Here is an image of the first floor on the house “up the hill” in San Pedro in its current state, just for reference. The plan is to finish that first floor to the point where it is livable and safe from the weather, then move down to the basement to finish that off so we can both have a space for ourselves and for visitors while the rest of the house is being completed.
Tío Lynn is working hard on the house on the hill to the point where the first floor is almost livable. Really, this has become and art project for him and we could not be happier about it. The range of skills to create this project is broad and, by the nature of the building, sometimes it is necessary to go back a step or two when unforeseen things are discovered or when a new idea requires some adjustments to previously complete elements of the house. We have figured out that this project is going to take two to three years to accomplish, not so much for lack of resources, but so there is time to think and let the ideas percolate between steps. I will put up some images of the house in progress over the next few blog posts.
Lorena has moved from fixing toilets to installing washing machines and she owes it all the the fact that I am too fat to sit on the washing machine without denting it. She did a fabulous job.
Man, I miss México. It was an awesome thing to have Lynn with us many if not most evenings to describe México and cultura Mexicana. From life in the working class Mexican neighborhood of the apartments, to the doings of the cartels in places like Culiacán, Durango, Jalisco, and the individual neighborhoods close to us, to the culture of the albañiles who remodeled the apartments and are remodeling our house on the hill to the neighborhood convenience store that was willing to sell us a single egg or a single stick of celery. We are grateful for our seven months in México and are very much looking forward to spending some months every year with our family in Nuevo Leon.
We are missing México right now. Especially we are missing Grandma Conchita, Tío Lynn, and all the really cheap red meat. That one inch thick steak Lynn is holding is all of the ribeye and an additional strip next to the ribeye that we bought for around $5/pound. Most of all we miss Lynn’s stories about his legal work and his encyclopedic knowledge of all things related to the culture and current doings of the Mexican narcotrafficantes.
The one “feature” of our house that we have not really figured out yet is the narrow, no-landing staircase that leads to the second floor. Putting big stuff up on the second floor would require us to get a lift or a boom of some kind and passing them through an upstairs window because some of the stuff we have will not fit through the stairway openings. It is hassle more than cost, but it made us realize that there are only two of us and it makes sense to live on the first floor and use the upstairs for visitors. To that end, we have decided to eliminate a few things, put up a couple of walls to create a downstairs office, finish out our bonus room upstairs with a mini-split so that we can cool and heat a single room rather than the entire second floor, and then just use the upstairs for when the kids come and to maybe do exercises and watch movies in the bonus room.
The truck from Texas arrived and was unloaded yesterday. As always, there was a lot of broken stuff. With so much experience moving around, you would think we would have this all figured out. Actually, maybe we do have it figured out. Things will go wrong. At any rate, everything is in the house and in the garage. Now all we need is a few months to get everything put into place.
Kelly got over 100,000 likes for this tweet. Enough said.
Lorena and I have been just hanging out in the house waiting for the moving truck to arrive and for broadband internet. We got notice a couple of days that the truck broke down and heard yesterday it will be two days late. If we had comfortable chairs here, that would not be so bad, but we do not. As for the broadband internet, we are still in limbo, but hope to learn next week whether any of the cable companies are willing to pull wire to our house. If they do not, our only option will be StarLink. It is a little slow and a little expensive, but we can survive with that.
Lorena has eaten a breakfast of 60 calorie Dave’s Killer Bread toast, a soft boiled egg, homemade no-sugar added applesauce, and a cup of coffee for years and years. We know we are getting settled into a new place when she can start doing that without too much trouble. We are almost there. As soon as the truck gets here, she can convert the apples to applesauce!
Our new house is next door to what I think is just a hobby farm. The have sheep and chickens we have been enjoying very much. So far we have only seen a couple of sheep–a white one and a brown one so maybe they are a 4-H project. That almost makes it better if that is true. We cannot wait until our moving truck gets here so we can use our binoculars to get a little better luck.
The tractor for the truck with all our stuff broke down so it will not arrive until Sunday or Monday (hopefully) rather than tomorrow as previously planned. A minor setback.
I am putting this picture of the house further up the hill from the apartments to show that its progress continues to move forward even though it is at a bit of a slow pace. All the apartments but one down the hill are now leased for a couple of years and Lynn is working to fill the last one. The next step is to sell the apartments to get some resources to go forward up the hill and purchase another property in the same zone to just keep going. It is an amazing amount of fun to see the progress.
The flight up from Mexico was uneventful. Then we had a couple of days of lots of activity getting the truck loaded with our stuff and hanging out with our dear Coker friends. Then we spent two and a half days driving from Texas to Virginia. Honestly, it was one of the least stressful moves (so far–we have not unloaded the truck yet). we have ever made. It was truly a beautiful drive from Granbury, Texas through Arkansas and Tennessee to Virginia. It just made us more grateful to God for his kindness to us in all things. I will post a couple of the pictures Lorena took of our drive tomorrow.
We have no words sufficiently adulatory to express how grateful we are to the Cokers, our friends in Texas. They went wildly above and beyond to help us with our move out of Texas to Virginia, then they did it again the next day to help a friend move to Texas from Louisiana. They are literally the most hospitable and servicial people in the world.
The picture above is from when Lorena and I made a final toast for a spectacular seven months in San Pedro. We cannot wait to go back, but it will be a while because Tío Lynn needs to finish the remodel of the house up on the hill. In the meantime, we had a beautiful and uneventful drive from Texas to Virginia. More on that over the next few days.
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