Hurry up!

This is the slowest week of my life.

Family party in the pueblo

After Karla's graduation ceremony this week, her lovely family invited us to come to the house and celebrate with them this weekend. When Saturday rolled around, we woke up early and started our long journey to the capital. Usually it takes four buses and four hours to get to Karla's house but we lucked out by hitching a ride part-way with transport from NPH. After we got into the city we just had to grab one final bus that drove us out into the county for an hour. The amount of land that's considered part of the capital here is apparently pretty huge; after an hour of driving through the mountains and forests, we were still in the capital.

Her town was really cute and rural, it definitely seemed more my speed.

Cows just walk around and graze. No need for ropes.

Same goes for the horses. Just chillin.

Her boyfriend Alvin met us and walked us through the neighborhood to her house. Entranced by Vroni's beauty, he suddenly asked her to dance with him in the street

Or maybe he was just giving her directions. My mind's a bit cloudy. I'm glad we didn't have to trek up that big hill.

Karla's house!

I didn't know if it'd be rude to ask for a tour so I only saw a few rooms of her home, but it was really cute. This room was my favorite. It had an open wall with a sheet to block the sun, so it was effectively a Florida room. (Is that what they're called? I've heard that term before. It was a room with lots of sun and breeze, kind of like an enclosed porch. Quite cozy.)

We had an awesome lunch of roasted chicken, herbed potatoes, salad and dinner rolls. It was delightful :) The closest thing I've had to an American meal since being here

Volunteers are always happy with free food (that's not from the cafeteria)

Her little brother made this killer cake, made all the floral centerpieces AND did her hair. Totally awesome AND super talented

Mom and Karla exchanged speeches thanking one another and talking about how much they love each other. Lots of crying followed from all. Then Mom gave her a school ring

Group shot!

We started to get a little nervous at this point because we had a four hour bus ride back home and it was already 4:30p. Having a group of foreigners in the capital after dark is just asking for trouble. Luckily one of the people at the party offered to drive us down into the capital which would save us a bit of time. We all graciously piled into the back of his pickup truck (completely squished, but it was still more roomy than the bus would have been). It was an awesome way to see the capital, I felt like we were a tour group.

Cool view of a neighborhood in the city

Us leaving the pueblo

As you can see, Elena clearly enjoyed the ride

As did Charlotte

We actually all had a really good time. I only got slightly nervous once, and that's when we were going 80 on the wet highway. I had a passing thought about what my chances of survival would be if we happened to spin out of control, but luckily I was caught back up into the laughter and scenery and stopped fretting.

And then it started POURING. It just added to the sense of adventure though

The driver never stopped in the capital, he just kept on going. He drove the entire two hour trip to our house and left us at the gate of NPH. It was really nice of him and made a potentially stressful trip home totally enjoyable

The worst father ever

So I'm walking to work today and Tia Rosa is standing out front of the clinic waiting for me. She asks me what I have planned for the day and I tell her that my schedule is pretty open. "Excellent", she says. "I have something for you to do." With that she reaches out her hands and tries to hand me a clearly near-dead bird. I ask if she wants me to put it in the woods, she says no, she wants me to heal it. She knows nothing of what happened to the bird, she apparently just found it on the ground in it's death throes and thought it would be a nice gift for me. We take it into the clinic and I make a little bed for it on my desk, then proceed to stare at it until it stops breathing. My way of helping the bird was helping it find its way to the garbage can.

I tell Tia Rosa the news and proceed to get busy on my computer. A few minutes later Tia Rosa is standing over my shoulder talking about how sad it was that I let my little bird die. I've gotten quite used to ignoring her since her favorite pastime is to tease me. Usually she walks away after a few moments of the silence treatment, but she was lingering longer than usual. Then I noticed that she's holding her hand really close to my head. I turn to see what she's doing and come face to face with ANOTHER bird!

She tells me that it has a broken wing and I need to take care of it. Wtf?! Where was she getting these birds from? I accused her of attacking birds for the sole purpose of gifting them to me (which she denied, though I saw a flash of something in her eyes. Guilt??) She tried to hand me the bird but I told her I needed a cage if I was going to keep it in my house for several weeks while it's wing healed. Sadly I don't know the word for cage so I asked for a "special box for birds." She handed me a cardboard box, wished me luck and walked away.

I kept the box open on my desk for the day and he seemed to be pretty happy. I gave him a medicine cup of water and some leftover rice from lunch (which he actually ate). Apparently the rice had amazing healing properties because as I was cleaning up from lunch he flew out of the box and up into the rafters of the storage room. I spent the rest of the day trying to coax the bird down from the twenty foot ceiling which proved to be absolutely unsuccessful. Tia Rosa declared me to be a horrible father for abandoning my baby in the rafters to die, but sadly there's not much to be done. Now I get to listen to him tweeting frantically from the next room over as he tries in vain to get out. Maybe once dehydration sets in he'll fall down to the floor and I can try for a second rescue attempt?

Graduation

Of the 24 volunteers currently at NPH, two are Guatemalan. It's been great having them around to help out with language and cultural questions; the fact that they're two completely awesome people is great too :) This week was Karla's graduation from college so she invited us all along. Not wanting to miss out on a chance to see the one and only University in Guatemala (yes, there's only one public university for the whole country) I quickly asked for a day off from work so I could head into the capital with everyone. Karla's been super sweet to me from day one so I was happy to be able to show some support.

Luckily transport was having a slow day so we were able to pay one of the NPH drivers to take us into the city instead of trying to struggle through the buses. After a traffic-filled two hour drive, we got to the campus with seconds to spare. I was able to snap up a few photos while we wandered around trying to figure out where to go (as you can tell I wasn't much help).

Have I mentioned lately how much I love models?

They have really cool Mayan tiles.

Luckily walking around with seven beautiful foreign women has it's benefits. Two minutes after arriving at the University we had scored our own personal tour guide. He was nice enough to stop what he was doing to walk us all to the right hall and we got there right in time for the graduation. The graduation was completely different than I expected. There are 100,000 students at this University, so I pictured a huge auditorium with a list of names that would take an hour to read. Instead, Karla was the only person to graduate. They hold the graduations by department and do short 30 minute graduations for each person. It was absolutely beautiful. First Karla had to stand in front of a panel of the department directors. She gave a short power point presentation summarizing her final project (which was helping kids start a community library. She's a social work major)

After that each of her teachers said a little something about their experiences with her in the classroom. Then they declared her to be eligible to graduate and dressed her in this special graduation gown.

The poofy hat makes it official

They gave her a medal for outstanding academic achievement too. It was so nice to see her get recognized for how hard she's worked. I was secretly jealous of her medal. All I ever got was a letter from the Dean :P She had a chance to give a little speech afterwards and she literally went from person to person in the audience and thanked them for how they supported her over the years. She started crying when she got to her mom (who raised her as a single mother for the last several years). Lots of folks started tearing up in the audience too. It was so nice that she had the opportunity to do that! Giving a shout out to family members is totally impossible in the states; it would have been so nice to thank my family in front of everyone.

Group shot!

When we left the auditorium her family had a little table set up with cupcakes and soda for all of us! It was really sweet and it was nice getting to chat with her family for a little bit. Check out the awesome cupcakes her little brother made!!

We headed out shortly after the snack but not before getting invited to a family lunch at Karla's house on Saturday! Woohoo! I love a chance to be nosey and I can't wait to see what her house is like! More pictures to follow :)

Dengue fever

The rainy season is officially here now. I thought I could handle it no problem, but this rain is SERIOUS. I had pictured it like the storms in NJ; heavy rain for a few hours and that's that. Sometimes it'll be raining here when you wake up and it's still raining when you go to bed. One of the employees told me that they've had rain for a week straight before, no breaks. I usually love the rain but when it's pouring out it's really really tough to find enough will power to walk up that mountain of stairs and go to work. I'm hoping once I snag my rain jacket from home it'll be a bit easier since I won't be saturated all day like I am now.

Along with the rain comes a whole lot of bugs (don't worry, my fly friends haven't left me yet either, we're just adding black beetles and mosquitos to the ranks now.) On a happy note, the gallon of bug repellant I brought with me is finally coming in handy :)

This week in the clinic a very sweet boy came in with a fever. He's relatively new and is always super polite when I see him, so I automatically like him. Anyway, he came in with a high fever and red rash all over his body. At first we thought he might have scarlet fever since that's relatively common here, but the rash looked different. We drew some blood and his labs came back with our answer... dengue fever!

Here's what the rash looks like (this is a google photo, not the actual kid.

Dengue is caused by mosquito bites. Some mosquitos carry the dengue virus and pass it along to people when they're bit. Symptoms are usually high fever (104-105 degrees), red rash all over the body and headaches. Depending on the type of dengue virus the mosquito is carrying, sometimes people will develop Dengue Hemorrhagic Fever which is a lot more serious and involves people bleeding out and dying from blood loss. People who've had regular dengue fever are at higher risk for the worse type if they get bit by another infected mosquito and for some reason white people and kids under 12 are at higher risk for the bad kind too. 220 million people are infected with dengue every year. Of these people, two million develop dengue hemorrhagic fever. Most of these cases are children in Central America and Asia.

Once we got a diagnosis the clinic went into full force public health mode. The doctor printed out brochures about dengue and started giving inservices to all the staff. Maintenance was put in charge of getting rid of all mosquito breeding grounds so you could see kids rolling old tires out to the garbage collection all morning. Unfortunately there's no vaccine to prevent dengue so now we just have to keep an eye on the kids and hope that the mosquito numbers don't get too out of control. Luckily the kid in the clinic is doing fine and will probably head back to his section soon. Let's just hope that this one mild case is all I'll see during my NPH time.

Movie Reviews

This weekend was pretty much perfect. Saturday I finally made good on my promise to take Martin and Alex to the movies (the fact that I wanted to see Los Vengadores helped fuel that along). I saw online that the first showing was at 3, so I told them to come down to my house when they were ready to go. They ended up showing up at 9:30 in the morning, not really what I had in mind. Luckily it's almost impossible to sleep past 8:30 here so I was already up and showered. We headed down to Parramos to catch the bus, all while images of my last bus ride to Chimal flashed through my head. While we were waiting we ran into Tia Rosa and guilted her into coming with us. She reminds me so much of my mom and I was really excited that she was going to come with us. She's only been to the movies once in her life and that was on vacation to Italy several years ago. I was a little worried that she'd end up hating the Avengers, but was also interested in how she'd react to the special effects.

When we got to the mall we realized that the first showing of Los Vengadores wasn't until 1p but they had Battleship at 12:30p. I've been in love with Taylor Kitsch since his Tim Riggins days so I didn't need a lot of convincing.

Yep, very little convincing.

We decided to have lunch together first (Dominos 2 for 1 day, woohoo!) By the time 12:30p rolled by Tia Rosa had had her share of our company and decided to head back home. She promised to join me for a movie in the future so hopefully I'll be able to choose one she might like a bit better next time.

The movie theater itself is set up pretty much the same as the ones in the States. You can only buy tickets 15 minutes before the show starts, so there was a line at the ticket counter waiting for them to go on sale. Once we got our tickets (Q20 each, about $2.50! Guess what I'll be doing every weekend now?) we headed to the counter for mandatory snacks. Like the States, snacks are ridiculously overpriced here too. Their idea of overpricing lines up with normal prices back home though, so we paid $2 for a bag of M&Ms. Not too shabby, though I did skip out on the popcorn. One difference here was that they were SUPER strict about outside food coming in. They searched all our bags and wouldn't let us take in our leftover pizza (we sent it home with Tia Rosa instead).

The theater itself was set up exactly like our theaters: comfy chairs, stadium seating. They didn't have the oh-so-fun trivia questions while we waited, but I did get to hear my first taste of Guatemalan country music which was entertaining. Everything from that point on was normal, complete with folks texting and talking on their phones throughout the film (something that I got used to in NY). This theater doesn't do subtitles so it was also my first full-on Spanish movie experience.

So, the movie itself... I don't know if it was because I only understood half the dialog, I was feeling nostalgic about my brother who's enlisted in the Navy, or if I was just blinded by TK, but I LOVED Battleship. Again, it's hard to comment on the dialog because I only caught a portion of it, but even without that I found the story line easy to follow. I thought Rihanna's character (and women in general) were shown kicking ass without making a huge deal of it. The effects were awesome too, though that was to be expected. All in all, I really liked it and would recommend it to everyone.

After the movie the guys left and Stephanie and Charlotte came to the mall. The three of us went to the next showing of The Avengers which was really friggen hard to understand. I guess the plot was a lot more complicated than the Navy blowing up alien spaceships because I felt completely lost on several occasions. It also sucked missing almost all of Tony Starks jokes; the audience was laughing and I was sitting there stone faced trying to frantically translate things in my head. I enjoyed this movie too, but since it took a while for the action to start, I felt like it was a lot more boring than Battleship. Also, Captain America is stupid. His special power is to throw a shield around? Lame. And I still have no clue what Black Widow's power is. She just talks to people really well? And that arrow dude was lamest of them all. But again, an hour and a half of things blowing up and watching Thor can't be all that bad. You could sit Chris Helmsworth on a stool for an hour and a half and I would pay to watch that.

Things I found confusing about this film: (spoiler alert!!)

1) When Hulk transforms the first time he's totally blood thirsty and tries to kill everyone in his path, including Black Widow and Thor. The second time he's all buddy-buddy with them and exclusively goes after the bad dudes and giant worm monster. What changed?

2) Also, this is probably due more to bad translation than anything else, but didn't Black Widow say something about Loki needing a bunch of Gamma rays for something, and then discovering that his plan was to use Hulk as a weapon or something? Did that ever happen? Because then Hulk jumps out of the plane and isn't in the movie for the next half hour.

3) Why didn't Fury just let Thor take Loki back to their world when he first showed up? Did he think that he'd just escape again?

4) What was the back story with Black Widow? Something about her dad being a bad guy and now she has to help out SHIELD? Or she was a bad guy in the past and now she has to help?

I liked the Avengers, but mostly for the fight scenes. All the writing was completely wasted on me, so I'll have to go back and watch it in English once it's available on DVD (which should be sometime next week since there's a huge bootlegging industry here).

Another cool note about this experience: they have bathroom breaks in the middle of movies here! Halfway through Avengers the film crawled to a stop and the lights came on. I thought something had screwed up, but then one of the movie employees came in and said we all had a five minute bathroom break. Totally awesome.

Volcano eruption!!

Well there goes the punchline for this story, but yeah, the title pretty much sums it up. Stephanie, Charlotte and I were walking through Antigua late tonight to being a friend back to his hotel. He was visting Guatemala for the week and staying in a pretty ritzy place, so we decided to be nosy and poke around. We were walking through the gardens trying to admire the flowers in the dark, when the dude said, "Oh and that volcano exploded so everyone's all excited right now." We were pretty nonchalant about it since the volcano explodes all the time (usually at least once a week) and sends up a big plume of smoke. Then it occurred to me, how are they seeing that smoke so late at night? It's pitch black out...

We turned the corner and there was the volcano with a huge river of lava flowing down it!! All three of us bugged out. After being here for almost six months, this was the first time I've actually seen lava! It was bubbling out of the top and running down the sides, super amazing. Sadly my iphone just barely caught traces of it. This was the one time I was kicking myself for not lugging my fancy camera to Guatemala (though in fairness I probably wouldn't have thought to bring my camera to a simple dinner get-together in Antigua).

I filmed as best I could and had a few laughs at the expense of the rich tourists (who went to ask the people at the front desk if they should evacuate. The volcano is miles away). We stuck around for about a half hour, then took a taxi home while we watched the mountain churning out lava through the windshield.) It was a totally amazing experience, I only wish I had better footage to share with you!

(If you full-size this you can see a little more action)

Clinic tour

Stella was nice enough to film this tour of the clinic for y'all. She gets very detailed, so here's a chance to brush up on your Spanish vocab!

How to be a creeper in six easy steps

1) Hear a noise in one of the kids' rooms late at night. Use the flashlight setting on your phone to investigate
2) When area is determined to be secure, turn off your phone and go about your normal business
3) Fast forward to three hours later when you're trying to silently climb into your bed without waking your sleeping roommate
4) Once in bed, turn on your phone to set your alarm
5) Since the flashlight app is still activated, the flashlight beam will shine directly onto the bed of your scantily clad roommate, making you seem like a crazy pervert
6) Immediately turn off the phone and try to stifle your giggle fit, which will actually just make you seem like a mentally unstable psychiatric patient

Exhibitionism (and Facebook)

Way back when, I used to be a total introvert. I barely spoke, had few friends and absolutely HATED having attention drawn to myself. Some of those tendencies still flare up once in a while, but for the most part now I'm just a ol' attention hog. Okay, that's a flat out lie, but I DO love seeing all the people who read my blog and follow my stories, especially when said people are from other far-away exotic locations!! Just this month I've had visitors from Russia, Germany, Chile, Ukraine, Panama, Latvia (where the heck is Latvia?!), France and Thailand!! I love that random people are popping by and showing interest in my story! The only thing that stinks though is other than a little blip on my visitor map, I know nothing about you people! That being said, I'd like to extend an invitation to continue your stalking through an easier medium: Facebook :) Get access to other photos that I didn't post here, receive instant notifications when I post a new story (via me shouting about it on my Wall) and also hear more about my interesting life that's not quite interesting enough to make my blog, such as "Man, I'm really hungry" or "I HATE MONDAYS!!" Neither of those are real examples, no worries. I will, however, post lots of amazingly awesome links of tree kangaroos doing cute things, so you don't want to miss out on that.
www.facebook.com/smc1013

The bar

There's not a whole lot to do in Parramos aside from visit the local bar. The place is called La Familia which is fitting since it's run by a great local family. You have just as much chance to be served by the middle aged owner or his ten year old daughter, just depends on who happens to hear you come in. The family is super sweet and always greets me by name when I come in (though despite what this may indicate, I don't go there often). The nice thing about La Familia is that it caters to the volunteers. The beer is super cheap ($1.30 a bottle) and their hours are flexible depending on if we show up or not. If we feel like having a few drinks until 1am, they'll happily keep the doors open until we stumble home.

The other night we went out to celebrate Myriam's birthday. Myriam is one of my housemates and ranks up there as Most-Likely-For-Shawn-to-Visit. She lives in Switzerland close to the French border and speaks a slew of languages which I find very cool. I have a good connection with her since we have a similar sense of humor and are both incredibly good-looking, so I swallowed my pride and borrowed some money for beer so I could help her ring in her special day.

Danny (also my housemate! She's from Germany), Hannah, Myriam, Dr. Nicole and Holger

Me, Erika (the volunteer coordinator), her giant Swiss husband Sandro, Sam and Danny

You know it's a good bar when you can bring your dog in with you. It always stresses me out when she follows us there because she has no concept of road safety and nearly gets creamed at least twice on the way. It's nice to have her to walk home with at night though.

Family shout out

Today was Dia de la Madre here (Mother's Day). As is custom with every other holiday here, firecrackers started going off promptly at 4am. Since there's a valley right outside my window, all that noise echoes and is channeled directly into my ear canal. My eyes shot open because I thought someone was shooting at us (which has never, ever been a fear of mine here, so why that was the first thing I thought of is kind of curious). I quickly figured out what it was though that didn't help me feel any better about it. Here's my question: If the country wants to do something nice for moms, if they declare this a national holiday and give all the women off for the day, then do you REALLY think said women want to be woken up at 4 in the friggen morning?! Why don't you take all of the kids out of the house and let your poor mom sleep in (and the poor neighbors, too).

So Mother's Day here isn't that different than in the states (other than the pyrotechnics). One cool perk that I mentioned above is that all mothers have off from work that day. Their kids/partners usually cook them a nice lunch and they get flowers. Pretty typical Mother's Day stuff.

So naturally with the holiday I was thinking a lot about my mom. I've been thinking a lot in general about my family and friends at home. This trip is amazing and it's already helped me in more ways than I had anticipated. Every week I get emails from folks at home encouraging me and telling me how proud they are of what I'm doing, but the truth of it is, if it weren't for an immense support system at home, I couldn't be doing this. My friends have been consistently sending me sweet emails, reading my blog entries and calling me on Skype to get the latest scoop of what's going on. On the occasions that I've felt depressed or homesick, knowing that they're taking this journey with me helps me stay motivated and optimistic. Some people have really gone above and beyond, too. I talk to Stacy almost every day. Our relationship is no different than when I was living a mile up the road from her (though with far fewer Coors Lights). My friend David Topete calls me all the time and even tried to wire me money after my wallet was stolen. It's great to know I'm supported by my friends and have folks who can back me up when I get into tight spots.

My Dad has been really great too. I've had some rough spots with my Dad over the years, but with a lot of patience and tolerance from both sides, things have been steadily improving. He's been a huge source of emotional support and encouragement. He calls me once a week and sent a wonderful care package filled with all the things I had been missing from the states. It's been nice to share this experience with him.

I feel like I don't even need to write about my siblings because everyone who knows us knows that we fall all over each other for the opportunity to help one another out. Our unity is unrivaled. We're quick to point out when one of us screwing up, but it's always in the context of "I've got your back, but next time you should do this, this and this." I think about them everyday here and can't wait to get back to being part of their everyday lives.

Without a doubt though, my partner throughout this journey has been my Mom. She's the air traffic controller for my adventure; she does the ground work and I take the credit. Before my trip, she helped me with all my prep work. She had her reservations about the trip, but knew that it was something that was important to me. She did everything she could do to make sure I was ready, from last minute shopping trips to long talks about safety concerns. Since I've been here she's run the show for me back home: managing my bank accounts, collecting my mail and handling any other random things that pop up. I can only imagine how difficult this would have been without having her to back me up. She's been my biggest supporter for years though, so it's no surprise. So even though it's not American Mother's Day yet, just want to tell you all how super amazing my mom is and how much I count on her!

More randomness!

All the funding for NPH comes from donations (mostly from Germany, Canada and the States). Aside from one-time large donations, we also have a Godparents program where folks can "adopt" a kid here, write letters back and forth with them and get pictures once a year (all for the low price of $25!). All of the money that's collected goes towards the basic upkeep of the kids: food, housing, bills; all the boring stuff. If the kids want to do other stuff during the year they hold fundraisers. The fundraisers pretty much go on all year long and most of the kids mostly sell homemade ice cream, cookies and desserts. Needless to say, I love it when I see the fundraiser kids walking by. This week we've had a few kids in the clinic recovering from various operations so Tia Rosa has been buying up bucketfuls of ice cream to give them (she's really sweet :) She always gets one for each of the staff too, so we've been having a mid-morning ice cream treat almost everyday this week :D

The ice cream is so organic and lovely. It's made by toasting fresh coconut, adding cinnamon and fresh milk from the cows, mixing it all together in a small plastic bag and freezing it. The Guatemalans have integrated plastic bags into their culinary scene; a lot of times when you buy juice or water from a deli or restaurant it comes in a sandwich bag instead of a bottle/cup. They also serve jello and ice cream like that. The way to eat/drink these things is the same: you bite a hole in the corner of the bag and suck out the contents. It took me a while to get used to it (and I still usually manage to look like a slob during the process) but I'm definitely more accustomed to it now.

Anyway, this coconut ice cream is hands down the best ice cream I've ever had before and an absolute STEAL at .15 cents a bag.

Me enjoying my treat :)

Okay, more randomness. We found a cool used bookstore in Antigua. Actually I take that back, it's not that cool because I feel like their books are grossly overpriced ($14 for a book?! What is this, the US?!) BUT they do have a cool policy that guarantees they'll buy back your book when you're done for half the price. They had a cool light in here that I thought my Mom would get a kick out of. It's an armadillo shell!

Turns out my declaration of the start of the rainy season was a bit premature. We haven't had a good storm in two weeks, only a small sprinkle every few days. It's cool though, whenever it's about to rain the sky gets this really pink cast to it. It makes everything seem very clear and crisp.

Here's Gustavo, one of the special needs kids who lives integrated with the other kids. I don't spend a lot of time with him but he liked my hat the other day and wanted a picture with it.

The boys have been playing with my Photo Booth. It's so easy to entertain teenagers.

I don't follow soccer but here its HUGE (please read that in a Donald-Trump-impersonation since that's how it sounded in my head). There was some big game between Madrid and Barcelona or someone else, I don't know. All I know is that all the kids piled into the cafeteria and we played it on the projector. Talk about a loud cheering section. It was funny to watch their reactions though.

I'm still researching Homesteading a lot, especially in terms of small-scale mortgage-free housing. Look at this awesome dude! I want to be just like him when I'm older :)

Taking full advantage of some cuddle time

Food: A photographic journey

It's funny how when two normal events line up just right in your life, they can become truly magical. As I've been bitching about for the last three weeks, my wallet was stolen. There have been several consequences to this event, one of which is an inability to buy food. Do not fret! I have not wasted away yet (though I HAVE earned the nickname of the Pauper). The school supplies me with enough food to survive, though it's not a joyful existence... Ah, but I jest. The food here is fine. It's not good, but it's fine. Adequate. However, this means that I now have no choice but to eat rice and beans twice a day and the supplemental "real food" is a thing of the past. No more chicken stir fry. No more tuna fish sandwiches. No more scrambled eggs. It's been rice and beans for two weeks now and I'm not very happy.

Luckily I have my visit home to look forward to and as luck would have it, my family has asked me to compile a list of foods that I'd like to eat while I'm back. This couldn't come at a better (worse?) time. Forget my homesteading blogs, forget facebook. My new time killer is looking up pictures of food on google. I stare at the forty images of pasta in front of me and imagine the taste of it; knowing that SOON it will be mine. Without further adieu, I present to you... my food list.

I don't care that there isn't a healthy item on this list. I plan on having a week and a half of unbridled indulgence; a reminder of all the amazingly awful things that await my return. I hope you all join me (and bring me gifts of food)