John & Susy Pint

This quick and simple way to delete messages with attachments or photos will make sure you stay within Yahoo’s new storage limits...for the rest of your life. By John Pint John Pint attacked by 11,000 email attachments At the end of July, 2025, it began to appear, a scary message from Yahoo telling me I had exceeded my email storage limit and if I didn't reduce it, I would no longer be able to send and receive messages. This would cut off communication with hundreds of people my wife and I had met while “teaching our way around the world” in South Korea, Spain, France, Japan, England and Saudi Arabia A quick search revealed that this little problem had been caused not by me but by Yahoo itself. For years they had been giving a terabyte of storage space to their non-paying customers, but now they announced that, effective August 27, 2025, they would cut this down to 20 gigabytes.  That is a 98% drop in storage space! So, how many gigabytes was I using? I discovered I could see the a...

  Por John Pint                                                                              Versión en inglés Parece que el mundo está siendo asfixiado por el microplástico. Nuestros océanos están llenos de microplástico. Los peces se lo están comiendo. Nuestra ropa lo está desprendiendo. Aquí en México, el omnipresente soplador de hojas levanta enormes nubes de microplástico para que podamos respirarlo. Y un poco de este material se mete dentro de nosotros cada vez que comemos o bebemos de un recipiente de plástico.  ¿No inventaron las bolsas biodegradables, los vasos y los platos de papel, para deshacerse de este problema? Bueno, la verdad ahora ha salido a la luz: el "papel" en esos vasos en realidad está impregnado o recubierto con plástico. De hecho, ni los vasos ni los platos so...

By John Pint It seems the world is being smothered by microplastic. Our oceans are full of it. The fish are eating it. Our clothes are shedding it. Here in Mexico the ubiquitous leafblower raises huge clouds of it for us to breathe. And a little bit of it gets inside us whenever we eat or drink anything from a plastic container. Didn't they invent biodegradable bags—and paper cups—and paper plates—to get rid of this problem? Well, the truth is now out: the “paper” in those cups is actually impregnated or coated with plastic. In fact, neither the cups nor the plates are recyclable, and when they finally break down, what you get is microplastic. Not so biodegradable Most “biodegradable” bags may need over 500 years to biodegrade. Likewise those “biodegradable” bags.  A 2017 study shows that, over a year, there was no degradation seen in so-called biodegradable bags submerged in seawater at 25°C. When they’re deposited in a landfill, a US National Library of Medicine report (2021) say...

Photos by John Pint Mexico has five big ecosystems and they just happen to converge inside what I call the “ Magic Circle ”  around Guadalajara, an area that many people refer to as Western Mexico. I live in a mile-high oak and pine forest just outside Guadalajara, which puts me in the Temperate Forest Ecosystem. The many foreigners living around Lake Chapala reside in the Arid and Semi-arid Scrubland Ecosystem with flora, fauna, and weather conditions quite different from mine. Communities located northeast of Guadalajara reside in the Grasslands, consisting of mostly flat prairie land while people located along the Pacific Coast are in two other very different, Tropical Ecosystems. This means the inhabitants of Guadalajara can reach any one of Mexico’s ecosystems after only a few hours of driving. It also means that people interested in moving to Western Mexico can literally pick the climate of their choice to live in. Here I will focus on just one of these ecosystems: the Temper...

May is the hottest month of the year both in Mexico City and Guadalajara, until the heat wave comes to an abrupt halt in June with the onset of the rainy season and pleasantly cool weather throughout the summer. May is doubly rough on hikers because it’s not only the hottest month, but also the driest. Hills turn brown and la maleza (the underbrush) shrivels up. On top of that, many oak trees actually drop their leaves throughout April, leaving much of Mexico tinder-box dry in the month of May, with shade at a premium, if it can be found at all. Therefore, in May, hikers typically rise at dawn, hoping to beat the heat. In case they're not successful, many escape the worst consequences of dehydration thanks to what is popularly called suero in this country. Suero translates to “oral rehydration solution (ORS)” similar to what is found in an IV drip: an isotonic liquid that matches the salinity and electrolyte content of blood. These days, fortunately, you can find an ORS at every c...