I passed the $200 mark today in my efforts to raise money for Wildcoast by running the Mexico City Marathon. I’ve got a blog all about my effort – you’ll notice it has lots of weird posts that have nothing to do with anything. They are the adverts that helped me raise most of that $200. I reckon I can easily add another couple of hundred dollars to that figure by the time the marathon actually comes around in the second half of September. But I’m writing today because I’ve been inspired….
I’ve raised a few hundred dollars for Wildcoast over the last few years, because I like turtles. The fact that I have ten of them in my back yard testifies to that. But I came across a post by Canuck in Cancun about a visit she made with her family to Akumal near Cancun. The photos are wonderful, and I’m going to have to make the effort to visit there one of these days. She also posted me a link through Twitter of a charity that helps protect the turtles there, called Centro Ecologico Akumal. And a thought occurred to me.
Seeing as I’m almost certain to reach my original goal of raising $300 for WildCoast, and as I’m confident I can get another $100 on top of that, why not make a donation to them as well? They do seem an extremely worthy cause, and one I am interested in. So I will. I’ll donate $100 to them. Or, to be more precise, I will adopt a turtle family. And that is when I got the idea for a competition.
The Competition.
I usually get a few fellow bloggers donate a few dollars to my causes each year. But only a few. It would be nice to have lots! But I need to be sneaky and offer something in return. A prize. It’s not easy to convince people who have never met me in the flesh to part with money. It’s not always easy to get people who have met me to part with their cash either, it has to be said! This year I am going to run the half marathon in the Mexico City Marathon event (my knee just won’t take the full thing.)
How long will it take me to run the half marathon? Have a guess, and leave your guess in my comments section. Then donate $5 to my cause by clicking here. The ChipIn widget utilises PayPal, and is safe, so anyone with a credit or debit card can play. And you can have a guess for every $5 you donate. Donate $10 and get 2 guesses, $15 for 3 guesses and so on.
Whoever guesses closest to my actually finishing time will win the prize – the turtle family will be adopted in your name, and you’ll get the official, personalized Certificate of Adoption from them! Woohoo! I know. This isn’t the most exciting prize of all, but it is something. A nice souvenir of my efforts!
So no need to wait around. Donate, guess my finishing time, and wait and see how quick I am in September. If you have no idea what sort of time to guess, here’s a couple of clues. I ran a half marathon a few weeks ago in 2 hours, 23 minutes, 10 seconds. But I do hope to substantially improve on that time. I ran that coming off a couple of nasty injuries, and was still smoking 20 a day. I still am, but I will quit soon! Really! I think. I am hoping to get under 2 hours in September, but that’ll only happen if I give up smoking. Any guess between 1 hour 40 minutes and 2 hours 40 minutes stands a chance though.
Needless to say, please feel free to post this post on blogs, tweet it, facebook it or whatever else!
On Sunday we visited the Museo de Arte de Carrillo Gil, in San Angel. Not for the first time. The exhibitions, almost always of a contemporary nature, change regularly. But I thought I’d do something different that return with a plethora of photos to be uploaded to Flickr and shared. I’ve been in something of a video mode recently, so I present instead a short movie, accompanied by a Chopin soundtrack, of my visit. Admittedly, the video does mostly comprise photos, but still.
The current exhibition featured a whole floor given over to arty videos, some of which I feature in the vid, albeit briefly. The longer snippet, of two men in a car, had me puzzled for a while. There was something wrong about it. I’ve figured out what now. I’ve also reverted to uploading my videos to YouTube, and you can click on the HD button and see it in higher quality. It really does make a significant difference. Providing you have a reasonable broadband connection. If not, it’ll keep stopping and starting. You can pause it, and wait for it to finish downloading, then play. Or you can just watch the non HD version.
I quite like taking videos on my camera. Just my normal everyday camera, the Panasonic TZ5, not a camcorder. But it gets ok results. Maybe, just maybe, one day I’ll take a good video worth watching. Till then, here’s a tour of the local park where I go running to get fit for the Mexico City Marathon. It’s a very green and pleasant place to escape the noise, smoke and traffic.
I source the music, incidentally and seeing as someone asked, from Jamendo. It’s a great place to find music on Creative Commons licenses which you can use or listen to for free. The tune in this video is called Porta D’Arce by Oprachina.
I thought up the idea of doing a Project 365, as it’s commonly known, about this time last year. Obviously I didn’t think up the idea itself – that’s been done by millions of people now, although I have noticed most don’t ever quite finish. But I decided to have a go myself. If I’d actually started it this time last year, I’d be finishing. But I waited till October 19th, and took the first snap then. On my birthday. On the top of a mountain, when I climbed the Nevado de Toluca. I thought it’d be cool to put not just a year of my life up on the web in pictures, but an exact year.
It’s actually quite hard work, and while I’m glad I’m doing it, it has taken quite a bit of dedication. I’ve not missed a day, and usually try to take a different sort of photo each day, though there are recurring themes. My turtles have featured a few times. Graffiti and murals too. And obviously family and friends, especially Poala, have found themselves repeated. But overall there’s been quite a bit of diversity to my shooting.
I have marked off each landmark. A week. Ten photos. The first month. Fifty, then a hundred photos. The half way mark. Today I reached another landmark, with the 265th photo. The end is in sight, even if it’s not quite round the corner yet. Tomorrow the number of photos remaining will drop to double digits.
When I have completed the project, on October 18th by my reckoning (and logic) the question of what to do with all those photos will arise. So far I’ve been hosting them on Flickr, and blogging them on my Project 365 blog. The photos will remain in both locations, and I’ll probably use the blog to do another, albeit slightly different project in 2010. But I want to do something more with them. I’ll almost certainly create a book using Blurb and maybe a big canvas poster too. I’ve got a hundred days to decide. Till then, here is my 265th photo.
Rainy season came on time this year. Then went away again. But over the last couple of weeks it has returned with a vengeance. Downpours that have had people furiously brushing the flood water down drains as it crept up to their doorways. Thunder here is also something to behold. Maybe it’s the altitude, but the thunder here is particularly loud and will literally rattle the glass in windows.
It’s not like this all day, happily. It’ll start some time around 5pm and go on for an hour or two. Sometimes a little longer. By morning the sky is blue, the air is fresh (or at least a little more breathable) and the plants are all doing their best to soak up as much water as possible before the midday sun strikes.
We do need the rain. Reservoirs that supply the city’s drinking water are running very low. But I’m not terribly fond of it myself. It’s a risky choice to ride my bike to work in the evening. Anyway, here’s a short video of last nights deluge in the street outside my home.
We got home on Saturday evening, after a nice meal out, and decided to give the floor a thorough clean. In every corner. Pull out every piece of furniture and scrub behind it. The full works. Now I know that this doesn’t sound much like me. And you might be thinking there was a reason behind this cleansing. You’d be right.
The water had gone off during the afternoon, and like many people we (or I, in this case) had left a tap on so we’d hear when it returned. The important thing is to remember to turn it off when you go out. Else, when you return home several hours later, there’s a stream of water coming from under your front door, and an inch of water in your house.
Thank goodness for earthquakes though. The house is, as a result of numerous tremors over the last few decades, on a slight lean, which meant the water filled just the living room and our bedroom and not every room. Time to get the mop? No, really, it was an inch deep. We used buckets. The turtles were, I suspect, hoping that we were adapting the house to a more aquatic environment for them. They were disappointed.
Still, the house is clean. And I worked off the aches of pulling and pushing furniture, emptying buckets the next morning with a quick solo tour of the city on my bike. I didn’t take many photos, and those I did I ran through various filters to add to my set Once Upon a Time – an effort to produce an album of old, antique or generally aged looking photos.
My 365 project is still on track. No missed days so far. And I’ve completed another month, with a total of 255 photos taken so far. In just 10 days I’ll have less than 100 photos to go till the project is completed. But there’s still time for a few more Photo of the Month votes, to select the best snap of the month. You can vote on one of the six photos that made the shortlist below for June by clicking here. Go on…it makes me happy!
A couple of weeks ago one of my students who had just recently been to London, and was about to go again, asked if it was true that we grow lots of vegetables in our gardens in the UK. It is true, although less so these days, as the WW2 ‘Dig For Victory’ veterans slowly die off. It’s a popular enough pastime. I’ve been growing my own tomatoes here in Mexico City this last year. But it was, I thought, a strange question. Don’t Mexicans ever grow anything in their gardens.
Of course, most citizens of Mexico City don’t have gardens. But that didn’t stop us Brits. We had allotments. Little patches of spare land turned over by local councils for the general population to tend to. Cunning, really. And I did think, what a great idea that would be to transplant here in Mexico. There are so many pieces of wasteland that are left neglected. They become overgrown, which hides the huge quantities of stray dog poop and broken bottles deposited there.
We have such a piece of land round the back of our apartments. Given a decent fence and gate, it could be turned into a nice allotment patch. I’d grab my slice and sow a few potatoes and corn plants. A communal greenhouse wouldn’t, however, be necessary.
World Trade Centers went up in New York and Mexico City at the same time. For years New York could boast ‘mine is bigger than yours’, but the one here lasted a bit longer. It’s home to offices, of course. And a Cinemex complex. A Sears store is added on. And many exhibitions are staged here. That was the purpose of our visit, to see a travel fair, but we decided the 50 peso entrance fee was exorbitant. I did check the people leaving to see if they had bags of goodies to justify the entry price, but their bags looked empty.
The star attraction for most tourists is Belinnis and the Skybar, seeing as there is no tourist viewing level. Shame really….it was the tallest building in Mexico City for more than 30 years till Torre Mayor went up. We didn’t visit the Skybar this time. It’s a little pricey I believe, so it’ll have to wait for a more special occasion. Instead, I amused myself taking photos of planes going past the WTC. Click here to see them.
