Hello Everyone, it’s Miguelito in Mexico!
I know it’s been a long time since you’ve heard from me, but, quite frankly, I’ve been busy. (Well, and, perhaps even more frankly, I can be lazy and lacking in focus.) Between the demands of the job—which often include working at home—and the demands of Miguel the boy-wonder—which can be draining of both time and energy—I often have difficulty moving from thoughts of writing up a blog update to the actual typing of one. It always seems like a bad time to get started because I won’t be able to finish, or maybe because I don’t feel I have a new tale of adventure with which to entertain.
My good friend Jamesthemathteacher has inspired me to redouble my efforts at more regular communication in the blog format. He is good for one or so a month these days and I do enjoy catching up with him, as it were, via his email alerts. It doesn’t take too much effort to drop him a quick couple of lines back, and presto, we’ve kept in contact. Honestly, I wish more of my friends and family would shoot out these types of updates so I could know what is up with them. Anyway, not only is James better at blog regularity, he’s also better at keeping them short enough to want to read them all in one sitting, which I’m going to work on from now on. If I’ve got a whale of a yarn, I’ll do installments like I started to do last year. But, I’m going to work on short and sweet.
When I first started this blog, it was primarily for friends and family in the states, to let them know what I was up to and to offer some insight into the Mexican ex-pat experience. After 3 ½ years (can you believe it!?) I feel like I’ve done a pretty good job of offering a sense of what life is like here. And it’s still quite good, but feels more and more like “home” and less like the new place. However, I’ve made so many new friends here that have moved on to new places, I’m starting to feel I need to make an effort at just sending out some basic updates and less like I need to write an epic tale of Mexican hijinks.
So, here it goes:
It’s been a great year since I last logged one of these. Miguel continues to grow and continues to be a beautiful, special boy. We found him a new guarderia that he doesn’t cry at every time we drop him off, so we are happy about that. It’s not free like the state-run day care we gave up on, but it’s only about 12 dollars a day.
My brother came to visit for spring break and I really enjoyed showing him around. Will, Avi and Juan came at the end of the school year to visit and we headed to Chicago to see them over Thanksgiving. Freaking cold is all I’ll say. Well, that and I’d like to see Chicago again not during the winter. More good buddies also moved on from ASF and we wish you all well.
I continued to squeeze out some travel, spending a week in Holland last winter on a school MUN trip, hitting Chiapas last summer for some Spanish classes and exploration and a weekend trip to the desert town of Real de Catorce. Together with Ale and Miguel, we visited another sweet Hacienda along with beach trips to Mazatlan and Puerto Vallarta.
I took on the MUN class this year (no one else dumbest enough to do it?), which is bound to add some stress to my life as we head through the next few months of planning the two day conference for 900 students. But, generally work is enjoyable. Even so, I’m going to take a look at some opportunities in administration out there over the next month or so. I’ll be heading to San Fran for a job fair in February and looking into some openings here at ASF as well. I could continue to be Miguelito in Mexico, or maybe I’ll become Miguelito in Shanghai. We’ll see…
Though I haven’t written much over the past year, I have managed to take a lot of pictures, including a shit-ton of pictures of Miguel, including some videos. That’s mainly the point of this message—check out these pictures.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/miguelito2066/ (click on a set, then slideshow)
In the meantime, I’ll be working on my next update. I swear.
PS. There was something else I wanted to say…Oh, yeah, we’re pregnant!
