By my birthday the Christmas and New Year’s fun has usually worn off, but here in San Miguel it’s still peak tourist season and the Christmas holiday hasn’t officially ended, either. When I say tourist I don’t mean gringos (though there are those as well), I mean Mexican tourists. San Miguel is a popular place, and only a four hour drive from Mexico City.

A few minutes from home is the town’s main deportiva, which is basically a big community center. There’s half a dozen soccer fields, some tennis courts, basketball, track, etc., all well kept and available for free. The kids play Ultimate frisbee with friends most weekends, and when they don’t we try and head up there to play frisbee, kick the ball around, or play tennis. But there was one huge structure that I didn’t know the purpose of, and I was surprised to discover what it was. A Frontenis court. Three of them actually.

At my age, and with how many sports I’ve played, I could not believe that there was a sport out there that I had never once heard of in my life. We looked up the rules, grabbed our tennis stuff (it’s not quite the same equipment, but it’ll do for beginners like us) and got to work. It was fun. A bit like a giant racquetball court with one wall missing and no ceiling to play off of. On another trip we’d bring an actual frontenis ball (rubber and much faster than a tennis ball), but realized pretty quickly that there was a reason proper frontenis is mostly a pairs sport. It’s way too much ground to cover quickly for one person. Anyway, it’s good fun on a Saturday morning if you play it our way.

Three Kings’ Day and the city is absolutely overrun by Rosca de Reyes (Kings’ Loaf). No family would be without at least one. Inside the bread is a little plastic doll representing Jesus, and whoever gets that slice is then supposed to buy (or make?) the tamales on February 2nd for Dia de la Candelaria. If this sounds like too much religion for us, that’s because it is. We did get ourselves a loaf, which nobody much cared for, and honestly, I think baby Jesus ended up in the trash with most of the stale bread a couple days later. Sorry Jesus.

Three Kings’ Day also meant it was time for the town’s Christmas Tree to come down.

The neighbor’s taco stand. I don’t have a taco stand, but it’d still be cool to have a tronco taquero to chop meat up on. If you’re curious why they use these instead of a boring old cutting board, look it up, it’s actually pretty interesting.

The view from our new dentist’s office.

Za wasn’t feeling so hot and started coughing, like a human cough. It was weird. Ali thought she had something lodged in her throat, so off to the vet they went. Fortunately there was nothing requiring surgery to remove, and it was in fact just a case of kennel cough. So in the last couple weeks we’ve had medicines to treat a cat with a sneeze, a dog with a cough, and now I’ve developed a bark. Bad dad joke.

We have a brand new car but somehow that doesn’t stop us from needing to go in every six months for an emissions test. Yeah, every six months. That is quite a racket. I can’t imagine what a family with three or four cars would do. They’d be at this place every couple of weeks.

After scoring a passing grade, I put the Jimny in 4-wheel drive and made my way back down the trail from the high-tech testing facility.

No, this is not Ouest’s cat. This little girl was in our carport one afternoon meowing at the top of her lungs. Ali heard her and called me out. I fully expected her to dart for the gap in the garage door (we currently feed about ten cats per night that start filing through that gap at dusk), but instead she just sat there and let me pick her up. Me, because Ali was expecting there to be claws and scratching.

Instead we got what was possibly one of the sweetest cats on earth.

We had no intention of keeping her, and didn’t want to scare her off or introduce her to our pets, so she became my office cat while we figured out what to do about her. And so long as I was in the office she was on my lap.

Za is completely oblivious to the fact that there are now two cats in her house.

There are at least half a dozen Facebook groups in San Miguel dedicated to doing nothing but reuniting lost pets. And there was zero doubt in my mind that this was a pet. She was way too sweet and loving to be anything else.

The kids started calling her Kitty Cat Meow Meow, which is quite descriptive, but not super catchy. However, with us, it caught on.

We briefly thought we had found the owner. Her cat had been missing for two weeks and the picture sure did look close. The lady was out of town but sent over a friend who determined this wasn’t her. Bummer, but the lady would actually find her cat a few days later. I asked around with the neighbors, but she wasn’t from our immediate area or someone would have known. And if you were missing a cat you’d be hard pressed not to at least have at least one friend who was checking the Facebook groups (Ali posted to every one of them multiple times) even if you weren’t on Facebook yourself. So after a few days we were stumped. We’d let her out in the courtyard to play now and then, but we really didn’t want her to disappear, so we kept close tabs on her and she spent most of her time on my lap or slapping at the cursor flying around my monitor, keeping me from doing any work.

A new washer. This was entirely too much drama. At least 100 texts exchanged, four technicians made house calls with multiple parts in hand, videos were made of the non-fixes and relayed to HQ, until finally somewhere the great and powerful Oz finally decided they’d just replace the thing. The washer was about three months old when it broke, and took three months to replace for free under warranty. If I’d known in the beginning how long this process would take I would have just bought a replacement. It would have been cheaper than the laundromat.

I’ve mentioned before how difficult it is to find furniture here. We saw this big shelving unit at an estate sale and decided to go for it, despite the fact that we own nothing to put on it.

Yep, she’s still around.

I got back in touch with the nice lady at the S.P.A., the one who had started bawling the moment we met her and told her we had adopted Ozzie, and she agreed that they could take Kitty Cat Meow Meow in.

The vet gave her a once over and gave her a clean bill of health. They shaved her stomach looking for signs that she’d been fixed, but they didn’t find any (later that week they’d take another closer look and find her scar). Kind of sad because it does show that she was very likely someone’s pet and was cared for. The S.P.A. would hold her in quarantine for another ten days to make sure she wasn’t sick, run blood tests to check for diseases, and give her whatever shots she needed. After that it would be a breeze to adopt her out. Honestly, she was an awesome cat. It was kind of fun to have her, and if we hadn’t just adopted Ozzie I have no doubt she would still be here, but being a foster family was just fine for a while too.

That was short-lived. Ali decided she didn’t want to accumulate a bunch of stuff to put on a shelf. She sold it, then asked me to take it back down. The process goes on. It’s WAY easier to move into a boat.

Ali hated the tile in our bathroom. Ask me to describe it to you right now and all I could tell you was there was navy blue involved. It’s not something that would have ever hurt my brain the way it did hers. And while I was sort of keen to take on the challenge of doing the remodel with her (I’ve never laid tile before), I have also learned over the years that time has value, and after getting a couple of quotes it was a no-brainer. Demolition day one. They were very good at destroying the bathroom, now would they be as good at putting it back together?

There must be at least 100 small nurseries scattered around San Miguel. We actually have four that we frequent regularly and we aren’t at all what you would call green thumbs. I’d say our attrition rate is currently around 50%.

Every February all the nurseries set up a booth in a park and set up their displays and finest greenery. We then go there, have zero idea what the actual market rate is for anything, take their word for it, load things up and bring them home. Ali has taken to this wholeheartedly though, and I have every confidence that she’s going to lower that attrition rate into the low teens this year.