We suffered from major power trouble here at the office since late last week, and we were mostly offline as we could not plug the server in as the voltage was way too high blowing al the UPS in the office. After 3 trips from the electrician to fix the worse of the problems including the main electrical entrance wires not being screwed in at all, and no ground connection in the entire place we finally had a bit more reliable power. The voltage is still too high, but we will not hold our breaths waiting for the city to fix the problem.

We decided to fix the problem by purchasing a bunch of big voltage regulator and a bunch of new UPSs. I reinstalled everything yesterday and brought back the server online and will return to regular postings shortly.

Lucito

I have just completed a redesign of my personal blog ‘The Sassquatch’s Lair’. Please have a look and let me know what you think of the new digs. Later this weekend I will start serializing some science fiction and fantasy stories I wrote ages ago, so if you are interested in that type of writing go peek at the Lair.

Lucito

I am a bit sad today, as all the efforts to prepare the picnic for Normita’s birthday were for nothing. First, we could not find a decent place to have it, as there are not too many real picnic areas around town where you can actually cook food, and the ones I had found are supposedly not too safe and somewhat full of garbage. Some people told us about many potentially nice places, but we did not find anybody that went there in the last 4-5 years, so it is difficult to know if they are still nice or not.

Normita found a natural preserve in the woods south of the city, and she called them, but you need to get there early in the morning to reserve a place for your picnic and they charge from $20 to $100 for a covered picnic spot. Before paying to go on a picnic I want to see the place, and I did not want to arrive early on Saturday morning with all the food, without being sure if we will have a place or not. We will investigate and see if there is a way of reserving ahead of time, and maybe do it there on another occasion. There is always the ‘trajineras’ in Xochimilco, but this also gets expensive to rent, and we went there last weekend. Maybe we can find some nice area out of the city one of these days, or simply do a cold picnic on a blanket somewhere in a park like we used to do.

The second reason we are not going is that this week was my mother in law’s birthday, and at the last minute the family decided to go out to a restaurant to celebrate her on Sunday. We had planned to relax on that day, as I am completely exhausted from work, and since the day was gone, and I still need the rest, we decided to postpone the picnic so that we can have a day off, and also time to investigate where to have it.

Instead I will probably prepare a nice meal for Normita on Thursday after work, and that will be a total surprise on what I will prepare.

Lucito

We spent most of the afternoon running around and taking care of some loose ends that we urgently needed to take care of, and when we returned home we did the same here before settling down a bit. Once that was done I finally found some time to install a copy of the new version of WordPress on the server and configure it for the new blog. The URL is at http://www.sassquatch.org/ and the site is live as of about 15 minutes ago. I will start posting there later in the week and also make it a little bit more stylish when I have a few minutes to program a theme for it. Enjoy this new blog, and I will make sure to keep posting here the recipes and related content that you are used to.

Lucito

Today I started on something that was long overdue. I moved the various recipes posted in the blog to some generic high level categories as I was somewhat losing track of if I posted this or that recipe in the past. This is only a start to facilitate navigations, and I will probably refine the sub-categories in the future, and also add another level or two in the hierarchy.

The basic WordPress software can display the hierarchy of the categories pretty well, but things get a bit cluttered when you start to have too many nested categories. I will look around to see if the newer version of WordPress is better at handling this out of the box, and if is I might decide to upgrade the version I am running for the blog. This will have to wait though as I do not want to take a chance in ruining the blog, so I will need to setup an internal test site first and I will not have time to do that until some urgent work around the office is done. I will also look around to see if there is some plugin available that makes navigating the categories smoother, and if not it might be worth writing one in my spare time.

In the meantime if you have any suggestions in organizing the categories, and if you know a good plugin that might help and making the navigation of them smoother don’t hesitate to let me know in the comments or directly at suggestion@igourmand.com

Lucito

You might have noticed that posting has been light lately, so I wanted to briefly chime in and check around the place before resuming regular topical postings tomorrow. The last few weeks have been incredibly busy ones around here from both work and entertainment. Last Friday was the wedding of Marcelita, Normita’s younger sister, and it was followed by the official party the following day. The party was tame by local standards, and only lasted from 1pm to 9pm.

The food was great and consisted mainly of Mexican dishes. After the party we returned home with Alejandra, Marcelita’s oldest daughter at 9 years old. She stayed with us until last night to give her parents a bit of a rest and a mini-honeymoon. I think that they plan to go to Veracruz with the kids and the inlaws next week, so I guess that the real honeymoon will be for another time.

When I noticed that the blog had been stagnant for most of the week, I put on my task list for the day to do a regular post, but time really flies and this is the first minute I have all day to write something for the blog.  The day turned out to be an organizational nightmare as I was planning to spend most of it programming, and I ended up spending it exchanging business emails and telephones. I will have to catch up on the programming until late tonight to keep up with the schedule, so I decided to only post a short note.

Tomorrow should be a tad lighter, as we are getting close to Easter and the city is already feeling empty as the kids are out school for 2 weeks and a lot of people are on holidays this week and next. There was almost no traffic when I dropped Normita at the Metro this morning. This should even get lighter there as the week progresses. I just wish that it would be like that all the time.

Lucito

Some of you must be wondering why posting has been light and the promised site updates still are not up. The story is a long one, but I will keep it short. If you have been a regular reader since the start, you remember that when we launched the site it was down most of the time due to the fact that when we moved to the new condo we had frequent power failures that were keeping the server silent for days at a time. After a month or two the situation stabilized and we managed a long uninterrupted period of power. About 3 weeks ago the regular blackouts started again and we have been experiencing blackouts almost daily. On Friday we had a long conversation with the utility company, and the jest of it is that there is a huge amount of new construction in our neighborhood, and the construction companies overload the grid by illegally connecting to it and thus bring it down on a regular basis. They are doing their best to prevent this and to fine the people, but it is difficult to prove and they do the same thing again the next day. Hopefully things will improve in the coming weeks. We also plan to upgrade out server as it is starting to show the wear of all of those power peaks followed by abrupt failures. We are also looking getting a huge UPS for it and the router so that we can keep running while the power is down. We are also looking at the possibility of purchasing a cheap generator so we have stable power.

Another thing that kept us from publishing was that some unexpected urgent work showed up, and the delivery was made difficult due to the lack of power. At least we finally delivered and we will be able to resume regular postings by tomorrow and also we will be able to finish the site upgrades we were promising last week. Until then have fun in the kitchen.

Lucito

For those of you who tried to access the blog for most of today and could not, the reason was that a large chunk of Mexico City was without power, including our neighborhood. This meant that our office’s server was down, taking down the blog with it and that I lost a full day of work. Now I’ll have to work most of the night to meet pressing deadlines. I did not even have time to have lunch yet so I’ll take a short run to the kitchen and make something quick before getting back to work.

Lucito

We are starting a new month and it seems that yesterday we were preparing for the end of the year and now we are already in March. Here in Mexico City the trees are already starting to bloom and soon the hot season will be upon us. Our real summer weather is normally from late March to the end of May as after that the rain season starts. In honor of the upcoming summer here are some pictures we took a few years back at the ‘Mercado de Jamaica’ a large world-renowned flower and fruit market just south of the historic center of the city, near where we used to live. It is a wonderful place to visit if you come to town as it had a huge variety of flowers for sale as well as a wide choice of fruits and vegetables. During the holiday seasons it gets very crowded as the entire city passed there to get seasonal offerings. It is a colorful mixture that is typically Mexican.

Lucito

As you might have noticed, our Padrino, Kurtito has finally posted his first entry to the blog. He wrote a wonderful review of a beer tasting event that he recently attended in Vienna. He promised me more posts in the coming weeks and we want to extend to him the warmest of welcomes as a semi-regular contributor to the blog. If you want to see more of his writing in his native German please go visit his wonderful website on Viennese lifestyle at Life-Style.at

I’ll be back to regular posting in the coming days. Things have been very hectic here in the past week with too much work and too little rest. I have a nice recipe in store for you coming up in the next few days that I invented in honor of the Chinese New Year last Sunday. More on that and other things later.

Lucito