Starring, The Three Amigos, plus Special Guests

Aside from just being the title of a song by 10cc, Ive been reflecting recently on how much love, or similar connected emotions, are at the root of everything we do. Of course this isn’t simply limited to being ‘in love’, as most often they are done out of love & by that I mean, because of love. A parent will sacrifice their life for a child, an addict their soul for a hit. Morally, they are maybe miles apart, however, Im sure they would both put up a very convincing argument as to the lengths they as individuals would be prepared to go to. No of course they aren’t the same thing, but to the individual it can feel like the same thing. A driving force that defies explanation & holds no truck with reason

We love ice cream but hate Brussels sprouts – do we really mean that or do we just like & not like? I quite like sprouts & ice cream is often lovely, so it seems crazy that someone could feel that strongly & yet their actions will often be a better indicator than their words. There is after all not much of a scale to play with: hate, really dislike, dislike, ambivalent, like, really like, love. Yes I could’ve used different words, but without going into expressions such as “Im really rather keen on”, three levels each way pretty much sums it up. Perhaps we need another word to express the difference between the emotional love for a person, or how you feel about your absolute favourite string cheese, for example

As Im typing, Love & Happiness just came on the radio, which to me is a sign I should see this thought through to the end, or just to the end of the paragraph at least.

So, love is a powerful motivator & it seems that at its most intense, there is nothing we wont do for it, because of it, or in pursuit of it. Its something we feel completely & yet cant effectively describe. Amazingly we can turn on a sixpence, hating something we once loved for reasons that need only make sense to us. Or when feeling hate is based on expectation, have reality flip that on its head when the belief is seen to be false. Logic plays no part in the process, yet good decision making demands the absence of emotion. Does that mean we can only get the best an algorithm can can calculate for us, or when we make important decisions, should we sacrifice sense for happiness?

I read recently that if we act based on passion, then we are far more likely to see that action through to fruition because of how strongly we feel about it. Its not logic that gets soldiers up & over the top of a trench, its not common sense that gets a climber to the top of a mountain & actual happiness is seldom the result of a calculation. Love is happiness & happiness isn’t always something that makes sense on paper. They say if you love what you do, then you will never feel like you’ve worked a day in your life. That may be true, but few of us are that fortunate, so what do we do? We focus on the goal, which is our individual version of happiness. Doing XYZ for X amount of time is an integral part of achieving that goal, so why not love it for what it means to you & your future happiness, rather than the pain in your ass it seems from time to time.

Act 1, enter The Three Amigos

When last I wrote, I’d just got my wheels sorted & was all prepped for our pre-arranged rendezvous at Guayaquil Airport. 24hrs before the off, there’s chatter on the wire with rumours of delays. Frantic cross checks produced contrary & confusing results, we believed what we wanted to hear & we got it wrong. Jeffs first leg would be delayed, thus missing his connecting flight. Due to the now known, future delay, the airline had been bumping passengers for a little while & the next flight had filled up quick. This meant him taking the next flight after that, which now also meant a 6hr delay for Jeff & a long ol’ wait for Stevie & I. It also didn’t help that I broke my phone again & until Stevie came through at arrivals, I wasn’t quite sure what plan we were working to. Not the best start, but it was great to have time for me & Steve to catch up – so we went to a DIY store to set the ambiance :).

So even though having my own transport means I can now knock 30mins or so off the 3hr journey, its still getting late by the time we reach home. Jeff & Steve tried their best bless them to keep me going, but I fell asleep first by a long way, so I hope they had a good time amusing themselves. A lazy breakfast followed by a ride out to see the house saw another glorious day unfold before us . Both were genuinely very impressed, with them now looking forward to staying in the finished version. I cant wait to be able to welcome them back. They also pointed out that it seems much bigger than it looks in the photos once you get inside & seeing it through their eyes, I cant disagree. Sunday should have been a last night blow out, though in spite of a nice meal out, we opted for a gentle evening of catching up properly. The kind of lazy intimacy you cant get over skype, just hanging out & saying what comes into your head, which leads to all kinds of fun & entertainment.

Soon enough it was Monday lunch & time for Jeff to depart. I dropped Stevie off at the house to begin getting his head around the job, whilst I sped down to Salinas to get my phone screen repaired, leaving Jeff to potter. We had lunch together & then Jeff took a car to the airport. What we hadn’t processed at this point, was that in an effort to mitigate the disaster of his arriving flight, he had changed his flight & was now going via San Salvador rather than Bogata. That decision turned the usual 5 1/2 hr flight with a 2hr stopover into 16hr nite mare journey. No matter how much he loves me, he is never doing that again!

So with just me & Stevie, it was back to work & we hit it like Spartans. Unfortunately the drive belt on my mixer broke in the afternoon, which meant the guys were now mixing by hand & that costs time & money, besides making a mess. This meant Tuesday I headed back to Salinas to find a belt. I went to every motor shop, washing machine repair shop, tool shop, you name it, no one had one. Everyone I asked assured me the person they were sending me to definitely had one. He never did. I returned back to site to find Stevie stripped to the waist, sweat glistening as he surveyed imaginary cable roots across my ceiling. There was a lot of work to do, like really, a lot. Following a conversation with the guys, they convinced me I just hadn’t been to the right place for the belt, so after having secured location details from his father, I took a labourer back down to Salinas. In an effort to salvage something from this, I took a little pride in knowing that he had as little luck as I had, or rather, I was just as good as him at not being able to get what I needed, but only because it didn’t exist, not because I couldn’t effectively communicate my requirement. Out of desperation I bought a sewing machine drive belt, but predictably that didn’t even last a single revolution. All this meant Stevie was left alone & discovering that even though I had done what I could beforehand, there was still a lot of concrete that had to be drilled & block to be chiselled before he could run his cabling. So I took the baton, or rather the hammer and got to work. Like dogs we worked through till sundown every night, stopping only for lunch.

After a bite to eat & a shower, we were good for an hour or so, then it was fall into bed before starting all over again first thing the next morning. So when Saturday rolled around, we definitely deserved a beer. Grabbing snacks to go, we made our way along the beach in Montanita & sat down for a beer whilst we watched the world turn & the sun swiftly head down before us. We stayed for quite a while with Stevie out pacing me by some margin, but I cant drink & he deserved it for he had earned it. When I’d finished my last mojito it was time for bed, or for me at least. Which meant for the second time I was wimping out & left Stevie on the deck to stare out to sea. I felt even more guilty at 7am Sunday when I took him a cup of tea. What followed was a quiet day at work. We were getting close, but there was a problem & we couldn’t make sense of how to connect to the incoming supply. I felt rough as hell & I could only imagine how Stevie felt, so we left it, hoping it would make more sense in the morning. But you cant stem the mans conscientiousness, so when we got home, Stevie took the cover off the distribution board to see how it was connected. Which was when all the power in the house went off. He quickly got most things back on as they were just the result of loose breakers, but the circuit with the fridge & water cooler wouldn’t come back on. You know when you see someones shoulders slump as they realise they so don’t want to be playing this game anymore, but then shrug some commitment back in to them somehow & carry on. It made me all warm n fuzzy to see. Having done what he could, we got around the rest with extension leads. It was all a result of extremely poor & dangerous wiring that was a major incident waiting to happen. The main incoming supply was just twisted & taped then buried in a wall. So without perhaps realising why at the time, Stevie quite possibly saved my life by disturbing that ticking time bomb.

So apparently the problem we were having difficulty understanding is the way electricity is transferred through the cables. In UK we have a live, a neutral & an earth. In Ecuador they use the neutral as a return, which goes to earth. This makes no sense to me as I am not an electrician. What it means in real terms is that the fully functional & safe distribution board I bought from UK will not work. Sadly it also means that Stevie wasn’t able to revel in his joy of accomplishment by switching the lights on in glorious ceremony, but we did test it & it all works as expected.

So from my perspective it’s a fantastic achievement. I now have a full 1^st fix electrical installation, with only a board replacement & final connection to be made by a local as a couple of hours work. My only regrets are Stevie not having any time to explore & get a better sense of what living here is like. Time off is what I think most employees would call it. It would also have been nice to spend more time with Jeff. Fortunately there will be more opportunities for both.

Cut to Construction Scene

After dropping Stevie at the airport, a couple of hours running around Guayaquil finally produced the drive belt I needed, so things were getting back on track at site.

The render debacle had caused me real concern, so as a stopgap I worked out a plan with the guys whereby they would only apply the first coat, this would at least buy me time to come up with a solution. I talked through my issue with Jose & when he understood what he needed to achieve, we were able to work out the best way to solve it. I am now beyond pleased with the result & cant wait to paint it. The only downside is that the process for them is slow, involves everyone & Im neither good enough nor do I have the time to teach them the skills necessary to improve things significantly. That being said, they level from top to bottom & from side to side so everything is perfectly straight to the eye, which in my case translates in to ‘well worth the time & effort!’.What this also means is that little else is getting done, except by me. This is fine as Ive now finished off some of the drilling & chasing we skipped in the 1^st fix electrical. Ive also been working out exactly what happens with the plumbing. In essence getting my head around the detail of what I need to do to move in whilst keeping everyone else productive.

One such solution was to progress the external works & it turned out my neighbour was looking to do some external work himself. He wanted a lot of soil removed from his front garden – I needed a lot of soil to fill my rear garden. I wanted my pool dug – he wanted his rear garden leveled. He needed access through my rear garden to level his – there is no mechanical access to my rear garden after the pool is dug. It was clear we needed to synchronize & he can barely decide whether to blink or breathe, so I took over. He paid me a token gesture & I got him to draw out what he wanted it to look like. It turned out though that it wasn’t what he wanted at all, so we spent a week with the digger frustratingly creating various options for him to be able to see what they looked like. Its only because of my friendship with Bob the digger driver, that he didn’t walk off site. It took 2 weeks to do what could’ve been done in 4 days & then only 2 more days to level all my new dirt & to completely dig my pool. He was able to do this because I gave him accurate instruction to begin with, I confirmed his adherence to the plan at various stages of progress & he did his bit by doing exactly as instructed. A point I tried to explain to my neighbour when he whinged about how much it all cost.

With all this new dirt I had no more room for the temp office & w/c, so I needed to get an operational toilet inside. Granted you still have to flush with a bucket & the door is the old one from outside, its lit by a diffused LED in-ceiling lamp unit (not actually fitted in a ceiling yet, more like hanging on a cable) & is underground plumbed all the way to the septic.

In evolutionary terms, man being able to sit on his throne indoors, has always been thought of as a significant step!

After some consideration, I figured the loo didn’t need quite as much space as Id given it, so with a quick shuffle & a cut of walling, we now have a cupboard under the stairs…& who doesn’t enjoy more storage eh?

 

So in between co-ordinating next doors hopes n dreams, Ive been working on the plumbing, which has meant more drilling of concrete. I had Stevie bring me out some spares, but even though they are by the same manufacturer, they are just slightly the wrong size to fit the large hole cutter that they supply as a pair. Even though Ive tried welding it, it wont hold for a complete hole, so now I use it as a template to stitch drill through 12” of reinforced concrete. Next time, set the bathrooms in stone before you start so you can cast the holes in the concrete where you need them as you go.

Having gotten no where with any of the glazing specialists Id been referred to, I needed to take action. I need to be secure & in the case of the roof, I need to be water tight cos rains be coming. I took the guy that did the music studio glazing up to Sinchal to look at what I had. In real simple terms, he’s going to get a new sheet of ‘similar’ glass & glue it to the rubber frame of the original. It wont function as originally intended, but as long as it fits & doesn’t look too different, Ill take it. As part of the deal, he would collect all my remaining glass from Sinchal & deliver them & the repaired panels to Dos Mangas. $120 all in, my previous quote was $1500, but what choice did I have. We shook hands & on the appointed day he set off to Salinas to meet his buddy with the glazing lorry suitable to transport my panels, buy the replacement glass, go to Sinchal & collect everything, then deliver to me. Im not an idiot, so having arranged for him to call me when they left Salinas, I went to meet them in Sinchal. “…..the big truck was busy” was their reply when asked why they were in a pickup. I got a bit shouty Im afraid, but there was no way I was letting my glass on that truck. They all tried to reassure me it would be fine & I took them to see the glass. We came to the two broken panels & they burst out laughing, saying they didn’t know why I was making so much fuss & this was nothing. I then took them around the corner & they became quiet until finally turning on my glazing guy saying of course they need the big truck. We will try again next Monday, meantime, he is busy trying to get the glue to stick.

By chance I met a lovely couple who live in Manglaralto just down the road from me. Would you believe, he is a plumbing engineer & has given me sound advice on what & how I need to do, as well as the components to use. All this means I am now up & down to Guayaquil trying to find & buy stuff. There is plenty of work now for the guys with the pool & garage, but I need to get a shuffle on with the interior if I am to have any hope of moving in by the date as yet still to be confirmed. I have however extended the beach house lease until end of May & then we will see where we are.

 

Animal House

I wasn’t sure I would ever be able to say this, but Im actually getting quite used to the wildlife, or more specifically, the spiders. I guess they’ve now grown accustomed to this big lump of concrete in the midst of their natural habitat, because they have begun to venture inside. Of course that’s quite easy for them to do at the moment & will continue to be so until I put the glass in the window frames & begin closing doors etc…but its still a bit of a shock when I first see them.

I was on the roof putting together the frame for the skylight when some movement caught the corner of my eye. Probably only half the size of my hand, this was a particularly vicious looking beast, fore legs up in the air & fangs clearly on display. What threw me though was a bright white sack hanging out the back of its abdomen. Jose confirmed this was an egg sack & she was looking for somewhere to secrete it for their gestation period. He advised much caution & suggested the fangs were most definitely, not just for show & intimidation, they were the harbingers of doom for anything that threatened her impending brood. By nature Im a fighter & not a runner, so it makes sense to me that this particular phobia tends to freeze me to the spot whilst I scan for something to defend myself with, or even better if I can attack. I still look for some form of protection, but I haven’t tried to kill one for some months now – Im hoping they will pass around the words of mutual respect & the importance of maintaining distance, rather than thinking Ive lost my edge & have now devolved from threat to victim to food source.

Then one evening when Stevie & I were again working late, we walk out to the truck as dusk was approaching & to quote his words “…..the biggest spider Ive ever seen….even in Australia”, was taking a stroll across my drive. I was transfixed, but couldn’t  get any closer than about 20 feet. Luckily Stevie had his camera, so clicked off a quick shot before retreating for his own safety. I tried to replicate the shot with a cigarette packet as a stand in. If the perspective seems a little off, trust me when I say it was easily twice the size of the packet.

There was also a much much smaller one that made it on to the back steps & then died. I leave it there so I have to walk past it all the time & yes I (now) know its dead, it still takes a moment or two to stave off the instinct to react. Im sure this will get easier….Im not giving myself many options that don’t include success in this particular therapy for aversion & as the trope states, ‘failure is not an option!’. So my people are gonna sit down with their people & as long as we all agree to neither kill nor scare the livin beejesuss out of each other, there may be a chance of tolerant, if not harmonious cohabitation.

 

The Boy in the Girls Bubble

As has become habit, I enjoy a midweek evening meal with Roey & the new retreaters. Its always diverse & even though these individuals have been bought together through shared interests & some common beliefs, they are often widely different. This week, one stood out. She is smart & witty, effortlessly fluent in 3 languages, she sashays across the multi-lingual conversations until eventually we find ourselves centre stage, verbally jousting with each other as the rest watched on & only chimed in if we needed them to, which we didn’t. We exchanged looks. I recognised the looks, I’d seen them before many years ago & whilst I didn’t specifically know what they were saying, I got the general message. She had noticed me as well.

Her name is Einat, she’s an early 30’s Israeli living in Tel Aviv, with the most amazing smile that brightens everything in its path.  Wanting to spend more time with this woman felt like the most natural thing in the world, so “see you tomorrow”, was a statement of fact rather than just a pleasantry. The following evening bought a birthday party & thus an excuse to go out. It quite quickly became the Si & Einat show, which saw us all the way through to home time, which in turn became moonlit beach time. A good lawyer could probably argue the specifics, however, this was most definitely a joint operation. There was no aggressor & acceptor, no seducer & seduced, this felt so easily negotiated that it was virtually organic. Just two people comfortably working towards their common goal.

From that night we were only apart for her retreat activities & my house building. There was little time for sleep. Long hours talking into the night, finding out who the other is & how they feel about stuff. Laughter with tears streaming down our faces intermixed with serious recounting of real life experiences. We were the equivalent of doing our homework on the bus as far as getting to know each other goes, but we crammed for that test like it would decide our future….

There was no official award ceremony, but we both knew we had passed with honours & would be getting a scholarship to continue the education. The problem began with where. Einat is returning to a new career in Tel Aviv, I am just beginning my new life in Ecuador. We talked about it of course & in a different place & time we might have simply eloped, but even if we allow a little bit of emotion into the decision making process, we couldn’t make it stack up for either of us in the others country. So six days later, a time that passed in the blink of an eye, our bubble burst & thoughts turned to an exit strategy. After discussing it might be better to rip off the band-aid & just go cold turkey, I pushed to indulge our inner Casablanca, by seeing the dame all the way up to her port of departure. Having seen her safely to the gate,  & kissed her for the last time, I walked away & didn’t look back as I let her get on the bus.

During one of those long nights together, we discovered she is also my muse & has kick started me on my book project. This will be on going now, so naturally we exchanged numbers on this. Yes yes, we are hopeless romantics, clinging on to some flimsy hope that the other will change their mind. Who knows what’s around the corner though, so we will stay in touch. For the short term, it means we are messaging each other as she continues her travels around Ecuador, which provided an opportunity. Not wanting to hijack her holiday, I will just be joining her for the last couple of days in Quito before she flies home, so we get to do the whole dramatic goodbye scene one more time for the special edition blu-ray.

 

Perhaps there will be more to come when I return from Quito, we’ll just have to wat & see……

So for now, I’d just like to wish my mother a very happy birthday for Monday 🙂 xxx

 

Until next time,

Si x