Undoing What Others Have Done

living.boondockingmexico@yahoo.com

Sounds pretty profound but it's not.  We had some cracked floor tiles on the porch after the abuse received from Hurricane Alex.  I am tired of waiting for a response from the insurance and I am tired of waiting for people to come and do things around here.  If you want it done, you do it yourself.  A guy came last week to help me out.   He ended up leaving.   I pay him a good daily wage and sometimes more depending on the amount of work and difficulty of it.   

He asked me how much I was going to pay, and I told him that he would receive the usual.  He shook his head and said that wouldn't be enough.  So I started to negociate with him and then the truth came out.  He had received an expensive watch a couple of years back from an uncle who had passed away.  He pawned the watch at Christmas to buy gifts.  (pawning belongings is a national pastime here in Mexico, so much so it is part of Mexican movies from as far back as the forties, in fact, they have a national pawn society and encourage people to pawn things).  So he said that he would have to charge me more.  I asked how much more and he said what he needed to get the watch out of the pawn shop.  I told him to drop dead and he walked away.   Too bad.  I have been good to this guy for years, paying him extra, helping him find additional work, talking to him about going back to school (never finished secondary), managing his money, and more.   

Where was I.  Oh, so now I have been chipping away at floor tile.  Very slowly.  Why so slowly you might ask?  Because the d-----bag who built the house, the previous owner, attempted to cut corners.  Instead of putting down grout to set the floor tiles on the porch, they poured the cement and then laid the tile before the cement dried.   What a b---- it has been to remove just 12 tiles without breaking any of the surrounding ones.  I tried all the tips from YouTube videos on removing tiles but none worked and then I discovered why.  

It keeps me busy and with all the banging and chiseling it release any frustrations I may have.   You have seen the before and by weeks end you will see the replaced tiles.