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Testing if this works. I can post to Instagram and it magically leaves a post here. I’m more of in an Instagram than Facebook mood these days (more pictures, less bla bla bla), but I don’t want my readers to have to subscribe to another service. Let’s try this for a bit as it seems to be working well at my end, but I understand that it may suddenly result in a barrage of posts as each photo on IG becomes a post here.

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I’ve been thinking about this post for a very, very, very long time. I’ve written I don’t know how many drafts. I am struggling find the right voice to both not sound completely entitled and bitter, but also to convey the immense gratitude I feel towards so many of my readers.

This is not a good-bye post per se. This is a “blogging hasn’t been working for me for a very long time and I’m trying to find another way to share what I want to share so I’m going to be quiet for a while” post.

Every time I start to get enthusiastic about blogging again, something comes up that dampens that enthusiasm. I recognise that a huge part of that has to do with how both the blogosphere and I have come of age in the decade since I started doing this. The default mode online these days is to not only take personal offence at everything, but to be very judgemental. I’m finding myself dreading the “you’ve got a comment” emails when I used to be excited by them. (Let me stress here that if you’ve commented in the past weeks and your comment is still there, you are most definitely not part of the problem!)

Coupled with that is that I have finally grown into myself as a person and to put it very bluntly, I don’t have the patience to deal with other people’s bullshit and fragile egos anymore. There are too many wonderful people in my life for me to expend energy on disrespectful people or to defend myself against a completely innocent comment that someone chose to see as offensive.

I’m also uncomfortable with the level of energy a couple of readers have spent thinking about me lately — it borders on stalking and I wondering what if the next such people aren’t harmless? I’ve always been careful about my personal security as I travelled and it seemed easier to keep an air of mystery to my location when I was hopping around. Now, it’s probably impossible.

I have met some truly incredible people in my travels and made some genuine friendships. Readers have sheltered me and fed me, provided me with a listening ear, taught me so much, and more. I have enjoyed meeting so many of you over the years and I should be meeting another one of you in the next couple of days (waves to D&L!).

One thing I am considering is finding a way to keep the blog for a closed group only. I just haven’t figured out a way to do that what wouldn’t result in my accidentally omitting someone who should have access. It’s easy to send out invites to anyone who emails me off blog, who hasn’t been banned from commenting, and who interacts on the Facebook page, but I don’t want to omit all lurkers by default. I guess what I’m trying to reach at is that, should I decide to keep on blogging the way I’ve been doing, I want to know who is reading my blog and limit access to it.

But right now, blogging isn’t something on which I want to expend any energy. I’ve got too much going on with work and my new house and discovering Mérida. I’m looking at maybe “micro blogging” on my Facebook page or Instagram, but that’s just a thought at this point.

For those of you who come here genuinely interested in what I’m doing and who care about me, I want you to rest assured that I’m in a really good place right now. Yes, a few bad apples have definitely contributed to ruining this for the rest of you, but, really, this choice at this time is motivated more by how many positive things are going on in my life right now than by jerks behaving badly. Frankly, it is a relief to me that something needs to give in my life and that I’m electing to spend less time at my computer online and more time out in the World.

I email with some of you on an occasional to frequent basis and that won’t change. Please continue to reach out as I will miss my tribe!

Algún día en cualquier parte, en cualquier lugar indefectiblemente te encontrarás a ti mismo, y ésa, sólo ésa, puede ser la más feliz o la más amarga de tus horas. — Pablo Neruda

(Someday some place, somewhere, you will inevitably find yourself, and that, only that, may be the happiest or the most bitter of your hours.)

So on fridge arrival day, I was up at the crack of dawn excited to do laundry. You know you’re a grown up when…

The most pressing thing to wash were my whites, including my sheets. I love how those sheets feel on my bed, but as I expected, they have been a giant pain in the ass to keep looking nice. Now that I have a proper laundry room and all the time in the world to let my sheets sit under the sun without stressing that a dog will eat them, maintenance will  become a lot easier. I can apply Zote soap to stains, scrub on the washboard, and then throw everything in the wash.

The extra time in the sun makes such an incredible difference — a yellowing pillow case looked a bit better when it came out of the washer and was snowy white by the time I brought it back inside!

I left the fridge unplugged until about 9PM, so about five hours. The opposite of riveting 44-page manual said that it could be plugged in immediately and I knew it had not been transported horizontally, so that was really an over abundance of caution on my part. Before plugging it in, I gave it a wash inside and out with a solution of water with vinegar and a few drops of dish soap, but only used water and vinegar for the inside of the water dispenser tray and the dispenser mechanism itself. The inside had a “new fridge smell” that was incongruent with the outside appearance and the wash really help get rid of that plasticky scent. I set both the freezer and fridge controls to “óptim,” filled the ice cube and water dispenser trays and went to bed hoping the ruckus the fridge was making was only the compressor firing up.

Yesterday morning, the fridge was dead silent. I did a quick search on “digital inverter compressors” and learned about this new (and rather awesome) fridge compressor technology that means that fridges are quieter and more energy efficient. An RV fridge is entirely silent and I have a hard time getting used to the hum of a fridge in the background, so this is yet another lovely bonus feature!

By late morning, I trusted the fridge enough to transfer the contents of the old one over and was champing at the bit to get groceries, but had no time. It was going to be a stupidly long day, something I am so over and which I hope will not repeat itself again. I fired a client this week, something that has been a long time coming that will allow me to provide better service to my other much better paying clients and free up a couple of hours a day. So maybe I will succeed in my goal of a more “normal” schedule starting in January.

The last two weeks, water delivery was at 4:30, so of course the doorbell rang at 3:30 yesterday just as a client Skyped in for training! But, hey, I’m not complaining. Better early than not at all! I’m so glad I have the water delivery worked out. I go through about a gallon a day (as I go through 2 x 5 gallons in 10 days), depending on how much I’m cooking things that need water, like rice or pasta. So a jug a week means I never risk running out.

Today was rather like Christmas continuing to come early as I got two Amazon packages delivered rather than just the one I expected. I don’t know if this applies to shipping to Canada, but Amazon.com now has extraordinarily good shipping rates to Mexico and super fast transit times! I still much prefer to shop locally for instant gratification, but if I simply can’t find something, I’m so glad to have both Amazon.com and Amazon.mx as backups. I start with .mx and if they don’t have something, then I look at .com. With everything I’ve shopped for so far, if it was a good price and had free shipping on .mx, it was prohibitively expensive to buy on .com and if it was expensive or unavailable on .mx, then I was going to get a good deal on .com.

As a point of comparison, I really wanted a fancy notebook that would have cost me 50USD to ship to Mexico this summer. That was never going to happen. With the new global shipping program, I’m getting the notebook for 23USD. Wow!

The most pressing thing in my orders was a seven-port USB hub. I have bought I don’t know how many hubs over the years, including several purchased here everywhere from Office Depot to Waldo’s, that have simply not worked. It was getting to be ridiculous so I found the best rated seven-port hub on Amazon and ordered it. This was one of those items that was more affordable on the .mx site and pretty much the same price as if I had bought it in the States on the .com site. So far, it’s working. Yay!

The nice-to-have thing in the same .mx order was a TP-Link WiFi extender to get internet upstairs. It was actually less expensive here in Mexico than it would have been in the US!

This product sounded way too good to be true — almost plug and play, double the original coverage, and only about 25CAD? It took me about five minutes to unbox it, muddle through the technical jargon, determine that the easy method wasn’t going to work, set it up through the nearly as easy secondary method, and go from not being able to download email upstairs to being able to stream Netflix! What a great product!

After working steadily through the afternoon, I finally headed out to get some groceries. I’m still waiting for some PayPal transfers so I couldn’t go and do the huge run I wanted, but I still had a comfortable budget to get some basics that will cover the next several days as well as some little treats for the house. For what I wanted to buy, I chose to go to Bodega Aurrera, but had to nix my plans of walking when it started to torrentially downpour as I was heading out. I’m still pretty sure that I could have walked there faster than drive!

There, I was annoyed to find a pink garage can for my office on a clearance rack — I bought the same model in purple this summer for $20 more. 🙂

I found these adorable and perfectly sized baskets with a woven pattern for my fridge:

There were so inexpensive and the perfect size for my pantry shelves that I am going to go buy several more. I may even shake things up and get a few in the lime green! 🙂

(No, I have not started drinking Coco-Cola. The pizza places keep ignoring my requests for them to not bring it even though it’s included! I gave one to my mecanico neighbour and keep forgetting to pass him these.)

By the way, my fridge was on sale at Bodega… for $7,999 ($1,000 less than new full price at Coppel). They also had the just over $5,000 nine-cubic-foot Daewoo I’d seen on Coppel’s site and my Mabe washer for $1,000 more. I was going to stop at Bodega on my way to Coppel and if I had, I might have made a disastrous mistake!

Last thing to show off is that I’ve been super annoyed with the grey hand towels for my bathroom, but replacing them wasn’t a priority until I found these for just $20 each!

There is getting to be way too much turquoise and matchy-matchyness in the house, a trap I fell into with Miranda, so I made sure to get a cheap plastic pitcher for dishwashing rinse water in a colour that I don’t have in the rest of the house. 🙂 That turquoise is everywhere right now and must be the colour of the season. Contessa would be heaven. 😉

It’s funny how a fridge that works as it should and a washing machine have so magically transformed my life and exponentially increased my enjoyment of my new home. It felt magical this morning to be able to pop my favourite dress (and a few other pieces) in the wash and to have them all clean and dry by the time I was ready to head out. Soon, the fridge will be full of everything I need to make a myriad of healthy dishes with ingredients sourced from all the specialty shops in my neighbourhood and nearby. Slowly, but surely, I am inching my way to the life I envisioned I would build for myself in this house!

I did some research about stainless steel rusting and bubbling last night to see if there was anything I should do to make sure that cosmetic issues with my new fridge don’t become functional problems. I immediately got results from very, very, very unhappy Samsung fridge owners. As it turns out, the issues with my new fridge are a well known manufacturing defect that has been going on for a long time that Samsung apparently doesn’t care about as they consider it to be merely a cosmetic defect.

This might sound like bad news, but it was actually good news to me. Out of all the complaints I saw, there was only one person who complained about the fridge operation itself. There were no problems of actual fridge function issues even after several years with the rust and bubbling happening, not even with the water dispenser. So now I know that except for the dents, the fridge’s cosmetic issues are normal for that brand and not indicative of where and how it was stored.

If I had paid full price for this fridge and it started rusting on me, yes, I would have been pissed off. But I got it for better than 50% off with full disclosure! I really don’t care to a point that the fridge isn’t pretty as long as it works well.

By about 3PM today, I was starting to lose hope that the fridge would arrive, but, of course, it finally turned up. I was really pleased that the parking around my service entrance was clear as that meant a straight shot from the truck to my kitchen. One of my neighbours is always parking in front of that door and I can never guarantee it’ll be clear. I am refusing to be annoying about telling people not to park in front of my house (unless it’s in front of the garage door I use!) even though the landlady said she absolutely did not tolerate it and would frequently call for a tow! But if I know I’m going to need parking in front of a particular door at a given time, I advise both of my neighbours who park in front of the house (one being the mechanic) and they are really good at remembering to stay clear.

I have a question I should have asked the guys today, but I didn’t have the right vocabulary for it — why don’t Mexican delivery people use a dolly? It might be an expense for a guy with a small shop, but can’t Coppel afford one for its drivers?!

At any rate, it is here! 🙂

Both sides are scratched up a bit, but it’s the doors that really that really took a beating.

Freezer door:

And the infamous damage around the water dispenser. Boy do I get why folks were pissed off that Samsung was all, “Meh, it’s just cosmetic. We won’t cover the repair.” You can see at the very left a bubble that if pulled on would likely take half the finish off the door.

The inside is sufficiently roomy!

Croft, here is my very nice portable ice cube making thingamabob. Once the cubes are frozen, you twist that knob in the front and, in theory, they should fall into the container below so you can make more ice cubes until the container is full.

THIS is what my last fridge was missing, a description of what each value is!

Now, here is the surprise of all surprises. I am shook. I had no idea this even existed. Can you understand what you’re looking at?

That’s a container to fill with water for the dispenser! So instead of having to fill a jug and open the door many times a day, I can just fill the dispense once or twice and then dispense water through the door! What a gift!

I was told to let it sit for 24 hours before plugging it in, but that’s not happening. I’ll plug it in before bed, fill it with some water bottles in the morning, see how everything is Friday morning, and then, hopefully, go for the grocery run of all grocery runs!