Kurt Vonnegut

Get away, see the world.

Back home from my awesome Peru adventure! It was more than I even expected it to be (and I had high expectations). The weather was great and sunny and warm, the people were amazingly nice and friendly, the food was delicious, the ruins were fantastic, etc. I barely saw much of what the country has to offer. I'm kind of amazed that nobody goes to Peru! Aside from Machu Picchu, which is what most tourists go to see, Peru has the Amazon Rainforest, the world's deepest canyon, the world's highest navigable lake, the Nazca lines, ancient ruins in the northern desert, etc. Not to mention just hanging out at the beach or checking out the sights in the cities. Sigh. So awesome, but it went by so fast.

I had some trouble with the language because I totally gave up on learning it after August of last year and I didn't really remember much from high school. But after a few days I was kind of putting together sentences in my hybrid language of English, Spanish, and Italian. Bless their Peruvian hearts, they tried their damnedest to figure out what I was saying and usually they got it! Congratulations to them! Machu Picchu was especially amazing and that was the best day ever because aside from seeing the ruins, Dad and I got bumped up to a five star eco-lodge hotel in the town in the Amazon Jungle below Machu Picchu where everyone has to spend the night! It was: AMAZING. The food, the room, the scenery, the perks of the hotel, everything. I couldn't believe it. I just was sitting there in the fancy dining room eating the most amazing food I've ever had and inwardly going 'EEEEEEEEEEEE!!!' the entire time. I was really going 'EEEEEEEEEE!!!' that whole day from the moment I saw Machu Picchu til I finally fell asleep (which, of course, was helped by the hot water bottle in the sheets and the nice chocolate on the pillow that the hotel staff came and put on the bed while we were eating. Seriously.)

Sigh. I'm back in heaven just thinking about it all. More pictures are on my Flickr site over yonder, but here are a few for your viewing pleasure:

Classic shot!

Cusco's cathedrals at night.

Quechua sheep herder in Puca Pucara National Park in the hills above Cusco. Elevation here is near 12,000 feet.

Dad and I on the train heading up to the town of Aguas Calientes in the Amazon Jungle, below Machu Picchu and where our awesome hotel was located.

Lima was cool, too, but we didn't get too much time to see it. Just about a day and a half before we left for the States. I would highly recommend a visit to Peru! It's so amazing and beautiful and the people are so wonderful and happy and friendly. I loved every minute of my vacation and can't wait to go back someday.

I got home and Beatrix's cat-sitter had left a message for me about how good she was. That also made my flight-weary self feel very proud. The cat-sitters son came one day with her and Beatrix so charmed him that he's now requested that his mom and dad get a cat just like Bea! She's quite the little lady. I caught a cold toward the end of the trip. I think I actually began to have it before I left, but I worked very hard to ward it off using vitamins and drinking lots of water and orange juice, etc. But after Monday and Tuesday at Machu Picchu, I sort of was exhausted. It was like the culmination of all the months of planning and I finally saw it and climbed all over it and the entire experience was so amazing and wonderful and once it was over, I was just deflated and boooom the cold hit me. It's not so bad, really. I slept for 14 hours when I got home and I think that's helped a little. No real complaints because I so appreciate my body keeping me healthy to see MaPi! I didn't have any trouble with the altitude at all. I've never had any trouble before in Colorado or New Mexico, but I wasn't sure about this because I'd never been as high as Cusco. But, breathing wasn't at all a problem. You do get worn out quicker and you have to drink a lot of bottled water because the water isn't potable and you'll dehydrate at that altitude really quickly, but other than that, I was fine. Dad did well with the altitude, too. Peru is a pretty young country, population-wise. Whereas the USA's baby boomers are in their 60s, Peru's baby boomers are in their 20s, so I felt right at home. Everything was very comfortable and many of the people were my age and it was just really really cool to meet people and wander around. It felt very very home-y to me.

I'm kind of Peru's biggest fan now. They're a big deal. Let's have lunch and let me gush at you a while.

Viva El Peru!

Lemony Snicket

You are my fire.

I heard Savage Garden on the radio last week on the way to work and I was so shocked that when I got to work, I walked in and announced to the room what I had heard and it was like *crickets*. Nobody remembered them...or they were too cool to come out and admit to knowing who I was talking about. I wasn't cool enough to pretend I didn't like the song I had heard on the radio. It was "I Knew I Loved You". Anybody remember that song? I sang along. As 90s pop bands went, I liked them. And, as it happens, I looked it up on youtube and watched the video for the song and who should be in it but Kirsten Dunst? The video is full of over-acted, emotional sappiness with long stares that are actually kind of creepy considering this is supposed to be a stranger. But, anyway, if you don't analyze it, it's still a nice 90s throwback song. And, of course, when you watch one 90s pop video, it begins an uncontrollable stream of Youtube recommendations for you to watch more, which brought me to this here gem.



I dream of the day when I can walk into LAX with four friends, all of us dressed in white and begin a spontaneous synchronized dance like these fellas at 1:34 of the video. That's going on the bucket list for sure. In all honesty, I would have been one of the screaming (not crying, I was not that far gone) girls at the end of this video for sure because I had it bad for the Backstreet Boys at this point in my life and their celebrity-dom. It ended not too long after this video was made when I got my hand grabbed by them as they went by in St. Louis and I snapped a picture of (the blond one) Nick Carter's ear and he turned and gave me a mean look (as anyone who just had a flash go off thisclose to their eyeball would do) and when that picture was developed, it was so real and unflattering and teenage boy-ish, that my entire image of them changed and I realized that they were just dudes, and not even all that attractive when you had a full 5x7 of their giant cheek pores + zits and earlobe.

The teenybopper in me dropped dead when I saw that photograph, but I still appreciate their music, not because it was all that spectacular, but because I think every girl needs that group/band/singer that she goes insane over when she's about 14 or so. It's part of teenagedom. You have to go embarrassingly nuts over some cute face when you're that age. I don't think I could ever really become one of those true hater-types who makes jokes about Justin Bieber or whoever-the-next-teenage-dreamboat guy will be because those teenage fans are whole-heartedly and sincerely into it and I find it endearing in an ear-piercing and horrific sort of way. When I see them crying on tv during a performance that you can't hear over the screaming, I can just smile and nod. I kind of admire their young sincerity, as scary as it seems when they're screeching, waving 'marry me' signs, or crying uncontrollably when they think he looked right at them. Because it's a pretty brief phase. They'll get a waaaaay too close picture of him, or they'll find something else that interests them more than teenage-boy pop music, or they'll just grow up, and suddenly, the door will slam shut on that phase....For that group of girls. But there's always another group coming up through the ranks that's going to need a Nick Carter or a Justin Bieber. It's like a little circle of life.

I think I had more of a plan and a flow that I was going to be heading down tonight on this entry, but it's clearly been lost down memory lane of 1990s videos. I certainly hadn't set out on the 'let's re-live my teenybopper years' road, but whatever. Here we are. There it goes.

Oh, but I DID get my Christmas tree down over the weekend.

Elizabeth Gilbert

Chase this light

I'm still in the process of cleaning out/clearing out areas of my house and today I made the switch and have the orange room mostly done as the music room now. As I was going through various and sundry cabinets and cubby holes in various pieces of furniture I found the box my camera came in with all instruction books and, the most amazing find of all: an extra lens, sun shield and remote for the camera! So I'm trying to figure out how to use these things and decide whether I want to take them to South America or not. I would like to, but I'm also kind of harping on this idea of packing really lightly. I don't want to lug suitcases all over creation down there. I have a backpack, but it's just a bit on the small side to be able to work as my only pack, I think. I'm willing to give it a go and stuff it full of things, but I'm not that optimistic about this travel light idea. And if I keep cleaning and finding more things to take along, I really won't be traveling light.

Beatrix's "cat sitter" came by today to meet her and get a key for while I'm gone and she and I used to work together and are friends. I saw her last month at a party, but we always find more things to chat about when we get together. And sure enough, we stood around and yammered away at each other for nearly an hour and a half. It was really nice to get to visit for a while. But, it's sort of the awkward kind of visit, when someone stops by for one purpose and then you start to talk about other things and before you know it, an hour has gone by and you're still standing around talking. And that's cool, except my legs get tired from standing in the kitchen for an hour talking, but there's no place to sit in the kitchen and I tried to move the conversation to the living room, but my couches were covered in things because I'm moving the rooms around, so it was still like we were stuck standing around and talking. She didn't seem to mind, though. She's cool like that. As soon as she left though, I shoved a pile of stuff down the couch and flopped down for a bit.

I need to take down my Christmas stuff. I wanted to do that today, as well as move the rooms around. I still plan to get that tree down this weekend. I tried to take a bunch of books that I had into a trade-a-book place in town today in the hopes of freeing up some bookshelf space. Well, I ended up buying a bunch of other books to fill the space, so I'm right back where I started. I know better than to expect to have any free space on a bookshelf. I did notice though that the trade-a-book place in town is carrying more genres of books than they used to. It used to be mainly romance novels, but they've got some decent fiction and historical fiction and even branching into young adult books, too. I saw a cookbook section, too. I was surprised. I'm sure they have some other types that I missed, as well. Anyway, I have plenty of reading material to make up for the lack of assigned readings for school. It's starting to begin to sink in that I won't be going to classes this semester. I'm seeing people arriving back on campus each day and they're carrying their bags of text books and talking to each other about what classes they're taking this semester, etc. It's both cool and a little strange to work on a college campus and not be a student. It's like you belong, but kind of have outgrown parts of it, too.

Okay, am going to watch a couple of episodes of "The Tudors" (I'm on the final season),having dinner, and then I am definitely taking down the Christmas tree.

p.s. Have you heard the duet of Lady Gaga and Tony Bennett doing "The Lady Is A Tramp"? Bennett's entire duet album is great, but this song is extra fabulous, I think. You should hear it.

There is no way back from here but I don't care.

I hope the last rush order for things I'm remembering I need for Peru is over. I'm hoping it gets here in time for packing, now. Hope, hope, hope. It's an extra battery for my camera. Apparently the batteries aren't available in town, so I ended up having to buy the entire kit and kaboodle, but that's okay. It includes a car charger, which might be nice to have anyway.

This week has been dragging. Every day at work seems to craaaawl by. I keep trying to change up the routine by doing different things at lunch, but it hasn't been working. It's still really really slow. It might pick up tomorrow after I finish this one task that I've been working on for a while. I can get back to scanning things and somehow time seems to go quicker when I'm scanning things.

Beatrix stinks. I can't tell why she smells so bad. It's like that character in the Charlie Brown stories, "Pigpen". She's just got stink all stuck on her somehow. She's not likely to enjoy being bathed, although she does have a real affinity for water and she did fall into the bathtub last month when there was water in it. But I don't think she'd enjoy a forced dip in the tub. And besides that, she's not dirty. She's very meticulous about her coat and she's always keeping clean. I don't know. Maybe the cat is just a stinker, simple as that. Smelly cat, smelly cat...

I attempted to go to a basketball game earlier this week to no avail. Spontaneity doesn't work out when you're going to see one of the few undefeated teams left in NCAA basketball, apparently. Mizzou was playing Oklahoma and a co-worker and I had decided to go but we decided to just get a ticket at the door because school is off and a lot of students aren't back yet, so we figured that it wouldn't sell out. Well, that was wrong. It was such a blowout game with Mizzou squashing Oklahoma that it wouldn't have been that exciting anyway, but still. We were surprised to see the Sold Out sign on the arena door before it was even 5 pm. Good on ya, Tigers. Both Mizzou and Baylor are two of the four teams that are still undefeated in the nation! It could all change pretty quickly, but for now, at this moment, it's good. Anyway, since the basketball thing didn't work out, we just went to the new cupcakery in town and it was good! My only problem with cupcakes (as if anyone really has a problem with such a wonderful thing as a cupcake) is that they often put too much icing on them for my taste. I am happy to say that I powered through and enjoyed my red velvet cupcake a whole lot. They just opened the cupcakery within the last couple of weeks and they don't have their menu up yet so the lady was telling us all about what they had. Get this: s'mores cupcakes. Tiramisu cupcakes. Carrot cake cupcakes. Triple chocolate cupcakes. Red velvet cupcakes. Some others that I've forgotten. I had my eye on the red velvet from the moment I set my eyes on the glass case. I do remember that they have a cupcake of the day, which was lemon and that sounded really good, but it was all sold out (story of the day, apparently). I heartily approve of the general idea of cupcakeries, though. You can always scrape some of the icing off when you reach sugar code red.

Earlier this week when I was eating lunch I overheard this person emphatically telling this other person how many choices a person makes in a day. And how every single choice that you make can change your life. And I was thinking about that. And it's not the first time I've heard that, but you tend to forget that you make so many choices in a day, you know? Like, you make so many decisions without even really thinking about it every day, but if you consciously chose to do something different, you could change the scope of your entire day at the least, and your whole life at the most. Not a minute goes by when you haven't chosen to act a certain way, do a certain thing, handle a given hurdle in a certain way, etc. It's interesting to think about for a bit, just the true amount of free will that you have every single second of your life.  Of course, you can't think about it for too long because you start to fall behind in your normal routine of auto-pilot and doing those things that you chose to do however many weeks or years ago when you consciously made that first decision to do what you now always do. I think the people at the restaurant were some sort of support group or church meeting or something because things became very Christ-heavy and I tuned them out at that point and focused on my yummy grilled cheese sandwich and super delicious snickerdoodle cookie. But, I did think about all the myriad of options facing me after I finished eating. I could have driven to the airport and hopped a plane to some place, I could have gone and bought another snickerdoodle cookie and stuffed my face for a little longer, I could have gone over and sat down with those people and tried to talk more about this topic of conversation and maybe end up making new friends, etc. In the end, I chose to forgo a second snickerdoodle, spontaneous plane ride, or the hijacking of a churchy/support therapy session, and instead just went back to work and tried to stay awake while working on entering details of Missouri regimental histories from the the Civil War into my spreadsheet. But still...I had options.

Huff and puff and change the house around.

2012! HAP-py New Year!

Sometimes the way things sound in my head doesn't translate to blogdom, but I hope blogom gets it more often than not.

I decided to start the new year off on a new re-organizing foot, so to speak. I woke up yesterday morning with a need to move furniture around. New year, new room layouts. I'm pretty ecstatic about the way it's turning out. It's not done yet. But, I have essentially re-done 4 rooms in my house. Out of...8. So, half the house is shifting to a new look for 2012. I like it. The kitchen has a giant island in it now, not really for sitting around and eating, but more for extra workspace for all the cookie baking and whatnot that I've begun to do. It's great. The orange room is no longer the 'do my homework room' so it's slowing going to turn into the music room with my stereo and I'm going to drag down the record player set-up + vinyl collection that I have upstairs and bring it down and make that a much more hip sort of room than it could ever have hoped to be as an office/homework/grad student study room. It's bright orange, so it kind of is begging to be awesome. My bedroom is completely different, which is fantastic. It looks bigger now even though I have more furniture in it than I had. I love it. Sleeping in it all new and stuff last night was weird. I hear more noises than I used to because my head is pointed toward a different area. I kept waking up hearing noises, and waiting for Beatrix to attack if something was coming. It's amazing how easily you can totally spook yourself when all you've done is shift some furniture around. Like, suddenly, the house that was never haunted for the last year and a half is now haunted...because you moved your furniture around and pissed something off? But, after some snooping around, it turns out that it was just the wind. I never heard the wind this way when I was facing another direction, so it's all kind of going to take some getting used to. But I like it. Then, I'm turning the guest room upstairs into a sewing room. I never have guests, so it's silly to have a room that I never use just waiting for that one guest to show up. So, I'm going to make it into something useful. I had an old table in the basement that the previous owners left and we brought it up to the second floor and put it back together and it works perfectly. I love it, too. A whole new room for zero dollars. It's a nice table, really really sturdy because it's from probably the 50s or 60s and is all metal based and pressed wood on top. Heavy as hell, but really sturdy. Great for a sewing machine. So, there you have it. My four rooms in progress. Well, the kitchen is done, so the other three are still a little in progress. The casa di Jill is all shook up for 2012. In a good way. It still needs some de-cluttering and some 'uh, what is this?' and 'ew, when did that fall behind there?' kind of things, but mostly, it's on its way. And I SWEAR, I'm going to take down my Christmas tree this year. It's been up for 13 months straight now, but seriously: this week, it's coming all the way down and being put away. I pinky swear, blogger.

My block has been tore up with moving this weekend. My old neighbors moved out, new ones are still in the process of moving in. In the duplex two doors away, another neighbor moved out and we're waiting on that new arrival sometime soon, too. Apparently it's a new worker from the Governor's Office who's moving in. One of the funny things about living in a more urban area than I ever have is the close proximity to your neighbors breeds familiarity and gossip. I'm realizing that since I already know some about the two new sets of neighbors, that those who were here when I moved in probably already knew quite a bit about me. Hmm. Anyway, with all the moving and trucks and helpers and people carrying stuff all over the place, God help you if you were just trying to drive down the street through my block this weekend.

I feel pretty fantastic about this year, already. Changing the way your house feels can have a big impact, you know? Like, you have a new start sort of, or at least a new way of living.