A parade walked by my house today...

...and I slept through it. I actually didn't wake up until Danielle broke into the house and started talking to me. I was having a dream that, if I remember correctly, involved a German prince from two hundred years ago, a daytime job at a diner, with said prince, and three wishes.

I was a little sad to miss out on my three wishes.

Here's what I would have wished for:

1. A German prince
2. The ability to fly
3. That fashions circa 1985-1995 would never make a comeback.

I was going to take a picture, but I thought it would gross you out.

So, in my little community, there is an interesting method of taking care of the many potholes that plague our little dirt roads: debris. Plant clippings? Just throw them in the middle of the road. Extra rocks? Likewise. Sometimes, where there was once a harmless dip in the road, it has been made treacherous by the sudden presence of broken cinder blocks (which, by the way, are not that effective as 'road-filler), and I have needed to swerve crazily to save my poor little tires.

Personally, I have nothing against this tradition. I feel like it gives our roads a unique, Picasso-esque flair, and it gives me something to blog about.

But, friends, I believe that our road maintenance has achieved a new low, and I am here to quejar.

I am housesitting for my friends, and, Friday night, I left my windows cracked a teeny bit in my van, so that it doesn't get that hot smelliness of closed in spaces. Well, I woke up Saturday, and was climbing into said van, when I noticed an obscene amount of flies congregating on my dashboard. "This is not okay" I said to myself, and proceeded to clean out my van, in order to discover the source of this shocking debacle. Well, van was clean, flies evicted, and I found nothing sinister, so I forgot about it.

Until this morning! I was walking home from exercising (Yay me), and I heard a suspicious buzzing sound coming from a pile of clippings that were-yes- filling the pothole in the road right in front of the house, so I looked a little closer. Tossed into the road, with the clippings was a whole lot of rotten meat. Yes, rotten meat. Raw. Meat. In the middle of the road. What, do these people think that all the tires rolling over it will make it less raw and rotten? I don't know. All I know is that I am keeping all of my windows firmly shut for the next while, smelly hotness or not.

The Unreadables

So I totally pirated this from Raych, and I know that this is going to give all of you who think I'm a nerd a really big laugh at how right you were, but I simply couldn't resist. So there.

This is the top 106 most unreadable books, or at least one of those lists.

What to do:
Bold the ones you've read, italicize the ones you started but couldn't finish, use red text on the ones you really sort of hated, put an asterisk* next to the ones you really sort of loved, and use blue text on the ones on your own personal To Be Read list.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights*
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice*
Jane Eyre*
A Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveller’s Wife
The Iliad
Emma*
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods*
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran: a memoir in books
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West*
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian : a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo*
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
The Anasai Boys*
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible
1984
Angels & Demons
The Inferno
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist*
Gulliver’s Travels
Les Misérables
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay*
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime*
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes
The God of Small Things
A people’s history of the United States : 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere*
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter*
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion*
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics : a Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit*
In Cold Blood
White teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers

My conclusion? I guess I'm averagely literary. I guess I prefer the books that entertain to those that educate.

Chrismon Tree

I'm sitting in a sweet recliner, listening to Josh Groban sing sweetly about the first Noel, dreamily entering into the Christmas spirit.

Did I mention that it is 75 degree beach weather outside? Lovely, but not Christmas.

Also, I looked and looked for that little 'degree' sign on my little laptop keyboard. Nowhere to be found. Which is why I had to resign myself to writing it out, like a dolt.

Also, my parents were thinking of getting one of these:

It's upside down. My mom waxed eloquent on saving floor space etc. 'But it's upside down' I patiently explained. I think she maybe got my point. I have heard nothing with 'tree' and any forms of the word 'inverted' strung together in any conversation we have had of late.

Fish...

Well, I've been gone from Mexico for almost a month, but now I'm back! I went to my friend Faith's wedding in Nevada, and then I got a call from my mum to come home and take care of her after some surgeries that she was having done. So, being the good daughter that I try to be, I went. And, actually, even though things with my mom's surgeries did not go as planned, I had a really, really good time with my family. The bonus is that I really, genuinely like every member of my family, so being with them is not a punishment for me at all.

Okay, sometimes they get on my nerves. The flip side is that sometimes I get on theirs. So we're even. It works.
I got back on Sunday night. And Danielle and Jen and Joanne and Rachel met me at Papa Rubens' for tacos, which was lovely. Then, Danielle, who was that day gifted with two rather large and geeky looking fish from her friend Pepe, took one look at them and decided that she would rather take pictures.
If you look closely, you can see that our fishy friends have buckteeth. Buckteeth! They looked like the comedy relief for some bad cartoon. I named mine Jerry, I think. Then I sliced him open. Eeeww.

And Joanne and I smelled like fish for a good long while.

Danielle is going to ask Pepe to clean the fish before he gives them to her, next time.

My adventures in bloodletting

I gave blood yesterday. It was my first time, and my main reason, though I would like to be known as a compassionate, upstanding member of society, was so that I could finally learn my blood type. I'm twenty five years old, and I'm still in the dark.

So I sit myself down on the little reclining chair, and display my arm for the inevitable injection. Naturally, I avert my eyes, because watching needles go in makes me woozy. Then my blood flows through this tube into a little bag. Bye bye blood. T'was nice having your companionship.

Afterward, I get up and feel quite fine. So I went over to Tani, who had not yet been pierced, and sat down with my cookies and juice to keep her company. The lady pokes her, and we wait. The women around begin conversing about the new vampire love series (get it? Blood, vampires....?) and discussing the characters like old friends. Tani's bag fills, and while the blood lady is taking out the needle, I suddenly feel like every particle of my body has encapsulated itself in my stomach, and wants immediate escape. Then the room starts spinning and I know I'm in trouble. So, I recline myself upon the chair just vacated by Tani, and wait, with cold packs, for my head to return to this galaxy. Eventually it does, and I take more cookies and juice and walk home.

And I have the pink bandage and the needle hole still in my arm to prove it.

There's got to be a better way

The Tijuana border crossing. Probably the busiest border crossing
In The World.
And the noisiest.
And the slowest.
And my feet.
Which have nothing to do with border crossings,
except for their intrinsic value as entertainment.
Which can be good when it takes you two hours to move half a mile.
Viva Mexico.

Roommates

These used to live in my house. They are spiders, and they are big, and slow, and stupid, and I think a little blind. But they are gross, and they abounded this spring and summer, after a prolific rain (for here) caused pretty green things to grow all over our yard, which seemed an ideal place for these newfound friends to make their home. They were not satisfied with their little leafy green roofs, however, and promptly moved into OUR house. Between the three of us, Danielle, Kim and myself, we slew scores of them. I'm sure the spider world bears us quite a bit of ill will, due to our relentless massacre of anything arachnid-esque. I'm not a bug connoisseur, nor do I relish showing pictures of yucky, crawly insects to you, my helpless and innocent readers. However, the insect world is one that is closely linked to the world in which I live at the moment, and there is no escaping that cold, hard fact. So here. Partake a little. And hope I don't decide to regale you with stories of deer slayers (quite frightening, until you realize that you are, indeed, bigger than them, and can therefore crush them with minimal effort, if you don't mind the squish) and other fun insect friends that dwell among us.

Mexi-snacks galore

This is a pretty typical Mexican shot. Since we live in an agricultural community, we are fairly dependent upon the seasons for most of our fruits and vegetables. I know this is pretty much the case wherever one may go, but it seems much more, oh, I don't know, in your face here. Maybe it has something to do with the ragged boys wandering the streets trying to sell strawberries from a five gallon bucket in the summer. Cucumbers in the spring. Corn in the fall. I wonder to myself: 'Are they stolen? Are they gleaned?' I will never know.

This good man here is selling olives. They are quite tasty. What you do is this: you purchase a bag of olives (non-pitted), and he will undo the bag, dump most of the water, add hot sauce (called chili. The people here have no interest in our soup-like concoctions of the same name) and leave you to taste, savor and enjoy the slightly bitter, oh-so-greeny taste of these olives. Its one of my favorite treats.

The first in a long line of many

It seemed apropos that, on this the day of my third Mexi-anniversary, I start something new. As you can see, that something new is this. My blog. Never in all my days as a human did I dream of having one of these things. It seemed pointless. Maybe, actually, it is. However, I when it comes to 'keeping in touch', I am a miserable failure, as all of my neglected friends back in the States will attest. This is my solution. I plan to show you lots and a plethora of lots of photos of my life down here.

Starting now.

Today is September 16th. Here in Mexico, we celebrate the famous speech given by Miguel Hidalgo (NOT the horse), 'Grito de Dolores', which incited the Mexican war for independence against Spain. How do we celebrate, do you ask? We line up on the side of the road and watch the schools parade down the street to the Centro, where we all run around and try to smash eggs full of flour on each other's heads.

November 20th is another important date, being the end of the war for independence against Spain. This picture is actually from that parade last year. This is the big parade, when costumes and floats and flags come out in abundance. These two boys are dear little insurrectionists against the man, with their plastic guns and little foil bullets. The mustaches, I think, are real.

Viva Mexico!