Dearest and loyal bloggerphiles, as I said to the ever too kind Susan Leventhal who exclaimed with surprise and admiration after perusing way too many recent and much-delayed accumulated house pix that “we were in!”, we’re in alright, up to our necks! I meant that in a, well, in all the ways you may choose to interpret. But, yes, our house in Mexico is now for all very practical purposes inhabited and so I’ll try to refrain from an excess of Fielding-esque digressions and offer some hard-core counter-caravan adventure facts.
 
As of this writing, which may not actually reach the blog-ether till I lug my laptop to a properly broad-banded wi-fi locale which is only a partial excuse for these posts being fewer and farther between, but more on that anon, we’ve now slept at El Rincon de Sta. Maria, Casa 9, better known to you as “Casa de la Sombra”, a total of eight nights. The very best news there is the operative word, “slept”. How unusually quiet it is here, at night, that is! I cannot adequately express to non-visitors/inhabitants just how wonderfully unusual that is in this cacophonous town. (I can, however, encourage the footnotables amongst you to refer back to the sounds of Obraje in 2/8 post). This fact alone makes it almost conceivable that we may contemplate patting our own backs at some point down the line. But let’s not get carried away just yet. The day after we officially moved in, we lost power and, with it, hot water for much of the day and night. But we’re evidently adapting to our surroundings for our solution was to go for dinner, tequila and churros and by the time staggered home across the black cobblestones, the power was back!
 
Here’s a partial home chrono-punchlist to date:
 
-We’ve made about three passable meals in the kitchen not counting breakfasts and showered in all three bathrooms with varied success. New parameters of achievement!
 
-The washer-dryer remains inoperable and, I have to say, remains the fulcrum of not a little cross-cultural cum builder-client tension. Remember Jackie bought it in October of last year at the direction of the contractor who forgot to account for it as he put the laundry room on the third floor and thus had to get a crane to get it up there where, surprise, surprise, surprise, Gomer, it’s sprung a leak but it’s not their fault?! Sorry about this but, yes, we’re at a you-know-where stand-off as our dirty clothes pile up!  Stay-tuned for this resolution, you amateur diplos (and non-DJ’s).
 
-The little plunge pool is also in operational limbo with its 5/7th filled and increasingly dirty-green contents being used mostly by Valente’s two limpiadoras to wash down the detritus left by their third stripping and attempted refinishing of THE metal WALL. But there may be a break in this stale-agua-mate (see Property Manager below).
 
-Yes, THE WALL. For some reason, the contractor has, of the thousand and one nights of punch-list items in front of him, made THE friggin’ WALL priority number one. Sound familiar? Got no clever socio-cultural takes on this, I’m afraid.
-We have no internet, cable or phone yet and don’t have an ETA on when we will! When the three nattily uniformed Telmex field guys came in their mini-white-van to hook me up last week, they discovered there was no more room at the broadband pipe-inn, so no web for you!  Evidently, the kindly and never conscious of being overwhelmed and thus always cheerful Valente didn’t take into account that seven new houses needed a whole new “last mile” underground cable access before the utilities could do their mass communication duties. So for most of last week, out of our impressive cocina picture window onto the chaotic construction of the other six houses, we witnessed the digging of a replica of the Regina Trench from the arroyo just past our place. Meanwhile. we’ve blown through our monthly allotment of tortoise-speed AT&T data for the month trying to reach out to you, dear friends and family and excruciatingly downloading a few movies and TV series. Our subsequent posting will offer the next chapter of this tale. Whether it will be the final one, only the speed by which it will be delivered will tell.
 
-As for plumbing. As I suggested above, our encounters with the coming and going of water has been complicated here, even problematic you might say. Water is, of course, scarce in the desert, a spring discovered at Ojo de Agua above this town in the 16th century is why it’s here at all and the idea of venting waste pipes has not been a priority of invention as is evidenced by the faint aroma-therapy of sewer gas in many a caballero room. About mid-week our master bathroom waste completely backed up necessitating the removal of the toilet and the twice-replumbing of the fuga-ing sinks in the master and the kitchen.  While fixed for now, stay-tuned for more on this theme, I’ll wager.
 
-The yearned-for notorious and, I’m guessing continuingly contentious roof garden pergola is on hold till, we’re told, the can-do but just not-now Valente finishes the main house punch list. Meaning, maybe we’ll see it when we come back in late summer.
 
-Still waiting for our modern art iron and gas fireplaces and the other bone of contention, the full-house water purification system.  
 
-We’ve hired a property manager, Manolo Orta who has already found us a housekeeper, a pool guy, a handyman and drove us in his SUV on Saturday us to nearby Celaya where we stocked-up at Home Depot and Costco on must haves for setting up a new household from pretty much scratch.
 
-We’ve also engaged a local landscaper, Sarai Guzman who has delivered a wonderfully fanciful plan for turning Casa 9 into a high desert oasis of buganvilias, succullents, olive trees, lavender and birds o paradise. Now we only need to see the presupuesto before we know if we can afford paradise.
 
Here’s a partial social chrono-punchlist to date:
 
-Had too little but nonetheless non-stop enjoyable tie with Lucia and Tony. Had great meals, learned the secret of the best churros and discovered our new go-to tequila, Siete Leguas.
 
-Attended another semi-expat house party, this time in the lovely and fecund Guadiana colonia not far from Juarez Park, hosted by Jacquie and Robbie from Louisville, friends of Kathy Carroll.  
-Still waiting on our illusive residency cards and a functioning bank account.
 
-Have to return the yeoman's VW rental later this week to Querètaro airport. We’ll miss jumping out of town to La Comer supermarket, Liverpool mall, El Vergel Bistro, La Burger Argentinian Parrillada, Tejidos Vidal chair-maker, Ferreteria Don Pedro, and La Bastide, yes, Stephanie a real provenćal restaurant with a French owner/chef.
 
-Prepping for AJ’s visit in a couple of weeks. Will the pool be usable? Will the showers be hot and strong? Will the web be available, TV getable and golf course welcoming? Stay tuned.
 
So there, dear friends, family and benign blog-creepers is a barely varnished rendition of a internet-challenged big move-in week 6.5 of Jackie and Michael’s Excellent Adventure.
 
 
 
 
 
 

Buenos Dias, dear intrepid bloggernauts; or Buenas Tardes /Noches depending on when you’re  reading this, oh, and Buen Provecho if you’re snacking while reading and Con Permisso if we’re invading your space with this post and much gusto if we’ve not met here previously. That should cover it, Gracias! You see, for such a truly no worries day-in and out community, such a no real time-frame and loosey-goosey word-keeping society, there are formalities to be observed here. Yeah, I know these aren’t Margret Meade-like revelations but no matter how much you read about this stuff in dumb extranjero-in-paradise scribblings, the affect doesn’t sink-in till you’re immersed in it for a good month or so.  
 
Bottom-line is there is little room or patience for anonymity here. We must acknowledge each other and each encounter with another soul, physical or no, is to be punctuated by an established verbal admission with eye-contact or its equivalent. That alone in the age of universal fake identity if not algorithmic robo mean-girl trolling is a jolt. You can neither run on these steep cobblestones nor can you hide. It’s as if, to quote my Bronx-born friend Fran Weinstein, “Don’t be fresh, I know your mother!” is set in grantito here. It takes getting used to, let me tell you. I have no doubt we’ve already gotten a reputation from countless tiny acts of social intercourse. Don’t know what it is, (don’t be fresh!) but we have to tend to it, that much we do know.
 
Now amongst you, our bloggerati, our reputation during this adventure has been as long-suffering indignantaries to the very edge of credibility. So as not to upset chronology nor dispute reputation, we will attempt to share the plot-twists around the supposed-to-be final push into our house here without getting too splastick. Here goes.
 
You may recall that when last we met, Little Dorit….sorry wrong serialized tale…, we had confronted the new construction demons and had won a date of Friday, Feb. 15th as our drop-dead you will be able to spend the night in your house concession from El Jefe Arquitecto et al. Well, we worked ceaselessly towards that date only stopping for a Valentine’s Day massage at the San Antonio flannel and Yoga emporium followed by a true night-out with our dear friends, neighbors and Mexico role models, Tony and Lucia who had arrived just in the nick o time to revive our admittedly strained spirits.
 
What a night for sore psyches we had, drinks at Casa Blanca, dinner at The Restaurant and dessert at Churros y Chocolate across from the Jardin. Lucy, from very old and distinguished Mexican lineage and Tony ditto except Italian and New Rochelle, gave us news from home and a new lease on the task at hand. Also for the first and, let me assure you probably the only time, we had somewhat outsmarted X-Acto and his henchmen of the SMA building trade by adding an extra night to our rodentially active Obraje in Exile digs and arranged for movers to come on Saturday even though we were assured on a stack of Architectural Digests that we would have running water and power sufficient for us to finally sleep in our place on Friday.
 
As you may have divined by the above smugness, the end of D-Day38 brought not blessed closure as negotiated but a neighborhood-wide power outage and water shut-down. What? Really, we can’t sleep here after all? But you promised, Snr Arquitecto!!! Oh whatever shall we do, as we are homeless in a strange land, bla, bla, more indignation and guilt throwing… I know it’s extremely juvenile and petty but, for the first time in weeks, we actually felt a tiny bit in control. We didn’t let on for a moment that we had this oh so very likely contingency covered as shit for once and that it was the next night that we’d have to panic but for now went off, faux-dejected with Tony and Lucy to our favorite organic restaurant in the Guadalupe complete with two youngster playing Django/Grappelli string jazz as we tested nopales con queso and local organic clara cerveza. Tomorrow was going to be a bear of a day, a marathon box-breaking, stock-taking and move-in of all the NY in exile stuff stuffed into the studio plus a solid month of Jackie design-dominance acquisitions to be assembled and staged.
 
We made a date with Tony and Lucy for Sunday at noon, strolled back to our car at the Rincon, drove it up the hill for our last night at Susana’s where we packed up our last 15 days of George Carlin defined subset of our stuff stuff one mo time and girded for herding the cats into their carriers in the morning. Burrowed into the pushed together twin beds at the back for a last slumber in the Upper Obraje, we drifted off till the teen party started next door at 2:37am and lasted till 4:16am. Nice send-off, kids! We once again pulled the insufficient sleep from our eyes and the ineffective plugs from our ears around 7:30am and began the march down the hill for the real and long move-in Day38.
 
We did indeed sleep at El Rincon de Sta Maria, Casa 9 that Saturday, even though we didn’t have hot water and there was several inches of construction and dry season dust over everything we set-up around the by nightfall. The coming week would prove to be some of the biggest tests to date as we were now living in a real live construction zone with day in and out setbacks and disappointments and Tony and Lucy would leave us for Mexico City. But we’re in, for good or ill and so stay tuned for an eventual and we hope proper ending to our adventures.

It's not like we've been on a remake of Castaway this last month, although Jackie has been yelling out "Wilson" in her sleep. San Miguel town, after all, is a city of about 60k (the entire municipality, including Atotonilco is about 140k) which swells substantially on the weekends, and our interactions with the populace, local, gringo, human, animal, whenever we step out of our lodgings can often be Manhattanlike in intensity. Still we must admit that at times our sojourn has felt a tad, how shall we say it, bunkerish? "Lonely" is much too sentimental an adjective. "On task" I like to say. Yes, we've been fairly singled-mindedly devoted to this house project and nothing but, which I know, dear friends, you do not find hard to fathom. Our existence, thus far, in this unceasingly gorgeous to the point of hedonistic locale that couldn't possibly be described as spartan, has been fairly spartan. 

As these self-indulgent scribblings so clearly establish, most of our social intercourse has been laser-focused on those who revolve around our Mexican real estate folly. Thus, the circumference of our circle has mainly embraced our two real estate agents, Ximena & Nancy and Valente, the ever-striving but not quite getting there contractor. And we don't really communicate all that well with Valente on either a basic informational or conceptual level. Besides, he's not too happy with us at present for implicating him to jefe Luis for the long-line of, if it weren't costing us time and money would be smile-worthy construction miscues, that have us in our present state of perpetual Obraje limbo. Ximena, the high-energy "sellers agent" has the unenviable job of running constant interference for The Arquitecto, so is pretty much sick of our bellyaching by now. So that leaves Nancy Howze, our soft-southern-voiced and ever patiently re-assuring "buyers agent" who, besides having a moniker that dooms her to owning a real estate agency whether that was her true vocation or no, is a can't help but being genuinely lovely human. She's an Alabama emigre who undoubtedly deserves her own story serialized amongst these electrons but suffice it to say for now, has been supportive, understanding, encouraging, and the nearest we've got to a true new friend. But, alas Yorick, one friend doesn't a circle make. Plus she goes back stateside quite often. So, as that home tunnel light begins to flicker in the tantalizingly near distance, it is time to lift the foot off the must-get-this-damn-house-done-and-comprehensively-dusted pedal and make time to make some new acquaintances here. But first, I know, I know, the gods of chronology must be appeased.

What happened last Saturday morning, you are dying to now, at the Casa 9 Summit, The Shade vs. X-Acto match of the century. Was it a titanic battle, a verbal slap-fight, an international incident, or just a really awkward and uncomfortable long walk-through the land of wtf construction blunders made even more unwieldy by the border wall of language?
The answer is yes, As per usual, Jackie and I had our strategy mapped, our points prioritized and our arguments watertightened. We even drafted an agenda with an accompanying punch-list and circulated them to all the attendees the night before. Early enough to take-in our incontrovertible arguments for corrective action before retiring for the night but not so early that they could possibly summon up any effective defense before 10am. So who blinked, you ask? Do you really? Well, not to display uncharacteristic hubris or to disparage our hard-pressed, well-intentioned and talented collaborators/adversaries in any way but they did. Without a scintilla of triumphalism, I can say we won!

Not to say it was a pleasant victory, for it was all those descriptors above. Awkward, tense, defensive, accusatory, guilty. Not long after The Shade opened the campaign by strafing X-Acto with a litany of his false deadlines that could be construed only as bad-faith and disrespect for us, his sacred clients, whose money allowed him to build more houses than anticipated in our agreement and has resulted in wasted costs and elongated discomfort for us. Luis, somewhat unexpectedly, seemed genuinely taken aback by the news, and actually walked away before pulling himself together to re-engage for the scheduled walk-through. Soon, however, he almost completely shut-down when Jackie next pointedly confronted him with a clearly mis-designed kitchen cabinet for a refrigerator the dimensions of which he had since October as we had purchased it months early at his insistence. Upon asking him if he understood the glaringly obvious gaffe, he stared at her defiantly said he did not, repeatedly and intensely, and again walked off muttering in Spanish to his right-hand, Tomas, "Se lo que esta diciendo". Yikes! Was this the end of Rico? Was the confronted maestro, challenged if not called-out by a gringa before his crew now going to crawl construction to a halt jut before the finish? Had we over played our irreproachable hand?

Well, this isn't Making A Murderer, you already know the outcome, but our victory was due not not only to our being right and buttoned-up and respectfully demanding and offering of equitable solutions but also to Luis's credit and that of Ximena and Valente, I'm sure, for tamping down a not undeserved professional hubris and  leaning against prevailing cultural proclivities to continue the tour where he recognized all our issues and some of his own and instructed his crew to fix them all at his cost with a promise that we could enter Casa 9 this weekend with power and water and cleaned as best as it can be so at least we could camp out in a few rooms as the punch list was finished the following weeks. Hurrah! Well, we'll see but still, Hurrah!

So, we begged Susana for one extra night in our Obraje exile, booked our movers to come back and help us move our out-of-bondage stuff out of the dust-laden and over-stuffed studio and prepared for our, wait for it, first ex-pat couples blind date. Yes, taking our eye off task for one Monday night! Our long-time friends from Larchmont, Paul and Monica introduced us to Paul's sister Naomi who visits SMA regularly with her playwright husband Steve and their coterie of Berkshire friends who live here part of the year. Honey and David, graciously invited us to their gorgeous home of nine years on picturesque Loreto St, not far from El Rincon, where we met Charles, Daniele and Roger, polyglots, artists, physicians, writers, scholars, creatives, raconteurs all! We watched a gorgeous dry-season smoke-tinged sunset from their terrace then made our way to Casa Blanca, a surprising and sumptuous hotel with a Moroccan watering hole in the heart of the Jardin where we feasted on mezzes and fine local Mexican wines. A memorable Monday Night with quite possibly new friends, if we're not too far out of their intellectual league. But to break the social fast once and for all, Tony and Lucy arrive tonight from next door New Rochelle. Yes! Stay-tuned for more end of isolation.

In the meantime, the logistical juggernaut that is the Source-er has not been lax. We've hired a property manager, Manolo, to take up the vacuum soon to be left by our overworked real estate agents. Our famous chairs from Tajido Vidal and a rare bargain studio sofa from high-end Namuh have been delivered and our parota dining table and chaise should be here by the end of the weekend. By detective work and Google translate we finally tracked down Leonardo, the basket man and are now in possession of seis canasatas for Jackie's home organization plan. Cushion and drapes are in the works and Jackie starts Spanish lesson on Monday!  The plans are for us to spend our first night in Casa 9 on Saturday, fngees crossed.

With that momentous signpost up ahead, we'll leave you for now with a small discovery that, we think somewhat encapsulates at least a part of our adventure to date. Back in October, at the insistence of our contractor under the direction of The Arquitecto, Jackie bravely endeavored to get on the phone with Liverpool Dept Store in Mexico City and bought a refrigerator, washer dryer and garbage disposal to be held until January. The refrigerator was an LG with a "front of door water dispenser" and "automatic ice-maker". Since October, we have been badgering the contractor and his plumber to put on the adequate water supply for this new-fangled Korean-made marvel. We want our water and ice dispensed 'Merican, godammit! Yesterday we made another walk-through with the ever-patient and good natured Valente. When we came to the newly delivered and installed fridge, we asked to see the water hook-up for the in-door dispenser and ice-maker. He grinned and said there was no need. What? Again? Would we have to go back to war over this now? He shook his head and opened the refrigerator door to reveal a plastic inset water-bottle that, once filled from your ubiquitous huge bottle of  delivered water, is what in turn supplied the in-door dispenser. And in the freezer we found a convenient hand-crank for the just-as-manually filled ice-maker. The joke and the lesson was on the gringos. To the Mexican market, these were as automatic as you can possibly wished to be, even in the eyes of Koreans!

First of all, for you chronoastes, we're at DAY31 as of this writing. Friday, Feb 8th, 2019. Yes, a full lunar cycle has spun overhead as we mark the halfway point of the second temp lodgings, our upper Obraje exile, as it were. Will we, at long last, actually be in our you've-got-to-be-shittin'-me-it's-still-not-habitable-yet home this time next week? What happened with the stuff from NY in exile jail-break? Did the perdido-en-espacio appliances ever make it in from Liverpool? Hold your caballos for we'll get to the week's achievements, disappointments, and (I know, they shouldn't be by now) surprises in a bit, but first we thought we'd introduce you to a very peculiar sonic rhythm that Jackie has oh so perceptively discovered here on at the corner of Juan Jose' Torres Landa and the empty lot with the tiny bodega that always has a baby wandering around at the rear.

Let's begin at bedtime. After snuggling-up on the most uncomfortable couch in the western hemisphere in front of my laptop to watch the latest parcelled-out installment of Victoria followed by at least three eps of Brooklyn 99, we know it's time to retire to the upstairs rear bedroom when a cadre of local teens begin their voluble socialization directly beneath the living room window, usually around 11:00pm. As we snuggle into our pushed-together twins for some possible i-reading followed by hoped-for brief oblivion, the first chorus strikes up from a couple of the local canine population as they  begin their almost asthmatic stichomythia from the rubble-ized empty lot. The duet is soon joined by others of their almost comically mixed bred ilk farther afield but still within the colonia and definitely our earshot. Soon their call and response routine melds into the drowsy night background until one unfortunately confused rooster decides, by damn it's dawn at about 1:30am. He finally gets the picture by 2:00am when there is no response from any other rooster in the state of Guanajuato and finally relative quiet and blessed sleep descends. The properly socialized roosters start in earnest, however, about 5:30am soon followed by San Miguel's famed church bell arithmetic the following hour. Finally, it's time to wipe the too little sleep from our eyes and the plugs from our ears and greet another impossibly beautiful high desert mid-winter morning, however, when the mice in the bedroom ceiling start their own insistently scratchy ablutions.

It's taken a solid week, but we found our place in the upper Obraje's sonic chain of being. Upon coming down to the rental kitchen every rodent dancing morning, I open the shutters to the Juan Jose Torres Landa street below and fire-up BBC Radio Three on my portable bluetooth speaker and grace my temporary neighbors with a bit of Elgar as they wend their way to school from the empty-lot with baby bodega. Im sure they'll miss us after next Friday. Or maybe not.

OK, you may now loosen the reigns on Trigger as I will now attempt to share some much anticipated, I hate to call it, progress on our project cum adventure cum what doesn't kill you, makes you bla, bla, late middle age experience. First of all, I got a haircut finally. 30 pesos. That's approx a buck fifty for my estudounidense amigos. I figure that price is perfectly commensurate with the amount of actual pelo I have that needs corte, so I guess, psychically speaking, I'm in the right place after all. Secondly, we managed to get a full tank of gas at the Pemex on Carretera a Dolores Hidalgo with only about a fifteen minute wait, so it seems the new president's anti-hijacking of petrol pipeline gas crisis has finally abated here. In the one-step-forward and two back category, unfortunately, was today's development that after having barged into CIBanco earlier this week to demand and finally get (yes!) a checkbook and an activated debit card to my peso account, I was informed that the account and the two thousand pesos in it were frozen because, yes, let's all say it together, HQ didn't believe my signature. I don't know. It's like some bizarre revenge from Sister Rita who could never get me to care about my penmanship in the fourth grade. You guys got any ideas on how to solve this Groundhog's day dilemma, I'm open to suggestions. Just don't ask me to write you a check in pesos for your help.

Wait, what? These are not the hotly pressing plot-lines of our adventure to which you were looking for resolution in this post? Ok, yes, we managed to spirit away the entire NY possession cache from Magic Marcos' pit-bull and Nicaraguan guarded storage bodega on Monday and deposit the entire haul in the not-quite-completed-but-completed-enough studio of our Casa 9. It's amazing what sticky problems a couple of hundred bucks and two bueys with a moving truck can accomplish here. We had earlier convinced Valente to finally put the locks we bought at Don Pedro's on the front door and the door to the studio that only about three dozen underpaid and overworked workmen have duplicate keys to, so we're good. Finally! Victory! Of course, there's still the issue of the missing items from the move that Jackie and Marcos have continued to battle over via What's App. Stay-tuned for further developments on that front but I suppose the big plot-twist this week was the unannounced and completely arbitrary establishment of El Rincon's  Green-Zone and how its overnight appearance set-up a long anticipated face-to-face show-down between The Shade and X-Acto tomorrow morning at the construction sight.

You see, it seems that the rest of El Rincon's alter cocker denizens were none-too-happy when their street was opened up to extend access to our supposed to be finished by now and is pretty close so what's the big deal house as it also opened them up to a view of the truly chaotic construction site of the other six, supposed to be only three, houses and complained to El Jefe Arqitecto. As a matter of fact our construction contract has us being shielded from just this mess too so you can imagine our shock n awe early one morning as we were stopped outside a towering, padlocked and barbed-wired fence at the edge of our house. It was like Fallujah and we were outside the green zone. This really meant WAR! We demanded an audience with Luis "X-Acto" Sanchez Renero who had stopped communicating with us in September, once we found out that he had decided to build three more houses directly adjacent to ours. That was three more than was specified in our agreement. Anyway, stay-tuned for the results of  our Saturday morning massacre.

In the meantime, dear bloggerphiles, don't for a minute think that all these villainous machinations has slowed The Source-er's unremitting pursuit of design dominance. Her achievements in the midst of ridiculous odds and a cobblestone induced fall this afternoon has been nothing short of miraculous:
-The Fridge and Washer/dryer was tracked-down and plucked from Liverpool purgatory and delivered.
-A one-of-a kind hand-crafted parota wood dining table is waiting to be delivered in a week.
-A Jackie-designed all wood pedestal table for the kitchen is being fabricated for delivery early next month
-A negotiated Sofi's chaise for the living room to be delivered on the 15th
-A Namuh futon-like couch for the studio is being delivered on Monday
-Six metal and rush dinning chairs and two pvc woven patio lounge chairs are being delivered on Tuesday
-Oh yeah, and I managed to find a smart TV at Liverpool that should be ready for pick-up tomorrow.
-And we've interviewed a great landscaper, a terrific property manager and have massages line-up for Valentine's Day!
And we haven't even started our language lessons yet!

So don't cry for us yet, Argentina. Keep a stiff upper lip, use SPF 52 and burn all the copies of your college yearbooks and with any luck, you'll all be our guests in insanely beautiful if infuriatingly difficult to get our yankee arms around SMA.



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What a difference a car makes! 

As promised, with the shifting calendar, we knew Day23 was going to be a big one so, anticipating it and the jam-packed ones to follow, the Source-er made the mad-brilliant plan for us to bite the proverbial projectile and rent a car for the next month. The only caveat was that we would have to somehow trek all the way back to Querétaro airport to get an affordable deal from, wait for it, Alamo. No, the dumb symbolism of that particular car rental brand did not escape us. And, of course, it proved as prophetic as it was obvious. After and hour and 15 minutes there via Uber (yes, It's everywhere) and and another hour and half with the beleaguered desk agent, we were roundly defeated at Alamo as they could neither honor the guaranteed Expedia deal nor, as it turned out, provide any of the class of car we had reserved. During this typically elongated two-languaged skirmish, I spied three bueys at Firefly Car Rental across the way bemusedly watching our surrender at the Alamo counter, so we eventually made a deal with them!

Yes, it was at almost a third more than the Expedia deal, but we got an almost new VW Vento with 3/4 of a tank of gas, which was no throw-away given the long lines at the Pemex pumps these last weeks here. But we had wheels, access to the open road, freedom! I eased the VW onto the Mexican highway filled with a new sense of optimism then proceeded to miss a turn for the toll road back to SMA and took the big 405-like carretera through the heart of busy, booming, Santiago de Querétaro. Wending our way back we stopped to check on our stuff in exile outside of SMA then on through the impossibly narrow, cobbled and topes-ridden streets of the place itself for our last night in the San Antonio. We got a spot for the Vento right across from our puerta, then re-packed, readied the felines and hit the sack, waiting for the bells to start hump day.

Thursday morning at 9:00am saw us waiting outside the Instituto Nacional de Migración on Calzada de la Estación along with a motley crew of mostly other viejo gringos looking to build a life on this side of the wall, for the arrival of Humberto, a paralegal from our immigration lawyers' office. He was to navigate us through the all important step of having our pictures (mugshot-style: front and side) and fingerprints (all ten fingees!) taken for our desperately important residency cards. Without getting too granular, you need a permanent or temporary residency card  to buy cars, get bank accounts and, oh yeah, get out of the country. We realized right away that paying the not unreasonable tarrif to San Miguel Legal for their services to complete this task begun at the Mexican Consulate in New York several months ago was a bargain when Humberto's number (15) was called first. Now, as you no doubt have started to clue-into by now, the usual pessimist's mind-game of asking "how bad could it be" when facing certain possibly daunting tasks, in order to be relieved and thankful when "the bad" is never approached, doesn't work here. Imagining what could go wrong to point of testing one's patience is just being realistic in Mexico. Simply put, we're living the pessimist dream! 

We're happy to report, however, that our immigration experience with Humberto at the start of Hump-Day23 was the exception that proved the above rule. Except for the fact that my picture for the Permanent Residency of Mexico Card has my nose lead-white like a sorry David Hasselhoff pining for the beach, it went smoothly enough that we now just have to wait for the actual cards to arrive at our lawyers' office any week now. That's assuming the immigration service doesn't run out of blank plastic cards as it did last year causing delays as long as three months; but we wont go there for the above stated reason. Not yet anyway. It went so smoothly we actually had time to get a late breakfast at El Cafe Tal before wrangling the cats and the three stuffed maletas, the keepable contents of our fridge, and a number of boxes, cases and bits of acquired furnishings into the now groaning Vento for transfer to our new reduced circumstances home for the next two weeks, a three story sliver of cinderblock construction next to a rubble-filled lot, up two very steep rutted roads above the dry Obraje but not far from our will-it-ever be-finished abode in the Rincon. Squeezing-in more meetings with the contractor, by mid-afternoon we had made the interim crib transition from the sublime to the barely adequate. 

Tomorrow, Monday, Constitution Day (the holiday calendar here easily rivals that of  New Orlean) is another watershed of sorts as we have hired a moving crew to once and for all rescue our stuff-from-home-in-exile at Magic Marcos bodega in the country. Assuming we can get past Marcos' perimeter fence and the chained pit-bulls guarding the compound, it will be deposited, presumably, in the mostly finished and we hope secure studio of the new house. If we actually pull it off, we will take a tremendous synchronized sigh of relief. Yes, we're still missing three newly purchased pieces that MM evidently sold off on one side of the border or the other, and we still can't precisely pinpoint the precise locale of the supposed-be-delivered-already refrigerator, washer-dryer, and TV from the local Liverpool dept store, nor who's responsible for the water-purification installation (I can go on...) but our Nuro stuff will finally be back under our control. Come-on! Yes! New definition of achievement!

So Now we sit in our second rented living room here on Superbowl Sunday afternoon after having spent a good part of the day at La Comer, the local version of a huge Stop n'Shop cumTarget, optimistically stocking up on food and new house essentials, listening to Spotify, eating Ritz Sabores con Mantequilla y Ajo and drinking Bohemia cerveza as our
 neighbors loudly visit each other's stoops over barking dogs, revving engines and crowing roosters.  
Middle of this month is now our new move-in date here in the pessimists' paradise.
​Stay-tuned.


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