(Post 81 of 233. Thanks again to those who participated in the Fundrazr!)

I can’t remember when I bought my treadmill, but it feels like it’s always been here. I use it a lot. I’m probably on it an hour a day on average (while watching TV). Last night, it turned on, but the belt would not move and I got an error message indicating that the problem was related to a voltage spike. Dang, there was a Mexico-wide problem on Monday that could maybe explain that, but I’d used the treadmill without any problems Monday night. Very curious.

I opened the casing where all the guts of the treadmill are located. It was very much temple from the start of Raiders of the Lost Ark in there, lots of cobwebs and dust.

The light on the circuit board indicated that it was getting power. With the cover off, I tried to start the treadmill and was able to determine there was no evidence that the motor for the belt was getting a signal. I did some digging and found a YouTube video explaining what the various blinking patterns of a treadmill circuit board mean. I was getting a steady blink, which the video said meant a problem powering the belt motor, so that confirmed my diagnosis (and that the video was relevant even to my off-brand cheapie treadmill!). poked around and found corrosion and a loose connection to the belt motor. I cleaned that up and tightened the connection, then tried to start the treadmill again. This time, I heard a “click” that told me that the motor was getting the instruction to move the belt, but the belt still wasn’t working. I went further in the video and there was a blinking code for “the motor is seized up.” I wasn’t getting that blinking pattern, but it did give me a nudge towards the next thing to try. So I decided to try to move the belt manually. Sure enough, it was stuck. Once I got it moving manually, I tried again to start it and, well:

But what a noise! Turns out that I should have been lubricating my treadmill. Oh, dear. Am I glad I learned this lesson on a cheap treadmill that was forgiving and not on a fancy expensive one! I found out that there is treadmill-specific silicone-based lubricant out there. I didn’t want to wait for days to get some online, so I called a gym and asked them if they knew where I could find such a product. I was told to try Decathlon, a full-service sports and recreation department store just north of me. I’ve been wanting to check it out for eons, but never had a reason to. Well, I finally did!

I head up there this morning and the store was wonderful to go through, kind of like MEC “light.” There were tons of deals, so I picked up a new workout wardrobe of several pairs of moisture-wicking leggings and tee shirts as well as some bits for making yoga more pleasant. Once I’d explored to my heart’s content (the store was nearly empty), I found an attendant who showed me where the lubricant is and even made sure I knew how to use it.

So that’s my project for tonight, cleaning up the treadmill guts and then lubricating it. Hopefully that little bit of attention will keep it serving me well. I’m virtually walking the Appalachian Trail, am 10% of the way there, and highly motivated to stay on schedule, so an equipment failure would be devastating!

My years tinkering with the RV really served me well. If I hadn’t changed out the converter in Miranda and made all those other electrical upgrades, I would never have had the confidence (or skill) to tackle the treadmill repair!

(Post 80 of 233. Thanks again to those who participated in the Fundrazr!)

I’m getting very close to the date when I’ll be able to become a permanent resident of Mexico. I’m also in serious saving-for-a-house mode and growing my business like mad… and over 40. Something that never used to bother me too much started to eat at me — lack of catastrophic healthcare coverage. It would be stupid to lose all that I’m working for for because of a medical problem.

I handle the little things just fine paying out of pocket. Because of how the healthcare system didn’t work in Quebec, I just never got in the habit of going to see a doctor for much. The thought of going for a sniffle is beyond me. Heck, I even learned how to do my own first aid care. I would have ideally needed more regular follow-up with my anemia problem, but the process for getting a simple blood test and then having those results followed up on was so onerous and flawed that I never even bothered with that.

So all that to say, I knew that getting myself a private healthcare policy in Mexico here for annual checkups and such would be a huge waste of money. I’m just fine paying the $200-ish pesos every six months to have my iron levels checked by popping out to the clinic right around the corner from me first thing on a Monday morning and then going back out around 4:00 P.M. to pick up the results. Ear wax build up? Most pharmacies have a medical clinic attached ,and it’s just about 50 pesos or so for the treatment. UTI? Message a doctor friend and he messages back a prescription. Easy peasy.

But what if my appendix goes rogue or I find out I have cancer or I trip on Bonita going down the stairs and break my femur? Big things that would affect not just my bank account at the moment but long-term. What if I found myself unable to work on top of accumulating hundreds of thousands of pesos’ worth of medical bills?

A friend of mine is an insurance broker, so I spoke to her about my concerns and the possibility of getting catastrophic healthcare coverage. The request, it turned out, was not unusual and such a product exists! She pointed out that the going cost for an appendectomy right now is around 150,000 pesos (7,500USD/10,000CAD). That would be devastating to my current savings plan.

The policy she recommended is from AXA, a company that has provided me vehicle insurance in Canada and decent service, so seeing a familiar name was helpful. I got the most basic policy for just under 13,000 pesos for a year, covering me, in theory, for up to 2 million pesos in bills. There are a ton of conditions that I’m not insured for for the first couple of years, so I’m glad I started young and can build up a history. The deductible is 40,000 pesos and I also have to pay 10% of the bill after the deductible, up to another 40,000 pesos. So I have to be prepared to shell out up to 80,000 pesos should anything really major happen. But the deductible is waived in the case of an accident.

On top of this policy, I am able to access the government healthcare here now, the new programme that replaced the former Seguro Popular. I just have to present my residente temporal card and a copy of my CURP (Mexican SIN/SSN). So if I find myself in a situation where my policy hasn’t kicked in yet or I’m not covered, I do have a safety net. I can’t imagine that the government healthcare here is any worse than what I experienced in Quebec, so my plan was to go through there if I had something catastrophic happen. But you know what? I’m not poor anymore, I’m constantly upgrading my standard of living, and so I’d much rather be in a lovely new hospital with a dedicated team of professionals than hanging out on a gurney in an overcrowded hallway…

The $13,000 for the policy was a huge chunk out of my savings account, but the peace of mind is priceless. I’m so grateful that I’m starting to have a network here. I think that if I had had to look for a broker first, I would have kept on procrastinating. But being able to go to a friend who knows me really helped cut down on the work I had to do!

(Post 79 of 233. Thanks again to those who participated in the Fundrazr!)

Some months ago, my cleaning lady and I were talking about food. She asked if I had ever eaten mondongo/menudo, one of the iconic soups of Mexican cuisine. It is made with cow’s stomach and/or tripe. It is considered a hangover remedy and is traditionally sold on weekends in Mérida. Such a thing really does not appeal to me, so I hadn’t.

Well… with last Monday having been a holiday, her schedule was a bit off this week and she ended up coming today, Saturday, instead of Wednesday. She remembered our conversation and brought a portion of mondongo/menudo for us to share! I popped out to get some warm, fresh tortillas while she portioned out the soup and “condiments” (chiles, cilantro, lime). The cost of living is going up — tortillas are now 20 pesos a kilo when they had been 18 since I moved here. I buy a quarter kilo at a time, which was 4.5 pesos, but now it’s 5 pesos (0.03USD difference). Insignificant for me, not so much for the average Mexican.

The broth was tasty enough, with a strong tomato flavour, but otherwise very bland and greasy, as is typical in Yucatecan cuisine. You really need the acid from the limes and the heat from the chiles to cut through that heaviness.

The cow stomach had no flavour at all, to my immense surprise, just like the pork stomach had no flavour either, but the texture was awful to my palate. The outside was rather gelatinous and the inside was fatty. This is definitely not a dish that I would voluntarily eat again, but I’m glad the proverbial ice was broken in case it is offered to me.

Yup, that’s just fatty tissue. Not my idea of a good time.

(Post 78 of 233. Thanks again to those who participated in the Fundrazr!)

Before lockdown I was pretty much in a routine of either getting my groceries myself once a week or having them delivered once a week. Once the lockdown started, it was 100% delivery for several months.

Before lockdown I almost never shopped at little specialty shops that I had to make a special trip to. In lockdown, seemingly everyone has figured out a good delivery system and I don’t mind paying a little bit extra for the convenience, so I have so many shops that have opened up to me. There are so many ingredients that were a real luxury before but now I can just get with a WhatsApp message, like wonton wrappers to make my own gyoza. I am really expanding my cooking horizons now that I have access to all these extra ingredients!

Today was a really good example of how I shop now between having everybody deliver to me and having the Walmart and the produce shop so close to me. I have a very full pantry, so I don’t buy a lot every week anymore.

Late morning, I heard the sound of a cow mooing, telling me to run outside and buy some fresh cheese and chorizo sausage from a gentleman on a pedal cart. At lunchtime, I took a few minutes and walked around the corner to the produce stand get some bananas and fruit for my smoothies.  I got back in and saw a Facebook post from a ranch I buy pork from announcing that they had smoked hams! So I ordered a kilo bone-in, and I also asked for some bone-in pork chops. Those will come this Saturday or next Saturday. No rush, I still have pork from my last order in the deep freezer. While I was doing that, the person who manages the co-op of small producers in the area replied that they found me a dozen duck eggs! ❤️ I ordered the eggs, a whole chicken, oranges, a basil plant, and a few sort of sundries to get to my delivery minimum. I’m going to be trying some local chocolate! After dinner and after my work was done for the day, I needed a leg stretch, so I popped out to Walmart to get almond milk and dog food. On the way back, the beer store by my house was open, so I went in and bought four cans total of two different types. And voilà, my shopping for the week done!

It’s a good thing that I have more eggs incoming because I got the deal of a lifetime, according to my price checking over the last year, on a KitchenAid mixer during a Costco Buen Fin sale (that I got a colour that I love is an incredible bonus, but I’m not a fan of the slippery bowl). So I need to start baking until I buy the pasta making and meat grinder attachments!

I baptized it by making a very delicious banana bread!

Even with a couple of shops near me, I’m still trying not to go out more than once a week or so. I actually can’t remember the last time I went out. It is good to go out a little bit every once in a while and just talk to somebody who can reply in the language that I really understand. Bonita is the best company, but she’s not the best conversationalist. But I can still understand a lot of what she says. For example, if I come out of the kitchen with a slice of banana bread and a cup of coffee and she’s sitting by her treat bag, this has to be the end result:

(Post 77 of 233. Thanks again to those who participated in the Fundrazr!)

Recently, the world lost the great Sir Sean Connery. My best friend Bast and I are movie buffs, so of course we started reminiscing about our fondest memories of his roles. Top of mind for me was as Henry Jones Sr. in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. We both love the scene on the beach in which Jones Sr. shows emotion before sacrificing a bunch of birds to save himself and Indy. That scene was filmed on a beach outside of Almería. When I was in Almería, I thought that it might be cool to go out and visit the beach, but couldn’t justify the time away from work to make the excursion possible.

l I made a lot of decisions like that when I was in Europe. My European adventure was not at all what it was supposed to have been, a voyage without end, a time of living in the present. But I had no sooner landed than my future was written out for me. And little did I know during those months that I was making the the right choices for the events that would follow.

The future of travel is so uncertain right now. I can’t think too hard about it lest I go mad with grief at such an unexpected cutting short of my adventures. All I can do is focus on the present. And it was the sacrifices I made during my nine months in Europe that are making it possible for me to ride so easily through this crisis. Somehow, as though I could see the events of the next few years written out for me, I struck a balance in Europe between living for the present while at the same time building in resiliency for pandemic. I learned to hunker down and focus on my business and I grew reaccustomed to finding my pleasures in a simple domestic routine.

And most important of all, I discovered that travel isn’t just about going out and exploring and having adventures every day. It is also about learning the local rhythm of life. And for me especially, those months on the shores of the Mediterranean, Africa so close and yet still so far away, meant a breakthrough in my Spanish fluency that I’m not convinced could have happened anywhere so quickly but in Andalusia, as that’s the accent I first learned. I am so grateful right now to be able to converse so easily in Spanish with the few people who populate my days. Whether I’m explaining potential solutions to electrical and plumbing problems to my handyman, conversing with an Uber driver about the social debt of large corporations, or laughing with a neighbour about something silly my dog did, I feel like this fluency roots me to the world in which I’ve chosen to live out this crisis.

And so, these pandemic days continue to march on relentlessly and unapologetically. There are little bits of normalcy again, like the one Sunday a month when Juan comes to do the yard work and “La Jefe” has fun supervising, but those days are brief and fleeting.

It’s hard to get time off (for which I am not complaining!), but when I do, I try to be on my feet and away from screens. A couple of nights ago, I started building a new cupboard I bought for my kitchen, finishing it over the course of the following day.

I’m quite chuffed at how perfectly everything fits and that I now have a proper broom cupboard.

My handyman was back today to install a light fixture above my kitchen sink.

(His next jobs will be unblocking the kitchen sink, doing maintenance on my bedroom AC (both of which he knows about), and installing a pressure flow thingamabob in my master shower (feasibility to be discussed).)

He timed his arrival today perfectly as I was literally just minutes away from completing a gruelling afternoon of making homemade pasta! Why all that effort, he asked me.

Because I get a stomachache from fresh pasta made with chicken eggs. But these beautiful duck eggs magically don’t cause me any issues (omelettes are DA BOMB, by the way).

He did quick and very clean work, so I had time to throw together a quick ragù sauce (hint: wine and sausage replace the need to cook the sauce for hours!).

Dinner was welcome because I hadn’t eaten since a breakfast of homemade waffles (I’m nearly through my list of eggy things I need to catch up on!). I bought a mini waffle maker that I still need to play around with. A friend assures me I could have gotten these a lot darker brown, so I’ll keep playing till I get it right. But they were still delicious! And that’s fresh-squeezed grapefruit juice, something that is no longer a travel treat but something I have a few times a week. There could be worst vices!

All this time cooking is a way to nurture myself. I’m paying attention to where my ingredients come from and planning meals with intent and an aim of nourishing myself. I don’t think I’ve ever since my adolescence had so much time to spend in the kitchen (I was cooking professionally in those days!). And I’ve noticed that the more time I spend in the kitchen in a day, the less time I spend in the kitchen over the week. It’s really great to pull a portion of chicken curry with rice out of the freezer for those nights when you have unexpected overtime because I took downtime to cook in bulk.

There is so much uncertainty right now. I choose to focus on what I can count on right now, like business continuing to grow and a house of my own being within reach. I’m not thinking (too much) about how I had planned to go to Japan for my ten-year business anniversary next year (a lovely bookend to the five-year anniversary in London) or that I haven’t been more than five kilometres from my house since March. There’s no reason to make myself sad over things I can’t control and what has been taken from me. Instead, I choose to focus on what this pandemic has given me, an economic certainty that was so very much out of reach that day in Almería when I decided on an amble through the city centre instead of an excursion out of town.