Someone commented on the lively thunder storms we experience here in Montevideo Uruguay, as they  roar up and down the River Plate.  Tonight/this morning we’ve been having one of those,  and here I am, sleepless in Montevideo.

It started just as I settled for the night, book down, light off- and as a result I haven’t slept well really – I just can’t help listening and watching!

Around an hour ago I got up for a bathroom trip, and turning  on the tap for a drink of water found no water coming out.  This meant the downstairs power circuit was off.  In this slightly crazy house water is pumped from the water main outside the gate into the storage tank out back, and from there pumped to wherever in the house the tap is turned on or the loo’s flushed.  The only way to get water while the power’s off is by bucket brigade from the tap just inside the front gate.  It’s not often, and we manage.  I did live in a tent for a couple of years and can manage most difficulties.  I turned the power back on OK, but the howling wind and rumbling thunder, plus something banging in the wind has kept me wide awake, though the wind’s dropping now, and as I’m starting to fade a bit, I’ll make this short.    Daniel and Maria are pleasant neighbours, lovely people.  They never complain about our dog who barks loudly at hapless pedestrians as they pass; and we never complain about their very noisy parrot who spends a lot of time outside.  I’m not going to complain about the noisy door banging in the wind as it often does at times like this, because I won’t hear it when I go back upstairs, and they too sleep on the opposite  side of their house.  And,there is a slight chance it it’s actually NOT from next door, but further around behind one of our local restaurants, which, at 5am has long been closed.

A few years ago I blogged a piece entitled ‘Sleepless in Perth, WA’ and one of my readers complained that that title was copyrighted, as in the movie title ‘Sleepless in Seattle’, and I shouldn’t have used it.  She went on and on about it and her strident, aggressive silliness eventually drove me to turn on the comment moderation required thingy.  She went away.  I reserve the right to be ‘sleepless’ anywhere, even in Seattle should I ever go there.  If any of you get cranky with me on this post I’ll turn that moderation app on again, OK?  !!!

While in the USA in last month, we had a lovely visit to the Denver Botanic Gardens, where our daughter Anna works.   Until November 30th there’s a fabulous array of Chihuly’s glass pieces installed in amongst the garden plantings.  The gardens were at their full height of summer colour, and most of the works were quite organic, and very in tune with the plants that surrounded them.  To see some of the images, go here  http://tinyurl.com/o6pw4xf     They say that by the time it closes, over 6 months it will have brought an extra 3 million visitors to DBG !  On the strength of this we avoided the one weekend available and instead chose  our last day, a monday, to visit – not realizing that this was a free entry day!  And, so there were crowds of people moving around the gardens, anyway!!!  But, despite the large number of people, the crowd was nicely behaved and mostly not too pressing.

So many of the installations were set in some of the delightful water features in the gardens, and this one above with forms in different greens with white and silver highlights, was possibly my favourite.  Green has always been my favourite colour.

Denver has a record of dramatic and fierce summer storms, and one year during the time we were living there our roof was pulverised by golfball-sized hail stones, so naturally I wondered out loud about insurance.   Each installation is  a mass of organic shapes attached at one end to a central form.  The glass is quite thick and strong, but if something does get broken, that module is just removed and replaced with another.  I imagine there’s a storage area somewhere in the grounds with lots of bits of coloured glass shapes sitting around on shelves, waiting …

At a not-very-well-publicised site, Parque Arqueologico de Monquira,  near the historic colonial town of Villa de Leyva, Colombia, we spent quite some time wandering among the henge-like  stones, menhirs, erected at what is thought to be the site of an ancient solar observatory, known as the Observatorio Solar Muisca, after the pre-Columbian peoples who lived there.  It is about 4 km from Villa de Leiva, is the Parque Arqueológico de Monquirá, otherwise known as El Infiernito.  This is one of the most important Muisca religious sites in the country and features the only solar observatory in Colombia as well, as a dolmen burial site:

The site was discovered by the Spanish who baulked at the enormous stone penises and proclaimed that the Muisca would be banished to hell, hence the name ‘El Infiernito’ (hell). The burial sites have been extensively damaged by grave robbers, and the stone used by local campesinos to build their homes.   What remains has been studied and maintained since the 1960s by archaeologist Eliecer Silva Célis, with the support of the Universidad Pedagógica y Tecnológica de Colombia.”

Such sites always really thrill me, being a connection to people way back in the mists of time – the Egyptian pyramids, Stonehenge and Obiri Rock, even the relatively recent Bayeux Tapestry all had enormous impacts, too… even dining seafood at a waterfront restaurant in Barcelona focused my thoughts on the amazing concept of continual inhabitation of that area by people since Neolithic times in Europe, perhaps 6,500 years ago.