We have great neighbors all around us. We've been really blessed everywhere we have lived to have had wonderful neighbors. Our neighbors I'll call Anna and Arturo are especially friendly people. Arturo is from someplace in Mexico originally. When he speaks English, he has just the vaugest hint of an accent - but he flips back and forth from English to Spanish effortlessly, and some of his nephews have come up to work with his son in his son's carpet business. I don't know why people get upset when people from Mexico move into their neighborhood. They showed up, fixed up the house their uncle rents out to them, practically re-landscaping the whole back yard which was pretty overgrown ( Arturo is in his 60's, and he works every day. But he's only one man. Anna has had a stroke and has a limp, and he helps her in her shop and helps his son in his business so you could hardly expect him to keep up his own place and the rental property in pristine conditon.) then went to work on their uncle's house, repainting the whole thing, fixing the shutters, re-doing their aunt's flower garden etc. When they first came up at the beginning of the summer, I would always smile at them and sometimes give them a little wave. But they would always look away and pretend not to see me. Finally it dawned on me that, in some parts of Mexico, if The Hub saw some young guy looking and smiling at his wife The Hub would be perfectly within his rights to go up and kick the young guy's ass. After I remembered that, I just gave the guys a little nod, and one time I saw the son talking to his cousins and give me a little head toss and a little wave, then say something by way of explanation. So now these basically quiet, hard working young men seem to know that I'm just a friendly American, not a troublemaking woman, and also they don't run into the back of the house when they see The Hub.

Anyway, Arturo is a friendly, generous person by nature. I can give you an idea of his charecter from this story:

The Hub's lawn mower was broken, so he went to a second hand shop and bought another one, which worked fine at the shop. No sooner did he get it home and start to cut the grass when it broke too. Now he was pretty burnt up, having his lawn half mowed, and two broken down lawn mowers to work on in the hot sun. He settled down in the car port to fight the mower and soon he was practically apoplectic with frustration, since he hates small engine repair even when it goes well. And this wasn't. So The Hub said a few choice words not suitable for a family show....which really wasn't so good, since Arturo had a bunch of little kids, his grandkids I think, playing in the yard.

When Arturo sent the kids to play in the front yard and came striding across our yard, I thought he was going to tell The Hub that he really ought to watch what he was saying, especailly if he felt like he had to say it at the top of his lungs, and Arturo would have been perfectly within his rights . Instead, came over, handed The Hub a cold beer from his stash of Del Sol, and said to him, very calmly and pleasantly, "You ought to take a break from working on that, Man. Life is too short to get so upset, you know?" Whereupon The Hub saw his point, and did take a break, and when it dawned on him that he had probably said some offensive stuff in front of the small fry he apologized, which Arturo just waved away.

Anyway, so now The Hub hangs out with Arturo and The Exterminator ( another neighbor) when they see each other in the yard...they take a break from whatever they're doing and Arturo gets out the Del Sol and they lean on fences or yard equipment or truck beds and insult each other, which, as far as I can tell, is how men act when they are friends. The trouble is that The Hub is not much of a drinker and he often skips lunch and Del Sol is a pretty good beer that even I kind of like and I don't like beer.

So the other day, I see The Hub chatting with Arturo, drinking a beer, and the next thing I know he's coming into the house with about 50 fan tail goldfish all swimming around in a little plastic pitcher. "Hey, look what Arturo gave us! He has this whole fish tank where they're just breeding and breeding. He has a ton of them!" He set the plastic container down in the office, and, I think forgot about it. Around supper time, his head began to clear and he said. "What are we gonna do with those fish?"

At which time I pointed out that I wasn't the person who brought 50 fantail goldfish in when we have a marginally operational outdoor pond and a 5 gallon aquarium in which the two big goldfish already ate the three fantail gold fish ( or something) because the tank was too crowded.

"Oh" said The Hub.

The Hub went up into the attic and brought down a 30 gallon aquarium that his brother-in-law gave him. We went off to Petco to look for a pump, gravel, lights...and naturally we had to get the cool Egyptain looking ruin they had as an aquaium decoration. "You said they like to have some place to hide." The Hub reminded me. That took an hour, by the time we visited the birds and also talked to a lady with a long haired chiuahua, which was an entire dog that didn't weigh as much as Winston's tail.

Then we came home and spent another two hours hooking up the new equipment, transplanting the aquatic plants, getting the lights to work, filling up the aquarium and transferring the fish.

"Hey, the little ones are upside down! What are they doing?" The Hub asked.

"Um, I'd say they're going to the fishbowl in the sky" I answered dourly.

So, we invested 3 and a half hours, and $85.00 ( which we no more have to waste than Winston has wings to fly to the moon) to kill every single one of the fantail goldfish and one of the large goldfish from our previous tank. Now we have one goldfish and three snails in a huge fish tank with a great looking Egyptain ruin aquarium decoration. And I've never seen a gold fish look more depressed.

As far as I can tell, the moral of the story is don't drink and talk at the same time.