thelaughingmuse | Entries tagged with viva mexico

Laundry-load tally: an even dozen loads, with just one more to do (jeans and sweatpants). I'm going to put that off until mid-week because I need a break from that particular domestic chore. (Build up three months' worth of laundry, get most of it done in two days, and see how enthusiastic you are to finish one more load, even if that will mean a totally empty laundry hamper.)

I got my most needful grocery shopping done. I still want another loaf of bread, and I'd kind of like to splurge and get myself a pint of ice cream. I may go out this evening, or I may just...not. Tomorrow, my facilitator and I are going to Aduana to renew my TIP, since the TIP's validity is tied to my residency card. That'll take most of the morning. Once that's done, I'll have a break from Mexican bureaucracy until I go to import my car and get it a Mexican title and plates, which I'm currently planning to do in about 2 more years. It has to get done before I become a permanent resident, and that won't happen for another 3 years.

For anyone who may be interested, you don't have to live in Mexico to get or maintain temporary or permanent residency. (You need to maintain a residency - that is, have a Mexican address - but that's pretty easy to do.) You do need to meet income requirements when you initially get your residency, and will need to travel to Mexico to actually get your card and - for temporary residency only - when you renew it after your first year. Plan at least a week for that process - and unless you're fluent in Spanish, hire a facilitator. If you have special circumstances, you may want to bust out and hire a firm so that they'll be people with multiple specialties. If you intend to get Mexican citizenship, you will have had to live in Mexico for at least 18 consecutive months before you apply. The outfit I worked with did a good job and are a good price, but I was a single person who easily met the income requirements and had no major health or financial issues, so...if you feel like you need to shop around for a facilitator, definitely do that. 2025 seems to be a good year to apply for residency if you'd previously been an edge case, because the value of the peso relative to the dollar dropped so the amount needed to qualify is lower. If you earned at least USD$4100 a month for the last six months (2024/2025), you should be able to qualify financially for temporary residency. If folks want to learn more, I can post more; but there's a lot of info online, and things change a little bit every year, so definitely do your research.

I learned a word: jodido. It means "screwed." As in, "I'm stuck alone on the surface of Mars. I'm so screwed."

Today I renewed my temporary residency. I had two noticeable signs of my improving Spanish language comprehension during this:

I took a book to read while we waited for the process to ... well, proceed. (Bureaucracy is bureaucracy, no matter the country.) The book was El Marciano (The Martian, in Spanish.) In the 20-ish pages that I read, all monologue by Mark Watney, there were a lot of words that I figured out from context, and several more words that I didn't know. But the sentences that I did have a lock on, I "heard" in Matt Damon's voice. If Matt Damon knew Spanish.
As the final part of the renewal process, the clerk behind the counter asked me 6 questions (what was my religion, did I have kids, how many years of school did I complete, did I like living in Mexico, similar) and while I did need to ask how to say one of my answers in Spanish, I understood all the questions!

And my washer and dryer were hooked up yesterday, so today I can start doing my laundry!

I'm absurdly pleased about many things.

Current Mood: accomplished

I did it! Well...sort of. I consolidated five boxes into two, broke down three boxes (only one good enough to re-use), and got some more things put away. I also finally - FINALLY - got my work monitor set up and working do I don't have to try to work on a laptop-sized screen. I prepped two more boxes to go into storage, and wrapped up one ottoman to go into storage. Not perfect, but...baby steps. More boxes gone from the downstairs, so things are closer to Looking Civilized now.

I got my first Radio Free Monday posted, after taking that over from Copperbadge. I have the HTML rock-solid, but had some questions on the editing. This will be a weekly thing, and probably in a few months once I have a lock in it I'll see about recruiting another admin to help out every once in a while - both to avoid burnout, and to let me take the occasional vacation.

I've started learning how to cook more local soups, which will be nice to help me keep warm. Last night was very cold, the coldest predicted for a bit. Nighttime temps are starting to hover in the upper 40s, while daytime temps are edging up to the top half of the 70s more regularly. We may even break 80F later this month.

I'm trying to figure out what I can do to keep the master bedroom cool in the hot months. If I can hang an awning out on the deck-let, even something that's more of a "privacy" weight rather than "blackout" weight, that will reduce the sunlight hitting the glass, which will keep the room...well, maybe not "cool", but "less hot". Then at night, I'll open all the windows, have fans pulling air up and out, and cool things down. Now I just have to get permission from the landlady. I'm also noticing a knock-and-ping from the boiler when I run hot water to fill the basin for dishwashing, which I think is a sign that it's about to fail. She's not going to be happy with that.

Just checked, and my washer and dryer are, indeed, going to be delivered this week! The company is currently going to contact me to confirm on the 9th, and will deliver the appliances on the 10th. (Then, sadly, I will have to wait until the following week for the installers. But I'll have the appliances in place!!)

Current Mood: jubilant

This morning I woke up at 3.30am. I got out of bed, opened the closet doors, and pulled out all the skirts, pants, and dresses. Then I sorted out the ones to donate, and tallied the rest. Then I did the same for the shoes. Ah, my beloved comfortable-soled booties whose 2.75 inch heel is too high for me now. I wore you each but thrice. Onward to new homes where you'll be appreciated.

(Shoe companies??? Women want shoes that are timeless, elegant, and stylish **and** have a lower-than-1.5 inch heel. Make it happen.)

So for those keeping score (which is really only me) that's 3 out of 4 closets sorted, sifted, downsized, and tallied.

Next week I'll tackle the Great Messpile. First, I have to sort through the knee-high stacks of boxes in front of the closet. They're only 3 rows deep. I can do that. Right?

...halp.

Home showings have dribbled off. Now that Biden's stepped down from rerunning for president, everybody's uncertain. The Dems are supposedly working to try and come up with their Best Bulletproof Candidate to slamdunk the OD (Orange Dictator) even though Biden basically handed the baton to Harris. So now...people who were looking to buy homes are holding off until their own homes sell, or until there's less uncertainty. I have no idea when the next viewers will come through, but I hope to have the Messpile cleaned out and looking staged Real Soon Now so that people can actually SEE the room. I also think that I'm through leaving the house when people come through for a showing. The last showing I had before everything ground to a halt, the people showed up nearly half an hour early. I couldn't get out of my driveway, and based on what my realtor said, I snuck out the back door and hid in the back yard until the realtor showed up and took the family inside. Then I went to my neighbors' house and read until those people left. It was still a bit weird.

After this morning's early shenanigans, I bought myself some new coloring books as a treat. Some will arrive in 2 days, some in 4 days, some in 5, and a few in about a month.

I'm getting ready to put my home on the market, so I've been doing some fixing up - replacing a broken window pane, replacing a section of the Pergo flooring (cheap-ass shizz, but that's what the previous owners put down and I didn't / still don't feel like changing it up), getting the upstairs windows' exteriors cleaned, painting over the bright paint colors in the bathrooms, et cetera.

I live out in a rural county. People are proud of being hateful shits out here. (That isn't what they claim to be proud of, but...that's what they're proud of. And other conspiracy theories. Sometimes it results in something funny. Remind me to tell you the story of the ardent Trumpist who flew a leather-pride flag.) Anyhoo...when the window-guy came, he kind of monologued at me about how wearing masks was for ignorant people and I could be free now that masking wasn't required and why do I trust doctors or veterinarians anyway they're all just liars and they've never actually seen the covid virus under a microscope and I should just listen to what he was saying and do some research. The pest-control guy talked about young people not wanting to work, and that's what's wrong with people in this country, the younger people are all weak and stupid, "there's no respect for traditional values", and so on for another 30 minutes.

I'm not looking forward to have any more servicepeople come and work on my house unless I know that they personally support equal rights for all human beings, and don't just give that statement lip service. I cannot WAIT to get out of this county, and then out of this country. I didn't just choose the fucking bear, I chose a country where machismo is much more openly in place...and I feel safer there. That choice of mine has at least one of the servicepersons' noses out of joint. Oh yippie skippy.

...oh! So, anyway. About that flag-wearing yahoo. For the past three years, a lot of folks out in my area have regularly flown flags on their vehicles. The usual combo is the US flag and then one other - a Trump flag, a don't-tread-on-me flag, a Confederate flag, and so on. This particular vehicle must have had trouble finding the flags that the driver wanted to buy. Or maybe they were gifted the flag by someone who saw something on Etsy, thought "Oh that looks like a thin-blue-line flag, Cousin Such-and-thus would just love this!" It had black stripes, blue stripes, and a white stripe in the middle. It even had the bleeding heart of Christ in the upper corner! Okay, so it wasn't bloody, but it was definitely a heart.

It was emphatically NOT a thin-blue-line flag.

It was a leather-pride flag.

I thought it was a little odd that someone who was a part of those two seemingly discordant communities would openly fly flags from both...but, hey, whatever your identity is, you should be proud of your whole identity.

And now, to go mow the lawn. Tomorrow I journey to Middle Earth. I never did see The Two Towers or Return of the King on the big screen, so I'm taking my chance now. (For the movies' 25th anniversary, Fathom Events is showing the LOTR movies' extended editions over three nights. I hope there's an intermission in ROTK because my body, specifically my bladder, is older now. Mama needs her bio-break.)

So I really need to mow the back lawn and keep the dandelions from fully flowering and then turning into white puffballs. But it keeps raining, and so I can't mow my lawn. (That's my story and I'm sticking to it.)

I finally gave in and made a checklist of all the things I have to do over the next few months, from larger to smaller. It is helping. I'm keeping track of things better, and figuring out how to break down some of the bigger bits into subtasks and then finishing those up. While I have sold a home and moved before, and I have moved across international borders, it's been 25 years and a lot less stuff ago. Also, I'll be crossing a border with three more cats than I did from the US into Canada. (I remember Bear being quite happy to sit in the passenger's lap, looking out the window and climbing all over the UHaul's cabin while Beep stayed in her carrier in the footwell.) And instead of 1500 miles, I'll be going twice that far. I'm planning carefully, and building in some rest days, and splurging and staying in hotels that cater to US tourists and so will have slightly nicer beds (IHG here I come) but I do hope that I'll be able to make the drive without breaking down and crying. If I need to take an extra day along the way, I can - I'll just reschedule the next stops - but I'm hoping not to have to do that too soon in the trip.

A lot of the folks that I work with have similar concerns: the chronic understaffing and sudden unexplained changes in schedule are making us make more mistakes - which is bad both because we all want to do good work, but also because too many mistakes will lose us customer confidence AND annoy the teams working with us. But, see, if we don't have sufficient staffing levels, but they still put more work onto our team, they need to expect that we have to start delivering less quickly and in smaller chunks to do better QA on the work as we do it, in anticipation of our making errors and attempting to catch them before the final handoff. We're all in agreement. It's the accounting folks that seem to think that we're okay with things. I'm ready to start a countdown and a personal betting pool: will they authorize a backfill for us before one of us quits in dismay/disgust; and if not, who will be the back-breaking straw.

Dashcam! I need to get a dashcam. Another item for the list. Fricklefrack.

I've gotten three virtual surveys, and received two quotes. I have a final virtual survey tomorrow, and I'm hoping to have all the quotes by the end of next week so that I can make a decision. I've researched all four of the companies and none of them seems obviously worse or better than the others, but I've gotten one rather outrageous quote from Company A and I started the process feeling more comfortable with Company B (whose quote I haven't yet gotten). Luckily they're all making it fairly easy to compare the quotes apples-to-apples, which makes the comparison calculus easier.

My home is almost "staged", and while I have some final painting to do, most of the pre-sale tarting up is done. And happily I have receipts of all the various maintenance that I've done since I bought this place, which will help buyers feel good about how well the house has been kept up.

But I'm still ready for this whole process to be done!

Today I partially disassembled one of my vacuums, got it working, vacuumed my floors, and then assembled a chair, a map-drawer thingie, a tall bookcase, and three utility carts.

My back is telling me how very, very, very STOOPID I was.

I was going to spend tomorrow assembling more stuff (a desk and small drawer unit) but. Nope. That idea can go play in the freeway. I'm spending tomorrow lying on a heating pad, drinking tea, and napping a lot.

I had several pieces of furniture that I bought over a year ago and just...never assembled. Hi depression. When I finally recarpeted the house in preparation for putting my home on the market, I decided that this was a very good time to assemble those pieces of furniture...partially because I can't bring new, still-boxed items into my new country-of-residence because they don't want folks coming in here and doing a commerce. Which I get. But it's set me on a bit of a scramble as I try to assemble the furniture while trying to do all the other things I need to do:

* wash my car
* paint the upstairs hallway
* get the lawyer-foyer painted by someone who a) has the specialized scaffolding needed and b) doesn't have a problem with heights
* mow my lawn...at least enough to head off the dandelions from going to seed
* stain the back of my little picket fence
* create a list of all my household goods, to take to get certified at the consulate
* and, of course, clean out the office and 2nd bedroom and take a lot of stuff to donation

...fuckitall. And get my taxes did. (I am the very model of a procrastinatrix from hell...)

Current Mood: tired

So I got the bookcases moved back into the sunroom and the living room, and then populated. Then I began assembling the two bookcases that I bought nearly a year ago and just kind of...leaned up against a wall. They're the same type of bookcase (Hemnes), but they're just a skosh taller than the first two that I bought nearly 10 years ago. And one of my two existing living-room bookcases is getting a little fally-aparty, so while it's still empty I'll take some time to retighten things, add wood glue, and reassess. If that particular bookcase is just too frail to make the journey, there is an Ikea in Mexico City. The sales tax is 16%, and the price is higher because it's imported, but I'd rather not have a bookcase that's falling hazard...especially since I load those suckers down with actual books that I regularly pull down and read. (I don't know for sure, but I wouldn't be surprised to find that the heaviest non-furniture item I'm shipping down is my book collection.)

The downsizing continues. Today I took two carloads of glassware, curtain rods, small drawer units, books, a few small kitchen appliances, and some cookware to the donation dropoff. I also took a box of live-flame candles that I've decided, sadly, that I'll never ever use while I have cats. I value their safety more than I want real live flame on actual candles. If the kitties knock a battery-powered candle off the shelf, I might have some dinged-up wax to deal with. I won't have a housefire.

Work...is. The checks keep coming, so I keep logging on, but sooner or later there's going to be a reckoning. We've all been in reactive mode for over a year, and our boss has been trying to limit the new stuff that we're asked to handle. Last week we had a sudden schedule change the second-to-last business day before Things Were To Happen, resulting in everyone on the team suddenly reaching out to all the teams they support and confirming, yes or no, that their particular items were staying on schedule or moving out three weeks. And then, of course, reworking a lot of things to account for said new schedule. Super fun. Anyhoo, my boss was not pleased at all. Boss has been trying for the better part of the time that they've been here, to get the other groups to communicate with us, to bring us in on the process, to not make docs an afterthought. But here we were, another afterthought. (No one communicated directly with our group about this change. I just happened to see the single broad-blast post about the change and linked it for everyone in my team's chat, and then told them that I was probably going to spend most of the day following up with my various assignments.) We were all quite aggravated and, I'm sure, ready to start drinking heavily. Or throwing things. Or both.

I'm thinking about starting to keep a separate journal of brief daily schtuff in English, and then in Spanish on the opposite page. My Spanish will be kind of meh, and I'll probably look back at my first bilingual journal and just cringe. But, hey, learning takes both time and practice. Seeing real evidence of my progress could help me realize how much (or little) I improve month over month, and then year over year. I would dearly love to get fluent enough to read a book straight through without needing to check a word's meaning. I've bought several books that I love in English, in Spanish translation. It's Spain-Spanish, which differs from Mexico-Spanish; but it's a starting point. I'm kind of interested to see how Hogfather (Papa Puerco) fares in translation. I've already gotten through El Orgullo de Chanur (The Pride of Chanur).

...and I just re-realized that since yesterday was Saturday, today was Sunday and so tomorrow I have to get up early and go to work. Guess I'd better get to bed, then. Eeeey, Melatonin (Ay!)

Current Mood: aggrieved

I now have big ol' lined journals (360+ pages, hardcover) for the next 30 years. And there are three varieties with large amounts of each, for my matchy-matchy twitchy-brain. And because I was happy to drive around to different stores, I paid $15 per journal instead of $25 or $41. (The journals are discontinued, and available to purchase at certain stores; but some enterprising folks also were selling them on Bezos' List for a bit of a markup.)

I've begun the pare-down process, donating lots of clothing, shoes, and bedding. I'm now reducing my absurdly huge nail polish collection. With a neighborhood full of teenagers, I'm hoping that I'll be able to find most of these good homes. I've only started culling my nail polish collection, though. I've got over a thousand bottles, so it's not going to be a snappy process.

I have to get actual walk-through / in-person quotes from the international shipping companies, make my choice, and schedule pickup-day. I've got two quotes so far, and they're about 10K apart, so one of them is giving me a pretty obvious teaser-rate. I don't want to end up with my stuff "held hostage" for however much they underbid on the job, so I might get quotes from additional companies and filter out Lowball Inc.

Home-polishing tasks are underway! Some more interior painting, a spot of floor refinishing, one window pane replaced, et voila! It'll be all ready to put on the market. According to my realtor the maintenance I've done is going to make my home look very attractive, so hopefully I'll be able to find a buyer who won't have problems renting back to me until I'm ready to drive away in late autumn.

And, of course, none of this even begins to touch on finding my first home in Mexico, and then finding an architect so that I can build the place that will be my forever home.

Jeebus.

One year ago tomorrow I posted about the big long power outage and how fucking cold it got in my house. And this year, tonight, we're watching a weather system head at us with high winds. Again.

I gotta get my happy ass down south.