Here are my shots of last night's Umarela, the annual Christmas celebration for our university, UMAR Huatulco. It was a wonderful time with great music and costumes, exactly what everyone needed this year as a recent tragedy at our university brought home the importance of celebrating life and friendships.
I don't have as many pictures as I would have liked. Most were too dark and blurry to be of any use until the Christmas tree on the left showed me how to adjust my camera a little better.
Fortunately, the video turned out much better and I think I captured almost everyone. If you were there, you'll probably find yourself if you look hard enough.
Ms. Marvel, Cruella De Ville, and Hawkeye
You have to respect the ingenuity of this man's costume. His shield was made from the cage of a broken fan.
Here comes Manny the mammoth again.
I just love these well designed snowwoman costumes. The matching hats were made from recycled cardboard. Very clever. The snowgirl on the left was the talented designer.
Lots of happy elves, the best kind.
It was great to see some of our graduates turn up for the event. Sure, they're blurry but I'd recognize them anywhere.
I confess I got a bit lazy with the camera after the parade arrived at Parque Ruffino Tamayo. I was too busy talking to cool people I haven't seen in a while. Sometimes you have to put the camera down and just enjoy the experience.
UMARELA 2015 starts in about 2 hours, giving me just enough time to post a few pics of some of the preparations earlier today. It may be hard to believe but this may be even better than years past. Excitement is very high and nothing makes Umarela more successful than high spirits.
This year the engineers, the men who really make UMAR operational, have outdone themselves with their mobile structure of Manny from the Ice Age movies. The details are incredible.
Here are some of the team members in front of the construction.
It's entirely made with the inner skin of coconut shells, perfect for the shaggy woolly mammoth look. The natural color was preserved with an alcohol based wood lacquer. The children are going to go wild for this when it rolls downtown tonight.
Yay. It's the annual Christmas lunch. I'm one of the early birds.
The food was great as always. Everybody left happy and satisfied and well fortified for the event coming up in less than an hour from now. I have three cameras packed so I should be able to capture a lot of the fun. Away I go.
Sunday, I took the boogie board bicycle rack out for the first excursion to La Bocana. It worked like a charm. The board didn't shake at all and, once I was on the saddle, it didn't feel like I was carrying any extra burden. I learned that, when mounting the bike, the rack side pedal has to be down so I can adjust my foot to pedal from the heel with the first thrust.
First portage from taking the shortcut the sector of empty streets for future residential development. People can enter by the Fonatur recycling depot but all other exits are blocked, which probably saves a lot of unnecessary accidents from commuters racing the clock and trying to avoid traffic lights.
Next obstacle was at the top of the hill descending to Tangolunda. Traffic had been diverted to an older 2 lane road half a kilometer back that I hoped to avoid because of my extra width and the blind turns plus increased traffic. I just kept going and hoped for the best. Sometimes a bicycle can squeeze through where normal traffic can't.
Approaching the moment of truth.
Whee. No problem.
This video is clearly staged. I saw Marbella waving to me from EcoSpa as I cruised through Tangolunda so I spun around and asked her to capture Boogie Bike in motion to show it off better. That's the name for the contraption from here on in courtesy of Francisco. It works for me.
Random photo from the journey.
La Bocana just ahead at the bottom of the next hill. I didn't even notice at the time that the front pipe had been shaken free. It was the one spot I hadn't glued because the reduction sleeve had been jammed in so tightly, I couldn't free it. I thought if it was that tight, it wouldn't need glue anyways. No problem when I pushed it back in but it freed itself one more time before I made it home. Maybe it was the constant vibrations of the tarmac that worked it out. It's glued tightly now and it won't happen again.
Ta-dah. Beautiful Bocana. I caught a few little waves and had some fun. Mostly it was a fishing day. An enormous school of fish had landed and fishermen and seagulls were everywhere. People were taking home buckets of fish. I grabbed my space in the water whenever a fishermen carried his haul back to shore and made room again when he returned.
With my flab on the increase, a lifestyle adjustment is in order . Much as I enjoy my new scooter http://alackofcleardirection.blogspot.mx/2015/09/new-ride-vento-hot-rod-classic.html, I get as much exercise out of it as I would playing video games. It's perfect for transporting my boogie board the 20 minute drive to La Bocana but a one hour bike ride would be much more satisfying.
The only way I could carry the boogie board on the bicycle was to tuck it under one arm and that just wasn't practical. I tried balancing it on the passenger spikes with a couple of bungees latched on the seat post. That worked for about 15 seconds.
Down in Puerto Escondido, I'd seen a few guys with surfboard racks on the side of their scooters. It seemed like a great idea. Of course, with a scooter, you don't need room to pedal. Hmm. I checked on the internet one night. Sure enough, people in the States have designed racks for bicycles too. The cost of postage is often more than double that of the product from to the States to Mexico so I headed to Surf Town, Puerto Escondido, our own international surfer mecca. Surely, if I could find one of these fantastic contraptions anywhere, that would be the place. I had pictures of what I wanted on my smart phone just to make myself understood. Nobody at the surf shops had ever heard of them and sent me way up the hill to a couple of bike shops where I was assured the only way I was going to get what I wanted was to pay some welders to make me one. Incidentally, I learned from one bike mechanic that Puerto is not a big bicycle town so there has never been a demand for such a thing before. The hill I climbed that day explained why.
Back home I hit the internet again and this time I hit the jackpot. A man has this great Youtube video demonstrating how to build your own. It's genius. There are a few other DIY rack vids as well but his is the most solid design. The others are a bit wiggly. If you read his full description, you'll find very practical detailed instructions that aren't necessarily apparent in the 3 minute video. Check it out.
Because of the shape of my frame, I couldn't follow his instructions without some modifications. His frame is a consistent one inch triangle. All of his PVC pieces are one inch, the perfect width for a rack and I doubt you would want it any thicker. My frame has all different widths from one inch to 1.6 so even if I went for a 1.6 thick frame, I'd still have problem getting pieces to fit together.
I considered buying myself a new bike but all of the bikes at our local store had the same style of frame as mine so I had to scheme a way to make this guy's invention work. Hence, my very first, probably last, instructional video. It doesn't show the whole process, just the adjustments I had to make for the original video. If your frame is like his, the first video is all you will ever need. If you have one like mine, my vid will show you everything else you need to know.
The first problem was solved at the hardware store where the man sold me a 1.5 Tee with a one inch sleeve. Everything else was one inch, just like on the video.
There were a few more snags ahead and I started to get discouraged again but I consoled myself that even if the whole enterprise was a complete messy failure, the actual investment in materials hadn't been that much to begin with.
At first I couldn't get the all important first Tee joint up high enough on the frame. It was obstructed by a little metal cable guide that I couldn't just brake off. I thought about it. How important could that piece be? Probably essential. Instead I took the easier route with my hacksaw and cut a tooth out of the PVC. Voila. We're looking good now.
The next problem was that the same Tee jint pinched off my front derailleur cable, limiting me to one front gear. That was something I could live with if I had to but I managed to carve a groove for the cable in the center of the joint and I was back in the game.
From there I was able to follow the instructions as given and everything worked out great.
I got more and more excited as each piece came together and realized it was really going to happen.
It was dark before I finished.
Almost finished here. I got to use my new-to-me power drill for the first time to make holes for the bungee cords. The foam insulation pipe covers on the top picture were added the next day for traction. Plus, I think they look cool.
I haven't been to La Bocana with it yet but I've taken it for a test ride around the neighborhood and it works very smoothly as long as I pedal with my heel and not the toes. The board doesn't wiggle a bit. I have to allow for my increased girth in traffic. I'm sure I'll get used to that in no time.
Tomorrow morning will be my maiden voyage. I hope La Bocana isn't too rough and scary. It has different conditions throughout the year and I think we're due for wide sand and long stretches of shallow water. I'd hate to get out there and then have to chicken out but I won't go in if it looks too psycho.
I popped in to UMAR one Saturday morning to work on some ongoing projects and saw the most intense insect control underway. I've never seen anything like it.
The place is mostly deserted on the weekends so there was nothing to stop total warfare. The few support staff could take shelter in any of the deserted buildings . It was a beautiful sight with the sun barely penetrating the clouds.
Dengue is always a potential threat at our low elevation, especially during rainy season. As a man who has suffered dengue twice, I would sooner ride my scooter at night without a helmet than watch the sun go down at Chahue without wearing a little bug spray. Downtown, trucks come by routinely spraying the residential areas but nothing like this. Our campus is in the thick of the jungle.
Some people don't believe in using bug spray and they may never catch dengue but all it takes is that one unlucky mosquito bite and you are off your feet for a week, if not dead. Fortunately, our administration takes it seriously and takes advantages of the weekends to deal with the threat with total warfare.
They look pretty authentic, don't they? For old cardboard, cereal boxes, bottle caps, hot glue and paint, I think these replicas of Thor's hammer look rather sharp.
I've had time on my hands, this being my sabbatical year and some of it has been spent putting Youtube how to vids to the test. It all started small with the cardboard standup cutouts. They were accessible even if they weren't as straight forward as I originally expected. I still can't say I've mastered the trick of assembling the different pieces in perfect alignment.
There's Will standing by the most recent cutouts to provide perspective. Will is a tall guy, but not a giant, so you can see that Ant-Man, the largest cutout so far, is less than life-size. That's all of these I plan to do for a while unless I find out one of my colleagues just bought themselves a new refrigerator.
This minor success made me a lot more ambitious and I decided to go for the gold and do my best to recreate Dali DIY's design for Thor's hammer, Mjolnir. This is much more complex stuff, not beginner material at all but the man gives a complete demonstration on video and offers downloadable templates on his blog for free. His designs are the coolest by far of anyone doing similar stuff on the net.
Dali is a true artist so I knew going in that I might not be able to do everything he did, no matter how well he led the way. I might even screw things up completely and have to toss it all. I never expected my hammers to turn out quite as cool as his own and I was right about that but I am happy with my beginner cardboard craft results.
Part One of the instructional video.
I decided to make three of them. That way I could fine tune my efforts along the way with each one. That worked for the most part but it took a long time. It was three days before I had all of the big pieces carved out. All in all (I didn't work at these every day) it took me over a month and I ran into more than a few problems along the way. A few times I thought I'd reached the worst case scenario of total failure but I'd already invested so much time that quitting wasn't an attractive option.
I couldn't follow his puffy paint design. I found some of the paint at Super Che after making some homemade stuff but I didn't trust either of them so I tested both concoctions on scrap cardboard. Three hours later, they were still wet. I decided they just didn't work and just went crazy with the glue gun. I made a few lines and curls and just scribbled through them randomly with the tip of the gun. I found out later that the test puffy paint scribbles dried but only after two full days. I don't have that kind of patience.
Part Two
I had two thin hollow metal pipes from an old mop and one wooden piece from an old broom for handles. On the final day when I could almost taste success, the wooden handle caused me serious grief. The pieces that were to slide on to it wouldn't fit anymore. I managed to get some of them part way on and then they jammed. I couldn't get them off either. That was a 20 minute struggle before inspiration hit me. On the chance that it had something to do with the hot Huatulco sun and expansion, I tossed it in the fridge for 5 minutes. It worked! Back in the game. And here are the results. I'm very proud.
Thanks to the mystery man, whose face we only ever see behind his fantastic mask and helmet creations, Mr. Dali Lomo. All my respect for your creativity and craftsmanship. Thanks for your generous sharing.
This year was the first day of the dead celebration at UMAR Huatulco where I was actually present for the preparations.
My intention was to lend a hand but that didn't work out.
I was ready and able. I just wasn't needed.
Maria Fernanda effortlessly oversees the whole show, making sure it's all under control.
Will probably would have helped too.
There's Chris, our newest Canadian on staff.
Pablo looks like he desperately wants to help too.
These ladies know exactly what they're doing. They might even call "help" interference.
I'm walking back to the office at this point because soon night will fall and
it will be time to scare people.
Sure, they don't look frightened in most of these pictures but as I held them in my clutches, I could feel their nervous trembling and hear helpless whimpers of terror.
Look how calm Karina is in the face of danger. That's impressive.
These pictures were taken with a special camera that can capture real ghosts and blood sucking fiends such as myself. For each one of these poses, there were at least two other cameras snapping away. Those people will be so surprised later to find themselves with photos of their friends with their arms around nothing but empty air. Mwuh ha, ha, ha, ha.
Understandably, Michelle and Daphne look a tad uneasy as if they sense an evil presence lurking behind them. And they're right. It's me.
Shortly after this picture was taken, these two ladies ripped my throat out with their hideous fangs. It's okay. I have an incredible ability to heal and I was perfectly alright by next morning.
Marbella looking very traditional. I think she might be just half dead.
There was a rumour that Anthony was behind that mask but it couldn't have been him. He's in his early 20s.
