things couldn't get worse they did: We hit turbulence, bad turbulence and the plane was shaking like a milk shake in a can. I looked at Peter and instead of being scared I got cross with Peter and asked him: What airline is this? He replied: 'Maya Airlines' then suddenly the little plane plunged 100 feet in free fall; it looked like the pilots couldn't get any control of this sudden plunge and gust of wind. Everyone in the plane was screaming. I watched the pilots in the cockpit crossing themselves and I thought to myself: when even the pilots are crossing themselves it’s not boding too well. Then I turned to Peter and still cross at him I told him: You realize we are also going to fly over the Bermuda Triangle where ships and planes disappear without a trace and we are also flying with an airline no one has ever heard of, where small planes frequently fall of the sky like mosquitoes around here, we won't even appear in the news, no one will know where the hell we are. I thought about my friend Robert who doesn't like airplanes and Hector and our new house that I would not see finished and then I started thinking how we could survive if the airplane went down, thinking that maybe airplanes should have a large parachute in case it failed. The flight seemed interminable after what it seemed an eternity the weather got better and we could finally see the lights below of the city of Merida.
Phew! it looked like if everything was going to be fine after all. When we landed in Merida I heard a passenger saying she would have been better off travelling in a third class bus with the chickens! She thought that would have been a lot safer than this flight. If that was her first flight I'm sure it put her off for ever but I think I would have sooner travel in third class with the chickens had I known what an awful flight this was going to be.

JAPAN AND THE NUCLEAR DEBATE

Today is exactly a week since the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disaster happened in the beautiful country of Japan. I have been very impressed by the way the Japanese people have conducted themselves in the face of such a holocaust with orderly lines to get what they need and already the teachers are giving classes to children from tents and doctors are working hard to assist their patients. Japan, has always been a country I have admired for their discipline and exquisite manners. They recovered from the bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, when the world thought they would never be able to lift their heads up again, to become over the years the third economic power in the world. It says a lot about the character of these exemplary people who live in a small island, and if anyone is going to overcome and triumph in the face of disaster it is going to be the Japanese nation. Of course, it is bad enough to overcome a tsunami and an earthquake together, events which occurs in nature with an unimaginable devastation and quite another one, to such a man-made disaster as a nuclear plant which the so called experts say is "cheap" energy, I think not; this is not a cheap technology once it fails, and hundreds of lives as well as land will be lost once its deamed unliveable. Our land masses are limited and we cannot afford to have vast areas of land empty for millions of years because of this type of "accidents": what the so called "experts" were saying only a scant few days ago that 'Chernoble cannot happen here' is very quickly turning into the worst nuclear disaster in history, even surpassing Chernoble. General Electric designed these Japanese plants that are now failing, so therefore they have a duty as well as a responsibilty to try and remedy the damage as they have a case to answer in this other hollocaust that they have now created. The excuse of: 'it was just designed for a 6 on the richter scale doesn't wash, this is a technology that cannot be controlled like a pandora's box where no one can predict the horrible devastation where other innocent people will have to live and suffer the consequences. I now hope that the bright bulbs in government will finally wake up to the fact that there are other means to produce greener and safer energy like for example: the hydroelectric technology, which can be harnessed from the rivers or the sea, they should be doing that, since Britain, and Japan are island nations surrounded by water, this technology is more viable and safer to obtain for all our energy needs, not to mention solar energy and to a smaller degree windmills too. Perhaps something good will come out of this disaster and goverments will finally shelve the nuclear nightmare technologies for ever, in favour of other natural fountains of natural energy.

MERIDA, MEXICO

Merida its a peaceful and lovely colonial town, just a walking distance from the hotel where we were staying at, is the Montejo Avenue, lined with grand beautiful houses in different styles, either French or Spanish styles. Merida prospered quite well by growing henequen or Izamal as some call it, after the port of Izamal where they used to export the ropes and bags made out of henequen. Great fortunes were made out of this industry but unfortunatelly the industry floundered with the invention of plastic
However, plastic bags have been found to rot the grains and its not echologically green as it doesn't degrade back into nature, so the Mexicans are beginning to see an answer in this plant to reintroduce it for commerce as the left-over of the henequen has been discovered by the NASA scientists to be more resistant than plastic in intense temperatures as it doesn't melt like plastic does, on top of this, there is a nice liquour that can be extracted from this plant and even though henequen is related to the agave (the plant that produces tequila) the liquour is completely different in taste to tequila. There are plans in Merida to start re-growing henequen again.

Robert, you would perhaps be interested to know that chilli peppers (without the bit that makes them hot) has been found by the Japanese to increase a person's metabolism
and Japan is marketing this discovery in pills to help people reduce weight.

Top Gear & Viva Mexico !!

Thank you, thank you guys for nearly wrecking our holiday in Mexico. The first time I heard about this fiasco was, when the Mexican taxi driver asked Peter and I, 'From where are you visiting us? we said Britain, our driver frowned and said if we had heard about the three idiots who insulted Mexico, from a British motor-show called Top Gear? We hadn't. When we got to our hotel, the British flag was being pulled down from the pole and that same night Mexican T.V. repeated the undiplomatic and ignorant remarks. I must say, it was Richard Hammond who started it all and the other two hyenas just continued the banter. So this picture is for you guys. Here we are.. In Mexico with our Viva Mexico sombreros accompanied by..Richard Hammond our donkey! After that, it was embarrasing to own up where we came from, so for the rest of the Mexican holiday we said we came from Canada. I have heard that Top Gear has since that apologized, although it wasn't quick enough for us over in Mexico. In future, think about your fellow country-men, as you are now infamous in Mexico. The Mexican spirit is a happy one and they will forgive you and they might even invite you to visit their country so that you can sample their hospitality. I recommend Cancun, San Miguel Allende, Guanajuato, Oaxaca and if you like Tequila, you can visit the blue hills where the agave plant grows. After we 'changed' our nationality, things were a lot better for us. Although at the second hotel we stayed at, in Merida, the hotel didn't have the British flag flying either. They had the U.S. flag, the Canadian, French, German and Italian flags but no British flag. Thanks guys!

The ' new ' house

As usual in the Birchwood family household every minute counts and Sunday is no exception. Today we have gone to meet the bedroom furniture designer. It is amazing
the range of things on offer, I got a hydraulic clothes rail so that I no longer have to stretch on tip-toes to get at my clothes. The shoe-rack is designed so that you can pull it out like a drawer so no more blind searching underneath the clothes. Every inch is useful. The inside of the closet doors have hinged mirrors so that I can move the mirrors around. In general, things are looking up. At the moment it has only bare walls as you can see but tomorrow Monday it will be the time when the kitchen furniture will be fitted in, and also the bathroom furniture and shower too. It really is very exciting to see it at this stage, where its no longer plans and dreams but the real thing.

After so much bureaucracy with the council of what nail was allowed and which one wasn't and after intensive renovation from top to bottom of this historical and listed home, the project is finally coming to be completed! in what I estimate would be another two months. Considering it was two years ago when we first started its really wonderful to come to see it at this final stage.

A message for my sweet sister

Patty querida cuenta conmigo con mi amor y carino especial para siempre estas en mi
corazon y mis pensamientos de tu hermana Maria