My Thought Spot

I have never been a great Dunkin’ Donuts fan. Their coffee is often claimed to be rated highly among normal coffee (not specialty imported coffees). Though I fancy myself a coffee know it all, I would not choose their coffee if given a choice of something else. The one thing they have going for them is that it is possible to make their coffee very strong without it getting bitter. Or, at least, that is what I have found.

Their donuts leave something to be desired in my mind too. But…

A friend of mine landed in the airport last night from Guadalajara. They have Dunkin’ Donuts there. She had a dozen donuts for me to choose from. Mmmmm! I took four for the family.

Eleven seconds in the microwave this morning and we were a happy family. At least until the donuts were gone.

Our local baseball team won the national championship just now (well, actually about 15 minutes ago). This is the Liga Mexicana de Béisbol (Mexican Baseball League). The Lions have not won the championship since 1984 and previous to that, it was 1957. This is only their third time in franchise history to take the championship. Though, from what I understand, they have been second on several occasions.
I am not a baseball fan, so don’t have all the numbers that some would probably want, but here are some interesting ones. We lost the first game of the series in Monterrey against the Sultanes. Then we won the second away. The next three games were played here and we won all three.

The interesting thing about this game is that we went into extra innings. It was the bottom of the 14th when Jesús “Jesse” Castillo hit a home run to the corner of right field. The final score was 2-1. This was by far the lowest scoring game of the series. All the other games had scores like 6-4 or so. The teams were looking tired Friday night (or first game at home). Saturday they looked a bit more rested, but tonight they were definitely worn out.

The game lasted almost 6 hours. The 14 innings sets a record number of innings played in a playoff game. As I understand it, 16 is the record in regular season.

As I mentioned, I am not a baseball fan. But I decided to take my son to a game back at the start of the season. This resulted in going to 3 or 4 more throughout the summer. Tickets are in the $0.70 to $9.00 (USD) range. So if we have the evening off, the tickets are really cheap. We usually spend the big bucks and get the $4 or $5 tickets. With parking and food, we can usually get out for about $12. Of course, it only took us one time of eating the food at the ball game to decide it was not worth the money we spent on it. I am still in awe at the scientific possibility of being able to smash a hot dog so thin. It was like the bun was an outer skin to the weiner inside. Amazing.

We went to one game of the playoffs last week and had to pay a scalper for tickets. We paid a whopping $8 for $4 seats. Outrageous! If I understood the announcer on ESPN2 correctly tonight, those same tickets were selling for $80 this afternoon. Yikes! The crowd was at 16,000 plus for the final games. I am not sure how many the stadium holds, but it was packed.

Congratulations Leones!

Yesterday we went to the Mayan ruins of Dzibilchaltún. This is a very early Mayan city. It pre-dates many of the cities further south, which would make it probably the earliest northern Yucatán Peninsula cities. I have read that the building of the city can be dated back to AD 200 with pretty good certainty. There are also reports that it could have been inhabited as early as 1500 BC. That would be about the time of Moses in the Bible. I tend to doubt that one, but theoretically it is possible.

It has a beautiful cenote that is about 140 feet deep at the deepest. It is mostly shallow and has a sloping hole that would be like a 140 foot long funnel. This goes down and connects into the underground river system that connect throughout the Yucatán. When we were there the water was murky due to the heavy rains we have gotten over the last several days.

At the main structure, The Temple of the Seven Dolls (pictures), the sun shines through and is perfectly framed by the doors of the temple at 5:00 am on the equinoxes. The temple gets its name from 7 dolls that were found in it. My wife thinks the cleaning lady had her daughter there with her one day while she was working and the girl forgot her dolls when they left. Hundreds of years later the dolls were found and now have a temple named after them.

Dzibilchaltún is just 10 minutes outside of the city of Mérida. The structures are not near as large as those at Chichen Itza or Uxmal. The square mileage is quite broad at Dzibilchaltún. The official number is 9 square miles are what they have mapped out, but I have also seen numbers as high as 19 sq/miles.

There are many neat places near town here. It is good to be able to go see them on occasion.