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Transatlantic

This post finds you from its origin deep amidst a crossing of the Atlantic Ocean. That itself is a wonder, even in the middle of this instantaneous and omnipresent age of communications. Why are we crossing “the big pond?” That’s a story worth telling, and more.

Only sight like this for 100+ light-years in every direction

We’ve noticed that our annual springtime pilgrimage to Europe suffered from the effects of that red-eye flight and subsequent jet lag, costing us a few days recovery every time. We tried preparing for the time change, avoiding the free alcohol, adjusting our eating, flying premium economy or even business class, but these only partially mitigated the effects. In planning the trips, I became resigned to getting a decent flight schedule and just adjusting from there. Then a neighbor mentioned he and his wife no longer flew to Europe in the Spring, they took a repositioning cruise there. I questioned adding the cost of a cruise on to the cost of visiting Europe, and he pointed out that the approximately two week cruise cost about the same as round trip business airfare.

Of course I thought he was kidding, but when I researched it, there it was in black and white. Seems every Spring, cruise lines sortie parts of their fleet from America to Europe (mostly the Mediterranean) to position the ships for summer cruising. The return trip in the Fall sets up all those Caribbean cruises in the Winter. There are some smaller fleet movements in the Pacific and to/from South America, but we were interested in the transatlantic leg.

Why are they cheaper than most cruises? First off, they involve different embark and disembark locations, on different continents, which make them more challenging for vacation planners. Second, the nature of the trip is mostly open ocean, and most vacation cruisers like port calls. Third, it’s always two weeks, in Spring and Fall, which means families really can’t afford the time commitment. So the clientele is older retirees, frequent cruisers, and people like us trying it out for transport. All of this applies to the repositioning cruises. There is also one line, Cunard, which operates the Queen Mary II and does a week+ direct cruise between New York and England throughout most of the year.

One thing I noticed immediately is that the best deals pass quickly. While most people don’t even consider transoceanic cruises, the number of those who do is growing and they are passionate about them. Such travelers snapped up the best deals. We ended up on the Celebrity Silhouette leaving Fort Lauderdale for Bermuda, the Azores, Ireland, then Amsterdam. While this is our first Celebrity cruise, we have cruised many times on other lines, and here are some lessons learned:

Use a travel agent (TA). I usually do all my booking myself, but there are so many variables to a cruise, and TAs also get volume discounts and other freebies, making them worth your while.
If you don’t see a great deal on the cruise you want, book a cheap inside cabin and watch for “sales” and “bids for upgrades.” Join CruiseCritic (.com) and register with the appropriate roll call board for your ship. There the cruise fanatics (and they are legion) will let you know everything you need to for a great cruise. Since transatlantic cruises are still rarely full, there will almost certainly be a chance to upgrade, almost always at a reduced price. The same goes for extras like drink packages, internet access, spa access, and specialty dining. Your TA and fellow cruisers on CruiseCritic will be able to help you navigate when to purchase what you want. For example, on our cruise, we got a basic internet package as part of our room, but we hesitated to upgrade to streaming internet because of the cost. Once on board, Starlink access was offered for a very reasonable rate. On the other hand, I am told that specialty restaurants are much cheaper to reserve before the cruise.
Transatlantic cruises are not for those prone to seasickness, nor for first time cruisers. Our crossing has been a rainy, cool-but-not-cold, and choppy. Everybody walks with that brush-your-left-shoulder-on-the-port-wall, brush-your-right-shoulder-on-the-inner-wall wobble. Not something you want to face if suffer seasickness, or don’t know if you do. Not to mention whether you will enjoy “at sea” days back-to-back-to-back.
Explore your ship. We found a little known quiet lounge tucked under the spa, which has proved a godsend when the weather sends all those sun-worshipers off the top deck looking for a place to park for the day. There are drink stations, small bars, game rooms, even a library, all of which might escape the eye of the incurious cruiser.
On a two week cruise, pace yourself. Last year we did ten days on a Panama Canal cruise, and felt like we almost ate ourselves to death. We had just begun intermittent fasting, which for us means eating only breakfast and lunch. But for the cruise we thought, “what the heck, let’s hit the specialty restaurants for dinner.” Bad idea. This cruise, we have kept to our routine, and it is working for us. We have received increasingly concerned voice mail messages in our room, reminding us we haven’t visited the main dining room for dinner, and “do we need help?” I guess there aren’t too many intermittent fasters on cruise ships.
Most cruise lines retain the nickel-and-dime routine, so that what you spend in the end is generally greater than what you paid up front. Virgin Cruises is an exception, and we look forward to trying them in the future. But you need to pay attention to what your room, status, and packages entitle you. Our “classic” drink packages gets us unlimited booze, but not “top shelf” liquor or some specialty drinks. We get all the special coffee drinks at the cafe, but not carbonated water, except from the tap at the bar. I know, what? There are charges for classes, specialty drinks, flights, shore excursions, you name it. So be careful, or you’ll end up doubling your costs (but not necessarily your fun).
If you recall cruises as stuffy affairs requiring dressy clothes, you’re out of date. Even the “classy night” (replacing “formal night”) is just a collared shirt and pants for men, dress or slacks & top for women. Some folks go full-up formal, but that’s no longer a requirement. Mostly they don’t want beach/gym wear in the formal dining room, but it’s ok in the many cafes, snack bars, and bars.
Cruising remains extrovert heaven, with an opportunity to sit with strangers at every meal, bar, or event, along with games (trivia, password, etc.). But the mixing fun is not mandatory. For introverts like us, there are plenty of hiding places and tables for two.
One curiosity is that ship’s time is set by the Captain, not the position on the Earth. Our Captain has moved us ahead one hour per night, getting us to the upcoming port visit time a day early, so no one is showing up confused about what time it is. The day-after-day time changes are much easier to deal with than the all at once six-hour change of a red-eye flight to Europe. Many frequent cruisers tell us they prefer the westbound Fall trip, as they gain an hour every night enabling increased night owl activity. To each their own.
Cruise lines vary in temperament: there are party lines, classy lines, lines for families, lines for retirees, although all folks are welcome on all cruises. There are also specialty cruises for wine-lovers, music fans, etc. All of which is to say do your research and find out whether the ideal transatlantic cruise you want is also a Star Wars theme cruise, especially if you’re a Trekkie.

Was it worth it? We’re almost done, and I can confirm the time changes are far less dramatic and easy to adjust to when done once every other night. The cruise entertainment has been better than I expected, but still just worth the price (i.e., already included), and the sea days can become a little monotonous. With a little more attention to pricing and deals, and an earlier start in selecting which cruise line/route, I’d say this is an attractive alternative. Slainte!

Letting the head settle on my Beamish stout

Book Report: A History of the American People

This is a 1997 work by British journalist and amateur historian Paul Johnson, who died last year. You may ask yourself, “Why read a history book that is a quarter century out of date?” I’m glad you asked. Partially, it came to my library as a gift (thanks, Catherine & John), partially because it is well written, but mostly because it is out of date. Think about it: history is the process of sorting the current and transitory from the long-lasting and important. What is good today may look less so with the lens of time: bell-bottom jeans, anyone? A history book written before 9/11, Bush v. Gore, Covid, and the Trump phenomenon is unspoiled by the need to address those issues. And the truth it seeks to find can be tested against what we as readers now know, which the author could not know many years ago.

Weighing in at more than one thousand pages, this is not your beach-reading selection. I took it with me on a long cruise (more on that soon), and I easily won the “who has the most ridiculously large-sized book to read” pool-side contest. I needed an extra towel to use as a chest lectern to read the tome. Despite its heft, Johnson’s work is well-written and easy to read. He was a self-proclaimed English leftist who gradually evolved into a conservative, and he admits to having a traditional English public (meaning private/elite) school education, which was long on English history but barely mentioned the colonies with the exception of some troubles in the late eighteenth century.

He writes with the detachment of a foreign observer, but the insight of a close family member. That he was an admirer of the American experiment is clear throughout the work, but he feels free to point out the warts and all of our history. The book highlights the tensions in the American experiment: the emphasis on individual liberty and the acceptance of slavery, the democratic language hung like garland on a republican system of government, the city-on-a-hill idealism and the realpolitik of Native American policies. All through it, he highlights an important American creed: the right of the person to “get along” (his wording) by succeeding at whatever he wants to do without help or hindrance from the government. The bounty of the American expanse, especially in land, means to this day there is room for the productive person to leave behind whatever society, religion, or caste holds him back, and come to America and succeed.

Among Johnson’s most penetrating insights were:

the unique nature of the Founding Fathers and the Constitution they created. Lost in today’s criticism of them is the fact they created not only the best, but the first written constitution, and one which has lasted the longest and been most successfully adapted.
The importance of compromise in American success, both in political and personal activities. When Americans have been willing to accept half a loaf (metaphorically speaking), they have been most successful. When they insist on purity of thought and policy, they have failed. The original concept of the separation of Church and State lies in the former, while Prohibition is in the latter.
The long history of partisan media, which only briefly in the twentieth century veered toward something self-described as “objective journalism” but then morphed into a elite, independent interest group. Today’s partisan media sources are actually a return to what the Founders saw as normal, even if they didn’t like it then, either.
A similar history of political violence that dwarfs anything happening today. A good dose of history provides solid immunity to those shouting about the “unprecedented” this or that event. We’re not tarring-n-feathering one another, beating Representatives near to death in the Capitol, or loosing the FBI and IRS on political opponents. Wait, hold up on that last one.
While Johnson’s conservative views are evident, his consistent appraisal of Presidents defies partisan approaches. Coolidge and LBJ do well, Bush ’41 and Clinton do not. He prefers Reagan to Carter, but Nixon to either. His overall positive appraisal of Nixon brings howls from liberals and progressives, but his factual account of Nixon’s record is unassailable, and while no one apparently voted for him in 1972, he won the greatest electoral/popular victory in American history, a sin for which the newly self-appointed media opposition will never forgive him. The author criticizes both FDR and JFK for widespread mendacity and libertine behavior, but gives the former his due in enacting the New Deal.

Worth reading? absolutely. There’s a free copy floating about in the library aboard the Celebrity Silhouette. Versions are no doubt in your local library or available cheap on line. One final amusing anecdote: When I considered the work’s reviews on Amazon, I noted the vast majority were positive. Some got quite excited that Johnson confused some civil war generals or the dates of specific events. But the interesting ones went like this: ‘I enjoyed this book until it got into current events, when it became clear the author had clearly lost his mind (i.e., disagreed with my views).’ All I could think of was: is it more likely a well-published author suddenly lost his way at the end of a history work, or is it more likely your views don’t have the historic pedigree you thought, and perhaps need to be rethought? Good books are like that, they cause you to think, not just react.

AI

“I’m sorry, Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that.”

To borrow a phrase from Leon Trotsky, “you may not be interested in artificial intelligence, but artificial intelligence is interested in you.” It’s hard to avoid the subject of artificial intelligence, or AI, today. It’s all over the news, with bold predictions of how it will change everything. AI stocks are super hot, and China and the United States are in a chip race based on AI requirements. States, cities, and companies are building vast server farms to feed AI, spiking energy demand at exactly the same moment we’re supposed to be transitioning to electric vehicles! Much of what you hear is hype (no surprise), and you may be old enough (like me) to think, “well that will be somebody else’s problem with which to deal.” But probably not. However AI plays out, it will affect you within a few years, so it may be worth it to understand a little about AI now. Here goes:

I. AI is artificial, but it is not intelligence.

Some of the results AI programs can produce may look almost magical, but in the end, they result from a simple process. Everything called AI today is based on computer coding of large language models (LLMs). What is that? You already know that computers use “ones” and “zeros” (or digits, hence the digital world) to do everything they do. These large language models take words and turn them into tokens, or groups of ones/zeros. The base language doesn’t matter, which is why LLMs can work wonders with translations. What the program does is take the tokens (words in your view) and predict what the next token should be. The prediction uses a probability model (ok, no more math) that says, “based on what I have been trained on, what should the next word be?”

As a simple example, if you trained a LLM on the works of Shakespeare, then you asked it to describe “love,” the LLM would say things like, “love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind,” or “when love speaks, the voice of all the gods make heaven drowsy with the harmony.” Beautiful, no? Now if you added the lyrics from the J. Geils band to the model’s learning, it might say “love stinks.” Which answer it gives is based on how many times it sees that particular combination of words, and who says it, and how.

But wait a second, we’re falling into a trap by using phrases like “it says” or “it sees.” It does nothing of the sort. The model searches its repository of data and pulls out all the tokens which represent “love” then looks at the tokens surrounding that token, then puts them together to respond to you. There is no thought involved. But how does it get such amazing textual answers?

The key is feeding the model more and more data. Companies started using things like Wikipedia, but that isn’t enough. Now they’re scraping public social media, ingesting copyrighted material, anything to get more data. Because the more data that your AI model uses to train on, the better the results you get. One problem AI faces is recency bias. In the rush to add ever more sources, developers turn to today’s data. Almost no one is creating original data from the 19th century, while the Kardashians probably provide a megabyte a minute. AI will lean ever more heavily on recent data for learning, which negates one of the lessons of history: the things that are best are those which stand the test of time. AI does not care about “right” and “wrong,” just “fit.”

II. AI is a tool, nothing more, nothing less.

The use of tools is the story of humanity, from fire to the wheel to flight to computers. Tools are neither good nor evil; it is all about how you use them. A steak knife can cut a filet or a jugular vein. Alfred Nobel thought TNT would revolutionize mining and engineering. So there is no reason to fear AI, but there are many reasons to learn about it.

Like any tool, AI requires some initial effort on your part to work properly. If you don’t learn to use it through practice, you’ll find it too hard to use (the story of me and typing, as my two-finger approach can attest!). Also, AI benefits from you, as another source of learning. AI programs learn how you speak, how you think, what you expect from interactions with you, and then can respond better to you. Of course, that also opens the door to manipulation, too. Current AI developers are not consciously trying to program AI to be “addictive,” but that is a real possibility.

As a tool, AI most benefits those who can master it. Regular AI users point out that if you ask AI a stupid or poorly-worded question, it may give you a similar answer! Why? Not even the developers know for sure. There is no way to “open the hood” and look at what the model is doing; it is just “doing.” Another mind-blowing fact: AI developers have noticed the AI programs seem to work more slowly and are less productive during December. The developers think the AI has “internalized” the notion of a holiday season from its data, and answers accordingly.

III. AI can do many things for you, but maybe not better than you.

Since it is ultimately simply a computer program, AI is fantastic at taking over mundane or routine work. It never tires, never sleeps, never asks for a raise. Computer programmers love it, as “coding” often involves reams of simple instructions which are boring to write, but perfect to be automated. AI is great at giving you choices. Remember how great it was when you first googled “synonyms for” and found a ton of great alternatives? Now you can ask AI to take a paragraph you wrote and give you five different and better alternatives, and milliseconds later, you have them. AI assistants can “look over your shoulder” as you work on an email, for example, and tell you that your tone is harsh or you’ve mixed up the dates you’ve asked for the work to be completed.

What do you do better than AI? Probably the things at which you are best. The initial AI efforts wrote about as well as a sixth-grader. Current models are working at the undergraduate-level. AI will continue to advance, but it will never replace human expertise. For one thing, its data is based on human expertise, so it needs humans to continue pushing the limits of science, art, philosophy and the like in order to provide the “tokens” AI uses. So a very good lawyer may use AI to do research, or to hone a closing argument, but she will not be replaced by AI. Because AI also “hallucinates.” (Notice how we anthropomorphize AI? we have to talk about it a living, thinking “thing” just to make sense of it!).

There are great examples of this. Remember how AI “guesses” the next word? In most legal briefs, you’ll find the phrase “according to the case of X vs Y, . . .” AI “knows” it should use these tokens when you ask it a legal question, but if it can’t find the right citation, it will simply invent one! To AI, these are the right “tokens” to use, but to us, it’s just plain making things up. Since it has no free will, the AI developers call it hallucinating, since what AI does makes sense to it, but not in the real world.

AI can also be manipulated. Perhaps you heard about Google’s AI called Gemini, which started generating images of black Nazis, Asian Vikings, and Indian Romans. How did that happen. AI generated tokens to create images, but a developer put a filter in the program to make the images it created “more diverse.” So AI promptly ignored reality and made black Nazis. These problems are easy to correct, but demonstrate how AI can go wrong.

Now that’s diversity in action! (from the New York Times)

Positive counter examples exist in the world of medicine. AI can look at hundreds of millions of CAT scans and never tires, never has a headache or eye-strain. A good technician will still beat AI, but AI can serve as an initial screening tool or a post facto double-check. AI can also look at large bodies of medical data and find correlations which individual doctors might never see. Likewise, AI is looking at the development of thousands of ways to fold protein molecules into amino acids and thereby make treatments for various illnesses and conditions. Such work, even with modern supercomputers, would have taken decades.

IV. AI is coming, like it or not.

AI is part of the ongoing digital revolution, which means it happens at a pace with which we humans just aren’t prepared to deal. We have gone from the beta (testing) version of AI to level 4.0 in about ten years, and the trend is accelerating. Unlike the flying cars we were all promised in the 1960s, or the electric vehicle revolution which is always just around the corner, AI is already creeping into many things, whether you realize it or not.

Computers were supposed to replace mundane tasks, and they did put typists out of a job, but then coders became a thing. Now coders are in danger, and even so-called “white collar” workers are being reviewed. If you’re average or below average at your white-collar job (and half of people are, by definition), your boss will be considering whether an AI program could easily replace you. AI is seeping into service centers, the places where someone from India tried to convince you they were in Cincinnati and really wanted to help you. AI can make travel recommendations, edit papers, even “teach.” As it does so, there will be examples of really excellent AI efforts that are astoundingly successful, and others which are complete busts.

What cannot be denied is that the level of investment going on in the AI field, the development of the data sources and the research into better ways for AI to learn mean it will continue to affect you, personally, whether you realize it or not.

V. AI will exacerbate inequality.

As much as humans are a learning species, it is amazing that we always convince ourselves this next tool will be all to the good. Mark Zuckerberg thought Facebook would be a place for people to connect and become “friends.” This despite his original intent was to create a site for guys to rate girls on their “attractiveness.” Larry Page and Sergey Brin at Google worked under the motto, “Don’t be evil,” despite the fact illegal child porn was immediately one of the top search functions.

The internet writ large didn’t make humans smarter, despite making all the world’s knowledge instantly searchable. It did allow neo-Nazis, perverts, and fraudsters a chance to meet and grow. All that information devolves into cat videos, Tindr, and scams. AI will be no different. A good writer will perfect an even better paragraph or story. A scam artist, a better pitch, customized just to you. A good priest, a better sermon. A crank, a more inviting screed against whatever. For every medical breakthrough, there will be fake-news causing unnecessary death or illness.

The power of AI will enable people to do great and terrible things. Those who better understand AI will be better at using it, and far better at avoiding it using them.

E-clip-sin’

Back around eleven months ago, I realized the path of totality for the April 8th solar eclipse was running through Mazatlán, Sinaloa, Mexico. While it’s not close (six hour drive), it’s close enough to lakeside, and we were still early enough to reserve a decent Airbnb. So we found ourselves in a very nice apartment on the 14th floor (18 story building) on the playa in Mazatlán.

The night before, we stood on the balcony and nabbed these pics of what seemed to be a typical Sunday night, with steady traffic along the beach drive and small crowds on the malecon. Of course there was a local group playing banda music directly in front of our building till midnight, but earplugs, a white noise machine, and some melatonin remedied that.

The crowds started to build in the morning. Breakfast at the mom-n-pop restaurant next to our building took twenty minutes to be seated, a full hour to be served, and they were going as fast as they could. By the time we finished and paid, it was only about thirty minutes to totality. The police had suddenly shut down auto access to the beach drive, so traffic was a nightmare, as people who planned to drive down to the beach were suddenly rerouted through the narrow side streets. But it gave the growing crowds unfettered access to the road and the sun show.

Our balcony was facing the beach, and it wasn’t clear if we could stay there and still see the eclipse. As the time grew near, we found a balcony spot where we could stand and–using those special glasses–look at the sun. By the time totality hit, there were several spots on the balcony with a full view.

Here’s my video of the event, with voice over:

The mostly Mexican crowds had a festive atmosphere, even cheering when a few rowdies got hauled away by the policia. As the eclipse neared totality, the crowd started cheering, and resumed it when the sun finally peeked out the other side of the moon. It was very interesting, if brief. I was struck by how “duskish” or “dawnish” it was; dark where we were, but you could see daylight in the distance in every direction, which was odd. And I imagined what it must have been like for people before science could explain and even predict it all; one minute, you’re working on your crops, then it gets dark under a cloudless sky, then light again. What did one make of that?

Our friends Barbara and John joined us for the event, and here’s John’s much better video, which captures how dark it was, and some of the crowd reactions better:

And you knew this had to be added somewhere in the post:

As an event, was the eclipse worth it? Yes, but I would add I think I only need to see totality once. And totality is totally different from any other (even 95%) type of eclipse. My mind wasn’t blown, nor did I have a moment of cosmic enlightenment. It was fun.

How about Sinaloa in general, or Mazatlán in particular. For all the talk about cartel violence, the city was quiet for the event, with the exception of the violence banda does to one’s ears! Perhaps it was the presence of Mexico’s Presidente AMLO, or the number of Guardia National and policia present, but everyone was on their best behavior. We had one brief stop on the autopista (toll road) along the way: a well-run military checkpoint asking if we were trying to import any fruta (fruit) into Sinaloa. Turns out that Sinaloa, like California, is free of the dreaded Mediterranean fruit fly, and wants to stay that way!

Mazatlán has some long, easily accessible beaches, a cute old centro, and plenty of water activities. And it’s still affordable, as it is not yet a big tourist destination. As a low-cost alternative to better-known Mexican resorts, it deserves a look. As a place to watch an eclipse, it was perfect. Now to get some fresh seafood and a margarita!

Spring Forward !?!?!

America just went through its annual rite of passage, jumping forward to daylight saving time. It is always accompanied by another round of complaints, confusion, and protest. ^{Americans have so little to argue about, it’s a good thing they still have this}(^sarcastic font). In the end, it’s all a battle about sunlight, when you get it, and what you call it.

Let’s start with the basics. The amount of daylight one receives daily depends primarily on one’s latitude (a north-south measure). At the equator, it’s twelve hours daily, always. As you move north or south, days become increasingly longer (in summer) or shorter (in winter). The seasonal daylight change is actually due to the Earth’s inclination (tilt), but let’s not introduce astronomy, ok? So there’s little reason to fool with the clocks for lands near the equator, as the amount of sunlight at say 7:00 am is roughly the same, January through December. But as you move toward the poles and light becomes dearer in the dreary winter, your children will be waiting for the school bus in the dark, or you will be driving home from work at night. Likewise, plentiful Summer daylight could be wasted in bed, so the idea was born to simply change what we call the time to adjust that variable to when the sunlight is available.

Next subject is geography. Most countries lie in a single time zone. It is an odd coincidence that most countries are either roughly square or taller (north-south) than wider. While they may switch from standard to daylight saving times (and back) during the year, the whole country is affected uniformly. If your nation fits snugly into a time zone, the fact it gets dark at 5:00 pm in one city and 5:15 in another and 5:30 in a third is hardly worth arguing about.

The major exceptions to this rule are the United States, Canada, Russia, China, and Australia, which span multiple times zones. Russia spans the most (nine), followed by Canada (five and a half!), China (should be four, but is one), the continental USA (four) and Australia (three). Which of these things is not like the other? Only in the US is the population spread out both across and within the time zones. Russia and Australia have the bulk of their people in a single time zone and vast relatively unpopulated other time zones. China is likewise, but simply mandates everyone be on “Beijing time.” Screw you, Xinjiang if dawn is at 11:00 am! Canada has population spread, but is still relatively sparse. In three of the four continental US time zones, there are several large cities on different (east-west) sides of a single time zone. Which means there are many people who will be advantaged or disadvantaged by being in the same time zone. When you try to make the bus stop happen in daylight in Boston, the commute home in Detroit is pitch dark, or vice versa). That is the simple reason it’s always been a contentious issue in the US, especially more so than in other countries.

Let’s take Mexico for example. The federal government did away with daylight saving (note there is no extra “s”) time last year. Mexico has four time zones, with the bulk of the population being in the Mexico City time zone. Quintana Roo (home of Cancún and the other resorts) mirrors US Eastern time, as that is where the bulk of its tourist business lives. Likewise, the Mexican border states mirror their northern cousins, switching or not to simplify travel and trade across the border. Mexico is in the tropics, so the real daylight change is between one and two hours at most, so no one is terribly disadvantaged and time doesn’t become a contentious issue.

Why do we even change times? It started as a wartime experiment when the US adopted it in 1918 during WWI. The idea was to economize on power and fuel by adjusting times so war industry workers had access to the most daylight in Summer. No one has ever definitively proved any real advantage to it, however. The initial opposition was attributed to farmers who complained about messing with Mother Nature, but this is probably apocryphal, since farmers work on natural schedules, and don’t care whether city folk call dawn 5:00 am or 6:00 am; it’s just when the animals need feeding.

Another silly argument to dispense with is based on the recurrent studies which show negative health effects from time changes. These are what is known as correlation–not causation–effects, meaning two things vary together but one does not cause another. If you ever heard the phrase “what does that have to do with the price of tea in China?” the meaning of that obscure saying is that you can find many variables that increase or decrease together, but no one should then assume one causes the other to change. How do we know there is no direct causation? If there was a causation between time changes and major negative health outcomes, the millions of business people and tourists who fly across the Atlantic and Pacific every day would be dying in droves. It doesn’t happen, so there is no causation, just correlation. What does happen is jet lag, which is lousy but not fatal.

What is very real is an increase in things like accidents when driving or walking at night, so forcing commuters or children to do so costs lives. But remember, making it work in New York means it doesn’t work in Indianapolis! There are workarounds. People in Xinjiang keep Beijing time officially, but do all their scheduling on “local time.” The central time zone in Australia is on a half hour offset, as is Newfoundland & Labrador in Canada. But that involves relatively small groups of people and places without that much travel between them.

So if daylight saving time is so great, why not keep it permanently? It’s only great in Summer, when it maximizes your time outdoors in the sunshine. The US tried this in 1974, when Congress repealed the “fall back” time change during the Summer of that year , and President Nixon signed the bill into law. Seventy-five percent of American supported the measure. When Winter came, the new Summer-focused time failed miserably (darkness for school busses, for example), leading to a massive change in public opinion and the repeal of the repeal by then-President Ford in October, 1974.

Time doesn’t have to change. Time changes probably don’t save power, or fuel, but they also don’t make you sick. What they do, do, is maximize your access to plentiful sunlight in both Summer and Winter. If that’s important to you, embrace DST. Or move to Singapore. But please stop complaining!

Ecce Homo

I have heard it said that nothing brings home one’s mortality more than the death of one’s last remaining parent. You now stand at the door, looking into the abyss, with no comforting generational buffer between you and eternity. My Dad just passed on, but I don’t feel that way at all. I have many emotions: I am sad for the grief I sense in my wife, my children and grandchildren, and my siblings. I am relieved that Dad’s suffering is at an end. I am grateful for the life and upbringing he (and my Mom) gave me. Mostly I am proud of the Man he was.

Charles William Neary, Chuck (but never, ever “Chucky,”) was the eldest child of Charles Joseph and Loretta (Vollrath) Neary. He was born on June 4th, 1929, and he liked to insist the market crash was not his doing. That was Chuck, always quick with a quip. If he didn’t invent the concept of “dad jokes” he almost certainly perfected it.

The eldest of twelve siblings, he was in some respects an extra parent to the youngest ones. Like his father, he was a good enough athlete to entertain notions of being a player, but too grounded to pursue them. In the early twentieth century, boys played sports, men held jobs. He was a quick study, and even briefly attended the University of Notre Dame, but couldn’t hack working a union job at the local Bendix factory with his father, attending classes, and commuting from their home in distant LaPorte, Indiana. At the same time.

His father wanted him to stay and support the family; Chuck wanted to get married and leave. He could easily recall the epic fistfight he and his Dad had in front of the family home when he decided against his father’s will. Chuck enlisted in the Army; a way to leave with dignity while setting the stage to marry Delores. His brief stint in uniform was uneventful, and he returned to LaPorte with his bride, until the fateful day when he soon got another telegram from the War Department directing him to return to duty due to the Korean war.

Chuck had learned to type in high school, so he was assigned as a personnel specialist to a division HQ. Through an accounting mis-classification, he found himself re-assigned as a combat infantryman just as the Chinese sent a million volunteers south to stop the United Nations advance. He never seemed traumatized by the months in combat, but he never talked that much about them, either. When he finally returned again to Indiana, he traded the olive drab of Army life for the navy blue of the Indiana State Police.

If the Irish cop is a stereotypical character, Chuck was straight from central casting. His had a wry sense of humor, was a quick and excellent judge of character, coupled with a friendly style that served him well. He lucked into a local starring role during the manhunt for a fugitive who killed a sheriff and eluded the police. Chuck literally chased him down in a foot race and became above-the-fold news in Chicagoland. He later helped pioneer a traffic speed enforcement program which placed police cars (driving the speed limit) abreast on highways; whoever tried to pass was arrested for speeding. One can’t print what he was called on the CB radios those days.

Sadly, he was as bad at office politics as he was good at policing. He found himself on the wrong end of several changes in leadership, stifled in his career and sometimes punished just for not taking sides. At one point, Chuck was sent to the ultimate dead-end job: the sole police officer assigned to investigate crimes within the Indiana State Prison. When I asked him once what was so bad about it, he said, “the victims are criminals, the witnesses are criminals, the perpetrators are criminals, everybody lies, and nobody really cares what happens.”

Chuck somehow survived that experience and got a fresh start as the Commanding Officer at a new post near Lowell, Indiana. He excelled in the leadership role, and eventually rose to headquarters in Indianapolis, where he was chief of investigations. He later admitted HQ was far too political a place for a no-nonsense detective like him. He retired from the force as an official “Legend of the Indiana State Police” although he continued to work security and investigatory jobs for years more.

When Delores became incapacitated after failing to rehab from a knee replacement, he became her full time care-giver. She refused a wheelchair or an electric scooter. He literally carried her around, or wheeled her from place to place in one of those chair/step-stool devices meant for home improvement jobs. He cared for her thusly till the day she died.

All those details are the stuff of his biography. They are things about him, but not him. What I could barely ever fathom was the “how” he was the “who” he was. Police work is legendarily the realm of workaholics, cops being on-call all day, every day. Yet Chuck was an omnipresent figure in my childhood: on the parish council, coaching the baseball team, running the school’s Presidential physical fitness test. At times I wished he wasn’t always around, like when he called me “Neary” so that he didn’t show any favoritism among the other team members. Perhaps the fact he often showed up in uniform was a detail I missed at the time: somehow he crammed thirty hours of activities into every twenty-four-hour day.

The man loved to drive, and he drove very fast. As a child I remember keeping tabs on how many cars he passed when we went on a long vacation drive. It exceeded a thousand. After all those years as a trooper, he was comfortable driving, and it was very hard to finally get his grip off the steering wheel. And yes, it’s genetic, just ask my daughters.

Chuck had a temper, and he could be overly strict. Between his upbringing and career, he tended to view the downside of things more than the positives: you can’t witness the worst of people and things all the time and not be affected. That manifested itself in views that were stereotypical and emblematic of his times. He fought to overcome the urge to voice thoughts which he later regretted, but you could see him struggling with the difference between what he thought and what he knew he shouldn’t say.

He was always his own man, very sure of who he was, and what he could or couldn’t do. If the man had a midlife crisis, it passed before lunch. If he pondered any existential dread, he shrugged it off with a so-what. His Catholic faith was enough for him.

He was clever, but always regretted not finishing a college degree. After a few beers on a Saturday afternoon, he once told me “being right all the time” was his biggest problem: “people resent it.” He was right about that, too. He probably didn’t realize how unusual that talent is.

In a modern twist on an Irish tradition, we loved to fight. Dad and I always engaged in battles of wits whenever we got together. Like the scene from his favorite movie “The Quiet Man,” we enjoyed the contest more than the result. I’d make an overly strong comment, Dad would object, and off we went. At times the argument would go on-and-on, each trying to find a new opening or point of attack. On more than a few occasions, we ended up completely changing sides during the argument: what mattered was the fight itself.

Chuck’s Dad died at sixty-three from a debilitating neurological disorder. The grandfather he never knew died at forty-two (kidney failure), great granddad at sixty-four (gastric ulcer). I once told him–based on our paternal history–my goal was to live to forty and anything more than that was “extra time.” Chuck lived to ninety-four, and I’m in year twenty-four of extra time. Maybe the genes aren’t all that bad.

In his final years, Chuck became a mainstay at his parish, then at his retirement community. He rediscovered his inner ham, playing the lead roles in several plays there. He found another chance at romance with Sharon, who was his companion and eventual caregiver to the end. His heart simply refused to stop beating although it declined from sixty-to-forty-to-twenty percent effective, and he needed to move into assisted living. When my sister asked him which facility he wanted to move to, he simply pointed up.

At 5:17 this past Tuesday morning, I woke up. I usually wake up around 6:00 am, a habit from years of military and government service. This was different. I went and said my morning prayers, then started my daily reading, when I got an e-mail from my brother-in-law asking that I call my sister immediately. Dad had hit the call button around 5:30, and had died shortly thereafter. I can’t help but think he gave me one last shove that morning, a little “get ready, you’re next in line.”

I loved the man, warts and all. His entire extended family, of which he was literally the paterfamilias, will miss him dearly.

Behold the Man.

Cuaresma, or Lent

We are currently three weeks into the holy season of Cuaresma, or Lent. Growing up in a predominantly Catholic community centered on the local parochial school, Lent (and Advent, leading up to Christmas) was a period of significant, noticeable change. The colors of the priest’s vestments and the altar cloth changed to penitential purple from everyday green. Fasts hit on Ash Wednesday, when Catholics (and Episcopalians among others) carried a visible reminder in ashes in the form of a cross on the forehead, and Good Friday, which was also the only day all-year that no masses were celebrated. The absence of meat on Friday was a year-long thing back then, so there was nothing new about it during Lent.

Time marches on, or to paraphrase the Beatles In My Life, some things “have changed, some forever not for better.” The Roman Catholic Church decided to modernize some of its practices after the Second Vatican Council, in a bow to the modern world. Unfortunately, the world didn’t respond in kind. There was no great increase in devotion, no increase in charitable activity, no increase in vocations to the priestly or religious life. Rather, most took the changes as signs that such things didn’t really matter: if the Catholic Church doesn’t even require such things, obviously they won’t matter to the faithful.

Some Catholics struggled with abstaining from meat on Fridays, which remained a requirement only during Lent. Children didn’t like fish, and some were allergic to it. Business people had dinner engagements where avoiding meat was a hardship. The Church compromised by indicating Catholics should substitute some personal form of denial in place of abstaining from meat. What the faithful heard was “we only have to give up meat on Fridays during Lent.” Ask a Catholic friend (or yourself) what you give up weekly during the year in lieu of abstaining from meat, and you’ll get an excuse (“Oh, that’s only during Lent) or a puzzled stare. Not what was intended, but what was effected.

It’s not like it was a great hardship. I’ve caught myself eating fine Salmon hierbas on Fridays in Lent and thought, “well, I’m technically in compliance, but is this really penitential?” Where I grew up in northern Indiana (last millennium), fish was fresh as perch from Lake Michigan (where fish could be used as thermometers due to their high mercury content), or frozen and expensive, or frozen and cheap in the form of “fish sticks,” which mainly consisted of batter around unidentifiable fish-meal that served as a means to carry enormous slabs of “tartar sauce” into one’s mouth, since eating “tartar sauce” by itself would be uncivilized. Heck, even McDonald’s catered to Catholic tastes, inventing the filet-o-fish when burger sales plummeted on Fridays.

Nothing reminds me of life as it was back then like being in an overwhelmingly Catholic country here in Mexico. Restaurants and shops advertise their comida de Cuaresma, special menus or meals that comply with the liturgical restrictions. When I still worked, the guards at my office building routinely stopped me to say “Sir, you have something on your forehead” every Ash Wednesday; I responded, “why, yes, yes I do.” That would never happen here. Holy Week, Easter Week, and the days between Christmas and Three Kings Day are vacation days, either in fact or in practice. The Mexican federal government and the Catholic Church have been at odds (or even at war) over the centuries, but the practices and habits remain unchanged.

I saw a phony FaceBook meme quoting Pope Francis as saying ‘to be kind to strangers, to help the homeless, rather than giving up things’ this Lent. I knew without researching it that it was false, as it makes a fundamental theological error. That is, it equates an everyday necessity (give to the poor, clothe the naked, etc.) with a penitential practice. The former all Christians are called to do ALL the time as in Luke 17:10, “we are unworthy servants, we have done only what we are required to do.” The latter is something we do special. But why?

Penitential acts are not for self-improvement. Long before Dry January became a thing, I started giving up all alcohol during Lent. No red wine with my pasta. No afternoons with a margarita on my terraza. No beer (green or otherwise) on St. Patrick’s Day (On this, I am still lobbying the Church in Mexico to offer a dispensation, as my Bishop back in Indiana did; no luck so far). While my Irish liver enjoys the respite, that is a secondary benefit. I give up something I enjoy as a penance: in a small way, I mirror Christ’s period of fasting in the desert before He began His earthly ministry. And I deny myself something that I want in order to submit my desires to God’s. If God wants me to drink Guinness on St. Paddy’s Day, He’ll arrange that dispensation; otherwise, my next tipple will be at Easter brunch.

That is also why I avoid some of the Pharisaical or Jesuitical practices (big words we could easily translate into modern language with “lawyerly”). For example, some friends offer to not drink in front of me; I insist they go right ahead and enjoy themselves, which is all part of my penance. Others recommend a non-alcoholic beer or a Mocktail which is promised to be just as good as the real thing; I decline, since the point isn’t the alcohol. And perhaps you’ve heard of Lent as a period of forty days, but if you count on the calendar from Ash Wednesday to Easter Sunday, there are forty-six days. Seems that forty total excludes Sundays, which are technically Catholic “feast” days when fasting and penance are inapplicable. Sorry, but that turns a long-run commitment into a series of one-week stands, which doesn’t sound theologically appropriate to me. Likewise, the fasting and abstinence rules apply only until age fifty-nine, but since God gave me more years than that, and I’m still healthy, I think I owe something in return.

Penance is a discipline, and it turns the mind from things we want or crave to higher things. I also gave up added sugar this year. Sugar is terrible for you, but I gave it up because I like it, and it’s so terribly addictive that I kept adding more just to make my coffee stay just as sweet. Every day starts with a reminder that while I would prefer adding sugar to my coffee, I said no. I don’t like my coffee better now, but it’s proving a solid exercise in self-denial.

Marriage, faith, or career all require hard work. It is rare to find a married couple who just always-and-forever get along. See one and ask them, they’ll tell you the relationship is either strengthening or weakening. You’re working on it or else. You won’t find a successful professional who is simply a natural. Even freakishly-talented sports superstars readily admit to thousands of hours practicing. And faith is the same. The more time and effort you spend on it, the better you are at it. Which is not to say it makes you a relatively “better” person. Just ask my wife, who readily admits I can be a just a subtle shade of irritable for some reason during Lent. I don’t know what the heck she’s talking about. Perhaps her penance is dealing with me during Lent!

No, giving up alcohol or sugar doesn’t make the world a better place. It may not even make me a more faithful person. But it’s an attempt at denying one’s self, and if there’s anything today’s world is sorely lacking in, it’s that type of self denial.

Palma de Mallorca, Spain

Forty years ago, at the height of the Cold War, a lowly US Army First Lieutenant took his pregnant wife on a week-long vacation (we didn’t have the fancy term “babymoon” back then) from Bavaria to the Balearic islands. They spoke no Spanish, had no cell phones, and had only a 1:250,000 government map to navigate by. They stayed in a tourist-package hotel near Magaluf, one which targeted Brits, evidenced by a full English breakfast and the London tabloids at the front desk. The hotel next door was for Germans: it had brötchen mit käse and the Süddeutsche Zeitung to read. From this the 1LT learned that Americans weren’t unique in wanting things from home, even on vacation.

Only his pregnant wife had an international driver’s license–a must back then–so the Lieutenant was reduced to the role of navigator. They got lost, more than once, on mountain roads, looking for a religious relic in a remote village, following a tiny line on a large map (insert your favorite Lieutenant with a map joke here). They arrived in small towns without any ability to ask for directions or even for help. They sought and found a convent offering a unique local pastry by walking around a village until they saw a nun, then following her home. They ended up on a “bilingual” cave tour where the local guide described the cave formations for ten minutes in Spanish, then stopped and said. “The Madonna. See? The Madonna.” They attended a silly recreation of a knight jousting competition (complete with eat-roast-chicken-with-your-hands) because it actually made sense regardless of the language.

It was their first great travel adventure. They survived, proof that there are Guardian Angels and they do look after fools and children (the couple qualified both ways). It was a great success, and they had stories to tell which still amuse themselves and others to this day.

When we started on planning a visit to try out the region of southern Spain, Judy asked me if we would be far from Palma de Mallorca? Why, no, and so here we are, forty years later, back where all the wanderlust started. The Cathedral still stands as mighty and majestic as always, but there’s an entirely new chapel with a Antoni Gaudi influence. The arch which was a must-see in the 1980s (“it had a mix of Roman, Muslim, and Christian influences”) is only a footnote now, found via Google Maps. One can’t get lost, even navigating the winding backstreets of the old city, because GPS tracks your every step. And the little lanes and winding country roads are now well-lit streets and highways courtesy of the European Union.

We speak Spanish, but everybody speaks English, too. Oh, and some German here. There are still little hotels catering to Brits and Germans, but who needs newspapers when your smart phone is in constant touch with news back home. On our last night, the hostess at the tapas bar heard us speaking English, so she assigned the English-speaking Argentine waitress to our table. When Judy started ordering in Spanish and we explained our home in Mexico, the waitress loved it. We even found a little Catholic church back near Magaluf, where the very English congregation holds one English-language Mass every Sunday with a very Nigerian priest presiding. Such is the world today!

Mallorca retains its unique culinary traditions, a mix of Spanish and North African, as translated by the Catalan settlers who civilized the islands. Plenty of delicious seafood, rabbit (like Malta), olives in every form, and of course tapas. The road signs are a mix of Mallorquin (local Catalan dialect) and Spanish, which at times even defeated Señor Google Maps. We traveled among the locals, visiting Sunday markets and strolling through the plaza, secure in the knowledge that even in a tiny village, we could find a kebab place for lunch–because who doesn’t want kebab for lunch? Apparently the whole word does!

We walked, we drove, we wandered, seeing how much had changed and how little, too. Mostly we recalled how much we had changed . . . and how little, too! The Balearic islands are known for partying, nature, and glitz (Mallorca, Menorca, and Ibiza respectively, although there’s a mix on all three). We were then youngsters “putting away childish things” and becoming adults. We had dreams of children and career and travel. Now we’re far more mature–at least in years–and we have realities of grandchildren, retirement, and still travel.

Perhaps Buckaroo Banzai was right: “no matter where you go, there you are.”

Andalucía, Spain

What’s better than being an expat? Maybe an intercontinental expat? A Tri-national? We’ve noticed that every Spring, we like to head to Europe for a few weeks. It is the period of the worst weather where we live–although I would note it is still not bad weather, per se, just dry and warm (90 F) with no rain in sight. And it’s shoulder season in Europe, with improving weather there but without the large throngs of tourists and expensive airfares. We would spend more time there in Europe, but we get tired doing the bag-drag as we visit all those wonderful places. Which got me to thinking, which is always dangerous, as my wife likes to say.

What if we got a holiday home somewhere in Europe, where we could go and stay for an extended period of time. How long? EU rules permit tourists to stay 90 days out of each 180, so an April-May-June period is doable. I considered Airbnb and its variants, but we don’t want to be trying a new place every year, and there is no guarantee you can get the same place. We don’t want “a” place, we want our place. But what kind of place?

Has to have great weather during the target dates. Small city or village, not big urban setting. Apartment or small house; we don’t need a big property, and can’t have a yard or garden to maintain. Are such things available, and affordable? Turns out they are! We’re not talking about those One Euro houses you sometimes see advertised: here’s two words of advice on those–JUST NO! But reasonable and affordable small homes and apartments are available for a few tens of thousands of US dollars! Why?

Many European countries are on a population downslope, a decade or more ahead of the US, which is experiencing the same phenomenon. In brief, there are two sets of aging grandparents with one child each, the coupling of which has one child. So there are three households, many times in small cities or villages, and only one young adult to inherit them. This adult wants to live in the big city, where there are jobs and opp-or-tunities (as Eminem sang), not in Grandma’s village. So these small houses are for sale, and there are many of them, which drives prices down. The trick is to find one which doesn’t require enormous renovation, is livable, and is in a town not on the brink of itself expiring.

My basic research indicated two target areas: southern Spain (Andalucía) and southern Italy (Puglia and Sicily). Both have great weather and many available properties. Spain has a well-developed expat market paved by Brits back before Brexit. Italy has the same for Americans returning to their Italian roots. Spain has a language advantage (for us), a better, high-speed, rail network, and allows tourists to own cars. So we made our way to Andalucía to see how it feels.

Much as Jalisco summons up Mexico, Andalucía calls to mind Spain. Tapas, Flamenco, bull-fighting, Jamon Iberico, and more history than anyone can possibly consume. Córdoba and its alcazar, Málaga and the sea, Granada and the Alhambra. It all felt oddly familiar. We had no language difficulty at all. We refused to adopt the Ca-thil-ian lisp, but no one paid our “esses” any attention. A few times we caused some confusion with a pronunciation gaffe, but generally everybody was welcoming and genial. The culture was easy to adapt to, with the exception of the hours. They keep to the afternoon siesta, but eat another meal around 10:00 pm! Given we have taken to eating only breakfast and lunch, we got along fine, but I have no idea how Spaniards do it, eating so much so late. And it remains the case that nothing happens before noon on Sunday, owing to Saturday’s late night revels.

The weather in January is about as cold as it gets here: 50-60 daytime, 40-50 nighttime. Bright sun most days, with fair skies. Cafes are still open, and restaurants have outdoor heaters. Even the beaches are still active, although more for exercise than sun-worshipping. The summer can get beastly hot (>100 F), so air-conditioning is probably a must, heating a maybe. Spring might require neither.

Andalucía passed all our tests. We probably won’t go looking for a place in the big, touristy cities, even in the suburbs. But we saw plenty of smaller towns and even villages that were attractive options. Welcoming culture, great food and weather, good-to-great transatlantic options (including a nonstop from Guadalajara to Madrid): All boxes checked. Come Spring, we’ll give Southern Italy the test!

A Mexican Cable Fable

One of the things making expat life such a phenomenon is the internet. No matter where you go, you can bring parts of your life with you: television shows, sports, even family connections. This access greatly mitigates the home-sickness any expat might feel living far away in a different culture. Of course the internet is (in the famous quote from the late-Senator Ted Stevens) “a series of tubes” through space. Tubes, cables, whatever. The ridiculous metaphor works on many levels, since a small series of cables is the lifeline which provides the whole world to your home. Yes, your telephone does it without cables and delivers it to the palm of your hand, but only a digital native wants to stare at a palm-sized screen all day.

When we arrived in Mexico, our first house had internet supplied by TelMex, the onetime Mexican government utility now owned by Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim. It was old-school copper, bundled with your landline, and you could get upwards of 20 Megabytes per second (mbs), enough to stream live television. Reliability was always an issue, with frequent outages and significant speed lags when more users logged in. Years behind the developed world, but good enough.

Eventually fiber optics came to Mexico. TelMex by law had to provide it to all customers, installed free of charge, but their roll-out plan was several years long. Our neighborhood paid to jump the queue, getting fiber optic cable installed early. Of course it was a classic negotiation: we had to pay to have it done, while those immediately around us declined to join in, getting the installation for free. Our neighborhood voted to go ahead, since we wanted the improved speeds (>50 mbs) and reliability. As for our other neighbors, it was just their good fortune to get access, too.

You might be wondering at the fiber optic speed, as in the States it would be in the hundreds of megabytes per second. Here, the fiber optic cable runs to a box in your neighborhood, but the last hundred feet or so are still copper cable into your house and modem, resulting in less performance. Fiber optic cable is expensive and delicate, so TelMex decided to take the performance reduction and avoid the problem of all that cable maintenance. I can’t say that I blame them. If you step on it, kink it, or otherwise molest it, fiber optic cable dies. Copper is far more resilient. You’ll see just how much more later.

Years later we moved into another house closer to the Ajijic centro, and the TelMex fiber optic was already in place there. We were all set for about a year, until the quality and the performance became unstable. It went out for days at a time, and when it worked, speeds dropped below one mbs (barely able to read e-mail) in the evening. Needless to say, television and streaming were out of the question.

We flagged down a TelMex vehicle in our neighborhood (that’s what you do here), and the technico (repairman) agreed to take a look. His instruments told him there was a signal getting through to our modem, but it was very weak, and there was something wrong down the line leading into the house. He showed me where our connection ran along our property line, then into a retaining wall and down to a junction box. The copper cable was stuck inside a broken, corroded plastic tube as protection: for all intents and purposes, it might as well have been lying on the ground. And in the junction box was a mass of extra cable, left there by the installers probably because they didn’t want to bring it back. It was a mess, and the technico couldn’t tell where the problem was, as he was primarily an “indoor” repairman, and this was clearly an “outdoor” problem. He worked for several hours identifying where the cables were, but could not help us any further. He even refused a propina (tip), as he said it was just his job. We weren’t excited about contacting TelMex for help, as we had heard plenty of stories of bad customer service.

We had upcoming travel, so we delayed contacting TelMex. We adapted and endured for a few months. I started using the internet early in the morning, when there was sufficient bandwidth. Judy & I shared time, to make sure we both weren’t trying to use the same few mbs. We sometimes used our phones, even for hotpots, but our T-mobile unlimited international plan throttles you down to 2- or 3-G speed when you are outside the States. We made do. Finally, the internet connection went out completely, and we had to contact TelMex for help.

Judy used the app (en español) to alert them to the problem and what their technico previously had told us. She lost the chat before she completed it, and thought she may have to start over. When she did the next day, they informed her that we already had a trouble ticket and would see a repairman shortly. At least they didn’t say, “mañana.” The next day, he alerted us he was coming and arrived late in the afternoon. He confirmed we had no connection, and I showed him the cable and the junction box. He inspected the cables, and while he agreed they weren’t protected properly, he said the problem must be further up the line.

He walked along until he found the appropriate utility culvert and opened it up. Inside there was another mass of cables, and another junction box for the incoming fiber optic cable. The tunnel was full of dirt, water and an ant colony, the latter quite upset their secure complex was disturbed! The technico brushed all this off (he had seen worse, obviously) and picked up the fiber optic cable, half of which was sticking loose out of the junction box. You could see the cut open ends of the cable and the light shining through! How it got that way he didn’t know; he seemed amazed anybody in our neighborhood had internet with that connection. He told us he needed to return the next day with more equipment and a partner to help test the re-installation.

Late the next afternoon, they started in on the junction box, cleaning the leads and reconnecting the cable. After about two hours, he came up to the house to say they were done, and our internet connection should be restored. It was: a bounteous 50+ mbs! Yes, we still see pretty substantial changes in speed, and brief outages. And we’ve purchased a Starlink dish as satellite backup. And no, the TelMex workers still refused a propina.

Lessons learned? Internet access is a key component to expat life. We bank, connect to family, plan travel, and socialize using it. TelMex customer service was very good. They were willing to speak slowly in Spanish, and happy we could understand and respond. Things like internet speeds are relative, and you can live with much less than sizzling. Global internet access continues to increase. It is amazing to me we’re using the same satellite system (Starlink) as a back-up that the Ukrainian army is using to fight the Russians, but that’s the nature of technology today. Sometimes old tech like copper wires has its uses, especially if the new tech like fiber optics is fragile.

Nothing momentous, just another aspect of life as an expat.