So I had just put down the penultimate Lee Child mystery (I'm working my way through them all), when I stretched and looked out the french doors in the bedroom to see San Miguel sunshine! The cold cloud cover that we'd had yesterday had broken up (there were still plenty of clouds, though) and sunshine was streaming in. It wasn't going to be a miserable day after all.
I can hear you now: 'miserable' mentioned in the same paragraph as your personal shangra-la? Well, yes.
You see, homes here don't have central heating. If you're lucky, your home has a fireplace or three outfitted for a set of artificial logs that burn gas. Many homes have at least one fireplace with a gas supply attached. Fireplaces seldom burn wood as it is at a premium here in the central highlands. Most trees were chopped down and burned in the preceding couple hundred years. It's one reason our homes are built of brick and concrete instead of wood-framed stucco. We even have a set of the logs which live in the bodega since moving from our previous fireplace-equipped home.
Our home doesn't have a fireplace (yet - but that's another story), but we do have a portable gas heater that takes the chill off the living area in the early morning. Finally found the adapter we needed to connect the BBQ-sized cylinder to the heater, so we're in business. The fan is a bit noisy, but if we situate the heater just right, it can be minimized.
With concrete homes, we depend upon the sun to warm them up during the day so that they radiate warmth through most of the night; and then the cycle repeats itself with the coming of the sun. This is particularly important when we need to leave a door to the backyard open so the dogs can take advantage of said yard during the night, allowing cool air to envelope the ground floor living areas.
We were just talking a few days ago about the weather having warmed up enough that we could pack the heater away -- glad we hadn't quite gotten around to it! However, with the sunshine now back, things should warm up enough to let us do that. But we'll wait to see if it holds.... At least it hasn't been really rainy while it was cold, as the previous couple of years had really cold January/February weather. And the first year we had only electric heaters, which caused our electricity bills to soar. (We don't use them any more.)
Before this cold snap we had been enjoying sunny weather. Breezy, but not really cool. Even though 'breezy' probably would not have been the word the dogs picked to describe it - were they vocally inclined. It was downright windy. And while I don't mind the sound of the wind whipping around the corners of the house, they get freaked out! Especially when the wind rattles the french doors that are in most rooms. (One reason we don't worry about using unvented gas heaters - with the way windows and doors fit here in Mexico, we don't need to spend a lot of time worrying about that. There's always some air movement.) Poor Miyake starts quivering and it doesn't stop, even when she seeks out our company, up close and personal. And if the wind blows a door shut - watch out, they'll all be sitting on the bed with you.
But it looks like the dire predictions for a low temperature below 30F won't occur - which is good when you don't have central heating!
