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living.boondockingmexico@yahoo.com
Taken this morning, Sept. 21, 2021 from the hills outside SMA at 6:40 a.m.
Blogs can be tell-all, make-believe, or insignificant blather. Today will be a bit of all three. Let's start out with the tell-all. I decided to stop work in March of 2020. I received my pension from the U.S. and still working on Mexican social security. One more year. Three weeks ago I received a call from the school where I had been working. They had asked me if I would do some consulting to get the team going since the coordinator of English had left. I really didn't want to but since they had been so nice to me, and the simple fact that the coordinator had quit, those were good enough reasons to say yes.
It didn't last very long. Oh, I'm still working from home with them but in person was a true challenge. You see, there is a person at a higher level in the school. I always called him the "used car salesman", married with kids in the school. There never was a fit between us and we always seemed to try and stay out of each other's way. After my second year there he was involved in a scandal. He had had an affair with a teacher in the school and she was pregnant. I lost all respect for the guy.
The CFE came back to adjust the line. After they repaired it was giving off a 12 V at the cameras.
On to other things. Our gardener Fernando who comes twice a week fractured his arm about 10 days ago. He is not able to work for at least a month. I've taken over the chores and the good thing is that with the heat, the grass has pretty much gone dormant. I cut the backyard last week and the front will be done today before we head out for San Miguel de Allende. It worked out well because our last housesit asked us if we were available and it just happened to be the same time frame. We have a beautiful place to stay at no charge, a dog and a cat to play with and we have promised ourselves to get out and do some hiking. Les always offers but we become complacent in our surroundings and never get to it. Let's see how it goes.
We're back in San Miguel de Allende. We arrived yesterday afternoon. It was a wonderful drive and the weather was in our favor. Overcast most of the way so the sun was not an issue for the driver. We arrived to our same house sit just in time for happy hour. The hosts leave this afternoon and we will be here for 10 days. It all worked out so well.
You can see that the rains here in Guanajuato have really done some good for the press.
Morning hikes around the area you run into raccoons, fox, and lots of these guys working hard.
No doubt SMA is growing. Even though this house is hard to get to, I can see why the owners like it here. It's like us not wanting to sell our house in Santiago. Maybe we can have the best of both worlds, I don't know.
The new house project is going well. We received the keys on Sunday so now we can get in the house and get some estimates going and take measurements. The roof is usable as is but it doesn't have tile flooring just yet. A good patio set and an umbrella will suffice for the near future. The real estate agent sent a work crew to repair some things and they got it done fast. It amazing how money always shakes the tree. She wants her commission.
As for Mexico, the cartels are advancing in mass. Monterrey is averaging 100 murders a month, the highest ever. For this federal administration, he has racked up 100,000 in less than three years. The recent eye-opener was a police ambush on the border of Nuevo Leon and Coahuila intersecting with the U.S. border. Several police were killed but the amazing part was that the attack was carried out by a caravan of 50 pickups each with seven to ten men inside. Almost as if they were moving from one territory to another.
As the world goes green, Mexico continues down its path of fossil fuel production. The government has now taken over the sale of gas LP forming its own company called Gas BienEstar. This is to control prices but since it was started a month ago, prices have increased. PEMEX was granted another loan of 12 billion USD to add to their name the petroleum company with the largest debt in the world at 125 billion USD. BTW, the 12 billion came from the IMF. The president took the money as a loan to pay off debt but for the first week, he put it in the international reserves bucket so to say he had established the largest dollar reserves in the history of Mexico. That was for his third presidential address.
You look at the breadth of the new social programs and all the money being handed out and you wonder if any of these socialist politicians ever read anything like this:
In Chicago, in 1966, a study was carried out that showed that, although the US government invested considerable sums to improve the educational apparatus of marginalized areas in the hope of helping its inhabitants overcome their condition of poverty and exclusion, the percentage of citizens who were promoted socially thanks to these policies was almost nil. The administration in turn wondered what the problem was: the fact is that the family environment had not been addressed, where inequality takes deeper roots psychologically, sociologically, and materially.
So that was a bit of insignificant blather to some and this was not make-believe. You can't make this stuff up.
