1 Comment from the old blog:

At October 10, 2008 11:21 AM,  1st Mate said…

I’ve found the same thing to be true; every time we have stalled or broken down, in town or out in the desert, someone has come by and offered to help. Sometimes we get a whole crowd, all offering different opinions, which makes it really interesting. But they’ll go find us a mechanic, whatever we need. And then on the highways, there’s always the Green Angels, those road warriors who come to the rescue.

ATM Ate My Card… But Kind Mexicans Got Our Car Going is a post from: Mexico with Heart - Living, Traveling, and Retiring in Mexico

This one offers a challenge too. You might logically think you were supposed to stop before going through the light, but nobody was doing that. Maybe the stop sign is left over from before the light arrived.

Mexican Directional Signs is a post from: Mexico with Heart - Living, Traveling, and Retiring in Mexico

I’ll start with one of the joys: we’ve been back home in Mexico over a month now, and Kelly finally managed to get rid of the algae in the swimming pool. It took a lot of experimenting and learning about the complexities of pool maintenance. I took my first dip yesterday and it was great!

But the real saga here is our domestic water. There have been so many events that I asked Kelly to write it up. Here is his account:

It is ironic that while we have been having massive rainfall (about 3″ one night recently), our gravity-fed domestic water storage system has been running dry because no city water has flowed through our pipes for about a week. Why? Well, our neighbor Maria said she thought that the city water was off, so I figured that we would just wait some; it usually returns within a day or two when that happens. But then Maria also said that the workmen down at the corner, four houses down the block, wanted to change our water line because it was interfering with a planned sidewalk.

Several days ago I talked to the men working on the wall down by the corner and asked about our water line, and they said that it was buried with debris from their work, and would be accessible in a few days. This means that the valve that controls our water is also buried under a heap of debris, so we don’t really know if it is open or closed. Obviously, this could be the reason why we don’t have water.

Today I noticed that the our tinaco (storage tank) was about a day away from being empty, so the situation was getting serious. I decided to pump some water from the lower cistern (aljibe) into the upper tinaco…something we have done many times. I flipped the switch on the pump, but no action…just a hum. Not good! I fiddled with the pump some, enough to realize that the armature seems to be frozen, probably from lack of use and the recent high humidity.

OK, I thought, I’ll go down to the corner with a shovel and dig until I find the water pipe and valve to discover if it is on or off. This was actually pretty easy, because all of the rain had washed the dirt away from the valve handle, and it was clearly off. Great…mystery solved…I’ll just turn it back on and see if we have city water.

YES! There is water spraying all over when I turn it on. There is a large smashed area on the PVC pipe where a stone had probably toppled on it during the work on the wall. The workmen’s natural solution was to turn off the valve and resume their work, which buried the whole mess.

Now I have a pipe to repair, which fortunately I happen to have the parts to do. I decide to dig the whole affair down as far as I can to protect it from further damage, and replace the broken section of pipe.

Soon I can turn the water back on to see if we have water at our house again. When I turn on the faucet at the bottom of our property there is nothing. Bummer. But then when I tried the valve to the aljibe, there was water. Go figure…it turned out the the hose on the faucet was crimped.

Great. Now I need to make sure that we are actually getting water into the tinaco, so I climb the ladder to take a look. I can’t hear running water, which is not a good sign. I peer in, and there is no running water.

OK, so then I checked the faucet right below the tinaco, and, sure enough, there is water. So I connect a hose to this faucet and run it up to the top of the tinaco…and there is no water there! It turns out that there isn’t enough water pressure to get all the way to the top of the tinaco, which at the highest point of our property…there only enough pressure to go about half way up the tank.

This is actually not all that unusual either, since in the late afternoon, our water pressure often diminishes noticeably. The solution at this point is to wait until tomorrow morning when we will likely have better water pressure, and we will be happily back to normality…whatever that is.

Well, the next morning there still was not enough water pressure to get to the top of the tinaco. I decided to see about repairing the pump, which meant disconnecting it from the pipes and getting it out where it would be accessible. I was able to manually turn the motor armature enough, so that when I turned the switch on again it whirred into action! So then all I had to do was reassemble the plumbing, prime the pump, and bingo…we had water pumping from the aljibe into the tinaco.

Now we can just pray that the the city water pressure returns to a reasonable level so the whole system will work automatically again.

[Update: Our prayers were answered the next day.]

Comments from the old blog:

• jose said…

  viva mexico!

• Anonymous said…

  Oh yes, water woes. Well my water was off and the power too, well I had just bought the home. We kept taking buckets out of the aljibs and it never efilled. After a few trips to the Chapala municipal office, we found that there was a broken pipe in the street and I had to pay for the pipe as well as 500 pesos labor even though it was in the street. So i did it. There hadn´t been water service on the property for 6 months to a year. The property always got a water bill. I wonder if I´ll get a credit? Probably not.

• I said…

  Guess I will echo Jose: Viva Mexico! So far, in my experience and the experience of many other foreigners here in Mexico, the truly amazing hassles that can and do occur (and not necessarily at convenient times) are more than outweighed by the graciousness and warmth of the people and other plusses of living in Mexico.
  Your mileage may vary!

Mexican Domestic Water: Woes and Joys is a post from: Mexico with Heart - Living, Traveling, and Retiring in Mexico

Just about the minute we heard the first raindrops, we heard a loud popping noise from down the street, and there went our electricity. We sat on the porch and watched the storm till we got cold… for the first time since the last storm… and then we came in and puttered around a while by candlelight.

I couldn’t reach the electric company by phone last night but I did this morning. The woman said it would be about an hour and a half. Kelly decided to hang out down the street near the pole and talk to the repairmen when they came. He took something to read, luckily, because they turned up about four hours later, after Kelly had chatted with several children who were curious what a gringo was doing sitting on the sidewalk.

Our Mexican neighbors think it’s great that we call, since few of them have phones and they feel that we are taken more seriously. Kelly did talk with the repairman, who said it could have been lightning or a bird, but he did replace something.

So we’ll see what happens the next time it rains. Could that be today? It’s still partly cloudy. On the other hand, tomorrow and Friday are holidays of sorts, so maybe it will be one of them.

Power Out and Back On is a post from: Mexico with Heart - Living, Traveling, and Retiring in Mexico

Not long after that, he heard a chain saw being used about a block away. He wandered down and found a Mexican man handling it very deftly. Kelly asked the guy if he’d be interested in taking down our tree. The guy came by after work that evening and took a look. He and Kelly made a deal: he’d be here Saturday afternoon around 3 PM, and he’d do the job for 300 pesos, about $27. The guy could have the wood.

So he turned up yesterday afternoon, with another man, a younger man, and two school-aged boys. They all got to work, and Kelly got out his camera. Here, work is underway on the sawing.

A closeup of two men with the guide rope:

And here’s the best picture… Kelly caught the tree in midair! (His camera did, I mean.)

Our view IS nicer.

We Take Down a Dead Tree is a post from: Mexico with Heart - Living, Traveling, and Retiring in Mexico

We’ve heard various rumors:

• One pump is out… no, it’s two pumps that are out, one on the west side of town and another one.
• It will be fixed tomorrow (which is a holiday). It won’t be fixed soon.
• They took a pump to Guadalajara (less than an hour away and Mexico’s second-largest city) but it didn’t get fixed and had to be sent to Guanajuato (a small city several hours away). This seems odd to me, but then rumors often do.
• The parts of the town at higher elevations are without water because there’s not enough pressure… or the whole town of 5000 people is out.

So what do people do in a case like this? The small city of Jocotepec, which is the equivalent of the county seat for our town of San Juan Cosala, has been sending over water trucks. My guess is that people here know how to make do with way less water when they have to, even if it means dirtier clothes, etc. Virtually everyone has a water tank on their roof.

Kelly and I are among the wealthy when it comes to water. Our new tinaco, or black water tank at the top of our quarter-acre, is an extra-large one, holding 2500 liters which is 660 gallons. At the bottom of our land we have an aljibe or inground water tank, which can hold a lot of water. We don’t know how much, but we guess about 10 times the tinaco. Of course, we do have to have electricity to pump up to the tinaco, but that’s been on all week. Well, except for two five-minute interludes.

As a further backup, we have the swimming pool, which we estimate holds about 11,000 gallons.

We normally do almost all the watering of our gardens and lawns directly from the town water system. We let it go till today, except for a little hand-watering, but many plants looked really thirsty so Kelly hooked up our hoses to each other and watered everything that needed it, not including the lawns. He was encouraged that he only used about 300 gallons.

Also, yesterday a Mexican friend told us about someone he knows in Jocotepec who has a water truck and sells water. We may get a load for the aljibe, which is currently about half full.

Water is about as basic as you can get!

Water Woes in a Small Mexican Town is a post from: Mexico with Heart - Living, Traveling, and Retiring in Mexico

While we were there, the sky got darker and Kelly and I thought we’d better get on back because it looked like rain. But our friends said they’d run us home if it did rain, so we stayed.

Good thing we did, because almost immediately the winds picked up and a major downpour began. Not just rain… hail too! Thunder and lightning were in the mountains just above. It was spectacular. With the strong wind, dozens of lemons fell from our friends’ tree just outside the window. Things quieted down after a while, but it rained for about an hour. The electricity flickered off and on but didn’t stay out long.

When they drove us home, it was a different story. Our street once again was without power, for about the fifth time since we moved here. As we walked up through our front yard with a flashlight, there weren’t a lot of large branches down but there were leaves everywhere. Kelly noticed about half an inch of hail still on the lawn; we later heard that it hasn’t hailed here in over 40 years.

Our dog Larry was exceedingly glad to see us, as he splashed through the water on the kitchen floor.

What was water doing on the kitchen floor?

We quickly lit our three votive candles, recently purchased after another night when the lights were out, and discovered that the kitchen floor resembled a lake in parts. It had come in the back door. From some plastic bins left outside, we guess it had rained between two and four inches, and a lot of that seemed to have come horizontally.

I’ve never mopped by candlelight before, but I did that while Kelly cleaned out the water that had flooded his toolbox in our little side porch.

We’ve got the phone number of the CFE (Comision Federal de Electricidad) permanently on our bulletin board, but nobody answered. Well, it was Easter.

In the morning, there was no power. We surveyed the damage and spent the morning cleaning up. Luckliy, our large water storage tank at the top of the land had over 600 gallons in it. No more would be added till the power was back on, but 600 gallons is a lot.

Here, Larry regards the yard from the porch:

Our pool was the worst of it, filled with debris. We cleaned out a lot but couldn’t run the filter because it requires electricity.

I called the CFE and they said there were many areas without power. It would be a while. So we moved the food from our refrigerator to the one in our RV, after setting it up on propane.

As the day wore on, I noticed how my mind kept assuming we had power, with little thoughts like:

• Guess I’ll do a load of laundry with all these rags and towels.
• Kelly’s not on the porch so he’s probably at his computer.
• I’ll put this avacado from a neighbor’s tree in the fridge, as it seems perfect.
• I’d better email my sister that my email is down.

I’ve been without power many times in my life, but somehow I found this time more disquieting. Maybe it’s because this disruption echoed the hurricanes of last year. We had watched on TV how people in several countries coped with flooding and power outages. The Mexican infrastructure is challenged at the best of times. How long would our power be out? How long would we be offline?

Kelly took a bus to Ajijic for some errands, and when he returned, he was annoyed that the power line on the other side of the highway had been fixed but ours hadn’t. We thought maybe the CFE might think there were no problems remaining in our area, so I called again. I got a recording which I couldn’t understand. An hour later, I got a real person and she was very good about asking exactly where the problem was. Encouraging.

After dark, Kelly took our cellphone down to the motorhome to charge it. Just as he was doing that, the lights came back on. It was a bit over 24 hours. I’m grateful but a bit more wary about assuming that everything will work.

Disruptions and Infrastructure in Mexico is a post from: Mexico with Heart - Living, Traveling, and Retiring in Mexico

The crew who’ve been working on our fence took on this job as well as the fence. They poured a cement slab just the right size, on neighboring undeveloped land right by the fence-to-be. (Did they ask anyone’s permission? Ya gotta be kidding!) After it had cured for a few days, and with the old tank completely drained, nine strong guys from teenagers to maybe their 40s gathered around the tank and heaved it onto said undeveloped land. As so often happens in Mexico, a use was found for it. They were going to break it up (ugh, and likely breathe some asbestos fibers) in order to take it to the dump in their truck when a guy came along and said he could use it as is. They warned him it had a small leak but he was going to use it for gardening and didn’t care, so off it went. I didn’t hear the details of how he got it away.

UPDATE: Now we see our water tank whenever we go to Ajijic, as it ended up at a nursery beside the highway. It’s lying on its side still, not yet in use.

Then they put the cement slab in place and put our new water lightweight water tank on it. All but two plumbers left. They have both worked in the US and Kelly said they did a US-quality job of plumbing… he was keeping a pretty close eye on it.

So within three hours, the job was done, and very nicely.

Water tank, 1.

Today I had a dental appointment at 2:00 PM at a place near the highway that runs along beside Lake Chapala. I left the house a little before 1:00 PM, to be sure I would be on time. As I walked down toward the carretera (highway), I saw a bus go by in the direction I was going. Hmm, could be bad news. But within about ten minutes another one came along, a small bus.

Now there are “big buses” and “small buses” that run along the highway from Jocotepec to Chapala, or some of them go to Guadalajara without going through the town of Chapala. The big buses are higher and more comfortable, a typical Mexican second class bus, and the small buses are more like school buses (not minivans). They cost the same (well under a dollar for anywhere I’ve gone lakeside), but the small ones leave the highway in Ajijic and again in San Antonio Tlayacapan, to meander around the town streets and stop for passengers frequently.

Since I was in good time, it didn’t bother me to be on a small bus. I got a good seat on the side where I could gaze out at Lake Chapala quite a lot, and the time passed pleasantly. When I got to the dentist’s office, I was early so I went to a nearby shop and while I was there, the power went out.

The dentist was without power too. He was chatting with some other people and explained to me that he couldn’t really do anything without power, not even raise or lower his chair. I pointed into another office where the lights were on and said that the power was back. “In there but not in my part of the building,” he replied. The power had been out for three hours the day before, he said, adding that the electric company had been notified again today.

The anticipation before a dental visit isn’t that much fun, so I kept hoping that the power would come back on. But after waiting around a while, I took his advice to reschedule and he found me an appointment for tomorrow at about the same time. I caught a big bus back home, noticing that the ride took about half the time of the small bus.

Dentist, 0.

Water tank 1, Dentist 0 is a post from: Mexico with Heart - Living, Traveling, and Retiring in Mexico

WATER: Our realtor took my husband Kelly to the place in our town where you pay the water bill, and by presenting several documents, Kelly managed to get the bill in his name. He also learned there was almost a 50% discount if you paid in advance for a year, and in our case that was around $100 US for the year for unmetered water. He paid it. With lots of gardens and a swimming pool, we will be using more water than we did in Colorado, though over time we will make the gardens more ecological.

We have since found out that in our town (San Juan Cosala, by Lake Chapala) the town water is not available 24/7. Lately it’s been more like 8 to 10 hours a day, often morning to late afternoon. Yesterday I read in El Ojo del Lago, a monthly free magazine in English, that “the town of San Juan Cosala is dealing with water distribution problems related to plugged-up or broken pipes and hoses. While the overall plan is to switch from hoses to more durable pipes, for now the community has periods of time when water is not available.”

Luckily, we have two water storage tanks on the property.

ELECTRICITY: We still haven’t succeeded in getting this in our names, but we know where the office is in the nearby town of Jocotepec. They need a copy of our multi-page deed to the house, which we got last week, and we need to mark a form with those little circles that look like the meter.

The power goes out from time to time, and local people tell us it happens more when it rains. We had a lovely rain last weekend, and sure enough the power went out at 7:30 PM on Saturday night. We happened to have the phone number to report outages, and a very courteous woman took our report about an hour after the outage.

The power was still out the next morning, when we set off to walk to the hot spring about a mile from here. One of our Mexican neighbors, who hadn’t spoken to us much before then, pleaded with us to make a fuss with the federal commission for electricity, or CFE, which administers the power. He said they would listen to us where they wouldn’t listen to them, ordinary Mexicans. He had wanted to watch a movie on TV the night before and was unhappy to have missed it. He was even unhappier that a scorpion had bitten his thumb in the dark night when he hadn’t been able to see it. (When I walk from our bed to the bathroom in the night, I use a flashlight! We’ve found two scorpions in the house so far. One this morning was in two parts and our cat was playing with the parts. She may well have killed it.)

When we got back from the hot springs, the power was on.

GARBAGE: The truck supposedly goes by every day but don’t hold your breath. Or you may want to hold your breath when you go down the street when the truck hasn’t been around for a few days! Garbage collection is free, paid for by property taxes, but tipping the garbage men now and then is recommended. We will when we get a chance.

PROPANE: Hard to miss on this one. A private company, Zeta Gas, has trucks roaming the neighborhoods from very early in the morning. Each truck is equiped with a loudspeaker which blares out the sound of car horn and ZETA GA-A-A-A-S! on and on. The propane comes in tall cylinders which cost about $30 US, and they take your old tank. We have two tanks but a lot of local people have one and so they are out of propane til the truck comes by.

BOTTLED DRINKING WATER: There are trucks from different companies that deliver this in roughly 5-gallon bottles. We’ve made an arrangement with a little store around the corner. The husband or hardworking 16-year-old son (NOT an oxymoron in Mexico!) brings us the water as needed. We like getting to know this family. A significant percentage of the bottled water sold in Mexico is sold by the Coca-Cola company, the Victoria brand of water.

TELEPHONE: Telmex, the phone company for land lines, told me none were available here. I’ve since heard stories where sometimes they are available for Mexicans more easily than foreigners. We are happy enough without a monthly bill and with a Mexican cellphone. Our US Verizon cellphone with the North American plan is what we call out on… the Mexican number is just so local people can call us.

INTERNET: We have our own satellite system that travels on our motorhome or at present is in the backyard. I wonder what we would do without that and without a landline phone: a friend in that situation in another part of Mexico got a Mexican satellite system much like ours.

TELEVISON: We brought our US satellite setup down with us, but it doesn’t work this far south. So we cancelled it and now have a Canadian setup which we got here in the Lake Chapala area and are greatly enjoying. Most American shows we want (like the Daily Show) are available. We are figure skating fans, and last week appreciated the much more extensive Canadian coverage of the world championships.

Utilities at our Mexican House is a post from: Mexico with Heart - Living, Traveling, and Retiring in Mexico

I took the laptop to one of the local repair shops and the owner  looked at my laptop within 10 minutes of my arrival and let me sit in his workshop and watch him. (This is typical of the kind of response we’ve gotten from so many different kinds of service here in Mexico. In the US, I’d have left the computer and gotten a call eventually.)

It turned out to be a motherboard problem, and he described my options. I could order a new motherboard from Dell but with shipping costs and Mexican import customs costs, it would cost nearly what a new basic Dell would be. It just so happened that a big Dell exposition was going on right now in Guadalajara, so I could go there the next day and order just exactly what I wanted. Mexican Dells can be ordered with English keyboards and versions of Windows, but I’d have to wait about a month for it to be built in Panama and then shipped to my doorstep via UPS, Fedex, or (reputed to be the best here) DHL.

“So I have to get a new computer!” I exclaimed happily. I do love computers!

Yesterday a friend  helped me to extract what I could from my hard drive, using a little case he put my hard drive into which had USB connections. I got all the most important recent files before the hard drive itself died too. (I’ve blogged before about the “good bad luck” Kelly and I seem to have.)

Was it the fluctuating Mexican power, even though we use surge protectors and Kelly had created a grounded circuit? Didn’t seem to be. Destiny has decreed it’s time for me to get a new computer.

After some time online, I decided not to go into the Guadalajara expo. Kelly has a widescreen Toshiba that I’ve been jealous of since he got it last year. I could get one locally but it would cost over twice what one costs in the US, as there are steep customs duties.  For now, it’s back to sharing a laptop with Kelly. We did this last year without murdering each other!

UPDATE: I ordered one online in the US and friend brought it down a few weeks later. Excellent!

My Laptop Dies is a post from: Mexico with Heart - Living, Traveling, and Retiring in Mexico