Casi un año como residentes

(Domingo 09 - Sábado 15 Junio ) 

Another week has come and gone so quickly! So many things to see and do. Will we ever have time for it all? Sunday we spent at Ania and Frank's for his third birthday dinner, another delightful meal, and good company. Frank's daughter, husband and two children were visiting from New Orleans. The grandson, Rio, will stay on for a couple of weeks, and Frank intends to keep him busy with all the various projects he's got going, including some landscaping at the new rental house. We also met Jean at the dinner. At present she is staying at an estate that has been in her family for years, about nine blocks north of here. Both she and her husband were anthropology professors at the University of Pittsburgh, and her two children live in Pennsylvania. Her father was the first to bring anthurium plants to Fortín from Hawaii.

Carmen patched and painted the edge between the ceiling and wall in the upstairs bathroom, which the workers had not done to her satisfaction. Not having the work crew here means our days could be a bit less busy, but at least for this week we went to bed tired every evening, having accomplished a lot of things we had been putting off while the house was a construction site.

Cosme came to spray a semi-annual fertilization for our plants. We gave him a ride home – or rather to his garden area which is considerably south of his home in Chocaman. It is a lot just north of Fortín which he is developing into a nursery and a future homesite We ended up buying a couple more plants and told him that we would not be buying any more, but would trade some in the future for leftover plywood, when we are done with what we need for our projects.

Carmen cleaned floors and happily they are not covered with gray dusty construction soot immediately. While doing so in the living room, we turned all the furniture upside down and festermicided the bases of all the wood as protection from termites. She also cleaned all the windows and the sills are staying clean. So refreshing to have a cleaner abode!

Dan hung the porch chair hammock. He also built and put the shelves in the bodega and happily filled them with tools, including gardening supplies, finally emptying out our dining area which has served as a temporary shop for these past nine months.

We spent one half day making a visit to the INM office in Córdoba to start our yearly visa process. Doesn't seem like a whole year has passed since we became official Residentes of Méxíco.  We were given a list of the items we needed for the visa, and got our tiny pictures that are needed. We go back next week. We took a bus for the first time in quite a while since it is really more convenient than a car for downtown city stuff. We walked around downtown Córdoba doing a variety of shopping. We popped into El Borrego, a store there that is known for its cured ham. We bought some and later found it too dry, though the flavor was good. We also bought some olive loaf which Carmen loves, except that she insists that this was like eating sawdust. Dan thought it tasted a bit like liverwurst. We also bought some swiss cheese that was fantastic, well worth another stop at this store.

We checked out tire stores on the bus trip into the city, and later in the week got four new tires on our car. We were told before driving here from the US that we needed new tires, but we waited. This set should last us a long time, as we don't put very many miles on the vehicle.

We spent a few hours wandering the flower and plant areas in town, trying to decide what plants we wanted here. So amazing to have all the tropicals and subtropicals as options that were just dreams when we lived back in the north of the US. However, we simply do not have room for one of everything, so decisions have to be made.  Some of the orchids we purchased earlier are blooming, and we just couldn;t resist buying a passiona fruit to vine up over the walls above the new terraza.

Our new clothes dryer has needed the fuel orifice changed over from natural gas to propane, so we had not yet installed it in the laundry room. A call to the Electrolux parts department on Thursday, to order the conversion kit, turned up the welcome news that the company would do this free of charge—we should expect a call within 48 hours to arrange for the service visit. Saturday three men showed up unannounced to do the change and they were here an hour and a half working on it, disassembling the dryer to access the gas jet down inside the bottom of the machine. Dan had to do some rewiring for the dryer, since the neutral line was the hot one (so hard to tell as Mexican electricians ignore any semblance of color coding of the conductors), and also make a ferreteria run for some gas pipe fittings. We were also thankful that they hoisted the dryer up in place on top of the washer, into the bracket that Dan had crafted for the stacking. The planned connection for the exhaust vent, snaking up the back of the dryer, over to and around the corner of the laundry behind the appliances and out the wall, all made up of rigid 4” sheet metal tubing which we cut and crimped to fit, worked out just as conceived. The installers asked if Dan was an engineer, seeing how compactly the laundry installation was planned.

The bananas Ania and Frank cut from one of their many trees and gave to us sunday are still thinking about ripening. Actually they are plantains so they can be cooked or eaten raw.