falling forward,gone girl and community

Really, my beloved but increasingly misguided and besieged homeland? Daylight Savings with black ice still on the desiccated pumpkins? With flurries yet smearing the fresh ashes on your foreheads? With the lurking treachery of the Ides still a possibly frigid week away? Meaning, we here in surprisingly rational on this topic Badhombreland have got to get up two hours earlier until April 7th just to commune with you, our sleepy brethren? George Bush’s most enduring legacy, other than “WMD” and “Mission Accomplished”!
 
So, my bleary-eyed chrono-idense friends and fam, Mardi Gras has passed and Lent descended from The Marigny to Brooklynn, Murray Hill and Petra since our last communique which no doubt left you all to wonder about the Big Miercoles. We’ll cut to the scoreboard:
 
-Still no Internet from that Throwback Thursday of Telephone Companies, Telmex! Even with daily visits from the preternaturally optimistic Valente who was joined by Jackie and me early last Friday morning to put a pathetic estadounidense face to the clockwork pleadings. No slack, Jack. We got a definite “work action” vibe from the lethargic men of the little white vans. Seems that a subcontractor had gone belly-up and the staff didn’t like the new workload in which we, once again bad timing-wise, are smack in the middle. Now considering trying MegaCable! Oh, yes the cable company. That’s how desperate we are. (AT&T has informed me that we’ve already used 75% of the month’s mobile data allotment!) Stay-tuned, if you can get our feeble signal, that is.
 
-The pool, however, is fully operational, thanks to Sergio & Co., if a bit frigid for some of weak loins, but that will be remedied by the time you visit… I promise!
 
-The carpentry, such as it is, has been completed, pretty much. The Roku TCL 612P display and the Definitive W Studio Sound Bar System have a proper 42” from the floor to the middle of the screen maple shelf on which to dwell in the two-story echo-y studio. Of course, with no broadband, we can only watch purchased shows from ITunes off my laptop via the HDMI cable I bought at the Radio Shack at the La Luciérniga mall on the Salida Celaya. Yup, Radio Shack is alive and well here. Comforting, no?
 
-Sarai, our marvelously personable landscaper is ready to start tomorrow on the roughly three garden areas of the oh-so-in-desperate-need-of-flora-at-this point house, the roof terraces, the patio and the carport/entrance. She took us on a whirlwind tour of local nurseries including her own exotic native plant backyard nursery cum laboratory in her very compact white pick-up. I even succeeded in getting the ever-pliable-and-ready-to-please-to-a-point Valente to install two faucets this week to facilitate the greening of Casa 9. Stand-by for pix, we hope…maybe
 
-As for the ever-changing disposition of the water purification and pergola projects, we’ll leave them in their comfortable slot in Luis Sanchez Rincon limbo for now. Even you house-hunter chronoastes don’t deserve any more droning-on about them, I’m sure. More only when there’s more to share on this for we should get onto much more pertinent current events, my contra-flow schadenfreuders!
 
Yes, you’ve seen the photo above: GIRLSCOUT IS GONE! Again. Many of you may intuit that this is actually not a great shock even though it’s been a great shock to us here under shall we say already somewhat stressed circumstances. The cat was acquired from the New Rochelle animal shelter the week after the notoriously destructive Hurricane Sandy and immediately, upon coming into our Premium Point Park abode, proceeded to irrevocably piss-off our two-year-old boy cat, Charlie and then immediately fall down the ash pit of our fireplace. Tony Gabriele, our stalwart neighbor, spent an entire day helping retrieve her, both ash-covered and wheezing in the basement by the end of the ordeal. Some years later, the same creature disappeared for six weeks, assumed lost but found near-starvation after hiding in the basement of our other neighbors. So, when, after being drugged and flown in a handbag with her arch-enemy and step-brother to a foreign land, deposited in three different homes over two months and harassed by a steady stream of loud workmen and an over-friendly neighborhood Ragdoll cat named Chloe, she decided to take to the roofs of the Rincon like some short-legged, long-haired feline Quasimodo, who could blame her? Jesus and Serafino, our privada’s gatehouse bueys, have each spotted her fleetingly, making her nimble way across on the interconnected roofs of our neighborhood, but she continues to elude us all. Will she come down before we leave for home? Yes, another cliff-hanger, to keep the real-life serial running.
 
The genuine bright side (you know there would be one, didn’t you?) of this seemingly tragic pet tale is that Girlscout’s distressing if not altogether surprising disappearance has thrust us suddenly and firmly into the El Rincon community as our neighbors, henceforth barely known to us for lo these weeks and months spent on home-building task. In a flash of four days, they have emerged from their beautifully designed walled enclaves and rallied around the search and rescue of our ludicrously dramatic cat. And what a pleasant revelation it’s been as the dramatis personae of our little modern corner of never ceasing to be surprising San Miguel de Allende have been revealed to us. Get ready for lots of names per individual because of the Spain-like custom of keeping both your father and mother’s name here:
 
-There’s the president of the nascent home-owners association and tall James Taylor chill private equity guy and contemporary of Cuaron, José Antonio Contreras Leyva and his wife Malu Lopez Portillo, Mexico City born & bred weekenders.
 
-Next is Michael and Monica Hoppe, Brits by birth, transplanted from Portland, owners of the notorious interloper Ragdoll Chloe and one of the few full-time residents of El Rincon; he’s an accomplished and well-known modern composer and musician; Jackie’s sure that Monica was a model.  
 
-Then there’s there the gregarious Pilar Romero and Max Garcia, weekenders and more from not far away San Louis Potosi; he’s an ex-oilman and now partner in his wife’s booming travel business. They hosted an impromptu rooftop gathering Saturday night where the cast you see here minus the Hoppes and plus her brother, nieces and daughter all graciously spoke flawless English to both our delight and shame.
 
-Finally, the slightly mysterious but definitely charismatic side-by-side neighbors and other full-time residents Lourdes Robles and Sicilia who own a gorgeously hip boutique hotel/B&B, Casa No Name, that sports a Unesco World Heritage protected mural. Lourdes moved here from Guadalajara after a revelatory yoga drop-out to India and Sicilia is an accomplished visual artist and muse for No Name. Lourdes is Casa 8 to our Casa 9 and resident nemesis to Luis, El Jefe Arquitecto, X-Acto!
 
And then then there are the two Canadian couples, one from Toronto and the other Quebec as mandated by Canadian law, who are long-term renters. And Peter and Nicole Mills, Aussie full-time residents in Casa 23. More on them and the owners of Casa 5 who live in Hawaii but are from New Rochelle, I kid you not, in future postings. In the meantime, dear bloggernauts, we prepare for our bus-ride into Mexico City Monday morning for a two-night stay at a boutique hotel in the Juarez nabe so Jackie can do more muebles Source-ery before AJ arrives on Tuesday and we all bus back to SMA on miercoles for our first-born as first-guest.
 
Who knows what will and will not happen at Casa 9 in these first three days in a month away from constant intercourse with Valente, Tomas and the crew that couldn’t hammer straight? Will Sarai get the garden going? Will Grilscout come down from the bell-tower? Will it be Telmex or (gasp!) MegaCable? Will the pool warm-up on its own? You know the drill by now…Stay-tuned!