The lights of the email account are on, but nobody is home

I have been wanting to get permission to operate my ham radio here in México. I have been here 2 years and have finally gotten things moving the right direction. I have all the paperwork in place that I think I need except the final form that I have to fill out with the FCC equivalent office, COFETEL. One of the extra requirements that I have been working on this week is that I need a local ham to “sponsor” me. They just have to write a letter and say that they are willing to make sure that I operate within the rules.

I wrote an amateur radio operator in an adjoining state to see if he could put me in contact with someone here. I wrote him because he had a nice, current looking, web page dedicated to radio. No reply after 6 days. I finally found the ARRL equivalent in México which is FMRE. They have a listing of members at their site. There were several in my state of Yucatán. I did a QRZ lookup on them and found several in my part of town. I have now written to the Yucatán division of FMRE, the Mérida chapter of FMRE and 3 individual FMRE members. Not a single reply.

If you have an email address posted on the web somewhere, would you do the world a favor and update it? I have no idea if these are out of date email addresses, or if my emails are getting caught by spam filters, or if no one wants to touch a foreigner with a ten foot pole, but they are not answering. I am not even asking for a sponser. I am just trying to get information as to where the COFETEL office is so that I can start the official paperwork. It is necessary to contact someone individually because COFETEL’s website is broken. The main page comes up fine, but if you try and burrow in to actually get any information, their websever is serving up junk.

Beat the Heat Run

I wanted to get up early this morning to get out on the road before it got too warm. I normally run between 77 and 85 (25-29 C) degrees. That just happens to be what the temperature is between 7 and 9 in the morning when I do my runs. Has been that way ever since I started running in January. Today though, I was going to get up early and enjoy the coolness.

Yesterday morning at 6 it was a nice cool 73 F/23 C with 100% humidity. I can’t really change the humidity since it only goes down as the temperature rises during the day. So, I should be able to at least run when the temp is low. Today at 6 the temperature was 79/26 with 100%. Sigh.

I am not one of these “jump out of bed into the running clothes and out the door” kinda people. Though I am a morning person and do not at all mind waking up early, I like to ease into my day. I usually take 30 minutes to an hour each day from the time I roll out of the hammock until I am ready to hit the road. So I was up at 5 chomping at the bits to step outside when the sun was up enough to be safe at 6. The run was great. Mentally I made myself feel cooler because it was earlier, but in reality, I had already looked at the temp and knew it was just as hot as normal.

As they say in México…ni modo. I did just over 4 miles at a 10:52 pace. It would have been a few seconds faster had I not stopped to try and be friendly with a few dogs. Also, Leo and Dick had me laughing quite a bit with The Daily Giz Wiz podcast which slowed me down some.

Intervalos

I read in a running magazine this last week about running intervals. Though I had tried to understand them in the past, I could never get my head around how they worked. Matt over at Dump Runners Club helped me understand how to run them and I gave it a go yesterday at the track. I did not do as many as I would have liked. I only did 6 sets at 200 meters each. I averaged a 51.33 second per interval pace. That will now be my goal to shoot for over the next couple of weeks. I will try to run each interval at exactly that speed.

The reason I did not run as many as I would have liked is because I ran into a friend at the track. It is nice to have finally been in the community long enough to start recognizing people in public. She was walking with a friend, so I fell in with them and chatted for a few minutes. I just did not feel like getting back into the intervals after that. All in all, I ran over 3 miles.

Today, I determined that I must really have something going on with the dogs. They were a bit more active today than normal. But not aggressive like they were Saturday. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that I have not washed my running clothes since my wife went out of town last week.

Dog Perfume

Is there such a thing? If so, I must have been wearing it yesterday. While running I attracted the dogs. We don’t have anything that would pass as leash laws here. It is just you and the wild.

I had a dog run out barking at me yesterday. Usually the ones who bark are behind fences. I think that this dog had gotten out, because I had never seen him before. He actually acted somewhat friendly, but I was not going to let him get close enough to me to share. His bark was enough to keep me running. He was a large white dog. Not sure what kind. Well, his actions set off the whole street. The rest of the dogs on the street became very aggressive in their barking and some even chased me a bit.

After I got away from that street in a whole different section of my run, I was attacked by three other dogs. They were far enough away to not be affected by the actions of the first set of dogs. These three were not large, but they came at me biting. None landed a tooth on me, but not because they did not try. One of them stopped biting at my legs and just concentrated on the New Balance 435s that were kicking him in the jaw. He almost got a piece of my toe!

I have had the street blocked by a pack of 14 dogs before and walked my way through them. They typically are not at all aggressive. But this group yesterday will make me be more cautious next time. Unfortunately, those two roads are right on a couple of my running routes.