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!

​Just when we’re finally convinced that the unrelenting, if it were happening to someone else it would be Larry David, Joblike impediments to a naturally progressive settling-in to our exotic sitch were really duh-stark messages from the zeitgeist that the body Mexico had basically rejected our extranjero organs, boom! we get our Residente Permanente Cards from the Instituto Nacional De Migraciòn. Yes! We’ve been officially accepted by the state, despite our bigoted political leadership and chronically bad penmanship. Not quite a Sally Fields moment, but comparable.
 
We got the mood-jerking news as we were coming back from retuning our stoic VW Vento after a month of lovely if challenging locomotive freedom to the bueys at Firefly Rent-A-Car at the Querètaro airport on landmark Day50. Forgive the narrative repetition but, yes all three of our estadounidense GPS apps got us considerably lost on the simple and direct way there. And when we finally got there, with only a quarter hour before our Bajiogo hired car ride back, the damage from the quaint Unesco-sanctioned cobblestones and lethal topes of our precious San Miguel had bestowed a $200 penalty to the suddenly delicate albeit teutonic rented undercarriage. Cha-ching-idense!
 
I’m loath to report, oh dear and hopeful blogateros, that our mood was already dark at the outset of that sad and expensive trek because the prior days had seen our oh-so-close to finally getting there home hit some topes of its own. Mainly distressing was the floor of the master bath and a corner of the adjacent patio being savagely turned-over like an unauthorized exhumation because of, you guessed it, serious plumbing problems. As the excavation was being thankfully closed for what we hoped was the last time, the almost inhumanly desirous to please Valente, showed me a cut off plastic bottle bottom as the culprit for clogging the waste. I immediately recognized it as very much like the one the, not sure if he’s actually part of the construction crew or just living in their equipment bodega, guy occasionally used to water the insipient little ground cover plants between the paving stones in our patio when everyone else had left for the day. How it got down the toilet one can only wonder! That bit of news was delivered just after discovering that our ubiquitous plumber/electrician had neglected to “REMOVE THE SHIPPING ROD BEFORE INSTALLING THIS BRAND NEW NOT INEXPENSIVE AND A BITCH TO GET DELIVERED WASHER/DRYER”, rending it leakily inoperable as our piled-up laundry was shipped off to always-there-in-a-pinch Nancy’s.
 
It’s Mexicotown, Mr.& Mrs. Gittes! You’re welcome!
 
Oddly enough, however, black moods, profound misunderstandings, unexpected expenses and hair-pulling incompetence aside, or maybe precisely because of them, we are more and more feeling “at home” in these physically stunning, socially embracive and meteorologically magnificent surroundings. Some days even our Spanish works, although that’s usually due to the linguistic benevolence of the local populace. Our cool and sunny mornings are punctuated by the sounds of birds and bells until the chiseled noises of construction on the six other houses take hold and we’re up over coffee to plan the day around punch-list and new digs logistics. Because we’re still without house internet, I look to getting to either the Starbucks or Geeks & Coffee to use their broadband Wifi to screen the Rockie Awards nominations and download the night’s Itunes acquired entertainment to my laptop. Then it’s off to another try at the bank as Jackie scans for more acquisitions to outfit our Mexican retreat for your visits, oh friends and family! Putting in four to six miles across the sometimes treacherous cobbled banquettes we meet for a late breakfast or early lunch and often encounter, as Lent approaches, the outrageously and anachronistically costumed indigenous dance groups who drum and “battle” around the Paroquia like the Mardi Gras Indians on St. Joseph’s Day. (A very Happy Carnival to all our Yats, by the way!). We are home by mid-afternoon as the temps top-out in the mid-80’s and attempt to communicate with the construction crew on the latest two steps forward and one (or more) back as the house, for good mostly, inches towards, ok, we’ll call it completion, for now.
 
Speaking of Lent, Ash Wednesday, este miercoles, portends to be another pivotal day in the contra-caravan adventure as our pool guy, Sergio promises to get our little watering hole up and running after the plumbing swat team used it to pump out the waste system last week. Our landscape architect, Sarai is taking us to choose our potted trees, plants and bougainvillea for her plan for the patio and roof garden. Telmex is said to install our phone and internet and the carpenter returns to build our TV table in the Studio and spice racks and book shelves in the kitchen. Will there be rejoicing or the beating of breasts as we go for our ashes? Stay-tuned dear blogophile.
 
Because we’re now starting to consider our return in about a fortnight to the always disappointing never quite spring of tax-time in the northeast, we have to prepare for leaving this maddening paradise just as we are finally, perhaps, getting used to it, of course. Can we get what we need done in time? Will the full house water purification system ever be put in? And what about the always contentious pergola? These, dear friends are questions that have taken on more importance for us that the outcome of the failed Hanoi summit. Sad, I know. But there you have it. Mixed emotions are already taking hold. Prelude to that, of course, is AJ’s birthday visit for which we are meeting him in Mexico City for a day before busing back to SMA and hosting our first born as our first house guest really. Stay-tuned for that as well.

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.



​

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.


​

Didn't mean to leave you on the edge of your collective seat till Day20, dear schadenfreuders. It's just that we thought perhaps this next post should be upbeat, full of end of tunnel lights, and happy progress or, in the words of The Shade/Source-er, no-one would want to visit us if we don't lighten-up on these communiques. The last installment, especially seemed to have elicited a great outpouring of supportive buckupedness mixed with a wee bit of gleeful pity. And we thank you for both. So if it's been a bit longer between posts, it's only because we've been waiting for appropriately optimistic material to present itself.  

But we decided to post anyway because this is a watershed half-week of sorts. Today marks our third week here and the end of our stay at the wonderfully cozy cocoon of Casa Gayle in the equally homey colonio of San Antonio. We're going to miss popping around the corner to tiny El Cafe Tal on Orizaba for a ridiculously affordable breakfast of lattes and huevos con jamon in the morning and hitting the Guadalajara Farmacia, Mexico's CVS/7Eleven, on busy Zacateras for a dove bar and some imodium before bed.

But what, or I should say, who we will miss most of all is Plant Boy. Most of the expat homes here are filled with heaps of wonderful flora on their patios and roof gardens that need watering and careful pruning at least three times a week, especially now, in the dry season. That task has been handled here at Casa Gayle by a young man who truly embodies the en Inglés adjective, winsome. The first week we were here, we would look up from one of our internet tethers and there he'd be, all khaki shorts, Timberlands, vest, and kerchief under dark doe eyes and a carefully surprised shock of dark hair. He'd stare at us, silently bemused for a bit longer than comfortable before heading up to the roof with his watering can and shears to work his magic on the potted greenery from the top of the house down. We asked Jessica, Gayle's property manager, all Canadians and Estadounidenses with homes here have property managers which is yet another action item on our ever expanding must-do list, if he could ring the bell first before letting himself in going forward. That helped alleviate the sudden slap of space-invasion of his visits but it was replaced with a slight apprehension of having to lock eyes with him at the front door when the bell rang. Alas, we never learned his name or more likely were told upon our first encounter but were too rattled to remember and didn't have the backbone to ask again. So we called him Plant Boy and are thinking of perhaps engaging him to tend meticulously to our garden across town if and when it ever comes into full bloom. In the meantime he will be missed. Or maybe not.

Truth be told, there has been much accomplished in the last days of  San Antonio that is cause for semi-celebration. I recovered from my bout with bad helado to the point where we went back to Hanks New Orleans Oyster Bar and Restaurant for 2 for 1 Mojito night and had a bowl of their impressive gumbo. I have 2,000 pesos in an actual Mexican bank account now, even if our suspect penmanship hasn't yet allowed a currency exchange account to be opened. We're going down to immigration on Thursday morning with a legal assistant to hopefully get finger printed as the next step to the goal of receiving our residency cards. That means soon we can leave the country and get back in again in a pinch now if needs be. But the biggest wast the looming partial shut-down of construction over the pergola stand-off was successfully negotiated by a truly bi-partisan effort. The most immediate result of that break-through was a trip to Ferreteria Don Pedro with the ever good-naturedly stoic Valente.

The Source-er and El Contratista and their dueling notebooks spent a half day shopping marathon in this hanger-like soup-to-nuts hardware and building supply mecca just outside of town. With our teetering Spanish and Google Translate on our phones and a young salesmen with fairly good English, faucets, shower-heads, lighting fixtures, gas fireplaces, door handles, and sinks, were identified, debated, negotiated and rung-up for hours on end. It was exhausting watching Jackie spend the architect's and our money on this scale, but finally, progress on the house's "finishes" could be sensed. Valente was happy. We chose not to examine why this was the third time Jackie and I had been to the daunting Don Pedro and performed much the same if not as exhaustive exercise over three trips to SMA in the year since we signed-on to building the house. Nor why we were facing having to move into a second rental for the next two weeks. Nor why our stuff in exile may have to put up the funds for another month in storage. We just re-confirmed our new definition of achievement!

So, faithful readers, tomorrow morning we Uber ourselves back out to Querétaro airport to pick up a rental car and sojourn back to Casa Gayle, pack-up again on Thursday to ensconce ourselves in a much more modest rental in the Obraje for the duration till actual move-in, we think. Stay tuned for the drive from Querétaro, a morning at immigration, the load-into new interim crib, a decision on stuff in exile, and many more thrills and spills on our contra-caravan adventure.

​Oh yes, and if you enter someone's space while that someone is eating, do give them a "buen provecho". It's good for your psychic digestion.

When last we left our intrepid contra-caravaners, I believe they were encountering some bumps along the road to late-life artsy kismet. Friday Day16 dawns clear and cool with the usual smokiness that accompanies the dry season in this 7,000ft desert plateau town. And we are recovering from the week's earlier one-two punch of food and real estate poisoning.

Yes, it's true that Day14 saw me foolishly succumb to the temptations of a street helado vendor at the corner of  Insugentes and Hidlago as we were trekking back to the Rincon to try to make sense of the baffling delays and unexpected invoices that stopped us in our proverbial tracks as week three emerged. What better way to shed the light of optimism on the dark corners of second thoughts than with home-made ice cream! Jackie got a generous cono de chocolate while I opted for a taza de pistache. The cart was a cloth-roofed rectangle sitting on the busy sun-filled corner of the quaintest of colonias,  filled with about a dozen dented aluminum pots with their flavors sharpied on masking tape on tight covers. The woman at the tiller of this land boat explained that one side was water-based helado and the other cream based. The pots sat in cracked ice to which another woman continuously adds rock salt. I later remark to Jackie that the helado-ista had to reach far into the pistachio tub for my choice and that her efforts resulted in a much smaller scoop than Jackie's. In other words, that sugar cream and nut mixture had probably been sitting on that corner of the cart on that sunny corner of that town for at least two days and I got the last bit. Lucky me! It was on our trek back, when Jackie brought-up dinner that I realized I wouldn't be eating dinner that night or probably much of anything for oh, probably the next 24 hours. Beware Montezuma's Pistachio!

So Day15 was one of, let's say leisure for me as we awaited an explanation and hopeful recanting of the surprise pergola invoice, and other more positive progress from the banking and immigration sectors. We'd given up on the missing stuff from Magical Marcos who, presumably, was already far north of the border helping out some other unsuspecting reverse emigre. This down-time also led us to realize that our little pipe-dream of turning the lime of our move-in delay into limonada of a couple o' weeks on the Mexican Riviera was just that. The questionable prices at peak season aside, not many of those resorts were cat-friendly, so, instead we spent the day chasing down a place to live starting next next week. Took some doing, but we managed by dint of AirB&B to find a cat-tolerant-if-you-cut-their-nails affordable house in the Obraje colonia just above our place in progress at El Rincon. It comes with a garage of sorts so Jackie went to work finding us a car rental at the Queretaro airport for a month starting the day before we have to leave Casa Gayle on the 31st. This way we could start moving our once moved stuff in two locales one more time to a third one before we moved it all for good to a fourth and final one, whenever that might be.

But, my God, has it all been work, work, work since crossing the border? What about relaxation, I hear you ask. Well, we had been spending our cool evenings before the ceramic gas fire watching the completely outrageous Netflix Latam telenovela La Casa De Las Flores on my laptop. No better way to start to learn the language and the culture than by watching really trashy TV, if I do say so myself. But having finished the series the night before (and guiltily hoping for a season 2), and to soothe our co-fevered brows during what was shaping up to be our semana horribilis, I bought the third season of Victoria from ITunes, so we settled in to watch the first two equally soapy episodes when halfway through episode two, we finally got a response from one of our twin real estate brokers who had met with the contractor that afternoon and consulted with the architect and gave us the verdict: We damn well owed money on the rooftop build and more! Huzzah! Forget about the threat of the Chartists' Revolt, this meant war!

Suffice it to say, we didn't take this lying down, even though that had been my actual position most of the day and it was late. Still, we took out the contracts and the signed architect plans and I dashed-off my best LA Law-esque point-by-pint rebuttal via e-mail to all parties and The Shade's awesome powers of corrective invective were unleashed via voicemail. The result was the convening of a mini-Yalta of all parties to gather inside the construction shed at the Rincon the following day at 12:30pm. Jackie and I prepared our case, drafted an agenda for the meeting. We also crafted a face-saving fiscal solution for all. I must say, with all modesty, we were good. There was no rebuttal to our arguments. Only the absent and suddenly uncommunicative architect came in for most of the much deserved blame. We discovered that he had drawn plans for a much more elaborate rooftop shangri-la than we had expected or budgeted for. And he never sent them to us! Clear violation of para 5! But then this is not LA or NY, it's Mexico, Mr Gittes. So we presented our perfectly reasonable financial proposal to untangle the gordian knot with which he had bound us, for we need to get our project back on track before we have to find a third rental or go home unmoved-in. We now await his response....*

Throughout all of the construction sturm und drang, of course, Jackie's pursuit of design superiority has gone unabated. On the way back from our summit, we stopped back in Centro at CIBanco which had had a change of heart and were now assuring us that our deplorable gringo penmanship could be overcome by their lawyers if we just stopped by for a few more signatures. Yay! Outside the bank was a street vendor with many of the usual crafts for sale including some woven baskets. Jackie had been on the prowl for just such baskets for a good part of a fortnight now. Leaning on my terribly creaky Spanish, we learned that Leonardo lived a few blocks away and could execute the canastas Jackie desired in a little more than a week. We exchanged email and I gave him a deposit. Bam! Baskets ticked off the list. That night, feeling somewhat more adventurous about sustenance, we walked to the very end of our rental street, 20 de Enero, to a spare store-front called Denver's Los Olivios, a local who had worked for Olive Garden in the states returned and opened his own Italian kitchen right here in colonia San Antonio. There, over chicken parm, we seriously engaged our first expats, Michele and Deiter, from LA and Frankfurt with whom we exchanged WhatsApp numbers. Not a bad ending to a tough few days. 

*You're probably wondering how and why does this Mexico DF architect seemingly have so much power over our lives as we are still awaiting his response to our proposal to get on with it! That for a future post. Stay tuned...

Any chance that the officiating crew for the NFC title game was composed of ex-Mexican architects, contractors and bankers do you think?

Well, it took a good solid two weeks, but the grand adventure patina definitely got varnished on Days 12 & 13. How can that be, you ask when yesterday was Ignacio Allende Day here in SMA where there was a parade of the city's entire school population with drums, bugles, uniforms, flags, braided hair and police motorcycles galore. The weather was, once again, gorgeous and it was followed last night by a son et lumiére presentation on the grand pink facade of the neo-Gothic 17th cent Parroquia de San Miguel Arcángel where San Miguel de Allende was declared the cultural Capital of the Americas for 2019 as fireworks colored the clear cool dessert sky as the gigantic post-blood moon rose over the hills. It was magical from the roof of our rented casa in the San Antonio where we were attempting to put the day's disappointments in context.

First thing Monday morning I was told that CIBanco HQ had rejected our signatures as inauthentic and therefore could not open an account for us until and unless we worked on or our penmanship! That was followed by silence from Magic Marcos on our missing stuff and similar crickets from our architect on an actual move-in schedule with a week left on our rentals, both living and storage. I did hear from our renters in Nuro, however, who were not happy about the heat, so I changed the settings on the NEST via the web-app and now I see they've set both zones permanently at 80! The pièce de résistance, however, was the one and only new bit of official correspondence to come from our construction team in weeks, a new invoice from our contractor for "extra" work we'd already paid for in November. This time, however, the cost was over twice that from the original bill! We were not pleased and spent the evening, not celebrating General Allende's feast day down at The Jardin with our fellow SanMiguelenses, but culling, copying and and showing the officials on our field visual proof in the way of contracts, wires and emails of what their eyes had somehow missed!

But, wait, for we're not done here on Tuesday, DAY 13, the two-week anniversary of our arrival in magical SMA. This morning, I woke determined to fix the bank situation once and for all and, after answering the triangle (Tuesday is Basura Day, remember) hiked down another lovely morning to Centro and the Banamex at the suggestion of our marvellous Nuro neighbor and former Mexican diplomat, Lucia, to get done what CIBanco couldn't. After taking a Zabar's cheese-counter-like number in the bank's waiting area I saw a young banker who told me that until I got my residency card from immigration, no bank account for me! Not sure how Catch22 translates in Spanish but at least there was a possible horizon on the cuenta front not unlike the car front. We just have to wait to hear from our immigration lawyer on those damn cards. As I returned to our San Antonio casa with a small bag of goodies from a hidden panaderia across from the Centro Cultural for Jackie, she greeted me with the amazing news that for the first time since we saw him in August, our architect sent Jackie an email! Whoa! Progress? Some good news, maybe? But all it said in terse English that we owed the contractor for changes made in the plans of the house and that the house would not be habitable and street would not be passable until mid-February now. Great. Now all we needed was for Marcos to skip town. 

OK, we heard from Marcos finally today and yes, he is leaving town and no, we still haven't gotten our missing stuff from him. Right. And we penned another indignant rebuttal to our lame officiating crew citing slow-mo replay from 50 camera angles and are now waiting to hear if we'll have to take it to the commissioner but chances are, on the move-in date at least, we're screwed. So Jackie is now trying to book us a couple of holidays elsewhere in Mexico (we can't leave the country until we get our residency cards) between losing our rental in 7 days and getting the street in the Rincon paved and Casa 9 ready for human habitation in 24 days. What we do with our stuff in exile not to mention the cats in the meantime, you'll have to tune in to find out!