This week was two months to the day from when I’ll be leaving Mexico and heading back to the Midwest.

I haven’t started packing yet, but I have started making a list of all the things I want to do, or do again, in my remaining time here. I think of it as my own Mexican bucket list.

Unfortunately, instead of crossing things off the list and heading back to Tonala to buy those hand-blown glasses or to Centro Historico for some museum time, I find myself caught up in the math of moving.

Not, “How many boxes?” or “How many more weekends?”

No, the math of moving is infinitely more advanced. 

For instance, if you have two kids and two cases of macaroni and cheese still in the pantry, how many lunches do you need to eat nothing but mac and cheese?

Or, if you have two jars of loose pesos in the house that won’t do you a bit of good in the Midwest, how many times a day do you need to get your windshield washed? 

It wouldn’t be so bad if each problem didn’t seem to lead to another. 

As an example, if you’re eating mac and cheese each day for lunch, how many extra meals a day do you need to eat to get to all those taquerias that you’ve been meaning to stop at? And how will that correlate into pounds?

Or, if you use up all of your loose pesos on windshield washings, how are you ever going to get out of the Walmart parking lot? 

It’s all a little mind boggling. The mathematics of moving has my head spinning faster than the heads of all those parents trying to understand the new math. 

Because some questions are simply unanswerable.

How many churros can one person eat in two months time, for instance. 

You’ll have to stay tuned for that one. 

I’ve only come up with one question about the math of moving that seems to have an easy answer. 

If you have two and a half bottles of tequila in your china cabinet, is that going to be enough?

Probably not.