lila lately

There have been requests for pictures of the dog.

Either Lila's trying to tell us something or druids came during the night and aligned her tennis balls to celebrate the Solstice.

"You want it? You want my bone? Huh? Huh? Go ahead, try to take it. I know you want it. You want it? Huh?"

something made neurotic

My creative writing class convened for the first time last night.

First of all, I find it interesting (and it also kind of weirds me out) that there are three archaeologists in the class. It turns out archaeologists are everywhere, walking around on the streets just like normal folks. Turn around, you trip over us. So please look where you're going. We also bleed - just like you.

Secondly, and more to the point, we did a brief exercise that produced illuminating, if not necessarily shocking, results. The idea is to arm ourselves against writer's block (as if this is possible! Ha ha, Crazy Teacher!). With this in mind, we wrote "I would write except..." and proceeded to fill up the rest of the page with our reasons. Or, rather, our excuses, which of course have a lot to do with our fears.

At the top of my list? "I have nothing interesting to say."

Now, I've known that I feel this way for a long time. But writing it down brought it to the front of my brain where it's now sitting in my nasal cavity hissing at me in an annoying manner.

I have nothing interesting to say? Is that really true? Can that possibly be true for anyone? And how sad, if it's so!

How can it be, I am now wondering, that I believe I have nothing interesting to say when I talk so much and have so many goshdarn opinions (just ask me!) about things ranging from curtain color (goldish-olive) to Intelligent Design (or whatever) to canned soups (no).

Surely I have as many interesting things to say as everyone else. The real question may very well be - at least I hope it is - "Why am I not writing about interesting things?" We never established who has to find them interesting, after all, so it can't be that hard, can it? Look at all the people who wax eloquently about needlepoint or rabbit care or the color of their child's IQ. Or the merits of bikini waxing. Speaking of waxing.

What care do I have for how smart you all think your rabbits are?! Yet you continue to write about it! Because you find it interesting - and there are other rabbit-loving bikini-waxers who also find it interesting and have follow-up opinions about it.

But, frankly, it thrills me to see how much you enjoy it. Although it also makes me envious. Because look at you! You never run out of things to say or people who will listen to you! People love you, you crazy waxing rabbit people! Unlike me - unwaxed, childless freak that I am who never even had a rabbit.

So I am now initiating a quest to find out what interesting things I am thinking that I am not writing about.

Let's see. The other night, I walked across the street to feed a friend's cats. In the dark. No streetlights. Spooky. That one scary neighbor and everything. AND...

precisely nothing happened.

So. Well, my daily life is apparently not it.

I could talk about politics, I guess. I could try. Maybe I have some interesting opinions about...oh, who am I kidding. The only things politics ever did for me were get me out of jury duty and make me wish I could function more rationally when I'm pissed off. I hate talking about politics. I am abysmally illiterate at politics.

I'd rather discuss food. So maybe I could focus on everything culinary. Do you want to hear about food? Because I just made a kick-ass box macaroni and cheese meal with frozen peas! ...Right, yeah, it's bumming me out too. I wanted chicken marsala and risotto, but it turned out I was too lazy to thaw the chicken. Or buy the marsala. Or find the frying pan.

Maybe if I had a child I could write child-related things that are interesting. I could - Hey, you're supposed to be in bed. Go back to bed.

I could write about - No, come on. Seriously. Go back to bed...Water? Okay, hang on...Alright, now go back to bed.

I think if I had a child, I could discuss - Dear God! How many of you are there?!? Nevermind, just get back in that bedroom. Now!

That is, I would like to analyze the merits of - Oh no F---in' way. No. F---in'. Way. You are not asking for stories. And who is that? Your sister? I don't think so. If you do not go back to bed - every last one of you - right now, I am totally selling you to Gypsies.

I'm picking up the phone...

Maybe kids wouldn't work either.

I guess this will be an ongoing discussion between me and that thing sitting behind my nose. If there's anything interesting out there waiting for me to write about it, we'll find it. And if we don't find it...well, there are plenty of needlepointing rabbit owners with opinions about bikini waxing out there. I'm sure you'll find something interesting to read.

breakfast on a rainy sunday

Raphael: Do we have cream cheese?

Jenny: Yes.

Raphael: YEYAHYES! Bagels! I love bagels! I love bagels with cream cheese as much as I love Seinfeld! Let me just go ahead here and put a bagel into the toaster and push down on this lever here like this…

(Lights go out.)

Raphael: Crap.

Jenny: Wait a minute, what just happened?

Raphael: Did you turn the space heater on?

Jenny: No. Is the coffee still brewing?

Raphael: No.

Jenny: Are you microwaving something?

Raphael: No. But the fridge just came on…

Jenny: So, wait a minute. Now we can’t make toast when the fridge comes on? I don’t understand. When can we make toast?

Raphael: What we need to make is a viable electrical system.

(Raphael goes outside to reset the breaker. When he returns...)

Jenny: Mmm, this bacon I'm frying is getting all nice and crunchy and shrivelly, just the way I like it. It will be perfect for my bacon, bagel, egg, tomato, and cheese sandwich. I really, really like bacon.

Raphael: I bet I know someone else who would really like some bacon.

Jenny: Uh, I’m pretty sure the dog should not get bacon.

Lila: The doctor told me to eat bacon.

Jenny: No he didn’t.

Lila: I’m pretty sure.

Jenny: I don’t know. I feel like I would remember that.

Raphael: Yeah, you’re right. It’s not a good idea.

Lila: I’m feeling marginalized.

smarter, more awesomer brain = higher sleep deficit

Graphic designer, I am not, but - yay! A new blog banner! Finally some real evidence that I am not a monkey with a keyboard!

Now, if I could only figure out how to get to bed at a decent hour and where exactly I'm supposed to hide this bunch of bananas while I sleep...

what we'll do

In a few years we will sell our house and make one hundred thousand dollars. Then we will leave.

We will hike the stark mountains of India and Kashmir, drink pungent yak butter tea with slow-walking nomads, and hang red and blue prayer flags from the stones in Nepal. We will rest in monastaries and stretch in courtyards tumbled with sunlight in the mornings. We will learn to chant.

We will sit on the cold beaches of Oregon and Washington and drink a hundred cups of coffee, tossing the dregs into the waves where slick-skinned sea lions will read our fortunes. Our dog will dig holes between the rocks that will fill up with salt water and reflections of the white moon and collect starfish and seaweed and heavy fog under the starlight. We will hang our wool sweaters to dry over fires at night and stand with our backs against enormous trees in the wide afternoons to make ourselves dizzy with space.

We will speak every night over candles and wine, giant words that bloom from our mouths, and grow tendrils from our throats that bind our bodies together so tightly that we must use the same footprints. We will clasp hands and run from tsunamis and embrace monsoons and whirl up into colored cyclones.

We will clamber over a ruined villa in Italy, turning over the stones with cold hands and sifting through the detritis. We will excavate into the loamy burial places of thousands with our fingers and press the bones back into the soft ground when we leave. We will climb through cornfields, the rustling of the stalks in our bones, and lie down on the backs of volcanoes in the hot silence and insect-buzz of the fields. We will use a knife to scoop out the flesh of pineapples in Peru and chew sugarcane in Brazil. We will burn our throats on cachaca and pisco. We will sip mate in a dark hostel in Argentina and bring music and white t-shirts to jailed men in Ecuador. At a bus station in Guatemala we will slice through a hard wheel of white cheese that we carry around in our packs. We will collect handfuls of ripe red coffee berries and pictures of saints to carry with us.

In Africa we will dine on blankets of sand and smoke apricot-flavored tobacco with toothless men. We will climb into half-buried pyramids and curl up in their warm dark wombs and let time wash over us. We will sort through gold leaf and strange masks on the way out, spilling pendants and lances through our fingers back into the darkness. We will touch the face of the queen as we pass, light touches like the breath of a bird's wing. She'll know it was us.

We will ride in tuk-tuks and taxies and make footprints in the dust of elephants. We will sleep on buses and cling to the backs of horses and camels and swing precariously on narrow bridges that cross gorges. We will have rides on sleds with ice-rimmed runners and lie on our stomachs to peer over the edges of carpets that skim the treetops. We will take gondolas and tiny planes and spend long nights on trains. We will find birds to fly us across the borders. We will drop our passports into ravines.

I will photograph so many things that my photographs with sprout wings and fly into the forests and become the leaves of the trees fluttering under the clouds. I will think so many thoughts that they will slip out of my skin when I move. I will collect them in the bowls of eleven thousand sheets of white paper cupped in my hands, and I will loose the paper to the wind.

warm feet...but not too warm

Every day now I crawl out of bed, pull on a thermal shirt, another thermal shirt, a blue wool sweater, a sweatshirt, two pairs of socks, and my favorite mucklucks. I then gingerly open the bedroom door...and promptly freeze my patootie clean off.

That's right. Every morning, my keister falls to the floor and rolls under the couch where Lila barks at it ("Look! A! Butt! Un! Der! The! Couch! Look! Look! LOOK!") until I retrieve it and dust it off and re-attach it with a good hot shower.

You think I exaggerate, but that's exactly how I lost my left toe the other day too.

Now this may sound like the lead-in to a massive complaint fiesta about how cold it is (for a welcome change, probably) but it's not. The truth is, I don't mind losing body parts to the extreme arctic conditions of our kitchen during the winter because, even though everyone agrees six summers has earned me the right to call myself a Tucsonan, I still much prefer extreme cold to extreme heat.

"Then why the crap am I still reading about how you live in southern Arizona?" you ask.

Yes. Well.

First of all, how would your mother like it if she knew you talked that way?

And secondly, there's the matter of the Guatemalan. Now, Guatemalans as a group seem to be highly adaptable and entrepreneurial folks. Someday I will finish my "Field Guide to Guatemalans" which hopefully will facilitate a clearer understanding of the hardy Guatemelan spirit. For the moment, know that my personal Guatemalan is perhaps even hardier than most of his kind, and that you should be pretty impressed by that. His muscley Guatamala-ness is truly inspiring.

The Guatemalan has an enviable ability to deal with extreme conditions. He loves the heat. As far as I can tell, the hotter the better. I have never seen him freak out when it hits 103 degrees again and it's humid and the power goes out not that it matters because the swamp cooler doesn't work in July anyway...! Not once. He loves to sweat. He loves to suffer. It makes him feel clean or alive or well-oxygenated or something.

He also loves to be cold. For fun, he once backpacked through the Himalayas for weeks. He remembers that it was pretty cold. "Optimal temperature" is probably a way to swear for him, for all I know. Engaging in activities that leave me unable to blink - such as leaping naked into icy mountain streams merely cause him to dance about and shout "WHOOO!" with a giant slap-happy grin. I have never seen him lose his patootie to the cold. Although I may have missed it while I looked for my own.

So why am I still in southern Arizona? Obviously I have fallen in with the wrong crowd. A crowd named Raphael who cares not for conditions of climate. Drought? Pshaw. Floods? Minor, although extremely wet, obstacles. Nine hours of low desert survey in the middle of August with nothing but a Nalgene bottle and a hole-y bandana? Bring it on!

Well, last year the Guatemalan, as you may know, decided to take all that fortitude and stamina and use it to become an architect. So being as how nothing about the Arizona climate affects him adversely and also because we're pretty settled here with the casita and the baby trees and everything, it made sense for him to apply to school here in Tucson. (My main criteria would've no doubt been does it snow there? I'll apply there if it snows there. If I was committing to five more years of school, we'd have moved to Boston last summer.) And of course he got in. UA admissions process and the prospect of decades spent paying back massive student loans? No biggie!

So to be honest, in one way, I'm still here because I have to be here. I may not like the heat, but I really like the Guatemalan. In another way, I'm still here because I want to be here. Because I really like Tucson too. If I can't enjoy the summers quite the way Raphael can, I can at least revel in the amazing winters: sunny days in the fifties and sixties waning into chilly evenings perfect for backyard bonfires followed by long, freezing nights that encourage long sleepy hours under heavy warm covers.

I'm going to be spending the next five summers of my life here, but I figure as long as I get five good months of cold weather a year and my mucklucks make it through okay, I can handle it. I am a Tucsonan, after all.

decisions decisions

Who says I'm too old to make good decisions? Today I made several decisions that I'm reasonably happy with.

Decision #1: Inspired by my last post, and after some clever manipulation of my schedule (time management skills! You haven't forsaken me!), I have decided to take a Spanish class during my lunch hour this coming semester. Yay! Uh. I mean, Dios Mio! Esto es excellente! I think.

Decision #2: I got a library card. I haven't set foot in a public library since early in 2001. I thought it might burn when I crossed the threshhold, but it did not.

Decision #3: Lila got a new Kong a few weeks ago - much bigger and theoretically more structurally sound than the apparently uber-puny one she had. And ate. So, five minutes ago, I decided to give Lila her giant new Kong loaded up good with peanut butter. It's the best decision I've made all day long. Better than the library card.

and

Decision #4: I thought I'd give living healthy a shot. Not only did I decide to go on brisk two-mile run with Lila with plenty of the appropriate pre-run exercises, but I've also decided to incorporate more leafy greens and antioxidant-rich...HA HA HA HA HA! HA HA - pre-run exercises...heh heh heh - leafy greens...ha ha ha!

Ha ha.

(snort)

paralyzed

I now have a full hour for lunch, and sometimes around 11:45 am, I think ambitiously to myself, why, now I have a full hour for lunch during which I will do one of the following in order to increase my value as a human being:

a. learn Spanish
b. read up-to-the-minute articles about archaeology
c. fit in some much-needed exercise

But, so far none of these accomplishments have inserted themselves into my personal time management strategy. So far I have spent my hour-long lunches - which were forced upon me beginning last Wednesday - doing one or several of the following:

1. staring at the calendar trying to make it be Friday
2. staring at a picture of an owl
3. thinking about what to have for dinner
4. thinking of things to Google
5. Googling things
6. paying bills
and
7. occasionally blogging about it.

the guate letters: part III

Photos are up in no less than six different albums:

Guatemala favorites: my favorites

Guatemala: mostly family photos - not for the faint-of-heart

Guatemala City: City shots

Antigua: From our two days in the Spanish Colonial town of Antigua

Christmas: Christmas prep, Christmas Eve, and Christmas Day

New Years: New Years Eve and New Years Day

Or just go here to choose from all six.


Dear Antigua,

You have so much going for you, Antigua. Traffic congestion is somehow easier to bear on cobblestone streets lined with fruit-candy-colored houses and while trying to avoid quaint horsedrawn carriages clopping steadily along bearing tourist families or fluffy young girls having photos taken to celebrate their quinceaneras.

Your lovely central park glowed with thousands of white Christmas lights while we were there, and at night it was not difficult to smuggle a bottle of Merlot onto a park bench beside a dark path. Although "smuggle" is probably the wrong word, as no one seemed to care. Even the guy across from us was consuming a beer and nodded to us in a friendly manner when we popped out the cork. Mainly we just carried it out there and sat there drinking it, living as close to the edge as we dared.

Your hotel population seems to be comprised of gorgeous old Colonial haciendas or equally charming sorts of structures, and ours was no exception with purple and red and yellow flowers dripping over the balconies into the central courtyards (two of them!) and red tiled floors and ceilings reaching at least 12 feet, if not higher. We had arguments, but in the end we decided we would never be tall enough to reach the beams in order to measure them anyway and went to take a nap in the hammocks outside of our room instead.

Antigua, you are also conveniently the location of the bright yellow Colonial-style home of Raphael's Tia (aunt) Aurora, who had just finished cooking a batch of tamales in a large black pot lined with dark green plantain leaves set over coals on the ground off her back patio when we arrived for a visit. Beyond the pot, the yard swells into lush, green overgrown vegation sprinkled liberally with flowers and leaves and berries of all other colors. Bougainvillea, of course, and purple and orange bird-of-paradise; bright red and yellow hanging combs of heliconia; thin-leafed, wild poinsettia; coffee plants weighed down with green and red berries; fiery orange roses.

Tia Aurora's house is gorgeous, with red and yellow tiles on the patio, a green kitchen, and, most impressively, a dining room at the far end of the patio with only three walls!

When you have a house in Antigua, Guatemala, you simply don't need a fourth wall.

Love, J


Dear Guatemala City,

I'm sorry. I don't love you half so much as your lovely little sister to the west, but you have the rough and dirty charm of a city built for people to live in, not to visit, and I find you more intriguing for it. More scary, but also more compelling.

Guate, you are loud with stores trumpeting reggaeton out onto the sidewalks. You are rife with broken ATMs and security guards bearing large guns at the entrance to every bank. You are acrid with black exhaust pouring from your red-and-yellow buses and with burning trash and the holiday smoke of firecrackers. You are tied up tight with wires and tinsel and decorated with layers upon layers of advertisements and colored paint. Your clotted streets are lined with vendors selling pineapples and melons and bananas, fireworks, cotton candy. Sober clowns juggling oranges for tips at traffic lights and children selling hard candies from bags at the windows of stopped vehicles.

Guate, you are a city of neighborhood tiendas once open to the sidewalks but now barred off against thieves; tiny corner markets where women in colorful indigenous dress offer fruits and flowers; shrieking children happily setting off Christmas firecrackers in the neighborhood streets; affable guards at the security gates that have sprung up at the entrances to the neighborhoods; rangy packs of wary dogs; businessmen dining in Mexican restaurants; and entrepreneurs offering transportation on hand-decorated and homemade taxi-contraptions. You are a city of cheap clothing, daily fresh-baked bread, and long lines for everything.

Guate, you are a city violently alive, cradling the wealthy and the poor, those of European descent and those of Mayan descent, all mixed together in a smoky basin slashed by rugged, steep-sided ravines and plagued by the shifting of the earth beneath you.

In short, Guatemala City, you are real and you are messy, and that's what I like about you.

Love, J


Dear Raphael's Family,

I call you the Clan, because you are huge and loud. You are about five times larger and eight times louder than my demure little family. But I like your loudness and your hugeness, even if it overwhelms me sometimes and I have to close the door and read a book (in English) for awhile. Because in your hugeness and loudness, you are extremely warm and welcoming, with ready smiles and quirky humor and, yes, good looks.

You made me feel like part of the family. Tea when I wasn't feeling well! A ride when I needed a ride! A bed when I needed rest! Pollo Jocon when I needed Pollo Jocon, even though I didn't, technically, participate in the party associated with the dinner and therefore didn't really earn it!

I promise to practice my Spanish before we come to visit next time, because my only regret is that you went out of your way to accomodate and communicate with me, but I haven't gone out of my way to learn to communicate with you. Next time, Clan, next time.

Love J.

the guate letters: part II

Dear Guatemalan Pharmacists,

Thank you very much for the little white pills and the four bottles of Pedialyte. They got things back in near-perfect working order within a few hours. Without them, I feel sure I would have simply expired right there in Raphael's sister Aura Maria's big, wonderful bedroom (with its private and much-appreciated bathroom) and they would've had to ship me back home down under the plane with the baggage. (I might have ended up in Norway, but at least I wouldn't have been awake anymore.)

Also, thank you for the giant and very expensive green pills and the Halls. I forgot to take the last green pill, lost as I was in a haze of apple Pedialyte and the orange sleeping pills I had meant to save for the flight, but my voice is almost completely back anyway - although they did not help with my Spanish.

Love, J


Dear Person Who Wrote "NECESITA UN MEDICO?" in Irregular Black Letters on a Block Wall Along a Busy Guatemala City Road,

This thing you are advertising, this "NEED A DOCTOR?" business...does it involve actual medical treatment? Are you the Medico in question or perhaps this practice belongs to your cousin and you are doing him a favor by providing him very cheap or possibly free advertisement perhaps accomplished in the dead of night? If I call you with a medical need, will you see me out of your car? Do you own a car? You obviously own a paintbrush, but it's not the same thing.

Maybe you and the guy who wrote "Venereal Disease" in giant red letters a couple meters down should get together. Meanwhile, I've got a pretty good relationship with some Pharmacists, thank you.

Love, J


Dear Fireworks People,

You are my second favorite people next to the Goat Man and his able assistant.

What I didn't know about fireworks before Christmas this year could have killed an elephant. For example, I did not know that it was possible to buy 50-meter-long ropes of firecrackers that could then be legally laid out in elaborate patterns in the street outside of your house and set off by young children in honor of Jesus' birth. I think Jesus would be very cool with that. I bet Jesus actually heard the firecrackers when they went off, in fact.

Anyway, now that I'm so well-informed that I could probably arrange to kill an elephant, I would like to tell you that the next time I visit, you'd better stock up on the little cone-shaped volcancitos that shoot sparks straight up out of the tip several feet in the air. And also the ones that come packaged up like ships (that really whistle) and bulls (that snort fire from both ends) and tanks (that fire sparks horizontally along the ground) and - oh, I'm sure there are hundreds of other shapes I didn't have the pleasure of watching explode. Babies, puppies, parrots...you name it, it needs to be shooting out sparks.

My particular favorite is the one shaped like a Chinese pagoda. I believe it's called "The House", but, oh, it's so much more than that! Do you know which one I'm talking about, Fireworks People? The one where your 10-year-old nephew Chato lights it in the middle of the street as a car is coming down the road and then it shoots sparks several feet up into the air and you think, "That's it?", but as you watch, the little cellophane windows begin to glow red from inside and everyone goes, "Ohhhhhh!" (That's the same word in Spanish as in English, by the way).

And then (because it's midnight on Christmas Eve or maybe it's New Years Eve - there are so many fireworks, you're not even sure what you're celebrating anymore), your nephew pushes you out of the way so he can set off the REALLY big ones. The giant, sparkly Fourth of July blooms that make you deaf and give you a crick in the neck. And those are really awesome too, especially when they're being fired up from your front yard. And especially when everyone else in the neighborhood is setting theirs off at the same time, and you can't figure out where the house is anymore because of all the smoke, and people keep unexpectedly lunging at you from out of the darkness and the incredible noise of fireworks booming throughout the city to embrace you and yell unintelligable things at you in Spanish and try to make you dance with them.

I think one phrase fully expresses how I feel about you, Fireworks People, more than any other: Thank God Chato still lives.

Love, J


Dear Guys who Sell Illegal Copies of Cds on the Streets,

I think there are no old classic country songs entitled "(N-word) (F-word.)" But I have been wrong before.

Love, J


Dear Aura Maria,

Thank you for letting me stay in your bedroom and for letting me watch The Simpsons in English. It was just what I needed.

Love, J

the guate letters: part I

Dear Guatemala Airport Personnel,

There's a gaping hole in the wall behind the check-in counter. You may have missed it. And it may very well be that I am a spoiled American but I could not help but notice since I am accustomed to being inside when I am inside. Perhaps this is simply not your way, Guatemalan Airport Personnel. Although you looked pretty cold too, as you took my passport and breathed on your hands to thaw them so that you could type something into the computer. You, with your cute little scarf and your visible puffs of breath.

But maybe this shouldn't bother me (I am perhaps overly sensitive about many things - like nine-year-olds selling pineapples on the median separating six lanes of heavy traffic, for example) but, Guatemalan Airport Personnel...the carry-on bag checks? And the random carry-on bag checks? And lastly the check of every carry-on bag as it heads onto the actual aircraft, rendering the results of the previous two bag checks pointless? Oh, and also you took away my coffee.

I have some sympathy, however, because I suspect that this alarming excess of security is simply a result of the following thought process: What if she's trying to smuggle several greasy boxes of hot and delicious Pollo Campero fried chicken onto the plane and we somehow missed it the first two times we looked through her bag? What if someone threw them to her through the giant, gaping hole in the airport after she passed the security checkpoint? What a disaster that would be, as we are very hungry from trying to preserve our body heat with only these tiny white gloves.

Love, J


Dear Miami Airport,

I'm not coming back until you at least get a damn TGIFridays.

I mean it.

Love, J


Dear 4-year-old nephew Pedro,
Even if you lean very close to my ear and speak very loudly, I still do not understand Spanish. But you're very cute. I really liked that time we played Superman vs. a Fork at breakfast. But, you know, you don't have to play every game over and over until other people want to stick the fork in their ear and die. I'm just saying. Maybe if I say it LOUDER LIKE THIS.

God, you are so cute, though.

Love, J


Dear Guatemalan Toilets,
Ummmm...I understand about the old ceramic pipes with the rough edges and everything? But as far as I'm concerned, it is your job to take toilet paper and cause it to go away. None of this "wastepaper baskets in every stall" business. No nothing with it other than flushing. We won't even talk about the other, even more important parts of your job that you're not always so reliable about.

Love, J


Dear Raphael's Mom's Toilet,
And you! The high-pitched screechey noise you issue every time you are flushed, causing everyone within earshot to yell in Spanish, "The plane's taking off!"? No! No!

Love, J


Dear Goat Man,
How cool is your job? Walking your little herd of muzzled goats around the neighborhood, squeezing fresh milk for those (like Raphael's mom) who like their morning cup of warm goat milk. And you even have an assistant to carry around the stack of styrofoam cups for you! Your job is way cooler than mine...or at least involves a whole lot more goats - and that's good enough for me.

Love, J


Dear Guy Carrying Crates of Hundreds of Unprotected Eggs in the Back of a Pick-up Truck in Guatemala City Traffic,

You are the brave man I strive to be. God go with you, Egg Man. God go with you and your gentle huevos.

Love, J


Dear Pollo Jocon,

You are my favorite Guatemalan dish - except for Raphael's sister Carolina, who is also quite a dish and who made you for us one night. You, with your pollo and your saucy green deliciousness, are the home-iest of foods, and I would eat you every night if Carolina lived with me. Someday maybe I will kidnap her and you will be mine forever.

Love, J

happy 2008!

It turns out I was the only person on the planet who did not know HOW FUN SPARKLERS ARE! Thank goodness I finally made it to Guatemala for the holidays where they set me straight in a big way with their crazy waving of estrellitas all over the place. And not just on New Years either. Oh no, my naive American friends. Also on Christmas. And Christmas Eve. And Christmas Eve Eve! And Tuesday! And before breakfast! And to cook wienies! But more talk of international travel later. For now, PICTURES OF SPARKLERS!