Ansel Adams:
You don’t take a photograph, you make it.
📷 Early (#mbmar Micro Blog March photo challenge prompt suggested by @krisfredrick) also shared on Pexels.
Everyone move along, there’s nothing to see here.
The “crack” on Josh’s iPhone screen that has occupied his sad mind for the last two hours was actually the smallest dried strand of egg yolk draped across his screen, hard enough and thin enough to seem like a crack to the untrained mind.
If only you could’ve seen the look on my face as I scratched off the scratch like a miracle healer.
A bunch of smart people say we need to learn “‘critical ignoring’ – the ability to choose what to ignore and where to invest our limited attentional capacities.”
📷 Road (#mbmar Micro Blog March photo challenge prompt suggested by @Dejus)
There’s a saying in Baja that “bad roads bring good people and good roads bring bad people”.
So we keep the ungraded and bumpy dirt roads as an instrument of faith in the neighbours we want.
Alexander Haymen:
“Home is where people notice when you’re not there.”
📷 Horizon (#mbmar Micro Blog March photo challenge prompt suggested by @crossingthethreshold)
📷 Connection (#mbmar Micro Blog March photo challenge prompt suggested by @agilelisa)
The moment I connected with my minutes-old first child and daughter.
📷 Shiny (#mbmar Micro Blog March photo challenge prompt suggested by @odd)
The second percolator I’ve owned in Mexico. I forgot the first one was on the stove, on heat. Melted all the plastic components.
📷 Gimcrack (#mbmar Micro Blog March photo challenge prompt suggested by @jafish).
My local tyre shop here in Baja California Sur has real gimcrack vibes.
Friday afternoon in Pescadero, Baja California Sur
July: great at selling luggage, not great at supporting it
Update: July have made good on this error and sent me a replacement bag to where I was in the USA. Thanks for going the extra-mile guys.
I feel so heartbroken when I didn’t keep my word. I struggle as a parent when I make a promise - or a threat - to my girls because I want to make sure I can follow through on my word. When I fail to keep my word in friendships, family, or business, it pains me. It’s why I pore over our website copy and contracts to make sure we can and will do what we promise to do.
So I guess that’s why I’m feeling really disappointed in one of my favourite brands: July.
Flying from San Jose del Cabo to Brisbane through Los Angeles in November last year a wheel came off my Checked Plus July luggage somewhere between Alaska Airlines’ check-in at Cabo and the luggage carousel in LAX. I’m no fool, I’m sure one of the gentle giants working in luggage handling delicately placed the bag where it needed to be and the faulty wheel just fell off.
I had travel insurance on the trip, and no doubt Alaska Airlines might have covered it - but I know from experience that airlines are painful about damaged luggage.
So I had one week to make the claim with Alaska Airlines, but I thought travel insurance was the sure bet, but I know they’d ask me if I’d contacted the airline for coverage or the manufacturer for warranty, so I contacted July as I arrived on Australian soil on November 21 - intent to get a quick no from them so I can make an insurance claim, buy a new bag, and be ready to go by the time I leave Australia on December 21. We have one month to solve a hopefully easy problem.
July’s ‘Happiness Team’ replies - and by the way, unless you’re actually going to make people happy, just be a customer service or customer disservice team:
“We would be happy to have replacement wheels sent out for you.”
This I was not expecting!
So I give all the details as required and requested, put to bed any thoughts of wrestling with Alsaka’s premiere airline, and even worse, my travel insurance, and await the wheel.
It shipped from July one month later, as I was boarding my flight to Nashville via Sydney and Dallas. I explicitly communicated that I was in the country for a month and it took a month to send the wheel.
Another wheel was then allegedly shipped to my Mexican address but it’s been three months and all I am left with now is a series of thoughts and no wheels.
- going to “the media” aka social media or the news never works, until it does
- I really like the July suitcases and kind of enjoy having a matching set of five despite one limping
- we’re in Baja California Sur for another month until we go to Nashville and Hawaii then Europe before coming home in August, what am I going to do about this three-wheeled bag.
- I’d really just like another big July bag but do I want to continue to do business with a company that can’t simply keep its word?
- I wish they’d just said no back in November and I would have bought a new bag and they would have never experienced the pain of letting me down.
- Can I even get a July bag in, or to, Mexico before April 8?
You’re a Miracle by Mike McHargue is a book that zings around the inside of my brain all day every day:
You are a miracle because 86 billion neurons in your brain form into thousands of structures and networks, built from a map created over billions of years to understand the world you live in. But sometimes, you are a pain in your ass because all these networks are running a playbook that’s been around a lot longer than you have. The cells in your body have survived through the eons by eating every delicious calorie they come across, allowing fear to make them run, and using anger to make them fight for their lives.
March 10, 1976, the first and last time “Articulate speech was transmitted intelligibly” over a telephone. For the 147 years since inarticulate speech transmitted poorly has been the theme.
📷 Ritual (#mbmar Micro Blog March photo challenge prompt suggested by @drewbelf)
Our morning coffee. While we’re in El Pescadero, it’s from La Comuna Espresso Bar at Mini Super Munchies.
Keith Richards:
To me, the main thing about living on this planet is to know who the hell you are and be real about it. That’s the reason I’m still alive.
📷 Together (#mbmar Micro Blog March photo challenge prompt suggested by @sherif)
Our little nomadic family, our most recent photo all together in Australia, in October last year.
Rancho Gaspareño
Bryan Jáuregui quotes Greg Schredder regarding Rancho Gaspareño, Baja California Sur, just south of Todos Santos, emphasis and photos mine:
Rancho Gaspareño was named after a Spanish galleon that went aground on the point, the Gaspareño. It was one of the so-called Manila galleons, Spanish ships that sailed between the Philippines and Acapulco for 250 years, bringing spices, silks and other luxuries from the far east to New Spain. All these galleons sailed the Pacific coast of Baja on their way to Acapulco, so naturally enough the area became riddled with pirates, many of them English and Dutch.
There are many tales of buried pirate treasure in the area, and local school groups still come to explore the cave at Rancho Gaspareño each year to tap into the lore. Treasure hunters have reason for optimism; in 1974 when the road from La Paz to the ferry terminal at Pichilingue was being built, a pirate chest of plundered loot was discovered by road workers.
I think of this part of the Baja coastline as the forgotten area. People drive past Rancho Gaspareño going a hundred miles an hour on the new 4-lane highway and have no idea of the history of the area.
The Guaycura and Pericue Indians were the original inhabitants before the Jesuit’s arrival in 1697, and they were essentially wiped out by the time the Jesuits left in 1768. The Jesuits built their theocracy based on a promise to the King of Spain to get rid of the pirates who were plundering his ships, and the pirates faded away with the demise of the Manila galleons in 1815. Dominican Padre Gabriel González had a ranch near Gaspareño from 1825 to 1850, and the tobacco, rum, sugar, corn, and livestock he produced there made him the richest man in Baja California. From his ranch the padre engaged in espionage and guerilla warfare during the Mexican-American war of 1846-1848, and – thanks in part to the Padre – Mexico won a major victory near Gaspareño (but lost the war). By 1855 the Padre had lost his political backing and left Baja for good. For the next one hundred years entrepreneurs made fortunes in the sugar cane industry with fields in areas like Gaspareño, but in the 1950s a severe drought and price drop lead to the demise of the industry; the last sugar processing plant closed in 1974. In that same year the trans peninsular highway made its way to Todos Santos, bringing new life to the town, and in 1985 renowned artist Charles Stewart arrived from Taos, planting the seed for Todos Santos’ current incarnation as an artists’ colony. It remains an agricultural center and surfing hotspot, only now it is firmly on the radar of major developers.
Now we all just speed past at 120km/hr on the four-lane highway and wonder how much the owner wants for it (shhh, $12M).
Charlie Warzel in The Atlantic writes on the vindication of Ask Jeeves:
Many years later, it seems I owe Jeeves an apology: He had the right idea all along.
For all the hype, when I stare at these new chatbots, I can’t help but see the faint reflection of my former besuited internet manservant. In a sense, Bing and Bard are finishing what Ask Jeeves started.