The plan is to post photos while visiting Mexico next month. I finally was tempted enough by a reduced price to buy a digital camera - a Fuji A205 2mp with 3X optical zoom. Amazing what you can build and sell for $80 these days....here's an early test photo.



Here's another of Pat and one of the girls...



Such a cheap camera can be lost or destroyed with little angst, and the small 16mb card that comes with it will hold around 125 images at the resolution of the flower image above. It runs on AA batteries available anywhere, and fits in a shirt pocket. At an Internet cafe, you just plug in the USB cable and the camera looks like a mass storage device - another drive. Upload the desired photos to an online storage pace and embed links in the blog.

I'll still haul around the mini film camera, but I don't know for how long. Maybe I'll load it with B&W film and use it more selectively for thoughtful documentation that might be a source for artwork in the future.

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I picked up my "Documento Migratorio Del No Inmigrante" FM3 visa today from the Mexican Consultate in San Francisco. This qualifies me to reside in Mexico with "visitante rentista" privileges for 365 days from the issue date - March 15th.

We made an error in obtaining this document so early, partly because we were unaware that it required activation with the local immigration office in Merida where a local address must be provided. We don't have one, as we are still looking for a house to buy. This dilema may be resolved by registering with the address of the guest house or a local friend. Pat was going to attempt this but he waited too long before visiting the office then discovered that they need a week to process the whole thing and return the endorsed visa - this when he had less than a week remaining before his departure. Hopefully I will complete the registration. Pat may need to start the entire FM3 process over with two visits to the consulado.

Might as well get accustomed to the Mexican way of doing things, eh? Part of the problem is that what you experience varies widely depending on who you deal with and where that encounter happens. The FM3 application from the San Francisco Consulate (resplendent with typos and sagging strangely along one side of the many-generations copy) is hardly recognizable as the form for FM3 that another US city Consulate might use. Some offices use in their unique variant of the application not only a different format but totally different eligibility requirements.

So now I have until June 15th to activate the FM3, which consists of simply entering Mexico through the destination Merida airport. Then there is a thirty day interval during which the local immigration office must record a local address. Since I will be there around two weeks, I need to round up my paperwork and pay them a visit within the first few days.

Makes you sympathetic with the Mexicans who line up for our immigration processes, and for the ones who simply circumvent the whole thing.

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Mexico plans are back on track, if somewhat delayed following delivery of a preliminary report from the radiologist on the MRI past week.

Benign.

There are still a few loose ends to clear up, including elective outpatient surgery (its a long story), but - ¡ojalá! - we will only be a month behind schedule when all is resolved. In fact, I now think we require the extra time to deal with the huge number of logistical loose ends that entangle us in the 'old country'.

It will be tight. As of now I am planning the travel to Merida for the end of my six-week sabbatical from work, which will commence with the surgery at the end of the first week of May. This will get me there just in time to activate my FM3 visa before the 90-day window expires. No more tourist cards filled out on the airplane! We were a little premature in getting the visas issued, as it turns out that after entering Mexico with it you are expected to register with the local immigration office within thirty days - presenting documentation of your residential address.

Uh, we don't have one of those yet. This will probably mean borrowing a water or electric bill to show the clerk at immigración, which seems to be an acceptable approach.

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Mexican people I have met seem to find a way to make the most of difficult circumstances. This friendly guy's legs have failed him. He had someone make him a hand-cranked bicycle.

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Maybe it's necessary to experience a life-threatening situation before you quit screwing around with things that waste your time and keep you away from the life you really want.

Here's a pleasant little reminder that time does not stand still while you wait to be happy.

Thursday I should learn if I actually do face a serious threat, or if I can resume the planning and execution that was underway before. I can say this: if given a reprieve I will proceed with renewed enthusiasm, and less doubt about the wisdom of what we have undertaken.

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The MRI machine is imposing. It resides in its own building where it hums ominously, attended by smocked technicians poised before multiple flat-panel displays.

After removing various metallic objects, I lie on a narrow platform poised before the glowing aperture. Straps are fastened across my chest to monitor breathing, and an IV is started in a vein in my left arm. Breathing must be synchronized with the imaging triggers, and contrast material that resonates a particular way in the intense magnetic field will be introduced into the IV at the appropriate moment.

Before the attendants step away, one places plugs in my ears - the kind I used to wear while piloting loud airplanes. She tells me to close my eyes - and think pleasant thoughts. This kind of advice is not usually the prelude to something welcome, but I comply as I feel the narrow platform begin to slowly insert me into the glowing core of the device. I do close my eyes, and think of lying on the bed in the old house in Merida where I stay, with the fan spinning slightly off-balance twelve feet above me... whooshwhooshwhooshwhoosh... The actual sound I hear is more like the deep throated pulsing of some sort of hyper-stellar drive, as the machine prepares to resonate my aqueous molecules in a way that can somehow be imaged in paper-thin slices. It pulses and throbs, but I try to think of the fan... whooshwhooshwhooshwoosh... I feel the breeze, as the machine circulates cool air to match my mental image. I briefly open my eyes and see the faintly luminous interior of the core, inches from my eyes. I close them again, and think of that twenty foot ceiling in the room in the hundred and fifty year old colonial house in Mexico. A house made of ancient limestone, and as much the opposite of this dense collection of electonics and metal and plastic as is possible.

Now the system begins to calibrate itself, testing my density and composition with a series of intense clacks and buzzes - TOC TOC TOC...cli-TOC cli-TOC cli-TOC...BZNNNTTTTT...BZNNNTTT. Then nothing but that throbbing, pulsing hyperdrive backdrop.

A disembodied tinney voice enters my ears, with that peculiar monaural headphone effect of being in the center of your head. "This will be a series of four - you'll need to hold your breath for thirty seconds on my cue". In keeping with the space travel ambience, she sounds like Sygorney Weaver, who she also resembled. Maybe if the MRI results indicate something truly ominous, it will free itself abruptly from my torso and scurry away, ending my ordeal here and now. Would this shock Sygorney? She has the world-weary manner of one who has seen it all, so probably not.

The series begins, with a deafening BZNNNT-BZNNNT-BZNNNT-BZNNNT. "Ok breathe...and out, breathe...and out, breathe...and HOLD it..." BZNNNT-BZNNNT-BZNNNT-BZNNNT. This continues, interspersed with slight movement in or out of the narrow confines of the device core as I am virtually sliced like lunchmeat on the old circular blade appliance I remember my Mom using.

"I'm going to inject the dye now", Sygorney advises from that central space between my plugged ears. "You'll feel a coolness in your arm". I do. I'm lying twelve feet under the ceiling fan, feeling the coolness...whooshwhooshwhooshwhoosh.....

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Want some insight into your relationship with possessions? With your history of consumption and hoarding of clutter?

Plan a move to another country, where the most you can practically take is a small stack of cartons.

Look around your house. Your garage. The attic. Look in every drawer, closet, kitchen cabinet, bookshelf. Now imagine yourself touching and deciding the disposition of every item, large and small. Lots of stuff in that junk drawer? Gotta decide - dump the entire contents in a yard sale or thrift store box, or sort through trying to apply some criteria for saving or...or....or what?

Attached to that couch you nap on? That big leather armchair you longed for so many years? Get over it. Everything must go.

With a yard sale staged for the purpose of seeing things go away quickly, it's best not to give any thought at all to what was paid for stuff. It doesn't matter. Everything must go.

At first, it's very tough to sort, to sell, to (gasp) throw away perfectly good stuff. But it gets easier. And easier. You start out tentatively, giving a lot of thought to every little item. Before long, you can gather up arms full of stuff, and dump it unceremoniously into boxes. It becomes less painful, and you actually start to get an endorphin high from the prospect that it will all finally just...go away.

You find yourself thinking, as you wade through the endless drifts of stuff - Let this be a lesson to me. I never needed all this crap to begin with. I thought I did, but I didn't. I worked a lot for the money to blow on a mountain of swill, and then it owned me. For a long time. I moved it, looked at it, occasionally dusted it, but rarely used most of it. Never again.

The best model for consuming was revealed in a scene from George Lucas' first theatrical release - the futuristic THX1138. In the grim opressive overcrowded underground Orwellian world that the hero inhabits, he ducks into a shop and purchases an orange cube of some sort. When he arrives at his dwelling, just inside the door he deposits the cube into a receptacle, where it vanishes with sort of a sucking flushing noise. Perfect consumption. No clutter. Everything must go.




Text © 2003-2004 Stanley J. Wolf

Almost three months since my last update, and it's time to bring this up to date and move forward with ongoing status.



After the New Year kidney stone incident, a CT scan done to have a look at that situation revealed another area of interest. A subsequent study of that area revealed ANOTHER thing to investigate. I won't bore with the details, but the past several months have been used up by long delays between appointments with various HMO (which I believe now means Hysterical Medical Overindulgence) people and for being scanned now and then with Xrays, soundwaves, and magnetic fields. The net result of all this is that the original kidney stone episode has resolved with minimal unpleasantness, but some uncertainty still remains with the other incidental items. Hopefully, that uncertainty will be removed in the next few weeks.

With any luck at all, I will then be able to travel to Merida by mid to late April. Pat is there right now, beginning a ten-day visit to scout the neighborhoods most likely to yield appropriate houses and ambience now that we have expanded the scope of our search beyond centro. He will take one more look at the current inventory of casas for sale, and if there is no good opportunity we'll shift to looking for a rental in one of the neighborhoods he's checking out.

Here's a place to check out local Merida listings for venta de casas (houses for sale) and renta de casas (rentals). Note that although the $ sign is used, unless USD is stated this is for mexican pesos - currently you divide by eleven to arrive at a dollar amount. Here's another site for current house inventory targeted more to gringo buyers.

There really is a lot of catching up to do, and (hopefully) the pace of preparation and action will be picking up soon - I'll commit to no less than three entries a week.

Stay tuned...

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