San Miguel is increasingly pricey but expat generosity is hardly the chief culprit Last Sunday Stew and I stopped at Querétaro's "Mercado de Flores," a hangar-size paradise of all things gardening located next to the city cemetery, that sells plants, pots and other supplies at noticeable lower prices than nurseries in San Miguel. If you …
Continue reading Is paying higher wages bad for Mexican workers?
After three years of masks, tests, vaccines and boosters, the pandemic just won't away We spent Christmas in New York, where it was very cold. Its eight million residents, plus probably another million tourists like us, appeared to be dashing between restaurants, cinemas, theaters, museums, subways, buses and any place that promised shelter and warmth. …
Consuming lots of news can make you a more informed citizen—or a neurotic zombie If there were a Twelve Step program to alleviate an addiction to news, I might qualify for membership. I already have had to deal with two types of addictions—booze and nicotine—so it's not much of a stretch that my well-nigh obsessive, …
Our bees buzzed double-time during the lockdown Partial view of our state-of-the-art processing plant. After a hiatus of more than a year, Rancho Santa Clara's honey production is back in business, with a bumper harvest of dark amber honey that is also light and particularly sweet. The pause in production was caused by our manager …
It continues to thrive while its neighbors remain mired in violence, poverty and corrupt politics This tiny Central American country can charm as well as puzzle you. Its dazzling biodiversity, which attracts 1.7 million tourists and $1.7 billion dollars in revenues yearly, is irresistible. The other, more surprising side of Costa Rica is how it …
Continue reading Costa Rica: A bird of a very different feather
A reader alerted me to a YouTube video of a "train" of Skylight satellites crossing the sky. Pretty amazing. I hope you can play it. The structure on the left looks like a pyramid. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pgysWWwESfU
They're not like Vermont's, but our own autumnal spectacle. Be sure to get up early and pay close attention. This time of the year we're showered with rapturous accounts of autumnal displays somewhere up North, when families drive around chasing the colorful fall leaves, a brief yearly event that is really a prelude to months …
One leaves for Texas, another witnesses a knifing and the third has a near fatal motorcycle accident One night a year ago, Félix, our gardener of twelve years, left without notice with his two brothers to work at high-paying construction jobs in Texas. Stew didn't take it well and cussed Félix for his disloyalty for …
Continue reading The hard and tangled lives of our ranch hands
Enough pandemic stupor. Time to move your butt and go somewhere Lately, Eric Burdon and The Animals' 1985 hit "We Gotta Get Out of this Place" has been echoing in my head. Download and play the video and you might feel the same. It's not that we want to pack up and abandon our very …
If you don't have any good ideas to deal with the U.S.'s immigration problem, just put on a show Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s hypocritical move to recruit undocumented immigrants in Texas and then dump them in Martha's Vineyard in Massachussets, follows the example of Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, who’s also been also shipping busloads …
El Rancho Santa Clara 