Today is a holiday in México (Día de la Revolución) so I got the day off from work and Enid got the day off from school. Robin and I thought about taking a family trip somewhere for the three-day weekend, but ultimately decided that we shouldn’t spend the money. So we’ve just been at home most of the weekend, except for some shopping errands. It’s nice to relax, but keeping Enid entertained all day for three days in a row is challenging. Robin has more stamina for playing with her than I do, probably in part because she gets plenty of practice during the week while I’m at work. I held up my end fairly well Saturday and Sunday, but unfortunately I woke up this morning feeling very run-down and tired, like perhaps I’m starting to get a cold or something. Mercifully, Robin has taken Enid up to Parque Chipinque this afternoon, so I’m getting a little break. I probably should be napping, but I don’t want to get too much sleep during the day and then not be able to sleep tonight. I recently started taking Xanax for insomnia and anxiety symptoms that were getting out of control, and I’m just starting to enjoy some solid, deep sleep again so I don’t want to mess that up.

The hot weather seems to be finished for the year. The climate is now quite comfortable most of the time, and we’ve even had one or two days that were downright chilly. It’s quite variable though, and a cool, cloudy day is often followed by a warm, sunny day. Maybe things will get colder in December or January, but if the recent weather is representative of the winter here then we certainly will have nothing to complain about. Well, nothing except the bad smell that often fills the air in our neighborhood on cool mornings. I’m not sure what it is, but it has the sulfurous smell of an oil refinery. There is a lot of industry in the parts of town west of us, so I suspect it’s blowing in from somewhere over there. Unfortunately poor air quality is one of the major sacrifices we had to come to terms with when we decided to move here. I can only hope that one year of it won’t do to much damage to Enid’s developing lungs. Hopefully all the time she spends breathing relatively clean air in Hawaii will help make up for it.

The Christmas season has already begun in Monterrey. Since they don’t have Thanksgiving, I guess they have no reason to wait. Twinkling lights are strung up all over town, and the stores are full of tacky seasonal brick-a-brack, fresh off the boat from China. It seems like the consumerism associated with Christmas is every bit as over-the-top here as it is in the USA. I am studiously ignoring it to the best of my abilities.

I did, however, feel obliged to take note of the current holiday and learn more about the Mexican Revolution this weekend (I got the day off work because of it, after all). So I took the path of least scholarly resistance and read the Wikipedia entry about it. I was quickly reminded why I abandoned my last attempt to gain some familiarity with Mexican political history: it is an endless, jumbled, convoluted mess of events and personalities that essentially defies any attempts to put it “in a nutshell”. Nonetheless, for the edification of my readers, here is my three-sentence encapsulation of what the Mexican Revolution was all about. There was a president named Porfirio Díaz who managed, through rigged elections and brutal suppression of opposition, to rule Mexico for thirty or forty years around the turn of the century. Finally, in 1910, a cabal of “revolutionaries” (including Emiliano Zapata, Pancho Villa, and future Mexican presidents Madero, Obregon, and Carranza among others) fought a bloody war to unseat him. But after doing so they began to fight amongst themselves over power for the next several years, giving rise to a long period of bloodshed and instability that ultimately resulted in the Mexican constitution of 1917 and (eventually) political stabilization under the domination of the PRI political party.

That is the short story. The long story is a lot more confusing, but of course more interesting too. Note that the Mexican Revolution was not a war for independence like the American Revolution. They had one of those too, but we already celebrated it back in September on Día de la Independencia.

Not much else new to report. We got Enid some new jigsaw puzzles, which she is enjoying. The 35-piece rain forest puzzle she has done twice now, more or less on her own. The 300-piece Noah’s Ark puzzle she is slowly assembling with help from Robin. She is also continuing to sound out written words, edging her way towards early literacy. Her Spanish skills also continue to flourish. We aren’t pushing that very hard at home, just letting it come naturally though her time at school.

At work things are starting to inch forward at last. We’ve put together a basic research plan, and the necessary reagents are beginning to trickle in. I was actually able to do some work at the bench last week. Even though it was just some small, simple tasks, I found it remarkably satisfying to get my hands into the work after three months of being stuck in an office. Now my priority for the next few weeks is to get as many of my supply orders as possible shepherded through the university’s (slow and often unreliable) purchasing system before the lengthy work stoppage that I’m told will occur next month (due to the winter holidays). If I can get the orders placed before then, hopefully the distributors will deliver our reagents and consumables quickly enough to allow for an immediate burst of productivity once the spring semester begins.