Charrerías are not just a Mexican version of rodeo. They are the national sport and a unique spectacle Rising a few miles outside Querétaro, within sight of one of the city's myriad residential subdivisions, creeping over the side of a hill like a white fungus, is Lienzo Charro Rancho Pitayo's enormous palapa and one of …
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 …
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 …
We spent the Fourth at a lovely picnic hosted by our friends Bill and Edith, and with a few other people some of whom we hadn't seen in years because they live in a small community of expats in a quadrant of the San Miguel countryside we'd never visited. Though the menu contained the usual …
New Covid variants. A mass killing at a Texas grammar school. The war in Ukraine grinding on. A stream of alarming revelations by the congressional committee investigating the January 6 mob assault on the U.S. Capitol. And just before we left, news that the ayatollahs on the U.S. Supreme Court had overturned Roe v. Wade, …
After two years of helplessly watching several evergreens and cedars in our ranch, some as tall as 20 feet, suddenly brown up and die, we may have found a cure. Yesterday, our eagle-eyed gardener Ulises showed me a frond from a Michoacán pine whose long needles seemed to be infested with reddish somethings the size …
Continue reading A cure for what's killing our evergreen trees?
The skies over San Miguel this time of the year are frequently cloudy, but that's only a tease. They promise rain but deliver only a couple of timorous sprinkles of little benefit to the plants and trees, except to rinse the dust off the foliage. Last night we had one of those teasers: It came …
Stew and I had the good fortune to be able to retire at age 57, several years earlier than most of our work colleagues and friends, which afforded that much extra time to satisfy our appetite for traveling. Though we've not been to the Far East, we've traveled from Iceland to Antarctica, and the Galápagos Islands …
El Rancho Santa Clara 