my heart's on fire for elvira

Last week we were in Mexico.  We ate all the tacos.  We drank so much soda pop.  I bought the biggest glass mixing bowl I have ever seen.  We found a dead seagull at the beach and Grant spent about twenty minutes trying to fling it into the ocean without touching it.  I bought another calavera (the black one is the new one). 

I don't know how "authentic" these terra cotta skulls are--I suspect they're just a silly touristy thing, rather than something that people actually use when celebrating Dia de los Muertos, but I love calaveras so much.  The painting is so creamy and colorful, and I love what the designs symbolize.  I love the tradition of Dia de los Muertos and would like to research it more, since it dovetails nicely with some of my Mormon beliefs.  I love that the guy we bought the calavera from went into an elaborate lie story about how he paints them all by hand, back at his house, and tomorrow is his painting day, etc.--which is why all the calaveras in all the shops look exactly the same, don't you know.  I realize that I'm tempting fate by buying another one because before long people are going to be like, "Oh, get her something with skulls on.  She's the skull lady."  And they'll try to give me skull kitchen towels and skull salad tongs and skull napkin rings and skull dishes.  Just stop right there, amigos.  We're going to keep doing things the same way we always have, which is with me being the one who decides what comes into this house. 

Where on the scale of cultural appropriation have I landed with the purchasing of the calavera things?  Hopefully closer to the "creepy, but I see where you were going" end than the "you are a malignant harvester of other people's identities" end.

All our baby goats are born now, and they're all boys, harrumph.  One of Sally's is a roan and we may leave him intact for future siring needs.  If so we'll call him Tyrone.  The others are all bound for the auction or the chop, and I'm not even going to name any of them this year.  None of them have captured my heart like Tex or Roger.

The lazy chickens who have never laid any eggs finally started laying while we were gone.  So either they were just really slow developers, or they were eating the entire egg plus shell, or they were too traumatized by last year's skunk attack to start laying before now.  Who knows?  At least they're finally earning their keep.