Bacalar has been on our travel list for quite sometime now. Between work travel, syncing our individual schedules and just getting around to actually booking the trip; we finally get around visiting this beautiful place this weekend in November. As we get off the plane, we’re immediately hit by a waft of the Yucatán humidity, soon followed by thick droplets of rain. Strikes me just then that we’re also right in the midst of the hurricane season. A quick lookup on the weather forecast reveals Hurricane Sara would be swinging past us and into the Gulf of Mexico in a bit. I slap myself on my wrist for not doing any research beforehand but also shrug this minor oversight very quickly. How bad could it actually be? Maybe some showers here and there? We walk outside the Chetumal airport for about 500m and take a taxi from the main road to Bacalar. Oscar offers to take us there for 550 pesos. This was about 50 pesos shy of the amount the tour planner had quoted. M immediately accepts and we’re on our way. First impressions of this place immediately remind me of Trivandrum - lush green vistas with coconut trees strewn all around, narrow roads and barely any traffic. There’s construction for Tren Maya happening along the route but it barely impacts our drive. In about 50 minutes we reach the hotel and check-in. ...

Back to the Yucatan for a work trip. Too many variables to factor in and ultimately I decided to head here for just a couple days. Short but super productive. Nothing to beat some good facetime. The new building here is at a much better state than Hermosillo and we should be quite ready for the move next year. Spent about a day at the NCC and head back to the COB to close out a few things there. Wasn’t quite hungry but decided to walk over to a quaint place closeby. Barely anybody at this Puerto-Rican restaurant - Spanglish, but boy am I not glad I walked in? One of the best meals I’ve had here in Merida in a while. Salsa with some piping hot white rice served with some steaming hot platanos glazed with baked beans paste. Simple yet -potent- with flavors and spice. Surprised we did not quite visit this place over the last year. Coming back here for sure! Missed going to the Korean place this time around for the ice-cream. Spanglish more than made up for that though. ...

S celebrated her 6th today. Unicorn themed - of course - and had her first and probably last ever Piñata. But for a mega meltdown initially she did great all through the event. A few weeks ago, we signed up for a Diwali party organized by the Indian Association in Mexico. Primarily on a whim and maybe for the food? The event was last evening and boy, it was a terrible disappointment! It started late as expected. And obnoxiously loud for no reason. Not quite sure if it was the acoustics at the venue or just the MC shouting into the mic. Maybe both? I love some good rock and metal. I love some good loud music. But I guess not all loud is the same. Also, this day and age, who even does a looping slideshow of pictures of people organizing the event? Dinner was supposed to be served by 1900. Servers said they had orders to serve only at 2030. Maybe the organizers wanted the food to be served only after the main event? When we rechecked at 2030, they said it was pushed to 2130. Had enough of it and walked out. People were still on the dance floor and there was a good turn out. I guess this kinda boisterous social mayhem is just not my jam? ...

Thanks to Bill Glover, I was able to rebuild my photo gallery. Similar to how I built this earlier in wordpress, all I’m doing is mimicking an archive page but with just the images. Took me a bit to figure out that the with function breaks the context and I had to dynamically reassign the permalink. With that sorted, this page should auto-update whenever I publish posts. Yay!

Spent most of this morning at the Basilica de Guadalupe. This photo does not do enough justice to how much this old church is actually falling apart.

A running list of things I’m working on for this site. Used lonekorean’s fantastic wordpress-export-to-markdown tool to convert WP xml to markdown learned that the hugo server and hugo build serve different purposes Setup aliases on NUC and Thinkpond to quickly build and publish Fixed permalinks to prevent link rot Fixed RSS feed issues [] Add webmentions to the site. Thanks, Hugo! Tweak CSS to display webmentions properly. Maybe explore this. Maybe explore setting up an interactions content type like Jessica Migrate older posts as deemed fit Build roadmap for Garmin posts migration Build a proper archive page Made some decent progress, thanks to D’Arcy Norman’s, pointers here . Build a proper photo gallery

That didn’t last long. Moved over to Hugo from WriteFreely for a bit more flexibility. This site is going through some major overhaul. Slowly and recklessly.

Being overseas and not having access to firecrackers, this festival is just not what it used to be. I wish I could go back to those days when we would try and wake up before Kitta mama would burst his 1000 wala before the break of dawn. Days when you yearn to wear those new set of clothes - The only time of the year when you get new clothes and not hand-me-downs. Days when you make a TON of sweets and savories to share with family and friends. Days when you would hop into people’s houses uninvited to see what special delicacy they’ve made. Days when every single house is lit up and the smoke of firecrackers permeate everything. Such good memories…. ...

Since 2007, WordPress has been home to most of my digital presence. Sometime last week one of the plugins – Wordfence, I think – took a major dump and nuked my site down. Didn’t quite see that coming but I take that as a sign for me to change things up a bit. I’ve been wanting to test out WriteFreely for a while now and this might be just about the right opportunity. I’m not quite suew how I want to handle the migration. For now though, it’s a brand new shiny slate. ...

Took a couple days off work for a short break. M flagged a quick trip to the Tula ruins. Just about a couple hours from the city, these ruins were a nice quick visit. There was barely anybody out here as opposed to the crowds at the Teotihuacán pyramids. On the way back we did a quick stop in Tepozotlan for brunch. Once back in the city, S wanted to roller blade and we head to Parque Americana for some good wheel time. I’m so glad we got these rollers! I’m definitely getting better at it. ...