Mangos,Weather, Beach

Summer is here! Hot and more humid, and the rains have begun. Monday night we got several inches of rain in two storms, and the casita next door flooded, so we helped sweep the water into the shower drain and covered all the windows with plastic (they only had screens or nothing). Today the glass man is installing windows into all the windows of our landlady's casita so our friend who is coming in a week to rent it, won't get flooded out!

Victor has been inundated with free mangos (the ataulfo variety is my favorite) and we had to make mango/lime sorbet two days in row, and then mango juice. What a treat, these little yellow/orange ones(ataulfo) are the best, so juicy and smooth textured flesh with superior flavor. I will make some mango smoothies and maybe a Thai dessert with rice and mango.

It rained hard again last night, but not as much thunder and lightening as Monday. When I awoke the sky was so clear and the view from our bedroom window of the mountains behind us was lovely, with the blue sky and no haze.








Sunsets are incredibly beautiful and we have taken so many photos of it from our balcony, for every night is unlike the previous one.

I still have to pinch myself to believe how lucky we are to live where we are. Some mornings, the early golden light cast on the houses below us and the ocean and the dramatic landscape make me feel like I am in Europe, it is just so different from the U.S.
I am growing to like the old and driving up to the States later this summer, as we go up interstate 35 on the freeways through the big Texas cities, and Kansas City, finally arriving in Minneapolis, is so much a different scene from Mexico. It must be the new and Modern.
The U.S. is a very young country and it shows in the architecture. I so look forward to taking a Mexico vacation to drive to places yet unseen, like Guanajuato and Patzuaro, Michoacan.

I meant to include this pic earlier, when I made fresh coconut milk for our Thai cooking. It was quite a chore, but some things are worth the effort. Another chore is the making of the scrumptiously delicious fresh mango and lime sorbet I make. It takes a while to grate all the limes by hand, boil up the lime rind with water and sugar, add coconut cream. Then cut up enough limes to squeeze out 27 tablespoons of lime juice and then cut up 9 or more mangoes to get out the flesh to puree. Finally stir it all together to make the most wonderful sorbet in Mexico! It seems we eat less here, cause it is hot and we just don't have access to great already made food like we used to find in Byerly's Grocery Store in St. Louis Park. Now we just make our own, and if we are too lazy we go without. So we eat a more pure diet here, and less junk food and less desserts and fattening food.

Last weekend we had overnight company, a family from the city of Tepic, capital of the state we live in, Nayarit. They love going to this beach near us, for it is in a little bay, protected and more tranquil. The water was so clear that day. Mexicans who can't swim like this beach for they feel safer. It was so warm that day and the ocean felt like a warm bathtub. Lying on the beach under our umbrella it was warm even, as the breezes didn't even cool us off.

I have been very busy doing genealogy research at Ancestry.com, for I have two free weeks of access to their records. I was successful in finding at long last, the Passenger Ship Manifest of Victor's grandfather coming over to New York and Montreal at age 19 from Tunisia where he studied at a French school for 7 years after leaving Macedonia (Ottoman Empire in 1888).
I even connected his family with some long lost cousins, and they are thrilled.

So long for today!