Good Luck and Bad Luck

I'm still concerned about the bad "ju ju" from 2010 carrying forward into 2011. Overall, things have been much better this year than last - no deaths or floods so far (no exaggeration, that's how 2010 got started). But, luck is a tricky thing and ours continues to be a mixed bag.

Take our lovely day at the Puerto Vallarta Beach Club. We enjoyed a very luxurious and exclusive experience at the finest locale - everything was simply wonderful. Until I handed my camera to a stranger and asked him to please take a photo, and the next thing I knew he dropped it smack onto a tile floor. Turns out it's unrepairable, so I will be camera-challenged for the rest of this trip. I will have to rely on my BlackBerry camera, which is pretty limited.

But, within minutes of my camera being busted, I got an e-mail on my BlackBerry letting us know we were one of the 12 winners of the Valentine's weekend dream getaway packages being offered by the famed "Cafe des Artistes" restaurant and hotel group! We won dinner for 2 at the Cafe des Artistes del Mar in Punta de Mita, drinks at Mandala nightclub in PV, an ATV jungle tour, and movie tickets - not bad!

As I don't have a camera, I couldn't take decent photos when we went for our prize dinner on Saturday night, except for this one I snapped of dessert on my BBerry. But the whole experience was amazing, we were treated like royalty (our photo entry for the contest had been blown up and was on display in the restaurant, and the PR person took photos for their newsletter), and the meal and service were incomparable.



We are probably going to go on the ATV jungle tour in the next few days, and that should be a lot of fun. We've never done anything like that. I think the guiding outfit takes the photos (that you are expected to buy from them) so we'll rely on that for some visual souvenirs.

The ups and downs of our luck continues as, yesterday, our less-than-one-year old Toshiba laptop warned of a problem with the hard disk, and a computer crash seems imminent. At least we got everything backed up to an external hard drive, and have a 3 year full coverage warranty on that thing.

And I woke up at 4:00 a.m. with a persistant cough, so seem to have managed to pick up a bug of some sort. Hopefully it can be baked out of me at the beach.

Todo bien. (It's all good.)