A few nights ago, while at La Frontera restaurant, an expat hangout, we were reviewing current events and gossip with some friends and someone mentioned that a local couple had actually chartered a private plane to take them back to California to get vaccinated for the coronavirus. The couple had almost hermetically closeted themselves at …
Continue reading A second Covid panic, this one over vaccinations
Damn. Punxutawney Félix was wrong in his prediction, which I announced in my previous post, that spring had arrived at the ranch. I should have instead paid attention to the real Punxutawney Phil, the Pennsylvania groundhog that a couple of weeks ago predicted we were in for six more weeks of winter. Judging by the weather reports of blizzards, …
Continue reading You can't hurry love, or the arrival of spring
Yesterday morning Punxutawney Phil, the weather-prognosticating groundhog wizard, came out from wherever he hides in Pennsylvania, looked around, and saw his shadow, which means six more weeks of winter. That's bad news for the people in in the Northeast and Midwest U.S., already buried under several inches of snow. At our ranch, we've received mixed signals …
Last week, before we left for the beach, I asked Félix to turn over the soil in the two raised beds, as a prelude to our yearly fantasy of an orderly cornucopia of vegetables—a few types of lettuce, radishes, carrots, tomatoes, chard, beets and what-have-you—that by midsummer, inevitably turns into an riot of vegetables on …
It's been only a year since our last two-week sojourn at the beach, except for 2020 having warped our lives, and everything around us, including our sense of time. It feels as if we'd been locked up at the ranch for eons. The drive from San Miguel to Barra de Potosi was the usual seven-hour, 350 …
While I sat in front of the TV on Wednesday, stunned by images of a Trumpist mob laying siege and storming the U.S. Capitol, I got a call from Olguita, a cousin in Miami who came from Cuba about 20 years ago. She was upset, sounded almost tearful. She couldn't believe that such lawlessness, routine in Venezuela, …
Back in March, when the Covid-19 virus had barely begun to infect and kill people in the U.S. and most of the world, the state of California imposed strict preventive measures that, for a while, seemed effective and were embraced by the citizenry. Ten months later the epidemic has returned to California with a vengeance, …
As a roommate I had at Indiana University would say, 2020 has been the kind of year that would piss off the Good Humor Man. Indeed. We've had a pandemic that still rages and whose death toll in the U.S. alone has surpassed 300,000; an economic dislocation that has left millions unemployed and scores of small …
Continue reading Have faith people, 2021 will be much better.
Hello again, after a few weeks of silence during which our lives were, in fact, filled with ups and downs, though fortunately, with more of the former. About three weeks ago, we had the opportunity to sample Mexican hospital care, when Stew had to have a knee-replacement operation. We ended up at Hospital Angeles in Querétaro, …
Continue reading Back after a brief and expensive hospital break
As much as I swear I'm not going to read, or write, any more about American politics, nowadays that's like trying to avert one's attention from a five-car pile-up in full view. During a two-and-a-half hour sojourn at the dentist yesterday, mercifully most of it under a haze of Novocaine, Stew received two root canals, along …
Continue reading How do you explain U.S. democracy to foreigners?
El Rancho Santa Clara 