December only barely slowed down at work, but I still started on a few personal projects while Alma debated starting an Only Fans

and Dodger took up up Pilates.

This gorgeous bag kept showing up on my Facebook feed for months (Meta really knows me). It is by a small Mexican designer named Motola and made from recycled plastic and aluminium. I treated myself to one for getting through trials.

I also treated myself to a genuine leather bag kit from Babylon Leather and started slowly working on putting that together. I could not believe I got the kit in the 10 promised days and that it flew through aduanas! I’ll do the reveal in the January post. 🙂

I made some really pretty meals in December. This one was Greek-inspired:

And this one was Tex-Mex:

I always get a ham at Christmas, and this year I got it just about perfect after cooking it all morning in the slow cooker with beer, molasses, orange juice, spices, and more.

The most amazing thing that happened in December is that I started on one heck of a quest that would change my life forever more and give me true freedom in my new life here in Yucatán. You can look forward to the entire tale in the next post, but here is a spoiler. 🙂

I’m looking back at my calendar for November 2024 and it is primarily filled with solid work days. I basically did six weeks in four weeks between the end of October and end of November. So in this post, I’ll just give a shoutout to two favourite restaurants my boss treated me to on the odd evening I finished early. 😉

The first one is Miyabi, a Japanese restaurant with a beautiful indoor/outdoor primary dining room.

This is my usual order, with mixed tempura that features ginormous sweet shrimp, two octopus nigiri, and then a roll that has fresh and spicy tuna WITHOUT CHEESE. Of course, I have a Sapporo beer to wash it all down. All of this with a generous tip is around 600 pesos.

Alma isn’t usually a proper snuggler, but she likes to touch me.

Dodger is a bit more cuddly and will sit on my feet if I’m getting up and moving around too much.

The other restaurant I went to is Little India, which moved from a very inconvenient location deep in centro to one further north that I can easily bus to. The food is delicious. I always get the thali, which is a plate with several different dishes. Not featured is my starter, pakora, which are deep-fried garbanzo flour and onion fritters that I promised myself I’d try making at home.

My tolerance for heat continues to grow. When I first visited Little India in its initial location, I had beef vindaloo (about 5 o’clock in the photo below) and struggled to finish it as it was so hot. I left all of the gravy. Fast forward to this visit and I did not find the vindaloo to be unbearably hot and I had all the gravy. This wasn’t just a one-off, I have a lot of other examples, like the quantity of fresh habanero sauce that went on my quesadillas the morning I wrote this post. Not being afraid of heat now is such an opening into a new culinary frontier.

October 2024 was a blur. I was pretty much triple booked at work as I was facing weeks of back-to-back real-time trials where I would have to do my regular work as overtime. I just focussed on getting through my pages while still doing a lot of cooking and, of course, keeping up my Pilates routine.

Cat photos for the month. Alma is so droll.

Dodger is adorable.

A lady reached out on Facebook offering me these gifts for some helpful posts I’d made in her group. Just goes to show that when you comment online, it’s never in a vacuum. Someone is reading. Be kind.

The only really significant thing that happened in October was a major power outage that ended with me feeling even more settled and supported here in Mérida.

Mid-month, thankfully before the real-time marathon, the power went off for hours. I reported to CFE, who said they were working on it. Neighbours also had an outage. It eventually got dark and I realised that the neighbours had power but I still didn’t… It’s the weirdest thing – I’d felt for months that I was about to have a major electrical problem with the house. I have a sneaking suspicion my body was reacting to something very real since electricity can be felt. I almost felt relief in this moment that whatever I was facing had arrived and would be dealt with.

I called CFE to tell them I still did not have power. They sent someone out surprisingly quickly, well within the four promised hours. He did all his checks and told me that he didn’t believe the problem was at their end and that I had to call an electrician. Thankfully, I had someone in my contacts that I thought could deal with something this major. I’d had a water pump fail some months before and this fellow had responded to my bat call for help, getting me sorted very late on a Sunday, including a hail Mary run to Home Depot at the eleventh hour before they closed. He’d gotten the work done, done well, and his price had been almost absurdly fair.

I messaged him that I needed help and he responded promptly that he was available. I asked the CFE guy if he could call and explain the situation and he oh-so-kindly did.

My electrician arrived super quickly and he started right from the basics, troubleshooting all my breakers and even rechecking the CFE guy’s work (yes, he climbed the pole). The problem was primarily at the entrance to the house, partly CFE’s fault, partly the fault of my main breaker panel. He told me that he had a contact at CFE that would probably come after his shift. It would all be above-the-board work using approved CFE methods, but I’d be paying him cash under the table. The two of them would get me sorted that night. Or I could put in a work order and wait for days. Of course I went with option A.

We headed to Home Depot for parts while we waited for the CFE worker. He was waiting for us by the time we got home. The guys then spent hours working their magic and somewhere in all of that, my house got upgraded to 50-amp service! They finally got the lights on around 11:00PM.

There were three culprits, one at the pole, one at the main breaker, and then a short at the house breaker that has probably been the cause of my lights flickering and constantly burning out despite being 15-year LEDs. The electrician said that this is probably what I was feeling all these months.

The upgraded service has been amazing and such a blessing — I can run the oven and Vitamix at the same time! The lights don’t flicker when I run the microwave! Oh, and I haven’t had a light bulb burn out in months.

Parts and labour cost me all of 6,000 pesos, and I have the security of having a really responsive electrician/plumber I can trust to stick with me through a crisis to a satisfactory resolution. I still feel very blessed.

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It’s late January 2025, and I’m finally getting ready to catch up on the blog. I can’t believe how late I am on my recaps. The autumn was BUSY with work and I didn’t have a spare brain cell left. The kitchen tour is coming, I promise! Thank you to everyone who has reached out to me to ask for updates.

September started out with Micro💩 software issues that made me joke on Facebook that I picked the right day to dress like a poor man’s Linda Hamilton. I crack myself up sometimes. Also, I got a haircut the next day. It’s incredible to need to do that regularly now!

Of course with the new kitchen, I did a ton of cooking in September, including a “Chinese week” where I made a bunch recipes from Souped Up Recipes. So grateful to have our Asian Mart with most of the ingredients and brands that are recommended in the recipes!

While in the middle of cooking, my new neighbours, from Pakistan!, dropped off these delicious banana muffins.

Other than hamburger, the only way I really like beef is in these recipes. I would end up adding this beef and carrots to my regular rotation.

Cashew chicken also happens regularly . I love Asian five spice mix!

My Chinese-style chicken teriyaki wasn’t much to look at but was delicious.

Beef and broccoli is always delicious. Oyster sauce is magic.

Of course I made plenty of white rice to go with everything.

That leek was longer than my fridge is deep! LOL

On a whim one Saturday afternoon, I decided to run away to Progreso for dinner.

I found a restaurant that served me a delicious mezcalita.

And an even more delicious shrimp aguachile with mango and habanero.

That broth was divine and I did not leave a drop!

I really need to do this more often.

The final recipe I did was American sweet and sour pork, which featured more ketchup than I normally eat in a year. As I expected, the recipe was way too sweet for me and did not end up on the rotation, despite being delicious. I actually finished up with the last of the dumpling wrappers, making sweet and sour pork gyozas!

These vegetables were for a different dish featuring pork and celery, so I’d have something blander and saltier to offset the sweetness of the sweet and sour sauce.

Obligatory feline portraits. I love my girls so much.

These rocking chairs are much too low for me, but at only $1,000 for both, I had to snag them as I knew they’d look good against the pink.

I came into some duck eggs and was able to knock a few more things off my egg bucket list!

A jammy egg over noodles. Divine. Many months later, days before I actually wrote this post, a restaurant ignored my “no egg” request with my ramen and included a soy sauce marinated chicken egg like this that looked so good that I decided to take a bite, figuring that since I’d gotten over the “ick” factor of eggs, that maybe I could build up tolerance to chicken eggs. Nope. It tasted rotten! I finally had the proof I needed for myself that I really can’t eat chicken eggs. 🙁

And then a Japanese omelette, for which there are no words. They are made with mirin and sesame oil, making them a little nutty and sweet. This was the first egg dish that I truly went “OH, this is why people love eggs so much.” I made this one a few more times!

I made another upgrade to the kitchen. I gave up on having a fancy faucet with a spray hose because there just isn’t enough pressure. I’d tried installing a pressurizing pump, but it kept jamming up with sarro. After searching for a compromise, I found this inexpensive faucet on Amazon that was the answer I needed. I lost the spray feature, but I still have the flexibility of a hose.

Proud to say that I installed the new faucet myself!

September had a huge milestone. A lady posted to a Facebook group that she was looking for head scarves for a family member undergoing chemotherapy. Now that I have a mostly full head of hair for the first time in my life (THANK YOU MODERN MEDICINE), I don’t wear scarves anymore. I gifted her my entire scarf collection. That was quite an emotional day.

I ordered dinner late in the month and added a brownie for dinner. Was I surprised when it came with ice cream and toppings! I love it when restaurants go the extra mile like that. Yum!

That really was it for September. I’m looking back over my schedule and I was pretty much double booked at work.

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In August, my wildest and most improbable dream for my life in Mérida came true: I got access to a proper lap pool within reasonable distance of my house. For months, there had been rumours of a gym complex being built in the same building where I have Pilates and that it would have a semi-Olympic-sized pool. When the gym finally opened, I investigated. After a tour of the facilities, I signed up on the spot! I really needed a change-up in my exercise routine and I’m still pinching myself!

Some August miscellanea before I give another glimpse of my new kitchen.

Here’s Alma being a weirdo. I just love when she glares at me. I cannot believe she’s been here two years!

Another task I had for the movers in August was to move that giant heavy armoire out of the way so I could access the outlet behind it and add an extension cord to charge my devices when I’m on the couch as well as run a fan without having an extension cord running across the room into the hallway! Such a small thing, but so luxurious!

Of course, I had to go see the Deadpool and Wolverine movie at some point. I cannot believe I saw Deadpool 1 when I was visiting here in February 2016 and also Deadpool 2 when I had just moved here in 2018!

Chili’s was serving very inexpensive mojitos, so I went with one of those in lieu of my usual margarita. They then served me the best ribs I’ve ever had.

I’ve been going to Pilates Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, first mornings, now evenings, for years. I’ve substituted the Friday evening class with a Saturday morning class. I go swimming after, then get a Starbucks if I’m in a hurry to get to work. If I’m not, I get brunch. I found this lovely oasis, 100% Natural, with view of a Sam’s Club. Those are enchiladas like I used to get in Mazatlán, so good, and they have bottomless American coffee.

Contrary to popular belief, my girls do get along and hang out together.

In August, I kept refining the kitchen setup and got into a groove with meal prep, cooking, and resetting the kitchen.

I started off the month with the island covered in this pretty but very cheap contact paper. It was a really good match for the space, tying in the different wood tons of the room and the pattern from the stove surround, but I knew immediately it was a temporary solution.

A few weeks into the month, a neighbour posted on FB Marketplace that he had remnants of this contact paper, which fit the kitchen even better and looked to be better quality. It was a funny transaction — I was back home with my treasure in under 20 minutes of him posting, I lived so close by. But alas, it started lifting immediately.

A couple of days later, the algorithm struck again. When I saw the item, I thought, if this is an easy transaction like the island was, it’s meant to be, but I’m not forcing it. I reached out to the seller and the item was available but he absolutely could not deliver. I asked him my flete guy from July could contact him directly so they could arrange a pickup. He said sure. I contacted the flete guy and asked if he was interested in what I knew was going to be a heavy job. Certainly. He got in touch with the seller. An hour later, the phone rang. “I’m going to pick it up today between 6 and 7. When I get there, we’re going to let you know and you’re going to transfer him the money. I have something else to do tonight and you have Pilates anyway, so I’ll just park it in my garage and I’ll deliver in the morning.” And it was that easy, other than having to deal with the money transfer while walking to Pilates. When I came out of class, both men had sent me this picture:

Little Miss I’m so simple and humble and don’t need granite countertops now has a granite countertop:

The counter exactly 1 metre across like the island is but a bit longer. It also has a lip to fit over the edge of a substrate. So I’m going to have the long edges of the island cut down so that you don’t see the corners peaking out like they are now. It’s not a priority at the moment and I want to wait until I’m ready to do a few more carpentry tasks in the room. The thought is to have another island fabricated to replace the metal table and get it a granite top also — it won’t be hard to get a close-enough match as I’m seeing that same granite all over Marketplace. I’m even thinking somewhere down the line of committing enough to this new layout to pull the sink so I can have the contact paper countertops replaced by granite as a permanent solution, then having cabinets made for underneath. By that point, it might also make sense to reface or even replace the ash cabinets and have them extended to the ceiling, to make everything match. But for now, the kitchen is really functional. Improved aesthetics can come later.

The counter was covered in paint, you can see the worst of it in the foreground, but it scraped up beautifully. I cannot believe that I now have this incredible workspace in my kitchen where I don’t have to worry about water spills, scratches, or stains. This is where I feel I need to talk about money. The island was 4,700 pesos delivered. The counter was 3,000 pesos delivered (both amounts include generous tips to the moving crews). Even adding in contact paper, risers, and a few accessories to make the cabinets more useful, I got my dream island for under 9,000 pesos. There is no way I could have foreseen that getting my layout anchor piece was going to be so inexpensive. I’ve been looking at big islands for a long time. They are very expensive, especially when you start adding in drawers. I really feel like I got a gift from the universe to make up for some of the money I lost to the scammers.

You can also see in the background one of my new cabinets! I really would have preferred darker cabinets like the island to offset the yellow, but it’s what was available. I got the little drawer unit for under the microwave separately. It’s a close-enough match to raise the microwave to the perfect height. I love having my cookbooks accessible like that.

I can’t believe I have only one more sponsored post to do and it’s going to be a kitchen tour.