For the past nine or ten years Stew and I have volunteered two weekends to work at a spay-and-neuter clinic sponsored by Amigos de Animales, a local not-for-profit funded almost entirely by the expat community of San Miguel, with additional support from the Guanajuato State Health Department.Our jobs are to sit by a table at …
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Live report: Health care in Mexico versus the U.S.
The quality and cost of healthcare in Mexico compared to the U.S. is one of those conversation topics among expats that is so contentious, yet shopworn, just the mere mention of it makes me feel like my head is going to explode.Heated opinions range from "Mexico has the best!—not merely better, or comparable, folks—healthcare system …
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Friends of old churches mourn today
People focus on different things when they travel; Stew and I tend to binge on religious buildings.The reason behind this habit is, to a large extent, practical. One can't see everything everywhere one visits, and places of worship are often the sightseeing equivalent of one-stop shopping: They are the biggest and most central structures in …
Tribalism reaches outer space
As if life weren't baffling enough at sea level, news came last week that, for the first time, astrophysicists had photographed a black hole, several billion times the size of our sun and located 55 million light-years away from the earth. A light-year is about 5.88 trillion miles.Here's looking at you, black hole.Then, about a …
Best restaurants in San Miguel if you're over 60
In his March 30 column, Frank Bruni, a New York Times columnist and formerly the paper's food critic, wrote about how his tastes in restaurants have evolved now that he is over 50.To write a comparable piece here would be ridiculous; there are more restaurants in some blocks of New York than in all of San …
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Horses, a young girl and three old guys
Locals call the squat mountains surrounding our ranch Los Picachos—"The Peaks"—which is way too grandiose; most are no more than scraggly hills. Google Maps says our ranch is about 7,000 feet above sea level, and the Picachos could not be much taller than another 500 or 700 feet. During the dry season the Picachos turn particularly …
Go Beto, go!
The Democratic presidential primary is still a long ways off and at the moment it looks as disorderly as the proverbial herd of cats. But as a devoted voter—I've never missed a presidential election since I became a U.S. citizen in 1970—I have begun winnowing down the mob of presidential wannabes, even if my evaluations …
A rainy Sunday reverie
Late yesterday afternoon I was watering one of my garden beds, a chore which four months into the relentless dry season, challenged my patience and optimism.Surely, in six weeks or so—I said to myself—the rainy season will jolt the plants out of their brownish stupor and the ranch will bloom again.After a light dinner and …
Let's break out of our own political bubbles
While looking around for other blogs I ought to be following, I ran across one that I found both gripping and moving, written by a young Cuban woman, still living in the island, who offers grim vignettes of the day-to-day struggles of life in that country. A link to her blog, "Generation Y," appears on …
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Return of the killer heirloom tomatoes. We hope.
It's with a humble heart—not gloating, mind you—that I report, perhaps a bit prematurely, a looming bumper crop of five or six kinds of heirloom tomatoes plus lettuces, radishes, peas, carrots, beeets, string beans, chard, squash, cucumbers and other greens, here at the ranch.Sadly, this is happening while our friends in the U.S. and Canada …
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El Rancho Santa Clara 