Breakfast and Life Philosophy

It’s so unusual to me to wake up in the morning and to know that I have hours ahead of me with absolutely no work to do and no schedule that I must adhere to.

My work deadlines are still there. But due to circumstances beyond my control, I cannot do any job-related work other than check my email. So my explanations of how the company supports Ethernet ring protection and generic routing encapsulation tunneling will have to wait until I return from Mexico.

Since we are getting room and board from a local Mexican family, I have no chores to do other than make my bed. No grocery shopping. No cooking.

Since I am many miles and hours away from my adorable grandchildren, I cannot possibly visit them.

Unlike our previous visits to San Miguel de Allende, this visit is so short that we did not sign up for Spanish school. So there are no classes to attend and no homework to do.

Micha and I did linger over breakfast, conversing with our hosts in our broken Spanish. It’s easy enough to understand Rosa Maria and Christobal when they speak to us, particularly since they are used to speaking slowly and clearly for the many foreign students that they have housed over the years. But whatever grammar I learned when I went to classes is hiding in the recesses of my mind. Nevertheless, I do speak and even tackle difficult subjects.

We started off talking about simple things like the weather and recent films that we’ve seen. But before we finished, we’d also talked about evolution. Rosa Maria finds it too difficult to believe that humans could have evolved from bacteria and monkeys. Why would some monkeys turn into humans and other not? I say something about the more intelligent monkeys getting together with other intelligent monkeys and so forth. Micha points out that the process took millions of years.

I say it’s possible to believe in both God and evolution.

Perhaps the Earth was visited by extraterrestrials at some point in time. Rosa Maria and I agree that with so many planets in the universe, it is likely that there are some beings on other planets. Could it have been extraterrestrials who designed the pyramids—how curious that they appeared both in Egypt and in the Americas--and the Nazca lines.

What about those Easter Island statues? Micha points out.

Now the physicists are telling us about “the God particle”, the glue that mysteriously keeps all the other particles together. So many things that we do not understand.

There is not just one truth. Or perhaps there is, but that one truth is beyond the capacity of human beings to understand. So for us humans, it is natural that people see the same thing and explain it in different ways. Multiple religions for a single God or for a force of nature or for whatever makes our world go round.

Our Shortest Visit in San Miguel--No Excuses This Time

We are back in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. But this time, it’s just a short visit. Only five days. Micha decided to get his dental implants here, because it was less than half the price of what the procedure costs back in California. Yes, even with the additional costs of travel. He used frequent flyer points and the living expenses here are so low.

Micha flew down here by himself a couple of months ago for the painful part.

I felt sort of bad about not being with him to offer emotional support. But he took solace from the fact that I was earning money back home doing my contract job. Fortunately, through connections that we had made during previous visits, Micha arranged for room and board with a really nice Mexican family, who were as supportive as possible during that visit.

This time, we are staying with the same family and the dentist will be finishing her work. No pain for Micha. And plenty of free time in between dental appointments for us to enjoy San Miguel.


When we came here together for previous visits—three or four weeks at a time--we had a full schedule of Spanish classes or else I was busy all day at the International Writers’ Contest.

Now, we have no classes and no particular framework.

This morning, I walked Micha part-way to his dental appointment and bought the weekly bi-lingual periodical, Atencion San Miguel, to check out what’s going on in the Que Pasa calendar of events. Maybe this time, we will go on the organized walking tour of the historic sites. We’ve never done that, because we’ve always been busy in the mornings.

I had intended to do some of my technical writing work remotely, since we are not constantly going to be doing other activities. So after walking with Micha as far as the Jardin, I came back alone to the place we are staying and logged into my laptop computer, eager to work.

But even though the internet connection seemed to be running smoothly, I ran into some sort of problem accessing the company’s servers. I contacted the help desk, but it’s not a simple problem to resolve. So it looks like I won’t be doing any technical writing this week after all.

Now, I have no excuses not to do my “other” writing. The writing that I always say I cannot do because I am too tired from sitting at the computer doing my hours of paid technical writing.