We interrupt this Mexican blog...

...for a bit of unhappy news about the United States.

A man whom Kelly and I both greatly admire, John Graham, founder of the Giraffe Project, stayed in our home some years ago when he gave an inspiring keynote speech at a conference. The Giraffe Project honors people who stick their necks out for the common good, with considerable personal sacrifice, and it does publicity to schools on what these giraffes have done. I remember John telling the story of being one of the last people saved from a stranded ship. As he had faced the possibility of death, he had decided to make his life more about serving the highest good. The Giraffe Project came out of that decision.

A couple of years ago I nominated someone to be a giraffe. Chellie Kew has devoted her life in recent years to the orphans of the AIDS crisis in Africa. I filled out a long form, talked about her with a staff member of the Giraffe Project, and was very happy when she became an official giraffe.

So when I saw that I'd received an email from the Giraffe Project last night, I was pleased. I love reading about what the giraffes are doing.

I didn't love this email. John Graham was en route to see his grandchildren when he was not allowed to board the plane he had reservations on.

His name had been put on the no-fly list. Seemingly there is no way off the list.

In a compelling article called Who's Watching the Watch List? John outlines what happened. Near the end he says, "I'm mobilizing everything I've got to challenge the government on this issue, in a country that I love and have served. Whatever your politics, it's your fight too."

Hmm, this may turn out to be good news after all.

Getting ready for Mexico with my new MP3 player

A few days ago my new MP3 recorder and player arrived in the mail, and I've been playing with it every chance I get. Right now it's recording a cassette I bought some 25 years ago.

I didn't get an iPod, the most famous of all MP3 players. Nope, I did a lot of research and ended up getting a second-hand iriver H320 from eBay. That 20 means it has a 20 gigabyte hard drive. It's already out of production and thenew iriver H340 has double the storage! I chose this brand and model especially for two reasons: because I can copy our large collection of old cassettes directly to it without going through my computer and because it's said to have exceptional sound quality for all forms of recording. That ties in with Mexico and makes up for its interface being not very intuitive. I'm also using it to practice Spanish lessons.

I will use this MP3 recorder/player for this blog. I look forward to standing around listening to street musicians and taping a little for the blog. Also, there were a number of times when we were in Mexico when we were going somewhere and it would have been fun to have a running commentary about what was going on around me... better yet if Kelly was taking photos at the same time! So when we go back, there will be sound at times here!

Actually, even before we go back, I expect to post a bit of Mexican sound. We were in Michoacan in 1979 and taped some kids talking and singing. It's on a cassette somewhere, probably on the shelves here in my office. I just took a look at all the cassettes there and decided that finding it is going to have to wait for another day.

Back to Platiquemos Español practice

Yesterday I got back into working on my Spanish. It felt good! I have a new MP3 player, which I will no doubt blog about soon, and I put my Platiquemos Español lessons on it. So when I went out for a walk before dinner, it was easy to slip the little thing in my pocket.

It was a little less easy to keep up a steady stream of repeating words as I began my walk... we live at over 8,000 feet and my usual walk begins with a long uphill stretch!

I decided to start over at the very beginning, even though I had done several units while we were in Mexico. The bits I reviewed yesterday were mostly pronunciation, and I noticed how badly I pronounce the r sound in Spanish. But I did have most of the vowels decently enough. Adelante!

Here's a blog from Mexico City

I've been poking around the internet, looking for more interesting blogs on Mexico. Clicking on the title of this entry will take you to one written by Jon Clark, an American living in Mexico City. He's been living in various parts of Mexico since 2002.To give you a bit of the flavor, some of his entry titles are

Mexico and Blacks
Dia de la madre
Mexico City Mosquitoes
Fun with visa application
One for The Ethicist
From Mexico City, Secretary Rice on Hezbollah

He also has photos up at flickr... here's the link to Jon Clark's flickr photos.

Indecision in the Hart household

A lot of conversation and thought went into deciding that since we are planning to live in Mexico for some time, we would sell our house here in Colorado, a decision we made early this month.

But it hasn't been feeling terrific.

What about the dog, the cats, our stuff? What about this small town community we've been a part of for nine years? Where would we come back to in the US if we decide to live here rather than Mexico later? I've been in tears a few times, and Kelly has had his problems too.

Night before last, we were talking about maybe building another house here in Crestone in the future. Kelly said maybe we should think more about keeping this one. We agreed to sleep on it and talk in the morning.

Well, he slept on it but I woke up around 1 AM and that was the end of sleep for me till dawn. When I realized I was wide awake, I had a pretty good time. I got up and sat in a living room window seat, where I could watch our cats playing in their yard in the bright moonlight. I realized how good it felt to think of keeping this place, at least until we spend more time in Mexico and see what we really want down there.

With that pretty clear in my mind, I thought maybe I could go back to sleep. But no. So I went up to my office and started a blog on dog training, especially clicker training. I've been working with our dog Larry to see if he could be easier to manage and thus a better candidate for Mexico.

Kelly and I talked in the morning and we decided not to decide. For now. He pulled up the FOR SALE sign in front of our house, and I called the local paper and cancelled a classified that hadn't come out yet.

If you've been reading this blog, you know how much Kelly and I love Mexico and Bernal. We also love our home and community in the US. Can we figure out a way to have our cake and eat it too?

We'll see.

Getting ready to sell is a lot of work!

Lately we've been painting, fixing up, sorting our possessions, and so on, in preparation for selling our house. If you haven't done it lately, I'm sure you can easily imagine that it's a lot of work. My thoughts of Mexico have mostly been pushed aside to tackle all this. Other than reading the news about Hurricane Emily hitting Cancun.

So if I'm not here every day, you will know why.

IF you think you might sell your house and move to Mexico -- or to anywhere -- I'd recommend getting a good long head start on the project! Specially if you are a packrat. I have tendencies in that direction.

Four Mexican-American teenagers

I'm still catching up on my magazine reading from being away six months, and this afternoon I skimmed through the April issue of Wired. There's a story there, the tale of four teenage boys in West Phoenix who had a couple of dedicated high school science teachers. The team took on MIT and other colleges in a competition to build an underwater robot. The kids are labeled the mechanics man, the genius, the leader, and the tether man.

I won't tell you how the story came out, as you can read La Vida Robot, online. But they did well enough for the account of their ups and downs to be worth a story in a major magazine.

The article talks about the aspirations these teenagers have... to go to college, or a career in the military. But all four of them face formidable obstacles: they are undocumented, aka illegal aliens. All of them came to the US from Mexico as younger children. They are ineligible for scholarships and count as out-of-state if they try to go to a state college or university in Arizona. The story ends with one of the students hanging sheetrock to save up $50,000 to study engineering at Arizona State University.

Well, I went online to see if I could find out more. I was pleased to see that the whole story is there, and even more pleased to see that a scholarship fund has been started. I made a small donation.

I was wondering why this story happened to move me so much. Maybe it's because when I was in high schoool, I was something of a science whiz kid myself. I competed for and got a summer job programming mainframe computers for the government when I was 16, complete with confidential security clearance. As it turned out, I didn't stay in hard science but that's because of choices I made later at Stanford. In other words, I've been privileged!

I hope opportunities that suit their talents unfold for these kids.

Want an eco-house in Colorado?

UPDATE JULY 22: WE AREN'T QUITE SURE SO THE HOUSE IS OFF THE MARKET.

Ours is officially for sale! I realize that most people reading this are more interested in where we are going -- Mexico -- than in where we are now -- Colorado -- but you never know. Maybe you know somebody.

How to have it all? At least the important parts?

Last night, I was tired when we went to bed but then my mind clicked into a wide awake and clear state. This happens to me from time to time, and since I didn't have anything major on the schedule this morning, I just lay there and thought for an hour or more.

I had received a nice email yesterday from a Mexican friend, asking when we would be back in Bernal. I had inwardly groaned at the impossibility of telling how long it would take to sell our house, arreglar our business (that's a Spanish verb I like, more or less meaning get it together), visit family around the US, and so on, and I had answered her that we didn't know but it seemed the earliest would likely be November.

So as I lay there thinking, I considered how sometimes I feel pulled to Mexico, and at other times I am filled with so much love for this Colorado community that I hope the summer will never end. (We are not near the big forest fire currently going on outside Pueblo... well, we are pretty close in terms of miles but we are on the other side of the mountains and not even getting any smoke in the air.)

Pushmi-Pullyu. What do I want? Well, I want it all. "All" in this case means involvement in both cultures, Mexican and English-speaking.

Suddenly I understood more deeply why so many Americans and Canadians are drawn to San Miguel de Allende, the Lake Chapala area near Guadalajara, the San Carlos region not that far south of Arizona, and other places with concentrations of Americans and Canadians. It's how they are getting it all. I hadn't seen this so clearly before, as we so much enjoyed being immersed in Mexican culture for our six months last winter. Bernal had at the most three other Americans in residence while we were there.

I thought about Carl Franz and Lorena Havens, authors of the classic book, People's Guide to Mexico (the link is to my review of it). They have lived and traveled all over Mexico, but a while ago they settled in the Lake Chapala area, speaking of the very thing that I was mulling over: having ties in both cultures.

I came to no conclusions and eventually I slept.

Friends moving to Mexico today

Today an online friend who got her FM-3 in the US and her Mexican husband are starting their long drive from the northern US to the part of Mexico where his mother, siblings, and other relatives live. They are going to a town of about a thousand people, perhaps a couple of hours from any large cities, and they will start out living in a very modest cement house. My friend speaks good Spanish and is a zestful person.

What an adventure! I don't expect they will be online for quite some time, but this morning I'm thinking about them a lot. Please join me in wishing them well!

A Friend's Mexican website

Recently our friend John Lowman, whom we met a couple of years ago in Ciudad Victoria, sent me the link to a new site he's beginning on Mexico not far from Texas. He and his wife Kay have made many friends and explored many interesting spots that are easy to reach for a short trip from the border. He's creating guided tours to some of those places.

His site is at www.geocities.com/mexicanadventures/

Seems like it might be just the cup of tea for some of the Texans and winter Texans! If he doesn't have just what you want, his email is on the site. Don't hesitate to tell him what you might want and see if he can help you.

Here's another blog on Mexico

Billie, who often posts helpful comments here, sent me a link to another blog on Mexico. It's at http://mexiblog.blogspot.com/ and is set in San Miguel de Allende with lots of photos. I specially liked the double-decker hammocks and one of a person behind a cactus.

Blogger Don and dog Greg are enjoying their lives there. When I saw comments about Wimbledon (I agree about Federer but thought Venus' comeback in beating Sharapova was tremendously moving) and dogs, I knew I had at least three things in common with Don... Mexico, being a tennis fan, and dogs. Oh yeah, and cats. I didn't resonate with his comments on what Mexican women and men care about, but they were interesting reading and at least a little tongue in cheek, I imagine.

Makes me homesick for Mexico, but that's a good thing if it will keep me moving faster on the 1001 projects here in the US. Yesterday I made some good progress on a dog project. Larry, our nine-year-old mixed breed (Australian Cattle dog, Chow, and at least a touch of German Shepherd) would not be an easy traveler in Mexico, as he barks at everything and goes into frenzies at times. I got an excellent book on clicker training for calming aggressive dogs and began working with him. He already loves clicker training.. well, the treats at least... so I am hopeful. He will have to show some real improvement before he can be considered for Mexico.

If you're interested in dogs and don't know about clicker training, I have a whole website on positive methods of training dogs. Here's a link to the page on clicker training dogs.

A bit bogged down on learning Spanish

I was going to dig right into our Platiquemos Espanol CDs while getting the house ready to sell, but it isn't happening... yet. Too much of that house-project work requires my full attention.

I found the old college textbook I had for learning Spanish and I am reading its lessons as a review. That's easier. But I don't think I'm learning much... the text will go in our garage sale pile when I'm done skimming through it.

Oh well. One of these days I'll get back to the process of really learning Spanish. Kelly's at least as busy as I am and I don't think he's been practicing Spanish either.

I'm still greatly enjoying the ease of speaking English. It sure shows me how important it is to me to be able to speak freely with people. I suspect that whether Mexico or another Spanish-speaking country would work out for me as a long-term home is directly tied to how well I do in the language. This isn't necessarily true for everyone, but as a writer and a conversation-lover, it is for me.

Now that's motivation.

Our Independence Day Announcement

On Independence Day, we enjoyed our small-town parade and saw lots of friends. It seemed the fitting time to announce what we had recently decided for sure...

We are going to sell our home in Colorado.

This doesn't mean that we are going to buy a place in Mexico anytime real soon. We aren't yet clear about that. But when we go back to our rental house in Mexico in a few months, it will become our home base.

Why are we selling, when we love this rural mountain community so much? Ah, that's why we announced it on Independence Day! By not having a mortgage, property taxes, property owners' association annual dues, homeowners insurance, electricity, water, and propane bills, we will be financially independent.

That's a term that has quite a pleasing ring to it! It may suggest a larger income -- a WAY larger income -- than we will have, but we'll be fine between our social security and the income from our business. We are both looking forward to seeing what kinds of choices we make in our new life. We won't exactly be retiring in Mexico but we'll be living in Mexico in a perhaps semi-retired state.

It always amazes me how many people could do the same thing but don't see it for themselves. One friend of ours bemoaned how much he is spending on health insurance per month. It's more than what it costs us to live in Mexico!

Happy Independence Day!

Mexican fish photos transformed

Every now and then I play around a while in Photoshop Elements, learning more of its features. It has a whole bunch of filters, and the other day I found a photo we'd taken at Media Luna, a lovely lake outside of Rio Verde in the state of San Luis Potosi. (I say 'we" because Kelly and I shared a camera on this trip and we don't always remember later who took some of the pictures.) So then I began trying filters. A lot of them weren't interesting with this rather monochrome image, but here are are few I liked. This filter is called dry brush:


















And here is glass:



















This filter has the inelegant name of plastic wrap but I like how the fish become emphasized:




















Here is solarize, which changed the leaf colors and made the fish pale:




















And the last is watercolor:



















Nice to think of cool water and little fishes on a hot summer day.

Would you listen to sound files or watch online videos?

I'm beginning to consider what electronic toys I want to have with me when we go back to Mexico... an enjoyable way to daydream about that return. I'm going to have my own digital camera, probably a smallish one so I'll carry it around a lot but with enough megapixels that I can really get serious with the images if I want to print them on paper.

I'm going to have a cellphone with a US number, as I blogged a while ago. That plan from Verizon (gotta be Verizon as it's the only company that gets a signal in our remote Colorado town) doesn't include a cellphone, so I'll be buying something. One thing I'd like to be able to do is make short sound recordings, for example of street musicians, or of me walking along some fascinating place and describing what I'm seeing around me. My thought is I'd add these to the blog. I'm guessing that some cellphones can do this with enough quality, but I haven't done my homework. I'm looking forward to a cellphone with a bit of a camera too, for blogging.

Kelly will likely have a small digital camcorder with him. After years of being a professional videographer, he hasn't done much with it lately and is looking forward to getting back to it. We'd be able to put short videos up on the site.

I'd love to hear from anyone out there... does this appeal? And do you have any equipment recommendations?

Your comments are welcome, either right on this blog entry or directly to me at rosana at mexico-with-heart dot com. I automatically get notified when people post here. Replies now or later are welcome, as it'll take me a while to get organized about all this.

Thanks in advance for any comments!