Photos and more

After a long hiatus, mostly due to laziness, I’m getting back in the groove with posting photos on Flickr, including more of my apartment and recent days and nights in Buenos Aires, plus trips recent and not-so-recent, like my trip to Salta with my friend Connie in, um, August 2008. Better late than never! These are especially worth checking out because they include our visit to one of the neatest places I’ve ever been, the Museo Pachamama in Amaicha – where all the non-landscape pictures in the group were taken.

My awesome new (used) couch is proving itself a worthy place to rest one’s head. It was first tested out by a friend who had some family problems one night and needed a place to crash, then my dear friend Mia flew down from San Francisco to try it out for a week or so. We had a great visit – it’s so much fun to share my favorite things about this city with friends so they can finally put faces and names to the things I often talk about. I’ve also recently decided to start offering a couch to travelers once again via the amazing Couchsurfing.org and have been meeting and hosting some neat people, including two American girls traveling in Central and South America for two months and a couple from France who will be enjoying my air mattress later this week.

Books

So I may not be posting much these days, but I am keeping my book list up to date – check it out if you’re looking for something to read! I’m happy to see that I’m on track to read more books in 2009 than I did last year – though I’m not sure why that really matters to me.

Blog? What blog?

I kind of forgot for a while that I have a blog. And that maybe someone would like me to update it. Actually I have no proof of the latter – nobody seems to be clamoring for more blog posts – but I can pretend. I have all the usual excuses and nothing more.

The apartment is coming together, slowly but surely. But to bring it together I have to tear it apart first – I currently have the couch in the middle of the living room and the dining table piled with stuff I moved out of the kitchen, all in preparation for beginning to paint tomorrow! Yep, sure would have been a lot easier before I had all this stuff, but that’s how it goes. The only thing I painted before I moved in was the inside of the closets – at least I recognized how much of a pain that would be if I didn’t do it right away! But I have some time off this week, and in talking to some friends about not wanting to fritter it away without getting anything concrete accomplished, I mentioned painting, and someone offered to come help, and voila! Tomorrow is taping and primering and all that, and painting will commence on Wednesday. Plain ol’ white in the kitchen, and I’m testing out a lovely spring-ish green on two walls in the living room. I really want to paint the rest of the living room – probably in a barely off-white – but I’m having a humidity issue in one corner that I need to get fixed first. Thankfully the super thinks it’s a building issue, so hopefully I won’t have to pay for the repair – and hopefully they won’t tear up the wall too badly. And I have my eye on a lovely shade of light blue for the bedroom; just have to find the store that sells it (I found the color in an old fan deck a friend gave me).

Before and after pix soon…

Whirlwind

The last month has been a bit of a blur, but in a good way, as I’ve been gallavanting around the US visiting family and friends – sorry if I didn’t make it to your neck of the woods! Now to figure out how to fit all my new purchases/gifts into the suitcase…

I’m looking forward to being back in BA… but hopefully the “polar” cold front will have passed by the time I get there.

A Pain in the Neck

So much for that writing every day thing… But here’s a slice of my life today.

I was up late last night researching things I want to buy while I’m back in the States this summer, and had trouble getting to sleep thinking about new toys and the impending arrival of a new (to me) couch! I was up early too, and headed out to a friend’s second-floor apartment to watch two guys (who arrived EARLY – shocking) lower said couch over the balcony and onto the sidewalk below. They kept telling me how complicated the job was because of this sign that was attached to the front of the building, but it all looked pretty smooth to me! Their clunky truck carried the couch and us 22 blocks to my place, where they (thankfully!) determined it would most likely make it in the front door of my apartment, and proceeded to carry it up 10 flights of stairs. The older guy, sweating on arrival, declared the stairs “mortal.” And mentioned again that they had done such a good job, and, you know, no obligation, but a tip might be nice. I was already paying a pretty penny for the move, but took pity and threw in a little extra “para los chicos.”

Then I had lunch and enjoyed a nice nap on the new couch.

Then I went to a personal training session with my yoga teacher to work on some things to improve my yoga practice. Afterwards I stopped at a store, and while the guy was wrapping up my purchases I was rolling my starting-to-be-sore neck and shoulders. He asked me if I’d been here long (“here” meaning BA, of course), and when I told him I’d been here two years he said, “That’s why your neck hurts. Buenos Aires is a nice place to be for just a little while.” This sums up the sentiments of a lot of people I’ve talked to here, who can’t really understand why so many foreigners would want to come live in Buenos Aires, when they’d all just love to get out. Argentine-American singer Kevin Johansen has a song about that, actually; this is the chorus: “And all the people that aren’t from here would like to come and stay / And all the people that are from here just want to get away.”

A Good Day

I got an email today from a new client that starts out, “Hi Amy, You are amazing.” Can’t get much better than that! Makes working until really late the last few nights totally worth it.

More soon…

A Good Sign

On the subway there are ads for the lottery that say something to the effect of, “You could win a new life today.” And every time I see one of these ads I think, “But I don’t want a new life! The one I’ve got is pretty great.”

Today’s Needle

Every once in a while I find such a fabulous typo that it makes me laugh out loud – it’s exactly this kind of thing that keeps work fun for me. Here’s today’s, with identifying details removed to help the author save face: “The market takes place in the lot between the car wash and the School for the Deaf and Blond.”

Ooh, pretty…

I went to the (perilously nearby) yarn “district” to buy some knitting needles today, and I found what I was looking for – but I also impulsively bought 4 skeins of yarn! They’re all different… A few I can chalk up to “research” for other projects I have in mind, but really I just bought them because they caught my eye.

In other news, the smoke is back, and lots of people I know are complaining of headaches and general malaise… The current conditions on my weather alerts even acknowledge it: “Smoky, 68 degrees.” I haven’t had time to find out why it’s back, I just know that I can feel it – and see it.

Searching

One of the adventures of living abroad is trying to figure out where to get something I need. Back in the States, whatever random item might occur to me, I usually have a pretty good idea what store – or what type of store, at least – would sell it. During my time here searches have been launched for envelopes, birthday cards, plain yogurt, meditation cushions, tortilla chips, and plenty of other things I can’t remember right now – and those searches have ended with varying degrees of success. A new search is about to be launched, as the long-handled lighter I use to light the stove (since the automatic “spark” button doesn’t work – I don’t think I’ve seen a single one in this country that does work) is running low on lighter fluid. At the supermarket today I bought matches, to avoid getting stuck without any way to light the stove, but I have no idea where to get lighter fluid. Supermarkets here often aren’t quite as all-encompassing in their stock as grocery stores back home; similarly, drugstores tend to be much more specific in what they carry. I also don’t know if they call lighter fluid by some other wacky name and not the rather literal liquido de encendedor that would be my first guess. My initial idea was to go back to the store where I bought the lighter (an independently owned grocery store near my old apartment – this type of store is called a chino here, because they’re pretty much exclusively run by Asians) and ask them. But first, I’ll take the Ask An Expert (Local) lifeline, when a bunch of Argentines come over for game night tonight.