and so it begins

It's 9 PM and the disco has cranked up and will blast away for the next 8 hours.  Of course there's nobody here yet; they will begin arriving tomorrow.  Right now our street looks like this.  But a zillion amps lends a certain je sias quoi to a lovely spring evening, don't you think?

By tomorrow afternoon it will be a solid mass of cars, if past experience means anything.  A couple of things are different this year, however.  To the left of this photo there was a vacant lot that was a camp ground/open air loo (don't spend too much time thinking about that), and the triangular lot on the right was clear of any brush and debris.  Not so for either this year.  The Oasis Hotel has taken over the vacant lot, built a little kiddie pool, put up lots of palm trees, umbrellas and tables for the use of their clients.  Pluse they have also dumped a lot of construction debris on the lot (v. sneaky but who's going to complain?) to discourage campers.  Things might look a bit different this year.  Probably instead people will put up lean-to's against the ugly wall and sleep on the narrow sand strip.  We'll see.

There has been a lot of clean-up going on during the last two or three weeks in preparation for the flood of visitors.  They even filled in some of the killer pot holes on the entrance road.  Because of the heavy rains we had last month the mosquitoes have been relentless.  Last week the spray truck came through and things got much better, but then the next generation hatched out and it got very bad again.  Again tonight the spray truck came through and we hope it will bring relief!

We usually race around shutting all the doors and windows to keep the stink out.  But not tonight; we left everything open in hopes of killing off any creatures in the house.  The last time they sprayed Mr. C went downstairs the next morning and found the terrazzo  covered in mostly mosquito  corpses.  That's good.  But the bad thing is that it kills everything, good and bad, including bees which we desperately need in the garden.

Tomorrow night we'll go down to sleep at friends' house in the colonia to get away from the "music".  Both of us have been sick for the last couple of days (I actually missed yesterday's domino game) but I'm hoping we'll have recovered sufficiently by tomorrow.