Thursday, December 1, 2011

Ah, for the life of a country boy

and to ramble in the new mown hay.

The past few days have mostly been filled with finding ads for places to live, contacting them and learning that the best ones are already booked for December. Except for the craigslist scammer: his place has everything you want, is always open, and he'll send you the keys provided you send him the rent in advance. No thanks.

We have seen a couple of possible places to live. One is behind the Pepsi plant, not too far from downtown. It's quiet, but doesn't look like the kind of neighborhood I'd be comfortable walking around in after dark. Still, it's a nice little place. The other is a four bedroom house out in the country. The lobby and bathroom off it are tiled with marble. The rest of the house is lovely. There is a caretaker who lives on the property. But the house doesn't have internet and it's 25 minutes from town by car, part of which is over a road full of killer topes (Mexican speed bumps) that would be very hard on the car. We likely wouldn't get into town that often if we lived there. The furniture is all covered in plastic and doesn't look terribly comfortable. Still, the country life would be a big change from Vancouver and might be interesting to try. It also has a great place to set up my telescope.we're looking at a couple more places today, then will likely make our decision.

On another note: yesterday we moved to a hotel on a hill in the north end of the city. We have much better access to our car here, and I was able to set up my scope last night and show the moon and Jupiter to some of the hotel staff. Seeing was crappy: I could barely make out the bands on Jupiter. I should have taken the scope out again when I woke up in the middle of the night, be I was lazy. Maybe tonight. It will also be quite a bit darker if I set up over by the pool.

We'll try to get some pictures of the place this evening when the light is nicer.The locals are all complaining about the very cold weather, but I was quite comfortable in a short sleeved shirt until 8pm or so. As I write this, we're sitting on the porch of our little cottage and watching an eagle soar over the village of San Felipe. The sky is cloudless cerulean blue, though there is some smog from the city. Long live aircare, I say: Mexico is a fine example of the difference emission controls can make (on the negative side vs Vancouver, alas).

Posting from the iPad can be annoying. Lots of blogger's buttons work only occasionally and with the new blogger interface, it's difficult to tell whether I'm in compose mode or raw html. I usually prefer compose mode, so I don't have to put in all the paragraph tags. Grrr. Also, the preview mode isn't working for me at the moment, which means I have to publish the post in order to find out what it looks like (or get the laptop back from Michelle.)

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