Sometimes we talk about returning to live in the U.S. There are lots of reasons why it may make sense at some point. The most compelling one is the idea that my daughter might return to Boulder, Colorado for high school. If she does so I think I’ll want to be “local” for her high school years.

Other reasons to go back are: my husband’s family members who live in Colorado, proper yard sales with expensive stuff for cheap in them, the possibility that I might get a decent web design job that pays gobs of money, springtime in Boulder (which is the best spring anywhere), my good friend Teresa Gail who lives there, the MANY health food stores there, and all the other conveniences that living in the States provides.

But just yesterday I was having breakfast with a close friend who is a gringa, and who has lived in Cancun for over 20 years. We started a discussion about what we dislike about the U.S. and it left me with the realization that the longer I live in Cancun the more comfortable I get. And it’s a soul-soothing, long-term, really lazy, don’t-change-a-thing kind of comfortableness.

We both agreed that one of the things we hate most is linoleum. It’s ugly. If you have it in your house, I’m sorry. My mother likes linoleum, maybe liking it skips a generation?

We also agreed that houses which are made of sticks and get blown flat in hurricanes are pathetic. Houses made of concrete which have wooden-trussed roofs that can blow off are also ick-ville.

The two of us dislike wall-to-wall carpeting also. And we both seriously dissed sterile office buildings that are air-conditioned in summer so you freeze during the best weather of the year. We also dislike the fact that neither of us knows more than a handful of people in the U.S. who save any money, most people both of us know are heavily in debt and are slaves to their jobs.

Then there’s the issue of having seen the U.S. from outside. It will not be easy to go back and be surrounded by people who have not traveled and who do not have any idea how the rest of the world sees their country.

Time will tell whether we decide to go back, but for the moment I’m happy here and not terribly excited about moving back to gringolandia.

It IS hurricane season after all. We’ve got a tropical storm developing in the Caribbean which looks like it may be coming in this direction. We will see what happens over the next few days. In the mean time I’m going to make Thai curry…and do the laundry…and paint my condo…and try to get that one site done for that one grumpy client…

I might get into trouble somewhere down the road for saying this but it seems really hypocritical and unethical to me that the U.S. gives Cubans the right to stay in the country legally when they enter the U.S. illegally!

The U.S. has a wet-foot-dry-foot law which effectively means that if a Cuban shows up on land (with dry feet) in the States, he or she can apply for permanent residency and it will be granted. It doesn’t matter if that Cuban enters the U.S. illegally.

But how, praytell, does a Cuban get into the U.S. and onto dry land in the first place?

Well, they sometimes take a life-threatening journey in a rickety piece-of-shit raft, right? We’ve all heard the stories.

And the other common way that Cubans get into the U.S. is to get smuggled through Mexico and into the U.S. over land. Which of course provides business to the many human smuggling rings which operate in Mexico.

I’ve read that the price to smuggle someone from Cuba into the U.S. is $10,000 usd per person, but I’ve heard whispers that there was a recent price increase due to tightening of the U.S border.

Now I’m not going to give an opinion on Castro or his regime or Communism or any of that. But if the U.S. wants to help the Cubans it should ensure safe passage for them.

But instead, through it’s wet-foot-dry-foot policy, the U.S. encourages unsafe passage and illegal human smuggling.

And when a Cuban immigrant is smuggled through Mexico who do you think pays the fee for their passage? That Cuban can’t pay his (or her) own way out of Cuba, if he could afford that he could buy a plane ticket and leave Cuba on his own. So relatives living in the U.S. are the ones who are likely to pay for Cubans to be smuggled through Mexico. Which means that part of the money earned in the U.S., part of the U.S. economy, is supporting these human smugglers. Surely our lawmakers didn’t mean for this to be the case, but that’s what it is.

To me you either help people or you don’t! You either fight illegal immigration or you don’t! You either fight human trafficking or you don’t!

But you don’t dangle the promise of permanent residency regardless of how they get there. You don’t encourage people to risk their lives at sea. And you don’t encourage human smugglers.

Even though Hurricane Dean didn’t hit us it did cause some extra drama which has been a challenge to get over. If I intend to stay in this area long-term I’m going to have to get better at handling the pre-hurricane it-could-hit-us-but-probably-won’t stress thing. As it is now I pretty much become a babbling idiota by the time it’s actually known if the hurricane in question will hit us.

And now, one week after Hurricane Dean didn’t hit us, I’ve got insomnia and am irritable and am constantly fighting headaches. Some of this is just due to it being the first week of school, and I’m not yet used to getting up early. And some of it is due to the fact that I’m behind on all my work due to all those hours of hurricane preparation. But I am recovering one day at a time.

Today some friends and I took some money and goods for donation to a Mexican charity called Caritas that is working in the areas that Hurricane Dean destroyed. Many of those affected by Dean are rural poor practicing something pretty close to subsistence farming. And the hurricane took their homes, and the contents of their homes, and their livestock. And in many cases the hurricane destroyed their crops.

So if I think that I’ve got anything to complain about then I’m full of it!

Here’s the Caritas Web Site – it’s in Spanish.

People have been asking me how best to support the many people and communities that were devastated by Hurricane Dean. My recommendation is to make donations directly to either the Cruz Roja Mexicana (Mexican Red Cross) or to the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Cresent Societies (aka the International Red Cross).

The Cruz Roja Mexicana web site provides information on how to make a donation via a wire transfer (which many people may find too cumbersome to deal with).

The International Red Cross web site allows you to make a donation via credit card, and you can specify that the money be used specifically for Hurricane Dean relief efforts.

• Donate To Cruz Roja Mexicana
• Donate To International Red Cross

For more information on the International Red Cross response to Hurricane Dean please click here.

For more information about the International Red Cross and it’s many national Red Cross chapters click here.

Just a quick note to let everyone know that we are fine, Cancun is fine and all is back to normal around here. Hurricane Dean did next to no damage to Cancun. And to be honest, I’ve seen more rain fall from the sky during an unpredicted “normal” tropical shower than we got from Hurricane Dean. It’s was truly much ado about nothing for us here in Cancun.

While Cancun and the Riviera Maya were largely spared, it appears that those in Mahajual and along the Costa Maya, where Hurricane Dean came ashore, were not so fortunate. I believe that story is still being told. The people I know in the Costa Maya were going home today to assess damage, so we will know more soon.

Several people have asked me about how and where to volunteer their efforts and/or send donations to help the areas stricken by Hurricane Dean. When I nail down an effective, registered charity that is making a positive impact, I will direct you to them.

I also want to thank the numerous well-wishers who’ve stuffed my email inbox with good wishes. I’ve tried to answer each of you individually, but simply don’t have time to reply to everyone.

All I can say is: Thank God this will be over soon! I’m physically and emotionally exhausted. I wanted to blog this morning, but there were a thousand and one things that had to be done before blogging made sense.

Now that Hurricane Dean is set to hit well south of us, our biggest concern is how much rain we will get and how much the street will flood. But the house is ready. We’ve anchored the trees so they don’t blow around much, and we trimmed them so there’s less to catch the wind. We’ve installed the dams against the doors, so any flooding we get doesn’t make it into the house. We’ve put the cars up on concrete blocks so they don’t get water in, if it does flood. We’ve also got the candles out and the flashlights have been found and the batteries have been charged.

In addition to working on hurricane preparations all day I’ve been trying to keep up with the HurricaneCancun.com blog. My pal Steve started it just a few days ago, but yesterday we had more than 14,000 unique visitors, and today’s numbers are much higher (as of 2 pm we’d had over 18,000 unique visitors today). Just keeping up with the vast number of comments the blog is receiving is running all of us ragged.

The Hurricane blog has attracted some attention from the traditional press also, which is great, but also means we’ve each had to stop hurricane preparations to do phone interviews. Today I was interviewed by the BBC live on the radio, and when they called me to start the interview I was literally shoving a concrete block under the front tire of my car. Talk about multi-tasking.

Well, I’ve been thinking all day that I would blog about how much I love living a tropical place, despite hurricanes. But too be honest, right now I’m much too tired to love anything. So I’ll save that for another day.

The rumor is that Cancun is shutting the power to the city off in one hour. So I’ll sign off now and go take that much-needed shower. See you all on the other side.

Hurricane Dean continues it’s track towards landfall on the Yucatan. The latest models show it scooting a bit south of us, but just a slight change in it’s course could bring us full force hurricane winds. So we are preparing the house as if we will be hit full on.

I’ve been spending far too much time writing for the Hurricane Cancun blog, but it’s rewarding because it’s gotten over 11,000 unique visitors just TODAY! Impressive! Steve, the owner of that site, is the local SEO God (that’s Search Engine Optimization for those of you who don’t know)!

Blogging about the hurricane gives me something to do with all this nervous energy. I can’t settle into much of anything with this hurricane bearing down on us. But blogging and preparing the house, I can do those things.

So I’m off now to finish up my backyard preparations. Our garden back there is overgrown, so I’m trimming trees with the hope that if they are smaller they will get less badly damaged in high wind.

Then I’ll re-attack the front garden, which is MORE overgrown than the backyard. The ficus there has already been chopped a lot, but needs more, and the bugambilias there grow several inches a day sometimes so they always need some chopping back.

I’ll also be bringing in all of the terra cotta suns we have hanging outside the house. At last count there were about 10 of them on the walls outside, but I’ll take them down so they don’t become projectiles when the wind hits.

And I’ll need to drag the lawn furniture into the dining room at some point. But I need to be careful not to let out the cats, one of whom is DYING to get out (he’s ready to rip through the window screen to get out, the little shit).

Then I’ll be back to upload my clients’ files to their own servers, and after that I’ll back up this infernal machine.

Plenty to do still, but I’ve been drinking lots of Celestial Seasonings green tea with caffeine in it, so I’m raring to go!

Hurricane Dean is continuing it’s path straight for us here in Cancun. Just what we need, another direct hit from a big-ass hurricane. Well, we will be ready, as ready as you can be.

We’ve still got to put away all of the myriad crap in the yard, primarily the lawn furniture and the potted plants. Then we’ve got to finish the hacking-to-within-an-inch-of-it’s-life of the ficus tree.

But first, before I do anything else, I’m going to get some exercise with my dog. We both need a good run right now.

H-U-R-R-I-C-A-N-E!

I feel very, very confident that we will make it through whatever it is that mother nature is about to throw at us here in Cancun. The house will be fine, we will be fine, the animals will be fine. The cars will probably be fine (as long as the ficus doesn’t fall over on one of them).

But that doesn’t mean I don’t feel tense. I’m finding that I’m very wound up, and I’m having trouble concentrating on anything besides hurricane preparations.

I’ve tried all day to find anything else that would keep my attention, but my computer mouse keeps taking me back to the National Hurricane Center web site. And my brain keeps haunting me with memories of Hurricane Wilma. So all efforts to distract myself have proved fruitless.

I did get 4 loads of laundry done today though. And we’ve got more food in the house than ever before. And lots of batteries have been charged.

And the dreaded ficus has been hacked to within 2 inches of it’s life. We’re waiting until Monday, when we will know more about Hurricane Dean’s path, to decide just how much more to cut it back.