A visit to a friend in Mexico City led us to discover its collection of Art Deco treasures Last week Stew and I visited a friend in Mexico City who's just starting the renovation of a 1929 Art Deco building, in the Roma Sur neighborhood, a project that's both exciting and intimidating. Restoration or renovation …
Putting an old dog to sleep is one of life's most wrenching experiences A favorite topic of internet clickbaits are tear-jerker stories of animals—blind, lame, abandoned or in some other dire predicament—that are rescued into a forever home and live happily ever after. Our dog Domino, approximately 14 years old, didn't quite follow that script, …
Rampant water hyacinths are choking the Presa Allende If you were charged to engineer the perfect invasive plant, you could hardly do better than the water hyacinth (lirio acuático, in Spanish), which has been nicknamed by some as "the weed from hell" or "the terror of Bengal," and is now spreading explosively throughout the large …
Yesterday, after two years of neglect that Stew blames on the Covid pandemic, political unrest in the U.S. and a misalignment of the stars, he and Gabriel, a local guy who's helping us with garden chores while the regular gardener Ulises paints the two bathrooms, went to check our four beehives, sitting forlorn amid the …
A change in our cat's hunting habits has left us puzzled Almost four years ago, on a dark though not stormy night, as Stew, Félix and I were coming back from town, we noticed two small fur balls tentatively walking along, one on each side of the road. We stopped, Félix got off and promptly …
To escape the gringo bubble of San Miguel we went to a wrestling match in Querétaro My husband and I have lived in Mexico for about 17 years but we can't claim we know the country or its people all that well. Some Americans clustered in San Miguel may rhapsodize about how much they looove …
I’ve been publishing a blog for about 12 years, mostly about the experiences of my husband and I since we moved to San Miguel de Allende in 2005, and felt it was time to redesign the blog and fix a couple of glitches. I hope veteran readers and newcomers as well like the new look. …
When Stew and I went shopping for our 2018 Audi Q5 it turned out to be a doubly frustrating search. We wanted a blue or dark green one with a manual transmission. We had done an unscientific visual survey and found that about 80 percent of the cars on the road were either black, white …
It's been almost a year since our gardener Félix went to work in Texas, along with his brothers Juan and Sergio, all of them undocumented. This was Félix's fourth trip across the border. He was a teenager the first two times, and was detained and sent back the third time by Mexican cops, who stole …
Continue reading Our gardener's Texas odyssey and the self-defeating politics of U.S. immigration
Amid the daily avalanche of media reports about the Covid pandemic—some based on science, others on speculation and still others, perhaps the majority, on Internet conspiracies and high-octane bullshit—occasionally you run across a new angle to this topic. Such was the case with a July 22 piece in the The Atlantic magazine, that designated an …
El Rancho Santa Clara 