The Gulf of America, pt. 2

For the text of the executive order, click here.

Renaming the Gulf has one thing going for it, historian Greg Grandin comments.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Re: oil spillage. This afternoon, while I was bottle-feeding Abel, Daniel got his mitts on our sesame oil. Let’s just say that the kitchen, hallway, and bathroom smell delicious now.

Actually, Daniel and Samuel were pretty good today. I’d worried because it was Karin’s first day back at work – my first full day alone with all three boys.

Daniel took a turn bottle-feeding Abel. He kept getting him to smile.

Abel has dimples.

Update: Samuel and Daniel both poured out the sesame oil. Samuel confessed.

They poured much of it onto Karin’s potted mint plant. That poor thing is subjected to unimaginable abuse. Yet it survives.

Quito is #1

For the first time since I was born (or maybe since the nineteenth century? the colonial era? the beginning of history?), Quito is Ecuador’s most populous city. At the end of last year, it had more than 2.7 million inhabitants.

Guayaquil, previously the largest city, also cleared the 2.7 million-person threshold, but with some 18,000 fewer inhabitants than Quito.

Read about it here.

I was born in Quito in 1981. Back then, its population was about one million, give or take a couple hundred thousand. During my short life – and I haven’t even been in Ecuador since 2010 – Quito has come to seem much huger than it used to, and more modern and sophisticated.

It always seemed polluted and blindingly bright, but now it has days when there are public warnings about the ultraviolet radiation.

It is also beautiful.