Mexico with Heart - Living, Traveling, and Retiring in Mexico » Weather & Climate

Hot Summer and Scorpions, Here by Lake Chapala

Rosana — Sat, 06 Jun 2009 20:18:42 +0000

It always surprises people in the US when I tell them that our hottest season is about now…. April, May, and early June, until the rainy season begins sometime in June.

It’s been plenty hot this year. Lately it’s been getting into the high 80s and low 90s every afternoon for weeks now. Being at about 5000 feet, it does cool down at night, into the high 50s or so, but our lows have been gradually rising. The net result is that our one-level brick house has been getting a bit warmer, day by day. I’m sitting at my computer now just after 8 in the morning, and it’s already rather warm here at my desk. Our big window fan is sucking in the fresh morning air from the yard, cooling things down a bit, at least with the nice air flow. We don’t need air conditioning.

I wouldn’t say this is any hotter than other years… memories are pretty subjective. We stay cool enough, most of the time. Our house is uphill enough from the town that we get whatever breezes come off Lake Chapala, about a kilometer away. We swim every afternoon now. Kelly has taken up wearing shorts regularly for the first time in his life! Who says people can’t change?

Once the rains begin, it cools down enough that we will start sleeping under blankets again, and we’ll get to stop watering the yards and garden so much. The highs will often be the high 70s and low to mid 80s, which I consider perfect.

Watering has been a challenge at times, because the city water was off for a couple of days. Getting enough water can be tricky at the end of the dry season, but part of the situation this year is that some new water mains are going in, a good thing in a town where the water system is sometimes called leaky. We take shorter showers and all that, but we did acquire a quarter-acre yard with lots of plantings. Everything is getting the minimum for now.

This is our first year with our vegetable gardens. We’ve had trouble starting seeds in the beds because of the midday heat, so we started seeds in yogurt containers and transplanted them. We’ve had great lettuce, just now trying to bolt. We’ve been eating lots of squash. We just pulled our broccoli plants yesterday, as we were getting more aphids than flowerets — these plants were great producers when it was cooler. Our tomatoes are still green but getting quite large. Our lemon tree keeps us in lemons, and we have some bananas coming along.

Now, about the scorpions…

They come out of the ground when it gets warm, and for whatever reasons, they love to come indoors. We spray, with some pet-friendly stuff, and that helps. But in recent weeks there has been at least one scorpion a week in the house. One week there were four, and I muttered about moving to Alaska.

This morning, we had just finished making the bed when Kelly said “Get the dogs away,” with an urgency in his voice. I figured it was a scorpion just from his tone of voice, before he even said the word. I called the dogs and got them outside. Kelly scooped the huge scorpion into our dishpan and flushed it.

This time was a little different, though — Kelly had been wearing just socks and he had felt a very slight sting. His foot showed nothing, though. He put our ice pack on the floor and rested his foot on it while he had his morning tea.

So he was lucky. I killed another one on the front porch just now.

And so it goes in our tropical paradise!

2 Comments from the old blog:

At May 12, 2008 12:41 PM, Steve Cotton said…

When I was on the coast in December, I looked at a very nice house that had just gone on the market. From all appearances, it looked like someone had just moved in the day before. It turned out I was correct. The woman, who had built the house as her dream home, moved in and was stung by a scorpion that very day. She immediately left, put the home on the market, and returned to her country. It is always sad to see dreams sitting dormnant — waiting to become someone else’s dream.
At May 12, 2008 8:06 PM, Rosana Hart said…

Now that’s a tale. Must be more behind it.

BTW, Steve, I appreciate your various comments on the blog even if I don’t always answer them. Warning: living in Mexico does not automatically mean a lazy life!

Hot Summer and Scorpions, Here by Lake Chapala is a post from: Mexico with Heart - Living, Traveling, and Retiring in Mexico

Old Timer Reflects on Waterspouts near Lake Chapala

Rosana — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 14:52:53 +0000

When this email by Gloria Mathai, who has lived in the Lake Chapala area since 1970, was forwarded to me by a friend, I wrote and got Gloria’s permission to post it here on my blog. She has seen a lot!

In my time here, there have been four serious trombas (waterspouts) in El Limon/San Juan Cosalá. The alluvial earth, when it’s saturated, is unstable. That area was studied by ecologists in the 70′s and deemed unsafe for building but, because of the gorgeous view, people acquired permits to build.

One week after one tromba hit high on the mountain in SJC,, my husband and I walked up the crusted river of mud. Looking for the path of least resistance, the river looked like a huge toboggan slide, up one side, down the other, carrying big trees by the roots. Rocks, the size of Volkswagons, were washed down and blocked the access road. Our friends couldn’t leave their house for 4 days. They had a meter of mud throughout the house and the swimming pool filled. The huge vertical scar remained up the mountain for years.

In Mescala, east of Chapala, there was a killer (people drowned in their beds) that struck in the night and washed out the access road. People in Ajijic and Chapala sent canned foods and blankets in by boat.

In 1982 a small tromba hit our house in San Pedro Tesistan after taking off roofs of houses by the lake. It came up our boundry line breaking huge branches, sounding like a train, opened up the corner of our 2nd story studio and deposited chayote vines from the farm next door inside. We couldn’t help but laugh when we saw it, the greenery hanging down prettily. Over 200 tejas (ceramic tiles) which capped our adobe garden wall just completely disappeared. We were fortunate to have such minimal damage.

National Geographic did a study of climates some years ago and declared ours are to be the 2nd best in the world! The 1st? Kenya, Africa. I feel I am fortunate to have lived here happily since 1970.

Old Timer Reflects on Waterspouts near Lake Chapala is a post from: Mexico with Heart - Living, Traveling, and Retiring in Mexico

Retiring in Mexico and Global Climate Change

Rosana — Thu, 28 May 2009 20:59:48 +0000

May 30, 2007 – What are these two topics doing together?

They’ve been on our minds during our northward trip from our home near Lake Chapala to Kelly’s childhood home in Idaho.

The day that we left Jalisco, we got into Mazatlan in the late afternoon and found a thirty-year-old Mexican hotel where we got a beachfront suite for about $75 US… this *is* the off season! It was fun to sit on our second floor balcony and watch the surf. And, we learned, the surf does sometimes come in very high, higher than it used to in the old days. Where we ate dinner, at a place a few blocks away, part of the beachside palapa restaurant had yellow plastic tape (think crime scene) blocking it off because the ocean had cracked a retaining wall.

Now I’m not saying that this city or any other coast city is a bad idea for retirement because of these little things. Beachside high-rise condos are going in like there’s no tomorrow… hmm, interesting phrase my subconscious chose. But since it is becoming clearer that our earth is changing, and with the rate of change not all that predictable, I would mull over any retirement decision regarding moving to a beach area. Are there hurricanes? Have they gotten stronger? Just things to include in your overall assessment of any area. I for one look at earthquake probabilities too, having been in enough quakes already.

The day after Mazatlan, we went to an absolutely charming town called Alamos, at about 1500 feet elevation in the southern part of the state of Sonora. I’ve long wanted to see it. It’s evidently in between two eco-systems, one being the Sonoran desert. I was quite taken with the town and will write more about it in other blog entries, with photos, as it’s a great place in many ways for retiring to Mexico. We were there for a day and a half, and I did my usual thing of asking everyone, Mexicans and foreigners, about the place and what it’s like to live there. It was plenty hot, and several Mexicans told me water is a problem there. That is to be expected at this time of year, with the rains due in a few weeks. People are resourceful and know how to conserve water. I understood someone to say that the town water is on one day, off the next. All this sounds pretty similar to what we deal with in San Juan Cosala at this time of year… but the average annual rainfall in our part of Jalisco is roughly three times what it is in Sonora.

I’m trying to make a fairly subtle point here. I do think it’s good to pay attention to potential climate change factors but I’m not saying “Don’t go” to any particular place. After all, you have to live someplace! Just don’t put all your eggs in a particular basket without considering things, including your own levels of tolerance for heat, drought, and uncertainty!

Retiring in Mexico and Global Climate Change is a post from: Mexico with Heart - Living, Traveling, and Retiring in Mexico

Climate of Lake Chapala Area

Rosana — Tue, 26 May 2009 13:56:19 +0000

Feb. 4, 2007 — Average monthly temperatures and precipitation, in degrees Fahrenheit and in inches. I don’t remember where I found this data online.

Month	Jan	Feb	Mar	Apr	May	Jun	Jul	Aug	Sep	Oct	Nov	Dec
High Temp.	76	79	81	84	86	83	79	79	78	79	78	76
Low Temp.	47	49	50	54	58	61	60	60	59	55	49	47
Precipitation	0.5	0.2	0.2	0.3	1	6.3	9.7	7.6	5.8	2.3	0.4	0.5

These numbers are interesting. Note that March, April, especially May and June are the hottest months. Once the rains begin it cools off, so the months that we think of as summer are cooler than spring.

Of course, climate and weather are two different things! It’s been raining hard off and on this weekend, complete with one long dramatic thunderstorm. I’m sure we had way more than the February average 0.2″ of rain this afternoon alone.

But it sure beats what we hear about from up north!

Climate of Lake Chapala Area is a post from: Mexico with Heart - Living, Traveling, and Retiring in Mexico

Loving the Mexican Downpours!

Rosana — Tue, 26 May 2009 13:26:45 +0000

July 13, 2006 — It’s the rainy season around Lake Chapala now, and we are loving it… mostly. People say that it usually rains just in the evening and night, and we are noticing that pattern, at least a couple of days a week. The other day, it poured hard one morning when we were working at our computers. We are grateful that our electricity is no longer going out every time it rains, as it was for months. The temperature dropped, and I put on jeans and a long-sleeved shirt instead of the culottes and tshirt I’d been wearing. Our view of the lake disappeared completely into grayness. I took a few photos and learned that it is hard to get a picture of rain. Here’s one where you can see the columns of water pouring off the veranda roof.

As I took that picture, I discovered that the floor of the veranda was puddled with places where the water was coming through the tile roof. Kelly put thumbtacks in the main places where the leaks were, and intends to do something about fixing them:

Loving the Mexican Downpours! is a post from: Mexico with Heart - Living, Traveling, and Retiring in Mexico

Hot Where You Live? Come to Lake Chapala

Rosana — Tue, 26 May 2009 13:24:34 +0000

July 24, 2006 — With record-breaking heat waves across the US lately, and California currently sweltering, I wonder how many Americans realize that it’s way cooler here in Mexico in the summertime. Not, of course, in every part of Mexico, but here at 5000 feet and with the rainy season in full sway, it’s downright cool here.

Today both Kelly and I pulled out warm clothes, as it’s been raining steadily much of the day and we have yet to see the sun. I’m wearing jeans and a turtleneck and had a sweatshirt on all morning. He’s got on a corduroy shirt over a long-sleeved cotton one, as well as his usual slacks. We have added an extra blanket to the bed.

Last week there was a lull in the rains, and it did get hot in the middle of the days. But since last Thursday, it’s rained part of every day and/or night, and it’s been in the high 60s and low 70s here at our place.

This area has a reputation for the rain happening in the late afternoons and evenings. Not only then, not this year! But I’m not complaining. After experiencing drought in Colorado, I’m happy to be soggy in San Juan Cosala.

Hot Where You Live? Come to Lake Chapala is a post from: Mexico with Heart - Living, Traveling, and Retiring in Mexico

Song of a Mexican Cicada

Rosana — Tue, 26 May 2009 02:01:12 +0000

June 10, 2006 – A few weeks ago Kelly and our friend John went hiking in the steep mountains behind our house and they reported on a strange electronic sort of sound they heard up there. John captured a little of it on a video in his camera but they couldn’t see the source.

Later, we started hearing the sound around our yard and we learned it was a cicada. Its song is said to presage the rainy season. I’ve read that it’s the cry of a male for a mate.

One afternoon recently I captured some of this eerie sound on tape. The sound of a truck in the background is not part of the cicada’s song, but comes from the highway less than half a kilometer away. If you click on the link, the mp3 file should automatically play on your computer, assuming you have the right software.

Here’s one that Kelly managed to get a picture of, with a leaf for scale:

2 Comments from the old blog:

Dean said…

You’re a tease Rosana! :) Tell me more about the hiking! I’m going to be interested in knowing the condition of the trails durring the rainy season too. And what about the Lake in SJC. Do you notice a reduction in the lirio since they’ve started spraying?
I said…

There seem to be many trails into the mountains that are north of the lake. A guidebook exists but I don’t know its title. I imagine it may be locally published and just available at lakeside bookstores.

But in this case, Kelly and our friend just went up a street near us and it had a trail which got very steep and rocky quite soon. This friend lives in Ajijic and said that there is similar hiking from his apartment

We HAD noticed the lirio reduction, actually before we knew the spraying had begun. Didn’t really think anything of it, since the winds do seem to move the lirio around, and our view is kinda peek-a-boo.

Song of a Mexican Cicada is a post from: Mexico with Heart - Living, Traveling, and Retiring in Mexico

It was 77 Today in Queretaro

Rosana — Sat, 23 May 2009 17:18:50 +0000

August 5, 2005 – People often ask us, “Isn’t it awfully hot in Mexico in the summer?”

Not in the central mountains where we rent a house. I’ve been checking the temperature in Queretaro, a city less than an hour’s drive from our town of Bernal, for the past couple of weeks, just for fun. It’s been running in the mid to high 70s at the hottest.

That’s cooler than when we left late in May. It was getting into the high 80s in May in Bernal, which is a little cooler than Queretaro as it’s a bit higher. But people told us that as soon as the rainy season began, things would cool off.

Now Merida or Puerto Vallarta would be a different story…

Here’s where I check Mexican temperatures: http://weather.noaa.gov/weather/MX_cc.html

There’s a list of about 60 locations in Mexico you can check. San Miguel de Allende is not among them — use Queretaro for it too.

It was 77 Today in Queretaro is a post from: Mexico with Heart - Living, Traveling, and Retiring in Mexico

The Rains have Begun!

Rosana — Thu, 21 May 2009 19:47:14 +0000

May 25, 2005 – Central Mexico has essentially quite an arid type climate but it rains from roughly May or June to September or so here in Bernal. It normally rains from time to time outside of these months, but in the three months we’ve been here, it’s only rained a couple of times. Once I noticed that adults were acting like kids, so happy to see the rain.

Then it rained a little last week, and again yesterday, but this afternoon it really let loose for about half an hour… not just rain but hail too. I sat happily watching it for a while downstairs. Kelly was upstairs, which you get to via the great out-of-doors so I didn’t see him till the rain diminished.

It poured in our front door, which is lower than the sidewalk outside:

Our back yard turned into a big puddle, especially where all the rain was coming off the roof Kelly added:

The roof that Kelly put over the patio wasn’t designed to stop all the water, though it does stop almost all of it. The remainder came in along the side walls:

Soon the sun came out and here’s the view from our upstairs deck:

Looks like rainy season here is mopping season in our living room! We got our big stringy Mexican mop and got most of the water out in a few minutes. Then I went out walking to do some errands. I asked one Mexican woman if this was a typical rain.

“Hay lluvia fuerte y lluvia suave,” she said: There is strong rain and soft rain. This was a soft one in her opinion. It must be quite something at times! I’ve heard that the countryside becomes quite lush and green. Too bad we’ll miss it this year.

2 Comments from the old blog:

At May 25, 2005 9:50 PM, BillieS said…

In San Miguel we had a bit of rain on Monday and it looked like it might rain this afternoon but it didn’t. It has really been dry and dusty. The countryside is so brown. I hope you can get back to Bernal in September. The wild flowers are beautiful then and the fields are green. It is really beautiful.
At May 26, 2005 8:19 AM, Rosana Hart said…

September is likely the earliest we will be back. I hate to think about how much there is to do before we can come back, so I won’t… not today anyway. Today is for cleaning out the motorhome and getting ready for the trip back.

The Rains have Begun! is a post from: Mexico with Heart - Living, Traveling, and Retiring in Mexico