May 16, 2008 – Today I’m going to give you an idea of what our lives were like this week, hoping that this will be helpful to people thinking of retiring to Mexico or simply living here, whether it’s by Lake Chapala as we are or anywhere else.

After I wrote last week about how hot it was, we had our first really significant rain, complete with thunderstorm that had me turning off our router and unplugging my laptop. It’s been cooler since then, hitting the mid 80s or so, cooling down at night. We’re rarely using our fan at all. Nice!

Meanwhile, we’re eating out of our garden quite a lot. Our lettuce is bolting and we will replant, but I am letting some of the plants go, in order to collect seeds… we use non-hybrid seeds so we can do this, bringing them down from the US.

We’ve got our first-ever artichokes, and in fact two of these are steaming right this minute. We’ve been eating squash, snow peas, broccoli, cucumbers, and more.

In the technological world, we had computer challenges this week. Our “spare” laptop running Windows Vista had some problems. We found a retired foreigner who loves to fix computers, and it is now in his obviously capable hands. But then, with no spare in the house, my laptop did some weird things. Freakout time! Even worse, it happened while Kelly was in Guadalajara at the dentist where he was having work done on an implant. (We do normal dentistry here at Lake Chapala.)

It’s been quite a social week for us, as we’ve been out and about some plus we had people over twice. Once, some good friends we hadn’t seen for ages came over for dinner.

Yesterday, we had a great time with a young family we are getting to know. Speaking almost entirely in Spanish for some four or five hours is great for our fluency! And whenever kids get into our swimming pool, I think of the family from Guadalajara that originally built this place and the pool, as their kids were growing up. Do I hear echoes of their laughter?