Are the usual pieties of putting an animal "out of its misery" sometimes self-serving? Stew and I seem to be on a sad streak lately in the pet department. Our Alpha dog Lucy died about eighteen months ago, quietly and I should add mercifully, because she spared us the decision of having to put her …
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 …
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 …
Tomorrow evening Stew and I will be going on a thrice-postponed trip abroad, our first since the Covid-19 pandemic began more than two years ago. We've been vaccinated twice and received the booster, in addition to a flu vaccine and the first of two shingles vaccines. And of course, we'll carry our KN-95 masks in …
Continue reading To mask or not to mask? But why? Does anyone know?
We've been in shutdown mode for almost two months, and recently I was reminded of how this weird situation might be getting to me: I couldn't remember which day of the week it was.Being confined at home, except for a few outings to the grocery store and a restaurant once a week, hasn't been terribly …
This year, the vernal equinox, the official beginning of spring, fell on March 19. And by an odd coincidence, on the same day the mayor of San Miguel announced a sweeping lockdown of the municipality, to go into effect the next day, that banned most public activities indefinitely, in response to the coronavirus pandemic.And if …
Continue reading Covid-19 forecast for San Miguel: Hopeful but with a chance of storms still ahead
Pardon my cynicism, but I half expected city officials in San Miguel de Allende to remain silent or lapse into denial with respect to the Coronavirus pandemic that has shut down much of the United States and several European countries. National and international tourism is practically the town's only business, so the city is, understandably, …
Continue reading San Miguel's thumping response to the Coronavirus pandemic now awaits enforcement
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 …
I've seen this VW Bug around town before, but never talked with the owner who, I've been told, is Canadian. This time his creation was on the parking lot of the Mega supermarket.Can't tell you what his schtick might be: Irrepressible creativity? A deep-seated craving for attention? Hippie flashback?Or about some of the logistics: How …
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 …
Continue reading Best restaurants in San Miguel if you're over 60
El Rancho Santa Clara 