Benoni & Co. (It’s cheaper than therapy.)

It’s been a crazy life these past two months but I’m going to try to do a better job keeping up with my blog. I originally started the blog for my own reasons - it really was cheaper than going into therapy, which was the other option - and I never really thought that anyone would read it. Happily it has turned out to be a great way to stay in touch with friends and family.

Steven and the girls have gone to Mexico for Thanksgiving. Today they are going to see the ruins and pyramid outside of Mexico City. We have three girls in our family now; my sister’s daughter Jamie is now living with us. I’m at home because I’m getting on an airplane this afternoon and I won’t get off the plane until tomorrow evening. Yes, I’m spending all day of Thanksgiving on an airplane. I’m sad to miss the time with my family (and the trip to Mexico City) but I took the family to Boston without Steven when he was travelling on business so I guess it all works out. Also, the project I’m working on has the perfect mix (for me) of interesting people and organizations, new skills to learn and a fairly interesting subject area. The trip is important so I’m glad we are getting to go. Given all the coordination between various companies and government organizations required to make this trip happen, it’s amazing we are getting to go before the end of the year.

I have a layover in Dubai so I will be able to meet up with my brother-in-law, Greg, who is currently living and working in Dubai. Every time I travel overseas, I try to make the time to see a little bit of whatever city I can. Every place I’ve been to so far has a museum or something that is interesting. Just walking around, using location transportation and watching people is fun to me. But Steven says the only thing to do in Dubai is to go shopping and I’m not really a big shopping person. At least, not at these prices. But just walking around and looking at the city will be fun.

People keep telling me that eventually I will burn out on travel and that I’ll start to be grumpy and I’ll just want to stay in my hotel and watch reruns of “Friends” on TV in the evening. It hasn’t happened so far so I don’t think it will happen at all.

I am quite aware that I am being melodramatic, so you don’t need to point this out to me.

While Steven was here in Mexico on his last trip, he worked to get lots of stuff done, including working with the decorator to do some finishing work. We had a nice bedspread in the master bedroom, but we needed curtains and the living room furniture from Steven’s father’s house wasn’t quite right once it moved to a rustic Mexican house.

The decorator decided that we should recover the sofas and have curtains made. While he was at it, he arranged to have coordinating bedding made for the master bedroom. Steven told me about this and apologized for not being able to show me fabric samples but I wasn’t worried. I had told the decorator what colors I hated and what colors I liked and anything that matched the rustic colonial Mexican style of the house was fine with me. We have brightly colored tile, rustic wood, bright blue and yellow walls - I’m just not that picky.

When Steven told me he didn’t want to tell me about it; that he wanted it to be a surprise I wasn’t worried at all.

Then I saw it.

The bed skirt, bedspread, matching pillows, matching drapes and custom window coverings are all made of fabric from the 70s. It’s chocolate brown and burnt orange with details in avocado green and harvest gold.

It’s hideous.

It clashes totally with the tile and paint already in the room. Even if we redid the tile and paint to match this stuff, it’s still really ugly. The room now needs long pile shag carpet and bean bag chairs to look complete. The Brady Bunch would be at home here.

The two colors I told the decorator I really hated were orange and brown - anything sunset, beige or brown. The only real direction was that it needed to match the house. We failed to communicate on both counts.

Now the tricky part is figuring out how to deal with this. I throw up a tiny bit in the back of my mouth every time I walk into the master bedroom; it’s that ugly. But my husband had the best of intentions when choosing it and he was influenced heavily by guests staying in the house (who voted against his other choice of primary red, saying we weren’t going for a bordello look). If I had been here I could have prevented this tragedy, but I had to work to help pay for it all (it’s not only horrible, it’s expensive too).

So how do I react? He looks at me, with an expectant expression and I don’t want to hurt his feelings. But the room is so awful that I’m not sure I can be even close to truthful and not reveal my true feelings. It’s going to have to be redone, I’m sure he’ll notice that.

I settled for telling him that it was just a bedspread and I would rather sleep with him in an ugly master bedroom than with anyone else.

It’s time again for El Dia de los Flores. A few years ago, we were innocently trying to load up the car and start the drive home when we were surprised to discover that overnight the town had filled up and the streets were lined with people selling toys, candy, confetti eggs and masses of flowers. Huge buckets of flowers were everywhere. You are supposed to run up behind people you like and crack the confetti eggs on their head. It means you like them. Uh huh.

We asked and found out that the day was “the day of flowers” which wasn’t really all that helpful. We were told that boys bought flowers and gave them to pretty girls. It’s always the Friday before Good Friday, or the Friday before “the week of pain” as Easter week is called here.

I found this on the Internet (pardon the horrible translation, it’s not the original authors fault):

It is a great traditional celebration every year takes place in the capital city, with the main stage the Jardin de la Union, or town square.

From Thursday afternoon the main streets of the city and around the garden many posts with women selling flowers and processed manually, Easter eggs, toys from different materials with ornaments alluding to the Easter. It is a sea of detail, flowers and handmade objects.

The tradition is that for the boys that night to invite his girlfriend or friends to a dance club or party. In the evening, in the early hours of Friday and from around 5:00 am all couples descend to the town square and the youth will give flowers to his companion, walk around the garden or just sit and see sunrise.

To continue the tradition, the governor accompanied by his staff, at 7:00 am on Friday delivered flowers (the governor personally delivered to every girl who is about a flower) and all attendees were given as gifts tamales and ice cream. Throughout the day carried out visits to the various shrines of Our Lady of Sorrows to be assembled and engaged in a very special way.

OK, so Steven and I are supposed to party all night (as if), stay up to watch the sunrise (not happening) and then get up really early to eat breakfast in the Jardin (not impossible but also not likely) and then all day Friday the kids will run around and buy little toys, candy and confetti eggs which they will crack on our heads and cause a huge mess.

Sign me up!

Steven is back home in Austin, so you know what that means - there is a refrigerator in the house in Mexico!

Ultimately, he went shopping again and found a smaller refrigerator, or “refri” in Spanish, that would fit the space. That means we don’t have an ice maker, but we didn’t have to move a wall. And the kitchen is now functional. Is it perfect? No, of course not. But it works.

We seem to have come to agreement with the architect over what detail work needs to be done. Getting it done is another issue, of course. But it’s progress.

My photos aren’t working right now, so I can’t show you but my house is pink. Yes, pink. 

We went to GTO for Thanksgiving and they have finished resurfacing and painting the Barranca side of the house. The bottom third is painted maroon and the top half is painted pink. There are white stripes between the two colors and around the windows and doors. Our house is in “el zono centro” so we have a limited number of colors to choose from.

There are about 12 different authentic colonial colors that you are supposed to use on the outside of your house. I didn’t pick pink. I didn’t pick anything, this is apparently the color the house was when we bought it. Age and weather had turned it into a dark beige looking house, but I never imagined it was pink. The Saavedra side of the house is more of an apricot color, and it’s fine. The pink is fine too; it just takes getting used to.

We cooked a traditional Thanksgiving meal in the kitchen, even though we STILL do not have a refrigerator. It went much better than last year, which means the turkey came out fully cooked and nobody got sick. Turns out that cooking at 7000 feet is different from cooking at sea level.

We met two American girls who are going to school here. We met them at the supermercado when we were buying our turkey. They were looking for sage and cranberries which you cannot buy in Mexico. We offered them ours, as we brought all the necessities for a Thanksgiving meal down with us. They came by around noon, bringing a bottle of wine and a bouquet of beautiful flowers. What a lovely gesture! We chatted for a while and then sent them on their way with sage, cranberries and the directions for cooking a 10-pound turkey when you are at 7000 feet.

I’m back in Guanajuato again. The furniture from Tyler has arrived (weeks late but mostly intact) and we are going tomorrow to buy some last things for the house. You might think that this means the house is complete, but that would be foolish. Of course it’s not. We are going to be almost finished until the end of the year.

If we are lucky!

I’ll post photos soon.

To Be Done List

1. Punch hole in kitchen wall to make place for refrigerator.
2. Buy refrigerator.
3. Finish resurfacing the wall on one side of the house and repaint.
4. Finish the plumbing installation.
5. Finish the carpenter work - door knobs, etc.
6. Lots of clean up.
7. Get the decorator to put everything in a good place and take it from a promising space to a wonderful space. This may require repainting some things. We knew that was going to happen.
8. Rewire the house so the wired and wireless Internet are stable and the router doesn’t fall into the fountain again.
9. Fix up the house’s website (www.houseinguanajuato.com)

See? December is a stretch goal.

We are going back to Austin to take care of some things with the intention of coming back for most of the month of August. We are leaving Mary Ellen here with her grandfather, which is stressing me out. Now I have one child in a different state and I will have my other child in a different country!

The house is now 99% complete, which means we only have about 25% of the work left to go. The furniture, which left Texas almost a month ago, is not here yet. I suggested that we check eBay and see if any of it is for sale, but everyone assures me this is normal for Mexico. Once it does arrive, we will bring in the decorator to arrange everything as well as it can be and then we will go buy whatever is still needed. That’s why we are coming back in August.

It really is very close to being done. I think being this close but not actually being done is actually more frustrating than our previous visits when things were more incomplete. And once the house is complete, we will have one person doing clean up work for several more months.

There is a great deal of paint touch-ups, clean up, and repairs that are going to have to happen. And, all the wood needs to be sealed and the floors will still have to be cleaned with linseed oil frequently as they go through the curing process. They are going to have to knock out part of a wall in the kitchen to make the refrigerator fit. These are all considered minor details to the architect, but are quite large to me. We need plants, we need to redo the Internet wiring which was done in a totally retarded way. The list is long. But really, it’s a beautiful house.

One of the adventures about buying a house in Mexico is the lack of control. We knew when we bought the place that we would not be able to be here to oversee every little detail. We were adamant that the plumbing be redone, the electrical systems be redone and that we have high speed Internet everywhere but most other things were vague concepts to us.

It is not at all unusual to spend weeks carefully looking at tile patterns and picking exactly the tile you want in a room, only to come down 3 months later and find the entire room is finished with a totally different tile, different color, different everything. We consider ourselves lucky if they stick with the general color scheme we selected. They do what they want to do and most of the time it’s wonderful - as good if not better that what we spent agonizing hours choosing.

I stressed out over the master bathroom to a ridiculous extreme. I downloaded a home design program and tried to do a blueprint of how everything should be placed and got nowhere fast. It’s a big square room, but somehow getting all the standard bathroom stuff in place in a way that seemed really functional and visually pleasing was very difficult. My only real desire was to get the toilet placed that it was not facing a mirror. I told this to our architect and gave up on the home design program.

We left town.

Now we are back and I went to the bathroom to see what they did. I had seen photographs earlier, so I knew they totally ignored the tile I chose but I like the tile that they did use and it’s just not that surprising anymore. What I didn’t realize is that they think our bathroom is part of a carnival fun house.

Visualize a square room. Imagine a closet built in along one entire wall with mirrors on the doors so you can get dressed and see what you look like. A wall of mirrors. Now turn around and in the left corner of the room is the shower - traditional open Mexican style with no shower curtain and.. YES a MIRROR along the side wall, set into an alcove. In the middle of the room is a toilet and to the right is a double sink with - a MIRROR.

So - taking a shower - no matter where you look, there you are. Using the toilet - there you are! At the sink you can see yourself from every angle.

What are they thinking?

I’m wearing a sweater and it’s not uncomfortable, but chilly enough for me to be happy to have it. Gosh, I love the mountains in Mexico.

We flew all day, arrived and unpacked, walked around the house to see all that was new and then went to dinner as Casa Valadez. It’s not my favorite, but Mary Ellen was very happy to go there. And I had a glass of wine, so I was happy enough after a short bit. The town feels more like home on this visit and it smells right. I can’t really explain it any better than that. I’ll put up more photos soon. The house is 99% done and we only have another 25% to go…

They are refinishing the outside of the house and then we will paint the outside.

I’m glad to see they are using scaffolding, because it’s a three story building on this side of the hill. But you really don’t want to see what they have on the roof to stabilize the scaffolding.

More photos of the house in Mexico. Progress in the master bedroom:

It looks bigger than it really is. At least, I don’t think it’s that big. The far door goes to the bathroom, the middle opening is the main door from the patio and then we have a new window that is over the back stairs.

This is what the other end of the room looks like:

Still lots to do, clearly.