My Garden Is Being Eaten

So, since we moved house we now have a garden that we can actually do something with. If it wasn’t being eaten away as fast as it can grow.

We have a ton of these leaf cutter ants that can literally strip a 6 foot bush in a day. We’ve got through about a kilo of ant powder, had the garden sprayed with insecticide and still it has no affect.

They really are fascinating to watch though, they march in lines following a pheromone scent that they lay down, then carry pieces of leaf that are about three times their size back to their nest. They don’t actually eat the leaves, they use them to create an environment in their nest where a fungus can thrive and then they eat the fungus. They are pretty smart too, they wont eat a plant until it dies, they leave just enough of it left so that it can regrow and then they go elsewhere for a while only to return a few weeks later.

Smart and fascinating as they are though, I still want to kill them.

New Cancuncare Redesign

It’s about two years since it really should have been done but the new redesign of the cancuncare website is well under way. I’m hoping to have it all finished in the next month or so.

The current site I cringe at every time I see it, it looks so amateurish and unprofessional that I hate to add new pages as I have to use the same crappy design. I suppose it was the first ever website I made though, it’s done well in the search engines and makes sales – so as far as it goes it’s been successful.

The new site is going to be something else though, I’ve already made a ton of new pages and with the system I’m going to use it will mean it’s very easy to add many more pages.

I’m going to be using a lot of video too, which I think will be a first for a Cancun site and is so much more 2007. Hopefully, the slicker more professional look, the crisper coding and the new content pages will be a lot more appealing to both surfers, and just as importantly the search engines.

I’d love to be able to say I designed and built it all by myself. However my design and coding skills, although improving, don’t go as far as what we will soon have at cancuncare. My good friend Kim (Rivergirl) at Magnolia Web Design is the one to thank for that. Kim came up with perfect code, right on the brief and made me some great easy to work with templates. Thanks Kim!

Now all I have to do is fill them with juicy content. You can see a screenshot of one of the new pages above left, but you’ll have to wait a little more yet before the new site launches.

Our House Move

We moved house last month and are just about settled in.

The main reason we moved was because it was too noisy at the old place, with teenage kids on skateboards every night, and the main road that was a few feet from our living room window often used as a racetrack. Of course, here, functioning silencers on cars are an optional extra.

We now no longer have to put up with the dogs too. There were about 15 of them (from just 20 houses) and almost all were noisy yappy things. Some of their owners clearly coudlnt care less for them, leaving them on hot 6 foot square patios for 24 hrs a day and only letting them out to either bath them in the pool or let them do their business where one of the toddlers would fall in it.

The new place is a detached place rather than a house within a complex and is much quieter. It has an extra bedroom to use as an office, is much bigger overall and has been maintained much better than our old place. The only disadvantage is that we dont have access to a pool any more (I never went in it anyway), but we do have a fairly spacious garden by Cancun standards and our daughter has a nice big paddling pool so it’s no great loss, and the new quietness and privacy more than makes up for that.