Steve is back!

We're in the middle of the third week of construction on the waterfall and fish pool. This time Cesar has deigned to have a helper (his brother, as it turns out, whom he can and does harangue mercilessly for not performing up to Cesar's exacting standards), so things are moving along at a somewhat brisker pace than did the Great Wall of Palo Alto. Once again, they are largely unhampered by the daily rainfall (October is the rainiest month here), devising ingenious if primitive methods of covering themselves and the cement work. Today Joel, the brother, was observed sitting on the ground beneath a sheet of corrugated tin propped up by sticks, while Cesar was clad in an oversize garbage bag. Steve was on site, too, erecting and welding a large trellis on the side of the garage to support a flowering vine (petrea volubilis). While he was here, we spotted a couple of other places on the house crying out for trellises and flowering vines, much to Larry's consternation. He confessed his fear that we're never to be without a surround of workmen, tramping over his beloved sod. It could be. One things leads to another, you know.

We celebrated Larry's and Charly's birthdays Saturday night with a food and drink fiesta. We hosted, in addition to the usual cast of characters, a number of Panamanian friends, new and old, mostly neighbors and service providers. We reasoned that it's always wise to stay on the best side of the water administrator, the liquor store salesclerk, the plumber, the electrician, and, most of all, the TV man. The latter is a regular fixture at our house inasmuch as the touching of just one incorrect button on the remote control throws everything out of whack in a way that is correctible only by a 15- to 18-step process that neither of us--or any of our friends--have mastered. Luis, the TV man, paid us back by drinking and eating copiously, as did his assistant, Fernando, when he wasn't putting the moves on Michelle, the liquor store clerk. The dogs played so long and hard with Jose and Dharma, the daughter of one of my Panamanian students of English, that they slept past their feeding time Sunday morning.

I never got back to Paradise Gardens for pictures, but I found three on The Boquete Guide, an internet news organ developed by a local ex-pat, which I have pirated and am including.

I'll post pictures of the water feature when it's completed. It's off to bed now because Steve and I set out early in the morning for an all day plant-hunting expedition.