This morning, around seven o'clock, I drove to town and noticed heavy, slow-moving masses of dark clouds tightly hugging the tops of the mountains on the horizon. In other locations or under different circumstances, the sight may have been considered an ominous sign of imminent thunderstorms or other inclement weather. My first reaction, though, was one …
Author: Alfredo Lanier
My husband and I live on an off-the-grid ranch outside San Miguel, along with the challenging but dear company of four off-the-street dogs and three cats. My interests lie in politics, writing, photography and sundry forms of spirituality.
Wait for the Covid vaccine is over, but followed by still more waiting
On Friday, about a year to the day after the World Health Organization officially upgraded the Covid-19 "disease" to a worldwide pandemic, the Mexican government's vaccination campaign rolled into San Miguel to an expectant and excited popular reception you'd expect for the arrival of the circus. The local Mexican media was abuzz and flyers went …
Continue reading Wait for the Covid vaccine is over, but followed by still more waiting
Everything's coming up roses, more or less
Don't you love the peace and quiet nowadays when you wake up in the morning? Ever since the Former Occupant's departure from the White House on January 20, we can safely open our IPad or Kindle tablets and read the news without fear of getting knocked over by reports of demented overnight tweetstorms from the White …
A second Covid panic, this one over vaccinations
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
You can't hurry love, or the arrival of spring
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
Punxutawney Félix says: Spring is here!
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 …
The lure of gardening pornography
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 …
And so, on to the beach
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 …
What couldn't happen just happened
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, …
A touch of "pandemic fatigue"
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, …
El Rancho Santa Clara 