The Daily Forge – Anne’s Scribbles

• It’s the dry season now, and temps have been hitting 100 each day for the past week. We don’t have air conditioning, but Josh has become a fan aficionado and we just got a new extra powerful one at Home Depot. The kids joke that we have become “nocturnal” since we mostly siesta during the day and do work only in the evening or morning.
• Our well has dried up for the time being, and we need to get in a proverbial line with our neighbors to have water delivered in a tanker truck. This week the delay meant we were totally out of water for about seven hours yesterday.
• The pests want to come in even more during the heat. I killed a scorpion this morning trying to get in the door, and a mouse boldly jumped in the kitchen window after chewing a hole in our new screen.
• The dry season leads to a lot of wildfires in the forests around us. Last week, we shut ourselves into the one dorm room on our base that has air conditioning, both to enjoy the cool and to avoid the thick smoky air choking our valley.
• Since the garbage truck driver decided he couldn’t bring his truck up the hill to our house because it is too steep and rocky (about a year ago), we have taken our trash out to a trailer on our property that then can be hitched to an ATV and driven to the truck as it passes. But then the ATV broke and both wheels on the trailer were destroyed by the sun, so we are scrambling for solutions.

The longer I live in Mexico, the more amazed I am at the functioning infrastructure in the Wisconsin that I left behind. If you have trash service, water, little contact with critters, and clean, comfortable air to breathe, offer up a quick prayer of thanks. I have many blessings, but those are only patchily in my life this May.