While volunteering at the reception desk of a local animal shelter, shortly after arriving in San Miguel, a woman came in with a battered birdcage holding a pitiful white puppy inside, with a bloated pink belly and soulful eyes. She had found a cardboard box containing three or four puppies, a few weeks old, by …
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.
My kind of town, Chicago still is
When we arrived in Chicago, two days before Thanksgiving, the reception was neither warm nor surprising: The weather was gray and cold, and a steady breeze drove the freezing drizzle at a thirty-degree angle that felt on the bare skin like pinpricks. The 25-minute wait for an Uber taxi felt more like an hour. But …
A mid-rise condo for your collection of succulents
This blog doesn't often stray into the arts-and-crafts area, but Félix and I last week built this clay brick "condo" for our succulent collection that we're both really pleased with, and feel it deserves some celebration.We needed an attractive, and space-efficient way to display the burgeoning collection of succulents we've collected over the past three …
Continue reading A mid-rise condo for your collection of succulents
One loud cheer for the 'fake news' New York Times
The New York Times, widely regarded the best paper in the U.S., if not the world, for the breadth and depth of its news coverage, has come under incessant attack by President Trump, and his millions of followers, as a nefarious purveyor of "fake news."We hear that the Times' news coverage is tendentious, if not …
Continue reading One loud cheer for the 'fake news' New York Times
The autumn of our forgetfulness
Old age is like a car turning over 150,000 miles; no matter how many times you've changed the oil or rotated the tires, things start going clink, clank and pfft. In older people, a sputtering memory is assumed to presage dementia. We fret about finding ourselves in the day room of a nursing home, drooling and …
CNN BREAKING NEWS: The buzz is gone away as apian debacle decimates honey production
I could tell something was terribly wrong when I saw Stew's and Felix' long faces, behind the protective hoods they wear when handling our beehives, as they returned from collecting the honey panels from the beehives."A real disaster," said Stew, in his usual understated manner. "We barely got half a bucketful of honey."Except this time …
Two American geezers in Munchkinlandia
Having arrived to the U.S. in 1962, at age 14, I missed much of the cultural iconography that guided American kids who grew up during the 1950s.I missed "The Wizard of Oz" (1939) starring Judy Garland and Bert Lahr; "It's a Wonderful Life" (1946) with Jimmy Stewart and Donna Reed; or even some of the mainstream TV fare …
Fanfare for an uncommon man
Expats sometimes shower their help with almost condescending praise for being reliable, honest, polite and some such. Our indispensable man Félix, the central character in many of my blog posts, is much more than that. He's a wiz; a singular person in Mexico or anywhere else.During the ten years he's worked for us, we've encountered …
To live and be buried in San Miguel
Expats who have vowed never to leave San Miguel get that final wish by being buried in a special corner of the Municipal Pantheon known colloquially as the "Gringo Section."It's a lovely spot, manicured and carefully laid out, that would not be out of place in any small all-American town. It's also walled and gated …
When Mother Nature knocks at the door
Unless you slept through junior high school science class, you'll remember that light travels much, much faster than sound, as in 670,616,227 m.p.h. versus 767 m.p.h.That's why during a thunderstorm you usually see the lightning first, but not hear the accompanying thunder until several seconds later. Or if lightning struck far enough away, you might …
El Rancho Santa Clara 