I'm Boycotting Hoopla

Christmas scented air fresheners being advertised before Halloween!  Black Friday starting on Thanksgiving evening! People rioting and getting maced!

What the heck is going on up there!?

And you wonder why I avoid the holiday season.  I wish everyone could spend at least one holiday season not in the US or any place that celebrates like the US so you could see how not miserably crazy and stressful things can be.

Bad Movies

Julia and Casey stayed with me for a few days for Thanksgiving.  As generally happens when any number of volunteers get together, we made amazing food and watch way too many movies.

I made a cinnamon bun bread that was positively amazing.  We also made hamburgers and French fries, success here as well.  The hummus, potatoes, and apply pie, were equally amazing.

Sadly the moving watching did not turn out as well.

We watched Breaking Dawn, Cowboys and Aliens, and Red Riding Hood.  All of which were as bad as the critics have said.

 

Breaking Dawn suffers from it usual bad acting in all Twilight films and the fact that I don’t completely understand why all of the menfolk are so twitterpated with such a shell of a female character.  There was no independent plot and its clear parts 1 and 2 should not have been separated since their isn’t enough substance in BD#1 to actually sustain an independent movie.

Cowboys and Aliens didn’t have to be bad.  The acting was good, but the plot was completely predicable.  You never got the sense the characters were actually in danger.  I think it would have been salvageable with the same basic plot if the movie had been funny, but as is, it too itself far too seriously.

I’m not sure what was wrong with Red Riding Hood.  Again, the acting wasn’t bad, but the was just something not engaging about the plot.  There is this whole mystery about who is the wolf, except they don’t do a good job procedurally of leading the viewer through the mystery.  Again, another bust.

So total fail with our movie watching experience, but made better by the company of good friends... and a few glasses of wine.

PS: Also found out there was an animated 3D movie called "Mars Needs Moms" that totally failed. Reeeeally, never could have seen that coming

Looking Fancy, Feeling like a Whale: Thanksgiving Mission Accomplished

After going to the local casino in San Ignacio for their Thursday Karoke night, my friend Casey and I decided it would be awesome to host a Thanksgiving dinner in San Ignacio.  We could have a big early dinner at my house or the office and then go to the casino for some singing, dancing fun.  Unfortunately I wasn’t able to get enough people to commit to coming, so I invited myself to my friend Melissa’s Thanksgiving in her site in Villa Florida.  Villa Florida is on a river and Melissa had already arranged to have her dinner at a hotel with a pool.  River/Pool is a very fair exchange for Karoke.

Casey made garlic potatoes, Julia made hummus, and I made apple pie that morning, caught one of the only double decker buses (with ac!) that will actually stop in San Ignacio without charging the full price all of the way to the capital, even if you want to get off sooner.  Amazingly they charged Casey and me the normal price (it was such a nice bus they could have charged up to 50% more), and they completely forgot to charge Julia at all.

(Pie and Potatoes on the Double Decker Bus)

We were all dressed up, so there was a lot of rubber necking going on while we waited at the bus stop, including 5-6 of the local police officers piled into their truck cruising around, and a set of guys in a truck who  let their vehicle roll back 4 car lengths so their car would be waiting in front of us instead of at the stoplight they were at.

We got to Villa Floriday around 3, having only picked at food around my house and finishing off the hamburgers I made the night before so we were getting hungry.  We found out dinner wasn’t going to  happen until about 7pm, so after a quick dip in the pool we heated up some pita bread and broke open some Lays and went to town on the hummus.  I have to say, it’s the best batch I’ve helped make.  I think I might just have to stop making it because I don’t think I’ll be able to top it.

In true Hora Paraguaya fashion, the locals didn’t start arriving for dinner until 9-10pm, after Melissa messaged them tell them to get to the hotel because the turkey was done and we were ready to eat.  Potluck style dinners aren’t really the norm, the host usually provides everything.  But Melissa’s friends did a good job of bringing additional dishes and we had a nice assortment of different meat dishes,  potato salad, empanadas, etc.

Julia, Casey and I had eaten so much hummus that we could hardly take advantage of the main course.  But we did our best.  Julia made a serious dent in the sausage plate in front of her, like there was an actual divot in the cut sausage pile.  Admittedly it was really good. 

Before we cut the turkey, we each went around the table saying what we were thankful for, a new tradition for the locals, who were very hesitant at first, especially the few stragglers that came after the main group had gone and started eating.  But Melissa held firm and told them they couldn’t eat until they shared.

I was surprised how some of the guests actually seemed ot like the hummus we made.  It had a really strong flavor, which usually Paraguayans don’t like.  The potatoes didn’t go over real well since we put a bunch of pepper and garlic.  The apple pie, which was very tart and cinnamon, didn’t go over very well either, since they prefer their desserts very sweet and sugary.  Not that Julia, Casey, and I were at all perturbed by this.  Casey ate the last half piece for breakfast the next morning, most of it was polished off while waiting for the bus that evening.

We left around 11pm to catch a bus back to San Ignacio, got charged the correct price again! Amazing! Got back into San Ignacio a little after midnight and started walking the 15minutes back to my house.  As we did a carful of guys offered us a ride, we declined, and declined, and declined again.  They even offered to get out of their car and walk with us.  No thanks gents.  They eventually got the message and went away.  Like I said ,we were looking pretty fancy, even if we felt like whales.

Game of Thrones

I admit it, I'm hooked. I blazed through the 5 books in two weeks. Considering they are ~800-1000 pages long each, well, let’s just say the laundry is a little backed up and I should probably make a meal that doesn’t consist of squash stir-fry or I’m going to start turning orange. I also devoured the first season on HBO in a few days.

The sad part is that season two won’t be available until next year, and the next books, well, it took the author 6 years to go from book 4 to 5. Hopefully he won’t keep me waiting until I’m forty to finish the series. That would make my crush on Jon Snow, ~17 years old in the books, but played by a 24 year-old actor in the TV series, very inappropriate. Hopefully covering a book per season will help keep him on a reasonable timeline.

And speaking of Jon Snow, I’d like the record to reflect my prediction that Lyanna Stark is Jon’s mother and Rhaegar Targaryen is his father (not Ned Stark).

Ooops its been a while.

Lila:

Lila is still gone. She disappeared almost exactly 2 years after I moved in with my host family in Campo 9. Lila had been living at the office, which has a huge grassy yard, surrounded on all sides by brick walls. I don’t know if she somehow escaped while the cleaning lady was raking the leaves off of the sidewalk in the front of the office. She may have also jumped through the iron gate at the entrance we use to lets cars into the yard. The first 2 feet of the fence are far too small for her to squeeze through, but she could have jumped through the bars above that because they are spaced farther apart. It is also possible that someone stole her. She was very friendly and would come up to the gate if people were on the other side. So someone could have pulled her out through the gate. Naturally I feel like shit about it because I could have put chicken wire on the portion of the gate with wider bars, but I didn’t because I didn’t think she’d try to jump out. The yard was so big, and there was so much noise, cars, dogs, etc on the other side, I didn’t think she’d feel the need to leave. She always did have a bit of a Harry Houdini complex.

Even though she has been gone for over a month, I still have a habit of keeping an eye out for her when I walk around the neighborhood and the office. If she jumped out, she could jump back in right? But really I hope that she died a quick death. I’d hate to think she is out there in the bushes somewhere, scared, hungry, thirsty. I’d also know how miserable she would be if someone stole her and the put her in a tiny cage. Its better for her to be gone than to suffer.

Dog sitting:

Recently I was the proud babysitter of 3 other dogs, 4 including Tucker. All under the age of 11 months. Yep, that’s a lot of puppy. Fortunately they were all really well behaved. Mo went into heat a few days before I was going to get her spayed, so she and Tucker had to stay apart. But other than that, they all got along swimmingly well. The most irritating part was keeping them all fed. I live 25 minutes, walking, from the grocery store so hauling kilos of dog food, rice, potatoes, carrots, and eggs got old really fast. Then I had to prepare the food. Tucker and Moe eat rice, potatoes, carrots, and eggs, which meant tons of chopping and boiling. Zoe and Indy ate dog food, but I always added a little of oil and egg because Zoe was terribly skinny when she came to me and Indy is a bit picky. Evidently when Indy’s mom leaves him at the vet when she goes out of town, he doesn’t eat for the first few days. Thankfully I didn’t have that problem. I also had a hard time making sure the dogs didn’t eat each other’s food. But it all worked out in the end. All the dogs when home chubbier than they came, which is my measure of babysitting success. And Julia bought me some pretty earrings and a Peruvian had from her vacation, which was a nice bonus.

End of Winter:

Winter is coming to a close here. There is always that moment of hesitation when I start to do dishes at night, expecting the water to be so cold my fingers will be numb by the end. I can take a shower ever other day, or every day, joys! If I want to because I don’t start to become hypothermic the minute I turn the hot water off. I do have to start paying more attention to what I wear unfortunately. During the winter time I’ll often wear my pajama shirt to work because I never take my jacket off. Who cares what I’m wearing underneath if they’re never going to see it. J We should still have some cold fronts that come through the next month or so, but by this time in November, I’ll certainly be complaining about the heat. Thankfully the winter has been quite tolerable.

The end of winter also means the return of mosquito. I woke up two days ago with 4 new bites on my right foot. Time to put up the mosquito net.

Thanksgiving:

For the past two years I’ve attended the big Peace Corps volunteer Thanksgiving bash at a hotel near Encarnacion. While it’s a lot of fun, it really isn’t worth the 380 mil price tag for the event, at least not more than once. So this year I will probably be hosting a small Thanksgiving at my house. I’m also looking into going to Brazil for Christmas and New Years.

Home Leave:

When I signed on for an extra year of Peace Corps, I also got 1 month of home leave. I’ve decided to take it during the month of February of next year. I’ll probably spend a couple of weeks in Texas, a couple in Georgia, and I’m thinking of maybe jumping up to Philly to see family there. Who knows. I’ll let you in on the specific dates when I know them.

Tonights broadcast is brought to you from my new house.

I’ve been house hunting since the week of Easter, April 24^th, when I moved from Campo 9 to San Ignacio Misiones to work at the Regional Office Coordinator. After weeks of searching, my new co-workers found a house for me in a neighborhood about a ~20 minute walk from the office.

The house is huge, probably 2-3 times the size of my previous house. There are 2 medium sized rooms, a master bedroom, a huge living room, a kitchen, and a bathroom (with a door that opens properly this time). The floor is good quality tile, and the ceiling and roof are also solid. It faces east, which means it will be cooler in the summertime, which is more important to me than being warm in the winter since summer here lasts longer.

It also has a huge yard for Tucker and Lila. Lila is staying at the office for a while longer because there are tons of holes in the chainlink fences that need to be closed up.

While I do like this house quite a lot, it’s a solid 20-25 minute walk to the office. Eventually I’d like to find something closer. There was a house about a block from the office that I looked into, but the owners couldn’t make a decision in time, this house was available now, and I really needed to move into my own place. There was a house a while back, notably closer to the office that I passed on because it was 500mil G per month and I was hoping to find something in the 300-400mil range. This house is 450mil, but I’d pay the extra 50mil to be closer to the office.

So I’m not going to settle too deeply into this house, since I’ll be keeping an eye on places closer by. But for the next 2 months or so, this will be home.

You'll Be a Good Dog... But For Now, You Are a Bad Puppy

Rolls of toilet paper shredded: 4-5

Shoe, blanket, jacket thefts: too many to count (3 today)

Bags of rice destroyed: 2

Stole a bag of potatoes and scattered them about the yard

Bags of salt destroyed: 1

Bags of sugar destroyed: 1

Innumerable plastic bags shredded

Steals and shreds floor mats

Destroyed his dog bed

Takes the blankets and sheets off of their shelf and lays on them with muddy feet

Chewed through rope leash I tied him up in the yard with 3-4 times

Destroyed his rope walking leash 3-4 times, until I bought a chain one, then he destroyed the cloth handle

Tore several pages out of Victor’s Anna Karina book

Destroyed a newly purchased bag of 2 dozen eggs: 5 survived intact

Tooth brushed destroyed: 2

Razors destroyed: 2-3

Bottles of conditioner punctured: 2

Takes clean laundry off of the clothes line

Pairs of underwear torn up: 1

Pairs of missing underwear: 1 (that I know of)

Only jumps on me with muddy feet when I’m wearing clean clothes and need to speak with someone important. Jumps on visitors the minute they walk in the door

Absolutely freaks out when left alone for more than 15 minutes for any reason

I see snip snip in your future...