Thanks to a series of problems, we’re limping into the final days of this stay in Mexico City. In my case, literally: I somehow managed to screw my knee up in the weeks before we got here–I suspect a torn tendon or ligament, but will find out for sure when we get home–and that’s hobbled me a bit. We still walk everywhere, but I have to wear a brace and my knee seems to give out randomly.

I wish it were just that. But this has been a weird stay. And a weird year, really.

Car trouble

In some ways, these issues date back to late 2025 and our final trip to Mexico City from mid-September through mid-November. It’s bad enough when your family and friends are all over–our daughter Kelly lives in Charlotte, our son Mark is in Rochester, and we have friends and family back in the Boston area–but being in another country, even one as geographically convenient as Mexico, can make the separation worse. One of my worries is being away from the States when something bad happens, triggering an emergency return or whatever.

We’ve mostly, but not quite, escaped that, at least so far. That’s just luck: Like some Final Destination movie, life, or fate, or per the movie, death, is trying to tell us we’re living on borrowed time. It’s not clear to me how long this can last. Actually, it’s clear it can’t last.

We’ve had issues in the past along these lines. Last summer, we had to fly home a month early when our daughter unexpectedly graduated from college and the school inexplicably decided to hold an August graduation ceremony for the first time in its history.

But we’ve had more instances when something bad happened and there was just nothing we could do, or when it just didn’t work out that we had to go home suddenly, like when our dog passed away while we were in Mexico a few years back. After that happened, Kelly took our cats, which was good for her and for the cats, but also for us, since that’s what’s allowed us to spend more time in Mexico and split our time more evenly between the two places. But when one of those two cats suddenly got quite ill and then passed away last year, sending Kelly into a tailspin, that was partially offset by our son offering to FaceTime with her from the vet so she wouldn’t be alone.

That triggered some good parental guilt, of course, but it didn’t make sense to fly home because an old cat passed away in a different state. But then Kelly totaled her car because of course she did, and she had to find a replacement. I figured this would surely trigger an unscheduled flight back to the States, with Stephanie heading to Charlotte to help our daughter with this horrible process. But it ended up working out somehow, and Steph was able to help her remotely. Kelly managed to purchase a new (to her) car and it seems like a good choice.

Bullet dodged, we finished our time in Mexico in 2025 with little more in the way of drama. But once we got home, in mid-November, it got busy.

More car trouble

Kelly and Mark came to Pennsylvania for Thanksgiving, which is a big family event at my sister’s house now, and so we got to check out Kelly’s car at least, since she drives and brings her cats; she semi-immediately adopted another cat when one of the two she was taking care of passed away.

Then Richard was in town briefly, which was nice, and I got to see some other friends at a local .NET Rocks event that weekend. We went back to Boston for a long weekend for a family holiday party in mid-December. And then the kids came to PA again, this time for Christmas, which is another big time for family, with some events that day and in the days leading up to Christmas. The usual.

Christmas is always special, of course, but every visit with the kids is a mixture of happiness and sadness since it always ends so fast and then off they go. And sure enough, a few days after Christmas, Kelly left for home in her car, taking the two cats with her. And then Mark left, heading up to Rochester in his car. We stood there in the doorway as we always do, waving goodbye and troubled by the separation, with no hope of fixing it.

And then it got worse. About 90 minutes after he left, Mark called: Something was really wrong with his car, there was a bang, a bad smell, and an almost total loss of power. So he limped into some remote town north of Jim Thorpe, PA, and managed to get a tow. This was a Sunday, a time we figured we’d just relax and unwind. But soon I was in my car, heading up to wherever Mark was, over an hour away.

I met Mark at the garage where his car had been towed. After speaking with the owner briefly, it seemed that whatever the problem was would be fixed that week, and that Mark would perhaps need to rent a car, as he had to work the next day and that week. So we started driving back to our place while Stephanie called various rental car places to see about getting him a car. Without going into all the permutations of what transpired, which, granted, are a little fuzzy in my brain right now anyway, I kept thinking about how every mile we drove south was another wasted minute for my son, who lives hours north of us, and that there must be a better way. Then, Steph was unsuccessful getting a rental.

And then it finally came to me.

Mark should just take our car and drive it home to Rochester. I would get out in whatever town somewhere an hour or more north of where I live, and get an Uber ride home. We were leaving for Mexico City in several days, and though we do need a car, of course, we had friends from Boston coming for four days or so over New Year’s, and they would have a car for that time period. And then we could Uber as needed until we left. We were just going to leave our car in the garage anyway while we were away, for over four months. But now Mark could use our car until his was fixed. He and a roommate/friend could come down to PA, pick up his car, and drop ours off whenever. It made sense.

Stephanie agreed when I called her with this idea and so I pulled over in the next town, called an Uber, said goodbye to Mark a second time, and then watched him drive away in my car, wondering yet again about the reality that there is nothing that a parent won’t do for a child. That was OK. But in the next few days, we got more bad news: Mark’s car wasn’t salvageable. The transmission had basically self-destructed, and the cost of the repair exceeded the value of his car. Fantastic.

The silver lining on this is that he had our car and we wouldn’t need it until mid-May anyway. He’d need to buy a car, but we could buy him some time because he could keep using our car while we were gone. He could then save up some money for a down payment, shop around for a car, and then get serious when it was warmer, maybe a month before we came home. It would be OK.

And this time, it was. Mark used our car all winter, and last weekend, he purchased a new (to him) car that’s he’s delighted with. We will fly home Friday, get an Uber home from the airport, and then he and one of his roommates will drive down to PA for the weekend in two separate cars, ours and Mark’s new car. They’ll get to go to a couple of favorite local restaurants with us while they’re there. And then they’ll head back to Rochester.

But there is more.

Tremors

We’ve somehow managed to escape any serious earthquakes in Mexico City so far. I can’t explain this, as earthquakes are common here. We’ve experienced the citywide earthquake alarm going off several times over the four years we’ve had this apartment, but we’ve given up trying to get out of our building if that’s where we are at the time because you’re supposed to stay in-place if you’re higher than the third floor. So far so good.

But right before we came here in early January, there was a decent-sized earthquake that measured 5.2 on the Richter scale. We just missed it, I guess, but our neighbors here told us they could feel it, as could Richard and Stacey in Acapulco. We’ve since had two earthquake alarms go off while we were here in early 2026, but I never felt a thing either time. The first one was literally nothing, it never made its way to Mexico City. But the second one was apparently something, and a few friends here told me they could feel that one too. Not me. Our building sways when big trucks go by, and I frequently feel that. But an earthquake? Not yet.

Instead, we’ve dealt with a series of admittedly smaller issues that are nonetheless frustrating, plus some bigger issues, one of which did cause an emergency flight back to the states.

Mosquitos, for the love of God

This will seem silly, but we have a serious mosquito problem in our apartment when it gets warmer, as it did for a month or more during this stay, in that case unseasonably. When we first came to Mexico City, I never once imagined that mosquitos could even live at this altitude, but they do and they’re the worst. I grew up around Boston, where everyone has screened-in porches because the mosquitos are so unbearable in the summers. And I am still surprised to tell you that mosquitos are not an issue in the very rural area of Pennsylvania we now live; that makes no sense. But the mosquitos here? You have no idea.

Ideally, we could simply just open windows and our balcony doors when it’s nice out and let in some air. And we can and do. But more so on this trip than ever, mosquitoes have been stalking me every night as I sleep. Again, like a Final Destination movie. I wake up repeatedly at night because they sting my hands, it’s always my hands, and when I get up, I go on a mosquito hunt. This will sound like an exaggeration, but one morning I killed 14 (!) mosquitos in our bedroom alone, each one a red splat of my own blood. I often kill 8 to 10 mosquitos each day. It’s insane.

After suffering for weeks and nightly spraying myself with the same bug spray I used to use when camping as a kid, but now indoors, we finally experimented with some plug-in mosquito repellent, the kind with a little container of oily, foul-smelling liquid. And as shocked as I am by this situation, I’m even more surprised that this seems to have worked. I have been mosquito-free for five nights in a row now. Finally.

But again. There’s more. There’s always more.

Back to the States, briefly

Back in February, our daughter hit a rough patch where she had to quit her job because the boss was insufferable, got a new job that she loved, but then found herself not having to work very often: She works with kids who have developmental issues, and this new job wasn’t getting her enough clients, and that means she was barely getting paid. She then had to move out of an apartment, and it was too much, and Stephanie finally decided to just fly to the States, to Charlotte, to help her clean, organize, and move.

I remember her telling me she felt that she needed to do this, and I immediately agreed it was the right thing to do. And then she surprised me by saying she could leave the next day or the day after that. What? I figured it would happen in a week or more, but in checking the flights, Steph found that the prices were no different. So it made sense to just go. So she did. And that worked out fine. Kelly is all moved and organized again.

Injurious

I mentioned my knee up top. I don’t know how this happened, but the timing wasn’t great. Last year, Stephanie had hurt her foot, had multiple X-rays and MRIs, and then finally figured that one out and, slowly, over time healed up. But during the interim we were’t able to walk as much, which cut into the pseudo-exercise I expect to get when we’re in Mexico because we walk here so much. There were several times when she would Uber back to our apartment from whatever place and I would walk. But it wasn’t the same.

With her finally healing from that injury and more able to walk effectively, I somehow did whatever I did to my knee. At first, I figured it was the type of thing that would sometimes happen and it would just heal. But it didn’t, and I started throwing my knee out randomly when we were walking. Clearly, I have torn something.

As noted, I had surgery previously on both ACLs. The first one was devastatingly painful, as were any repeat injuries before the surgery. The second time, just over a year after the surgery, I was shooting around with a friend before a basketball game, did a cross step to get by him, and suddenly dropped the ball and stopped. He was confused, but I knew immediately I had just torn my other ACL. He was incredulous. “How?” he asked. “You’re not even hurt.” But I knew. And it was correct. Cue the second surgery.

So this new knee issue was like the second of those experiences, but it was even more subtle because I don’t know when it happened, and I’m not sure whether it’s the ACL. But it’s something. So I went through a few knee braces, found one that sort of works well, and sometimes it’s fine, sometimes I throw it out, and I have trouble fully extending my leg. I will get this looked at when we go home, but for this trip, the second time in a row, my expected walking routine has been curtailed. I am walking more than when Steph hurt her foot, but more slowly and still not as much as usual.

Worse, I’ve had two semi-related accidents.

The first was the more problematic. We were walking up our street to one of our favorite local restaurants on a block that’s notably dark. If you’re not familiar with Mexico City, the important bit here is that this entire city is sinking into the ground because it was previously built on a lake and the remains of that lake below the city have been mostly drained. The sinking doesn’t happen evenly, so some areas are worse than others, and there are slanted buildings and buckled sidewalks and streets intermittently all over the place. Sometimes trees and their roots will add another element of uncertainty.

And that’s what got me. As we were approaching a cross street, I could see a car parked in the crosswalk, illegally. “That’s illegal,” I said, stating the obvious. And then I tripped.

To be clear, I trip all the time. I’m naturally clumsy, sometimes I joke about how I can walk down a hall and almost pinball against each wall as I go. But in Mexico City, the never-ending sinking-related uncertainties pose a unique challenge. And so the two of us will trip at some point basically every day. And I always catch myself, of course. Until this time. When I did not.

I can’t quite explain this. Once, I came out of the bedroom here, had a weird altitude-related dizzy spell and almost passed out, so I fell to the floor but somehow managed to catch myself with both hands out, sparing myself from what could have been a bad injury on the marble flooring here. I’m vaguely aware that doing that kind of thing can be bad, too, one could break one or both wrists and that would be horrific. But this time, I didn’t even do that. I tripped on a tree root coming up through the buckled sidewalk in the dark, didn’t quite catch my footing, and … I just fell.

I played basketball most of my adult life, all the way through the time we moved to Pennsylvania in 2017. I’ve injured myself a lot, and I have been roughed up a lot by the 250 to 300 pound guys I played this game with, and it was all very normal and even enjoyable to some degree. And I always kind of figured those experiences would inform whatever physical damage was to come down the road, just as those experiences taught me that my repaired knees were always going to be fine. Until that wasn’t true anymore.

In this case, I just hit the ground. I landed on my shoulder and arm, basically, and I hadn’t even had the time to try to put my hands out to brace my fall. My head never hit the cement, thankfully, so I was spared that potential problem. But I could tell I was hurt. My phone had skidded 8 feet or so up the sidewalk, ruining the case but inexplicably sparing the screen. When my wife bent over to help, all I could think of was to ask her to get the phone. And then I sat up and got up.

When we got to the restaurant, I went into the bathroom to check the damage. I had not torn my shirt at least, I only have five dress shirts here, and this is one that’s not made anymore. But taking that off, I could see I was scraped and bleeding from my shoulder, my upper and lower arm, and my wrist. Later, I discovered a similar issue on my left knee, which is not the same knee I’m having a problem with. My shoulder and upper arm looked the worst, but my lower arm hurt the most and it developed a knot that eventually went down and disappeared.

If you’ve ever hurt yourself like this, you know that it looks worse when it’s getting better. You bruise up and turn purple, which is lovely, but then it turns yellow too and that looks even worse. I took some photos in the bathroom later, as if I’d ever forget this event. But this triggered a round of concern from families and friends who saw the photos, including the kids who both separately contacted Stephanie to make sure I was OK. But I was OK, just concerned that I had finally not caught myself as I tripped up this street.

And then it happened again, sort of. We were in a favorite bar, this one not so close, up in Juarez north of Roma Norte. It has very high chairs at the bar, which always seem a bit precarious. But in this case, I tried to adjust the position of the chair while still sitting in it, and of course my height and weight imbalanced the already top-heavy nature of these terrible chairs. And when a corner foot caught whatever imperfection in the floor, my injured arm gave out at the worst possible moment. And I just … fell.

I know what you’re thinking. I fell from a bar stool and have a drinking problem. But no, we had just gotten there. This time, there were two outcomes. One, incredible embarrassment, which is probably obvious. But two, I didn’t hurt myself at all. As I said to Stephanie, that’s how I expect these things to go given that basketball experience noted above. I’ve been roughed up a lot, and despite the height and not being able to brace myself in any way, I was fine. Thankfully.

Totally unrelated to the above, about 10 days ago, I was washing the dishes in our tiny sink here in Mexico. We don’t have a dish washer here, of course, so we do this by hand. And it’s usually my wife, because she thinks to do it, and so this time I figured I would spare her that work. And in washing one of the small water glasses we have here, it just broke in hand. And I immediately knew this was bad, as one does sometimes.

I had cut a deep gash into the webbing between my left thumb and forefinger, directly in line with the skin that folds there. I could see into the cut more than I liked, and it was gushing blood everywhere. I had a hard time believing this wouldn’t need stitches, but I was also hoping to avoid that. So I had Stephanie round up some bandaids, and I cleaned it off–later wondering whether the water coming out of our tap, which is undrinkable, might contain something bad–and crossed two bandaids over the gash.

That first day, I had to keep replacing the bandaids as they would just get soaked with blood and become unusable. By the second day, that slowed down, but as I showered and otherwise got the bandaids wet, they would come off, and that gash, though smaller, remained. The location is tough, and you don’t realize how much you use or move certain parts of your body until they’re hurt. Even a week later, I was thinking this thing was never going to close up.

But then it did, finally. This past Saturday, I forgot to replace the band-aid; I had moved to just one, after a shower and it stayed closed and was fine. I mean, it’s scarred. But I have a few scars on my hands and arms, from basketball in many cases, but some from as far back as my 1985 summer of concrete construction work, which is crazy. So I guess I got lucky here too.

Mom

Yesterday was Mother’s Day, so I ordered flowers for my mother, as one does, in this case on Thursday. I knew we’d be talking that day, as well, and my plan is to see her in late June when I will go back to Boston for a long weekend or whatever. And that was that, until an hour later when my brother Jonathan texted me: Our mother was in the emergency room with atrial fibrillation (AFib). Ah boy.

My mother is 81 years old, and she’s legally blind with poor hearing. And she’s a complainer, there’s no nice way to say it; she makes me look like the most positive person on earth by comparison. But she’s otherwise very healthy, or at least she seemed to be. Each time I visit, I comment on this. So this was surprising, though maybe it shouldn’t have been. But over time, thanks to updates from my brother, I learned that she had needed oxygen–she later told me she had gone in because she was having trouble breathing and she figured it was related to allergies—and was on blood thinners to prevent clotting.

Jonathan saw her that night and said she seemed scared, and her not seeing or hearing well wasn’t helping. I tried calling on the hospital phone number he gave me and never got through, but then the next day my brother texted to say she’d be going home soon. That was good, but she has congestive heart failure and kidney disease, which is not good, and she was exhausted. So I ended up just calling her Sunday at home, which I was going to do anyway.

She’s OK, all things considered. She presented an acceptance of and peace with the situation to me that was perhaps a residual mother’s need to make things OK for her child, which I of course get. But as of now, this is all very uncertain. She has more tests to get through, more appointments, and we’ll learn more as it comes. But this is a sudden unwelcome turn that is currently unresolved.

When it rains

In addition to the mosquitos, the other odd issue we have here with our apartment is that, when it rains, it can soak the floors just inside our balcony doors. We like to leave those open as much as possible, and it’s clear that just the smallest of awnings over our balcony doors would prevent most rain from getting in. But we don’t have that, and sometimes the floor gets wet.

This isn’t ideal, as the floor in the bedrooms is a cheap faux wood material and not the marble that’s elsewhere. When we think it’s going to rain, we close those doors or just leave them open a few inches, and sometimes we come back from being out and have a little bit of toweling up to do. This is no big deal, but I often talk about replacing the floor in front of these doors and putting down marble or whatever stone-like flooring so we don’t need to worry about this as much.

Friday night, we went out to dinner with a friend and neighbor in the building. She had previously turned us onto Café Tacobar, and now we’re regulars there and know the owner, so she has a good track record. And that night, she took us to another place, a new place locally, that we did fall in love with. So she’s batting 1.000 still, so to speak.

Walking from our building to this new place, we were joking about how there was a tiny percentage chance of rain and that of course this would happen because none of us thought to bring raincoats. And we had left our balcony doors open about two feet each. But then we were surprised when we walked out of this place to discover it had rained while we were there. We hadn’t heard or seen it, but the whole world outside was soaking wet. That’s nice, Mexico City can always use the rain, as it cleans up the air. And so we just walked home and thought nothing of it.

When we got into the apartment, I checked on the floor in our bedroom without even turning on the light. The mat in front of the open door was soaking wet, which isn’t unusual after a lot of rain, so I picked it up off the floor and brought it into the bathroom, throwing it in the shower so it could dry off. Then I turned on the bathroom lights and turned to face the bedroom.

Hm. There was a puddle on the floor, to the side of where the mat had been. That’s never happened. When I kneeled down to look at it more closely, I put my hand on the corner of the bed, and the blanket on its side and top were soaking wet. That, too, had never happened. So I called Stephanie in and asked her to turn on the overhead lights.

That pool of water also included a small stream of water that led to another pool of water on the floor right under the center of the bed. And that had definitely never happened before. What the heck. So I lifted the mattress so Stephanie could dry everything under there. This was very unusual.

We guess that the rain had fallen almost sideways, or at least at some angle, which meant it had come into the room from the outside more than is usually the case. The little awning I still want to get for these doors wouldn’t have helped at all. Nor would the magnetically attached screening we are separately thinking of buying to help further with the mosquito problem. So this was likely just a freak occurrence. But it was still quite surprising and most unwelcome.

And until the next day, the worst thing I had expected our apartment to experience that weekend.

Explosive

Saturday began like any other day. Actually, it was better than that. We had gone to bed at a normal time, having not stayed out too late, slept well, and woken up at normal times. We both got some work done, and then we both started working on some of the wind-down tasks that occur at the end of every stay, but this time a bit more proactively than usual. I was pretty happy about that, as I often procrastinate on these things until the final day. So everything was going great.

Until it wasn’t.

In the middle of the afternoon, almost exactly at 3 pm, there was a sudden explosion down the street, a loud bang that made me jump. The lights all turned off and then turned back on immediately, and various surge protectors and voltage protectors we have around the apartment started beeping. The Internet never went down, which was nice, but as we started checking on things, it was clear that we had big problems.

Both of the voltage protectors, one on the refrigerator and one on the washing machine, were dead. The water heater was dead. Two fans were dead, as was the fan in one of the bathrooms. A lamp in the bedroom was dead. Our Nespresso espresso machine was dead. Our refrigerator sort of came back on when we detached it from the dead voltage protector and plugged it directly into the wall, and though the light inside came back on, it wasn’t cooling anything anymore, so that was dead too.

Great. We quickly ordered replacement voltage protectors, a new Nespresso machine, and a fan via Mercado Libre, a sort of local Amazon.com, and they arrived the next day. We planned to pick up a new surge protector locally in the next day or so. We contacted some neighbors to ask about electricians, and some worked on getting us in touch with someone. But the water heater, which we’d already had so many issues with, and the fridge were going to be problematic. We leave for Pennsylvania Friday and won’t be back until mid-July. The clock was ticking.

We later learned that there was a major incident at a light pole down the street. Which isn’t the first time recently that this has happened: Workers had been out working on the light poles a month or so ago, probably related to new building construction in our neighborhood, and there was a separate incident that took out our Internet for the entire day and for the same reason. One block over, the power was out on about two city blocks for that time period as well.

Look, this is Mexico. I get it. One might argue that we were overdue for this kind of problem, given how tenuous the electrical infrastructure here seems. But it’s been fine for years, more than fine really. It wasn’t until this trip that we had any major issues, aside from the water heater problems we experienced four years ago when we first bought the place. It’s easy to get complacent.

We went out to dinner Saturday consumed by the impossibility of fixing any of these issues before we had to leave. These kinds of problems are incredibly stressful to me, and I joked with a bartender friend who had just put a drink in front of me that he may as well just make another one because I was going to stress-pound that one down immediately. But we got through that, came back home, and watched a little TV, which required us to use the built-in TV speakers because the HomePod minis were attached to a battery-backed surge protector that was no longer working.

That night, we got a WhatsApp message from the building manager. “La fella de luz e por una falla en la zona nos dan un tiempo apromiximadamado para la solucion de 2 a horas,” which translates to “The power outage is due to a fault in the area, we have an estimated time for resolution of 2 hours.” This wouldn’t help us, we thought, as we had already lost so many expensive appliances and devices despite doing what we thought we needed to do to protect them from this kind of problem. So we went to bed.

When we woke up, Stephanie gave the Nespresso machine a shot, despite it being destroyed. Otherwise, we’d have to drink some instant coffee, which feels like a punishment. It was still broken to some degree, but she found that one of the two buttons you can use to make espresso actually worked, though she had to manually stop it. Interesting. So she opened the fridge. The light was on fully, not dimly as before, and it was cooling things normally.

When she told me this, we started looking at other things that had broken. The water heater, miracle of miracles, was fine. The fans worked. The ceiling fan in the bathroom worked. The laptop was fine. I turned on that surge protector under the TV, and it wasn’t beeping anymore. Aside from the Nespresso machine, which was still screwed up, pretty much everything was fine.

This, to us, was as surprising a turn of events as the original explosion and resulting damage. It didn’t make sense, electricity is either on or off, right? But as Brad and I discussed on First Ring Daily–I had expected him to have some insight into this—we must have experienced an electrical phase out in which whatever electrical box out in the street had exploded (or seemed to explode) had triggered a situation in which our building (and elsewhere in the neighborhood, I assume) was essentially only getting partial power.

We had never heard of such a thing, let alone experienced it. But almost everything is fine. And that is incredible.

Sunday, all the replacement items we had ordered arrived. We sort of don’t need most of it now, but we kept all of it. I had wanted to get another good fan, and the new one is excellent. I had wanted to get a surge protector for the NAS, and I’m thinking the other one might be put to good use for the water heater. And we do need a new Nespresso machine.

All’s well that ends well, I guess. Hopefully, this is the end of the drama for a while. But I’m guessing not.