Happy New Year from us Vagabondians
[NOTE: If you just signed up, you may have already read this - sorry for the duplication!]
So this is new…
A new year, a new way of communicating. Think of it as a NEWsletter. (ha!)
It's New
In the past we used MailChimp as our newsletter provider, but it was designed for large-scale commercial mail, and was rather difficult to use and maintain. This new service (substack.com) is much better, and it's still free. We have also used our Facebook group to communicate with you, but they like to limit who gets to see our writing, and then force you to pay them for the privilege of having you see it. So we are going to phase out our use of the group. Going forward, when there are new photos or blog posts to tell you about, we'll do that here.
If you got this from us in an email, you have been subscribed here automatically. I migrated you over from MailChimp. As usual, if you no longer wish to receive these emails, just click to unsubscribe.
The blog
I am still working on renovating the blog. The big hold-up at this point is the photos. A lot of them don't show up any more. Links have changed, some services now require payment to link to them. Frankly, I need to consolidate. So I did.
Photos
We have upgraded our Flickr account to Pro and I am in the process of uploading a massive backlog of photos to the site. Unfortunately the internet upload speed here is 0.52mbps - yes, half a megabyte! I think I had faster speeds on my last dial-up account. But we should have much faster speeds in our new apartment starting in April. Speaking of...
Time to Travel!
Our landlord is renovating in April, and afterward the rent will be much higher. Unfortunately the rent is high *everywhere* here in Lakeside. So we have decided it's time to once again declutter, downsize and hit the road. Our current desination is Guanajuato, a city we've visited twice before. Fast internet, cheaper rent, less expat gringos. No lake, but amazing colorful views.
We will miss the view from our kitchen window
Bryn already has her Mexican Residente Permanente card and by the time we get to Guanajuato I will have my Residente Temporal card. This means we don't have to fly out of the country every six months. Our last trip to the States cost us a few thousand dollars! We did manage to add to our savings this last year, but we really need to accellerate that amount. Having a different home base will help.
The big ending
I will be posting a link to this newsletter for those on the Facebook group who aren’t already on our list. I have really enjoyed writing this update! Knowing that you get it straight into your email without having it hidden by some silicon valley overlords will hopefully motivate me to update you more often. But not *too* often. That would be annoying, and it would cut into the time I spend doing important things, like experimenting with beard shapes. What do you think?
It’s not a patchy spot if it doesn’t exist…