Winter in Montreal, Canada can be interminable.  The sun rises at 7:45a.m. and sets at 4:24p.m. these days.  The temperature right now is -17 C.  The short, cold days too early become longer, colder nights.  The husband and I disagree sometimes on what the future holds for us.

There's been so much talk online, in the press, all over the place, about safety in Mexico, including Sayulita.  I feel so safe in Sayulita, it's ridiculous!  Yes, we lock our doors.  Yes, we have a safe in each unit.  But no, we don't have bars on the windows.  No, we don't have a guard dog.  We don't sleep with a club, or anything else, by the bed.  People near us surrounded their property with a wall that's about 10' high.  Motion-detector lights have become all the rage.  Nobody's put bars on windows yet but perhaps that day will soon come.  I hope not.

We have two new additions to the family here in Sayulita.  Twins, in fact.  I would love to show you a photo but their mother is very protective, naturally so, and won't let me photograph them quite yet.  The parents are locals, I believe, probably born and raised here themselves.  They come from a once very large family but now there aren't that many of them, hence their sense of privacy and protection when it comes to their children.  I'm speaking, of course, of the chachalacas.

And more and more and more of them are in English only.  In Sayulita, Mexico, where the vast majority of residents are Mexican, one can't go down any road in the centre of this beautiful village without seeing businesses with English-language names offering services spelled out solely in English.  This troubles me.  In my home province of Quebec, Canada, the population is overwhelmingly French.  A problem existed though.  While the majority of the population was French, increasingly the language of commerce was becoming English.  So much so that the majority French population began to feel excluded and, worse, disenfranchised.  I can see Sayulita headed in the same direction.  Very, very quickly.

"Mexico is a loud country."  Oh, how I wish I could remember in which guidebook I first read that.  It's something I keep trying to impress upon our guests, without actually scaring them away!  Most of the noise is fun, and short-lived.  I consider it simply loud sounds, not noise.  Roosters, dogs, car radios, the gas trucks - the many, many gas trucks - all contribute to the friendly cacophany that is Mexico.  Church bells on a Sunday (actually, pretty much any day, I'm finding); fireworks, especially on a Saturday night, to celebrate a wedding or perhaps a christening.  We're fortunate, in our guesthouse, to overlook the ballfield and the plaza in the distance, to bear witness to all that goes on in our little pueblo. 

So The Husband headed back to Montreal for a few days of unexpected business.  Just at the same time as the sun decided to disappear for the week.  So he's up north where it's a high of -10C and sunny and I'm here where it's a high of 25C and rainy.  Oh, how I do love irony.

Today in Montreal it's a high of -3C, which isn't bad at all for mid-January. They say it's like Spring. Here in Sayulita, of course, it's only 10:00a.m. and already it's 25C. Do I gloat?  Damn right I do. We worked very hard to make this dream a reality. A lot of people up north don't understand that. They call us "lucky". They seem to think that going from fantasy to reality is just a matter of wishing it to happen. Let there be light, and there was light.

The first meeting with our prestanombre always leaves me gasping for breath. Part of it, of course, is the ever-increasing money it seems the Mexican government is determined to bleed out of us. Even if we wanted to sell our property, which we most definitely don’t