What I Use: Mexico City (October/November 2024) (Premium)

Tomorrow, we fly home from Mexico City after seven weeks here, our longest continuous trip outside the United States so far. We have a complicated several weeks ahead of us, with Thanksgiving next week, our daughter's college graduation and subsequent move, Christmas, New Years, and then our daughter continuing her education in a new state. It's going to be so busy, I get nervous just thinking about it. So for now, I'll ignore that and look back.

Work, work, work
I came here with two major goals, both book-related, and as I wrote in From the Editor’s Desk: Slog (Premium), that ended up being a major source of stress and fatigue. And as I look back on this now, I'm still confused by how it all went down. The short version is that I got a ton of work done updating the Windows 11 Field Guide for Windows 11 version 24H2, and I'm pretty happy with that, though there's a lot more to do. And my wife and I both got a ton of work done creating our first (and probably only) book together, Eternal Spring: Our Guide to Mexico City, though we still have precious little to show for it from a public-facing perspective.

That will change soon. This past weekend, we finalized our plans to ship the first, incomplete, preview version of that book, and we're stepping through the remaining to-do items so that can happen. As I wrote about this previously, getting over that hump will be a big deal psychologically, but we're hamstrung by a desire to get this right, and to put out something we can easily update and expand, and then keep up-to-date. I figured we would cross that milestone about a month ago, and then maybe by the end of October. But it will happen this month. And then we'll fill in the missing pieces going forward.

I'm going to write more about this--yes, writing about writing--soon.

Tied to this, when I wrote that Slog editorial, I had only written one of the three laptop reviews I'd hoped to finish during the trip as well. (So maybe there were three major goals.) And I was held up by some issues with the Lunar Lake-based laptop that Lenovo shipped to me here, and so I wanted to get through that first because I have to ship it back before we go home. But I'm pleased to report I did get that done: My Lenovo Yoga Slim 7i 15 Aura Edition and Lenovo ThinkBook Plus Gen 5 Hybrid reviews are both out, and I can at least fly home with a clear conscience on that.

Home office
Our apartment in Mexico City is tiny, maybe 700 or 750 square feet, with two bedrooms and two bathrooms. My wife is using the second bedroom as her home office, while I do what I do at home and move between a few different places. Here, that's a kitchen table--that's really in the living room, though it's all one big room--with my laptop dock and external display, the couch, and the bed.

This is curiously workable for me. After years of working mostly out of a home office, we downsized in 2023, living for several months in a two-bedroom apartment in...