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I have recently been having fun writing blog entries for a newsletter called Expat Insider, and wanted to share those links here:   
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    Over the years we have lived in Mexico, we have rescued or adopted many many animals. Eight dogs, a hundred and ten cats, twenty-five snakes, two Harris hawks, a parrot, a bunny, a ferret, a lamb, and several opossums, rats, mice and fish. The problem started shortly after we moved into our then-new house. We’d brought a dog Fresca, a cat Buddy and a guinea pig Zipper down with us from Chicago (never bring a guinea pig to a hot climate where Timothy hay is hard to find – they’re very delicate and I’m convinced they’re sold as an annuity pet). As we all settled in, Buddy got out. He’d been a housecat in Chicago, then a half-in-half-outside cat in our rental house when we arrived in Mexico, and now considered himself a fully-fledged outside cat - and a Fearless Hunter (of birds, frogs, lizards, squirrels). We were desperate. We loved Buddy, and looked everywhere for him, and finally put up posters advertising a substantial reward for his return. We got calls with kittens, cats that looked nothing like Buddy’s poster photo, and even a dog, then finally our next-door neighbors brought him to us, and claimed the reward. But for years afterwards, I’d be stopped on the street by people offering me animals. Well, one thing led to another, and our reputation grew. People would drop off boxes of kittens, sometimes with their eyes still closed, or the worst, a burlap sack with two puppies in it, one already dead. We rescued two soaking kittens from the creek behind our house, where they’d been dumped. We rescued a pair of hideously flea-ridden puppies on one of our walks. We rescued a hawk whose wing had been torn almost off by a wire (we had to put him down) and another who’d hurt his wing, then been held in a too-small cage and had damaged his tail and wing feathers (that’s a whole other story!). A friend brought a shoebox of baby mice whose mother she had accidentally killed – I had to give one of them mouth-to-mouth resuscitation (more on that another time!). We “won” a lamb in a raffle, “because they knew we’d take care of him” (we ended up giving him back, with a small donation). We’d also get sick animals who were dropped off or wandered in – I started to wonder if there were signs up in animal bathrooms saying, For a good time and free food, call Emerson… almost all of them arrived with fleas and/or parasites, so I stock flea and parasite medicine, and administer that as the first step, so our population doesn’t get infected. But then there has been all kinds of mange, worms, minor cuts and more severe injuries or illness (lymphoma, feline leukemia, cat AIDs, distemper). I have been bitten by a gazillion fleas and had mange several times, and usually have an assortment of scratches and bite marks. When the animals arrive, we patch them up if it is within my limited scope, or more often, take them to our growing circle of vet friends. Most have survived, but heart-wrenchingly, I’ve had to put lots of animals down who were too sick or had them die in my arms from rat poison or leukemia or organ failure or being run over.
For the others, though, once healthy, everyone gets sterilized, though it barely makes a dent. We placed many dogs and cats in homes, but we were getting overwhelmed. So finally, with some friends and the help of our little town’s mayor, we organized a castration/neutering clinic. We sterilized eighty-five dogs and cats over two weekends, then COVID hit. Maybe because of the sterilization clinic, or because I finally had to put up signs asking people not to drop off animals, our population has finally stabilized. We only have three dogs now, and ten cats. I have loved each and every one of these animals, even or maybe especially the ones who arrived looking like monsters. And though theoretically we rescued them, I feel like my life has been infinitely improved by having spent so much time living with, tending to, and being delighted by them! Here are some videos and more photos I took, so you can see what I mean: Cat Breakfast Time Itsy Bitsy Making Friends With Calvin and Co Kitten Tuna Feeding Frenzy Neighbor Cat Nursing Pepito Simon When We First Found Him I hope you enjoy them as much as we enjoy them!  HIGHLY RECOMMEND! My husband gave me this book for my birthday, since he knew I’d fallen in love with octopi after watching My Octopus Teacher (Netflix Original documentary). I loved this book. (I realize, looking at my prior review posts, that I always say I love the books, but that’s because I don’t generally persist with a book I don’t love going into it. Life is Too Short.) I strongly identified with the two protagonists – an older woman who cleans an aquarium at night and the octopus she meets while working. There’s an intriguing mystery, but I would have gone on reading it just to hear the octopus’ internal dialogue, which entranced me. I wish I could get to know one, but a. I live near the ocean but not THAT near, and b. my son tells me I’m “too old” to scuba dive. Ha! What does he know? The book was a good blend of very un-scary suspense, low-key drama and elderly romance – the woman’s son died under somewhat mysterious circumstances as a young man, another man is looking for his real father, a barkeep finds his soulmate but is too shy to tell her so, the octopus yearns for freedom. I couldn’t stop reading it, and stayed up until 3am, for which I paid dearly the next day, but it was worth it. I won’t give away the ending, of course, but I can say that I found it satisfying, the straggling ends tucked in neatly and convincingly. I hope you enjoy it too! Buy it on Amazon by clicking here. #RemarkablyBrightCreatures #ShelbyVanPelt #MyOctopusTeacher In our orchard and garden we have a lot of volunteer trees, things that birds or animals or the wind have sown over the years, and that our lackadaisical gardening efforts haven’t pulled up as “weeds”. One of these is what’s called a mojo tree. We know it’s a mojo because, this year, it’s started throwing mojo nuts at us. It started a few weeks ago. We’d hear a plaat! and ignore it, figuring one of our eleven cats or three dogs had knocked something over – again. Then we’d hear plaat! plaat! pause plaat! spaced out, like a Chinese water torture. We’d finally get up to investigate, but didn’t ever see anything knocked over, so went back to ignoring it. But it got harder and harder to ignore. Then one day, I was sitting having my mid-day cup of coffee and tortilla with cajeta on it (a very sticky caramel sauce made from goat’s milk), on our second terrace. I heard plaat! plaat! and then felt a sharp rap on my head. I finally looked around, indignant. Lety, the woman who cleans our house for us, had been on vacation for the holidays so hadn’t been sweeping, and I realized the flagstones were littered with small green balls, including the one that had just hit me in the head. One year shortly after we’d built our house here, a pair of red-and-white nuns came to our house and asked if they could pick our mojo – they sold it to pay for the church/convent they were building. We said Go ahead and watched them fill their red tunics with the little balls. But none had fallen since then. I had never heard of mojo until we came here. In our town they make an anti-coffee out of it, roasting then grinding it to dust, then brewing it like coffee. Its Latin name is brosimum alicastrum, also known as the Mayan Nut, breadnut or ramon. The tree is in the Moraceae family of flowering plants (kin to figs and mulberries). Mojos aren’t actually nuts – they’re drupes, consisting of an outer skin, a pulpy middle layer, and a woody inner shell that has a single seed in it that looks like a nutmeg or a macadamia. Mojo, it turns out, is a traditional Mayan superfood, and ancient Mayans used every part of the mojo trees - bark, leaves, and nuts. The only part they use here that I know of is the nut – a nutrient-dense caffeine-free coffee alternative that is high in potassium, fiber, calcium, iron, antioxidants, zinc, protein, and vitamins A, B, C, and E.
So, if you’re like me and really really love coffee but really really can’t drink more than two cups a day, consider mojo as an alternative! Just send me a note and I’ll mail you a box – but you’d better hurry, they’re going fast! #MayanNut #SuperFoods #Mojo We live on a small property with a creek at the bottom of it. The hill that goes down to the creek, often quite steeply, is filled with coffee trees – mainly Arabicas. We have about a hundred trees (more like bushes), which to my uninitiated eyes when we moved here seemed like a huge number. Naively, I pictured us merrily harvesting our beans, magically roasting then grinding them, then blithely sipping our own delicious brew. That’s not quite the way it worked out. The first time we “harvested” we had the help of our youngish children, which everyone with youngish children knows isn’t necessarily that helpful. When we’d go to Michigan to pick blueberries, for instance, there’d be one for the bucket, two for the mouth, one for the bucket, and so on… We got our first “crop” in successfully, after the berries had mostly turned a bright holly-berry red. We squeeze-popped them all out of their red husks, then lugged the 5-gallon paint bucket of now-naked berries up to the roof, where we were going to soak then dry them before roasting. Sadly, out of sight out of mind, and when we remembered it, the big bucket had turned into a bubbly, smelly mess. We could probably have made a coffee liqueur out of it, but that wasn’t what we were after. By the next time we had a hill full of red berries, we were smarter. We’d talked to our local coffee maker across the bridge and realized that there was no way we were going to be in charge of all of the steps that go into coffee production. They had some kind of machine that squeezed the outer skin off, and big vats where they soaked the gooey seeds that came out. They let those ferment overnight to break down the goo, then in other vats they washed them, and then spread the goo-less seeds all over their big parking lot – yes, where they drove cars and trucks. Once the seeds were dry, they had a kind of jiggling machine that shook off the dried paper coating around the seed. And THEN they toasted them. You see what I mean about a lot of steps? So we had Armando, the man who helped us with our garden, pick two big burlap sacks-full of beans then we lugged them across the bridge. At the end of a couple of weeks, we were the proud owners of two small 1-kilo bags of coffee. The children insisted there was no way we could be sure that the two kilos of beans they gave us back were actually our own beans, but I refused to face that, and just really enjoyed drinking it. We make café de olla, not percolated or brewed or pressed or anything else. We scoop three heaping soupspoons of coffee into our Talavera coffee pot, add a clove, a stick of cinnamon broken into fourths, three thingies – pods? - of cardamon broken open, and pour just-boiled water up to the very top of the coffee pot. Not very scientific, but after about 4 minutes, or until we can’t wait any longer, we pour it out through a sieve, add piloncillo or raw sugar, maybe a splash of coconut milk, then slurp it on down. You really can’t beat it, and if I squint, I can pretend it’s our own crop!  HIGHLY RECOMMEND! I just finished Girl, Woman, Other and though I’d planned to write this week’s review about another book, couldn’t resist substituting this one instead. I had nominated the book for our book club, mainly because Bernadine Evaristo won the Booker Prize for it, and that’s always been a reliable bellwether for me.
And I’m very glad I did - I really enjoyed it, although I did struggle initially with the way it’s written, very eecummings, almost no punctuation, sentences don’t start with a capital letter and sometimes aren’t sentences. I also felt embarrassingly un-woke during a lot of it, so am considerably more humbled than when I started reading. It presents the intertwined stories of twelve black British women, who span the spectrum of blackness as well as feminism and even gender. Each of their voices are vivid, unique, compelling, all with very different, interesting, relatable lives (even for me, a 62-year-old white woman who identifies as a woman but retains most of her feminist ideals, albeit more muted since I was in college a million years ago). I was struck about halfway through to realize I wasn’t sure if the current strand was about a black or a white person - though the book was about black women and their often-horrific struggles, the universal similarities were pronounced: people struggling with their marriages, their careers, their parents, their children, how they see themselves, how they age. So though it was sobering and humbling, I’m very glad I read it. Buy it on Amazon by clicking here. #GirlWomanOther #BernardineEvaristo I know it’s one of the commandments, but ever since moving to Mexico, I can’t seem to resist Gula – Gluttony, and end up constantly with what they call here Mal del Puerco - "the curse of the pig". In English it sounds terrible, but in Spanish, it’s hysterical. It literally means I’m eating because it’s just so delicious I can’t stop myself. Day before yesterday, to take my mind off how much my post-op shoulder and pre-op hip and goodness knows what other grievances, Bob and I decided to go out for breakfast to a new restaurant I found – as usual – by accident. It’s sign and front door are both small and inconspicuous, and since it’s not on my regular route into the bigger town nearby, I hadn’t found it until just the other day. You walk in a long entryway, called a saguan here – where carts would have driven in the olden days. The ceiling is slats of palm wood, with ceramic globe lights hanging down. A large hand-carved boar mask – we have famous mask carvers nearby – grinned down at us. Mal del Puerco…! The first terrace was inviting, with its Mexican pink archway, but looked too sunny, so we went past the bar to the opposite side of the courtyard, in front of the outdoor kitchen. The waiter appeared right away, wiping invisible crumbs off and handing us typed menus in rumpled plastic sleeves. Could he serve us café de olla? Absolutely! And a fruit plate and deep fried gorditas – double-thick smallish tortillas, the closest I come to doughnuts since I can’t eat wheat but can still gorge on corn. Oh, and also green juice. When I travel to the US, I always buy green juice in those plastic bottles in the airport, since it seems like my least unhealthy airport-fast-food alternative, but believe me when I say, it’s not the same as the green juice here. This was just blended, and the waiter asked if we wanted it strained or not – NOT, of course! So delicious. Fresh orange juice with pineapple, celery, parsley and nopal. It sounds revolting, I know, especially nopal which I usually hate because of the baba – the slime, like okra, yuck – but it isn’t. And it has the added benefit of being a de-toxifier, always a good idea for those of us who suffer from Gula. We sit watching the hummingbirds and butterflies, enjoying the smell of wood burning in the open fires behind us, sipping our spice-laden café de olla, eating our gorditas – mine with sugar, Bob’s with salsa, waiting for our breakfast, which pops out very quickly. I have chicken tacos smothered in green salsa, and Bob as always has red chilaquiles, our state’s specialty. Afterwards, I can hardly roll out to the street. Thank goodness we came by car – no way could I walk home from here!  HIGHLY RECOMMEND! I loved Shanghai when we visited it right after Tiananmen Square, and so really enjoyed reading this magical book about what it was like as the Chinese republic emerged.
The book is about a young Eurasian orphan whose courtesan mother abandons her in the courtyard of a large estate, in which she and her mother had lived in the now-decaying Western Residence. It was a fascinating glimpse into how common it was for Chinese men to have multiple wives and mistresses and concubines then, how ruthlessly the children of foreigners with Chinese women were discriminated against, but mostly, how the spirit world was incorporated into day to day life. The girl, Jialing, survives because the family that buys the property after her mother and the other mysterious residents decamp, agree to take her on as a bond servant, so the grandmother can earn credit for her next life. The story follows Jialing’s childhood, befriended by the Fox spirit who lives under a hydrangea bush, the eldest daughter of the new family that has moved in, and a young English girl who ends up vanishing. As she grows up, she is consumed by the need to find her mother, and understand why she was abandoned, and it is only her determination and the occasional protection of her Fox spirit that keep her safe. She eventually finds herself caught up in a mystery and the cauldron of political intrigue that gripped Shanghai as the regime changed, then being torn between a life of safety and comfort and the man she realizes she loves. Buy it on Amazon by clicking here. #DragonSpringsRoad #JanieChang  HIGHLY RECOMMEND! I saw the title of this book and laughed out loud. As a 62-year-old mom who had her children in her late 30’s, my own nest-emptying process is still a work in progress, but it has caused me a lot of heartache – nay, anxiety!
I really enjoyed Separation Anxiety – the book, not the feeling… ;) It’s about a mom whose career as a writer has stalled, whose marriage is teetering, whose teenage son has started freezing her out and whose best friend is dying. By accident, she tries wearing her dog in her son’s baby sling, and then she finds she can’t stop. Her first children’s book did spectacularly well, but not so the next two, and now, ironically, she writes pieces for a self-help website. Her husband’s career as a musician never took off, so he turned to pot and has a job stocking high-end snacks. Their initial chemistry has been subsumed into her caretaking, so they are separated but don’t have enough money to live separately. Her son has just crashed into adolescence and pushes her away at every opportunity, growing moodier and more silent with each passing day. She’s exhausted and lonely, and the dog in the sling is her only comfort. Slowly, though, she climbs out of the hole, and the story is about accepting ourselves and the onslaught of life with as much grace and compassion as we can muster. Buy it on Amazon by clicking here. #Separation Anxiety #LauraZigman At least, I don't think so, but maybe wondering if I am IS the sign? I'm at Roberto the Vet's now with Charles II, and he's our 109th cat. So I agree that the signs are all there, but.... let me tell you at least Chaz' part of the story. He just showed up one day a couple of weeks ago - as they often do here in our house in C-, a small magic town in a small state in Mexico. Charlie, my dead mother's King Charles Cavalier Spaniel, and our only brand name pet, appointed herself Defender Against Alien Cats, and every now and then races off in a paroxysm of barking. She did it recently several times and I finally figured out why, and did my best to undo the damage, but by then Chaz was pretty traumatized. I had a short-lived craven hope that he'd move on, since we've only recently finally gotten below double-digits in the cat population. Most of the cats we’ve rescued have either been adopted out, or died, or wandered off, but we have a steady stable – clump? cluster? herd? – that sticks with us. Anyway, patiently, cunningly, I lured Chaz back, using food to buy love, as always. Slowly, he crept back, his ribs sticking out, snarfing down whatever we put out, but not TOUCHING the hard cat food we always leave out. Hmm. The day finally arrived when he’d let me pat him, and shortly thereafter, pick him up. I discovered enormous testicles, and a major build-up of plaque on his teeth. A couple of days later, I figured I had bought enough love to snick him quickly into our waiting cat carrier, and that brings me to today. Roberto the Vet will neuter him, scrape off the plaque – the worst case he’d said he’d ever seen – and pump him full of antibiotics, so it looks like he’s an official new cat. Other than his very peremptory yowls for food – totally understandable, given his teeth – he’s quite friendly and nice, as you can see here, and has already started making friends with the other nine cats and three dogs. He even lets me scratch his chin. So excited!?  This is Chaz today - drinking from my water glass. It turns out he has incurable lymphoma, and we've almost taken him to be put down a bunch of times, but he keeps coming back. His fur is much better now, whiter, he's gained some weight, his gums aren't as pale and his lymph nodes aren't as swollen. So for now, we just give him whatever he wants to eat. Fingers crossed! #CrazyCatLady
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