Shopping and more shopping (Ginger)

Last Sunday we had a visit from a friend we have made here, a young man named Delfino.  He works at a great (not too expensive) pizza restaurant on the waterfront.  I had been pestering him to find out where he mastered English, it turns out he had been an english teacher.  He was kind enough to bring a snack and spent the afternoon with us on the boat.  He brought pictures of his home in the mountains and we heard his story of moving to Zihua to teach english.  He's had a long working career for someone who's 18th birthday will be this May. If anyone has suggestions of how to get a job on a cruise ship (Konnie?) let us know because he's interested.   We found we had no pictures of home to show to Delfino.  Since then I've loaded some old photos to our photo page, so, no, we don't have a cat and dogs aboard, it's not snowing in Zihua.  Our K dock neighbor  Margie on Hoptoad had scanned a lot of old photos into their computer and used them as a changing art screen saver on their boat.  I loved looking at their travel and family photos when we visited. It was a goal of mine to scan some of our photos to bring with us but I never quite got around to it.  We'll have to do that before our next trip.  It's easy to take familiar home sights for granted when you live there.
This week has been busy with shopping, cat sitting, yoga, boat sitting, more shopping and stowing food.  We had two successful days of grocery trips and we've almost absorbed all of our purchases.  Truth be told we probably could have made it to the Marquesas without adding anything to our ample supply of canned and dry goods but now that the water line is a little lower and the lockers are full of our favorite snacks we're almost ready.  We were cat sitting for Effie while they took and inland trip to Morelia and Patscuaro.  By all accounts it's a great inland trip to a medieval city, we're sorry we missed it.   They reported the sightseeing was great but Mac was sick the whole time.  She went to the doctor upon their return and was diagnosed with Dengue fever.  This plus several other cases in the last couple of months has convinced us that maybe we really did have Dengue that first week here in Zihua.  It took us about 5 weeks to start feeling strong again.
Friday was a long day.  Peter spent hours in the morning trying to get a computer program working to for de-coding numeric weather reports.  Then we headed off on the major grocery trip and put away all of our new supplies.  As we made our last trip ashore to get our laundry we were invited to the beautiful ketch Sequoia for dinner.  Mary and Rick made a fantastic smoked Bonito and we enjoyed a delicious coleslaw and home-made peanut butter cookies.  It was the perfect end to a stressful day.  Mary and Rick are on their way north now and we look forward to maybe seeing them somewhere in the Pacific next year.
We've begun the bottom scraping job again.  It took over an hour to scrape 1/4 of the bottom yesterday so we should be done by the time we start our scuba cert class next Wednesday.  We decided we'd be smart to get certified here as we may want to dive somewhere and it will be nice to be ready to go.  Our class is 4 days Wed - Sat so we've delayed our departure to get certified.  Fortunately the weather report this morning said light to no wind for the next 5 days.  We'll be ready to go a week from tomorrow and if there's a promise of wind we'll be off.
Today is more bottom cleaning and sewing of lee cloths so it's time to put away the computer and get out the sewing machine.
(Happy Birthday, Jim!)