Real Life Travel

An Ode to Preschool

2009-03-21T08:42:00.001-06:00

They welcome him in with a smile and a hug;

Now he's not putting permanent ink on my rug.

He can laugh and run and play;

My house can recover for the day.

The living room's a mess,

The kitchen's a wreck;

Do I smell something burning on the deck???

The fish are frightened --

So am I --

Was that a Lego I saw floating by??

The computer mouse is missing

The toys are on the floor

I'm pretty sure that's jelly

On the laundry room door.

The DVDs are scattered from here to there,

There are 600 children's books

On my chair

And on the floor

And in the bed

And in the bathtub.....

It's only 7:30 in the morn,

Why do I feel so muddled and worn?

O Preschool, Preschool, I love thee!

A safe place for him;

A fun place for me.

(cross-posted from my blog at http://kellyarmstrong.pnn.com)

Tonto is in My Freezer

2008-10-25T20:30:00.000-06:00

Tonto is a tamale; one I made myself. My neighbor Rocio invited us over last Friday for a family tamale-making fest, and now tonto is in my freezer. You’re supposed to wait till Christmas to eat them, but I’m not sure I can wait that long.

The singular is ‘tamal’, actually, if you care to be linguistically correct. And let me be the first to tell you that Costa Rican tamales are nothing like their Mexican cousins -- not a pig's head in sight (the Costa Rican's save that for the posole). In fact, about all they have in common is masa. Rocio’s family (I lost track of how many children, grandchildren, in-laws, friends and employees were floating around that evening. Did I mention that I don’t speak Spanish?) informed us with great enthusiasm that every Central and South American country has its own variation of tamales, and every family within each country has its own recipes.

I want Rocio’s recipe. Wow!

Rocio came over to my house in the afternoon to offer the invitation. I thought it was for some sort of dinner party. She took me over to her house and showed me the THREE employees hard at work already: one young man was cutting plantain leaves into the appropriate size and shape; one woman was frantically washing enormous pots in the sink, and a second woman was stirring broth.

And I learned: here’s what goes into a Costa Rican tamale:

Masa and mashed potatoes: mixed with lots and lots of lard (“This is not a health food,” Rocio assured me.

Pork/Chicken broth: cooked with more lard, garlic, thyme, and six hundred bay leaves in a pot my children could bathe in. Mix this with the masa and mashed potatoes

More masa: with achote (a coloring/flavoring agent), lots of lard, garlic, and salt

Pork and chicken: that’s where the broth comes from

Rice cooked with chicken broth; capers added after cooking

Olives, prunes and strips of pickled peppers (for color). Huh?

Still thinking we were going to a dinner party, my husband and I dressed appropriately, I made an apple pie (what goes with tamales???), and we brought a bottle of wine with us. Well, the wine was a good choice.

When we arrived, Rocio handed us aprons and put us to work! This was serious business! She explained that the traditional time to make these is Christmas, but who has time at Christmas? So we had lots of wine and guaro (a local drink made from sugar cane) and made tamales now.

First, a son (I never could keep all the names straight) arranged a sheet of plastic and two plantain leaves on a plate. A daughter-in-law added a huge gob of masa and potatoes; a family friend added meat, and one olive. Rocio spooned on some rice with capers. My husband Gary was responsible for the prunes. My job was to put in the achote-colored masa and the peppers. But then, we got a bit behind and I tried my hand at folding a few plantain leaves around the tamales (which were then tied up by the young man I’d seen earlier).

Maria Juana (who was the employee responsible for wrapping up the tamales) politely laughed at every single one of my efforts (and I hadn’t even had any wine yet!) and refolded every single one. I finally learned my lesson and went back to draping a decorative pepper or two across each mound of masa/meat/rice/olive/prune.

And then we made the tontos. At the end, when we were running out of ingredients, the call went out for the tonto: the big, dumb tamale. And everyone got to make his own just the way he liked it. Juan Miguel liked lots of chicken. Rocio liked lots of achote. Me, I used lots and lots of achote masa (which I also ate in handfuls when no one else was looking) and six huge olives. We passed them to the experts who folded the plantain leaves and tied them up, and then added a special colored string (everyone picked his own color), so we’d know whose tonto was whose.

My tonto has a pink string, and it’s sitting in my freezer right now. I think about it all the time. Because, after all the work was done, we actually got to eat a fresh tamal.

OH MY GOODNESS!!! IT WAS SO GOOD!!!

I love Mexican tamales; they are a small passion of mine. But Costa Rican tamales, I must say, make their Mexican cousins look, well, quite pale and sickly, actually.

I am counting the days until Christmas, and it’s not for the presents, let me tell you!!

"I Need a Towel for the Worms"

2008-10-22T14:27:00.001-06:00

“I need a towel for the worms.”

These are words designed to terrify the mother of any 3-year-old. Along with “I fed the fish some crackers.”

We didn’t even want a fish. In fact, we (read: I) planned actively to never get a fish. Ever. I mean, what do you do with them when you move to a new continent? Cats were hard enough. But fish? Gary assured me we could use the magical “fish transporter”: drop them into the white porcelain bowl here in Europe, pull the handle, and they magically reappear in Central America. But I wasn’t buying it.

So why do we have a fish? Because I don’t speak Spanish. My housekeeper, on learning that it was the Timothy's birthday a couple of months ago, promptly told me she’d like to get him a gift. I thought she was talking about some sort of floating toy for the bathtub. No, what she had in mind was a fighting fish. We named it Sparkles. And after 2 months in a tiny fishbowl, Gary was finally able to get a small aquarium for it. The fishbowl was out of reach of the kids. The aquarium, on a low table, is now the most popular spot in our house.

Yesterday, while I was unpacking boxes, Benjamin found me and triumphantly announced that he had fed the fish! On closer inspection, I learned that he had fed the fish three wasabi-coated rice crackers. Not ideal fish food. I swear Sparkles looked at me pleadingly; wouldn’t you if your lungs had suddenly been filled with wasabi powder?

The two of us hashed out the idea that he should NEVER put anything in the fish tank.

So, he hasn’t. Yet. But this morning while I was putting on my make-up, Benjamin came in to the bathroom, pulled a towel off the rack, and announced that he needed a towel for the worms. I had no idea what he was talking about, but I was scared anyway. I had reason to be. He had found the jar of mosquito larvae fish food, opened it, and poured it, not in the fish tank, but all over the floor. So now my floor is covered with dead mosquito larvae. Yum.

That magical fish transporter is starting to look very attractive. Say the word, and I’ll send Sparkles to you for a nice, long visit!

Haunted by My Garbage

2008-10-15T19:26:00.002-06:00

Today, October 15, is Global Blog Action Day, when bloggers around the world devote a blog to discussing a particular cause in order to draw attention to it. This year's cause is poverty, and I decided to write the following about an experience I had in Jakarta several years ago.

I frightened him sometimes when I’d open the metal door to put my trash in the trash hole. When we lived in Jakarta, I don’t remember that a trash truck ever came by, but all my trash somehow disappeared. The moldy leftovers that had been forgotten for too long in my refrigerator, the fruit peelings, empty milk cartons, and the thousands of other things that were just so much detritus to be ejected from my home. It all disappeared.

One of the biggest takers seemed to be a young boy, probably about eight years old. I saw him several times; maybe he was just the least experienced. Maybe in a few years, he’ll slip silently up and silently away and whoever it is who lives in my house now will never know he exists; never know he’s the one taking her stale bread and coffee grounds.

The first time I opened the metal door on my side of the 8 foot concrete wall, I found him, scrabbling around in the debris. He looked up at me with wide, brown, startled eyes, his face smudged, his blue shirt filthy and torn, before scuttling away backwards, like a crab. For my part, I stood in startled silence, the new trash bag dangling from my hand, my own eyes wide and surprised.

“Come back!” I wanted to say. “Come back, what do you need? I have it, I’ll give it to you!” But I spoke no Indonesian, and he was gone.

After that, I was embarrassed about the things I threw away. They were still trash to me; I didn’t want them, but I was embarrassed to set them out for him to find as treasures, squashed between the JC Penney catalog and the scrambled eggs my son hadn’t wanted for dinner.

I saw him often; he was always startled, frightened, quick to disappear. My Indonesian didn’t improve quickly enough for me to call to him; the best I could offer was a quick and encouraging smile. No one else knew of our encounters; had the day guard seen him, he would have chased the boy away. I spoke of him to no one; I wondered how I could help him.

And then I was required to get on a plane to go to America to have a baby. And after that I was required to stay in America when all family members were evacuated from the Embassy. And I never helped him, and I never spoke to him, and he has haunted me ever since.

Is he still finding treasures in the trash of the wealthy US Embassy employees who live in that house on Brawijaya street? Does he have a home? A family? Does he live on the street? What does he eat – or do I know and I am embarrassed to admit it?

And why was it so hard for me to think of a way to help him? Couldn’t I have come to the trash, every time prepared with… a bag of clean clothes, some money, something to eat that wasn’t already garbage?

My son is eight now, about the age of the boy in Jakarta. And I look in his smiling grey eyes and remember the startled brown ones from so long ago. And I imagine what it would take for me to send my boy out to dig through someone else’s trash for his supper.

And then I imagine what it would take to make sure nobody’s kids would have to dig through the trash for their supper.

What would it take?

Pasta: A Very Bad Idea

2008-10-12T16:12:00.001-06:00

Friday I had a brilliant idea: The boys had picked out a pesto recipe in a kids’ cookbook that they wanted to make. So I thought, why not make the pasta too?

I’ll tell you why not: it’s a bad idea.

I had this vision of the four of us sitting cheerfully at the kitchen table, cranking the handle of my pasta maker, laughing delightedly as the perfect strands of pasta poured from the machine.

You know it didn’t happen like that.

First, we had to run a piece of dough through the machine to remove the bugs and debris that had accumulated while the thing sat in our cabinet. And then persuade the little one not to eat that piece of dough. Meanwhile, the rest of the dough sat in a misshapen lump on the table, soaking up water from the air (atmospheric humidity in Costa Rica during a rain storm: 2,000%), and getting stickier and stickier. Which, of course, no one noticed until the machine was completely gummed up.

Six tries and four cups of flour later, we had a sheet of dough we could feed through the cutters. It came out looking like a birds’ nest. Back to the flour bin. I could have just dumped the whole bin of flour on the table. It certainly looked like I had. There was flour on me, on the table, on the walls, on the floor, ground into the carpet, coating the pasta – and it was still too sticky.

Fifteen minutes and one test sheet of pasta into the process, the oldest stormed off in a huff because it wasn’t working, I was waving floury hands and screaming at the little one who was eating all my dough, and we hadn’t even told the middle one what we were doing.

By now, it was personal. I was going to make that pasta. No matter what. So, the little one sat at the table and ate raw pasta dough while I grimly fed lump after lump into the machine. In an hour and a half, I managed to make about 4 ounces of pasta. The recipe said it made 8 ounces, but the little one kept eating it.

Per instructions, I laid it out on a clean dish towel to dry, and set about making the pesto. By this time, no one was interested in cooking, least of all me. But we were going to EAT that pasta. No matter what. So I chopped and blended while the little one banged happily on the table with a spoon.

Except he wasn’t banging on the table. He was banging on the pasta, I learned much too late. My lovely, semi-adequate strands of pasta which I had laid out on the table had been pounded into an undifferentiated glutinous mass. I dumped it in the boiling water anyway and we ate it, lumps and all. It wasn’t too bad.

I’ve got a pasta machine for sale. Dirt cheap. Guaranteed to provide fun family together time.

I’ll even pay shipping.

Exploding Laundry Soap

2008-10-11T19:53:00.002-06:00

San Jose, COSTA RICA -- You just know it’s going to one of those weeks when your laundry soap explodes.

Yesterday marked the beginning of what promises to be very much one of those weeks.

Since I have three small boys (= mucho mucho dirt) and laundry stain treatment in a spray bottle costs about $5 per bottle, I asked my husband to pick up a jar of pre-treatment gel the last time he was at the store. Which he did.

But, what we both thought was gel, was actually an evil, caustic powder which can be mixed with water to pre-treat stains.

Since, however, this powder doesn’t actually dissolve in water and it’s so caustic it eats the skin off my fingers, I needed a better solution than mixing it in a cup and scrubbing it into the innumerable stains my kids' clothing seems to attract.

My housekeeper Marisela came up with the (I thought) brilliant idea to mix some with water in an empty spray bottle. She did, and we congratulated ourselves on our cleverness. I went off to blog and she sat down with a well-deserved cup of coffee.

About 5 minutes later, a bomb exploded in my laundry room.

This evil powder apparently fizzes slightly (OK, a lot) when you put it in water. So much pressure had built up in the spray bottle that it exploded, showering all the walls in the laundry room with soapy water, and spraying 10 feet out the open door to coat my newly painted walls in the kitchen (more on that painting bit later). It covered walls, ceiling, clean laundry, floor, dirty laundry, ironing…. Hoo boy!

So, I guess it’s back to the drawing board. Maybe at this point, $5 for a bottle of properly mixed spray doesn’t sound so bad after all. At least it would be safe.

Maybe I can use this other stuff on the resident rooster.

Here chickie, chickie, chick!

How to Savor Every Moment of Life

2008-10-03T15:49:00.005-06:00

I have been driven recently to meditate on the transitory nature of existence and on how best to suck the marrow from each moment of what may be a violently foreshortened life.

I've been riding in Costa Rican taxis.

As far as world-wide standards go, these guys really aren't too bad. Egyptian taxi drivers are bad, they like to drive four abreast on a two-lane road. Forget seatbelts. Indonesian taxis are bad; they are often infested with cockroaches, spiders, and ants.

Costa Rican taxis, on the other hand, often have seatbelts, some of them even usable. They're always clean, and the drivers are very, very friendly and often work very hard to teach Spanish to the gringa, whether I wanted to learn or not. Is there such a thing as too friendly? There is if an impromptu Spanish lesson turns into an opportunity to learn phrases like, "Please watch out! You're about to drive off the bridge!"

The taxi drivers here have a reckless disregard for human life not seen since the days of Japanese kamikaze pilots. During one memorable ride, I spent more time staring out the front windshield (in horror) than the driver did. He persisted in flinging his arm over the front seat so he could more easily turn around and talk to me in lightning fast, incomprehensible Spanish; unfortunately, at the time, we were going around a corner, into the wrong lane, into a stream of oncoming traffic. Another time, in another taxi, we went around a corner so briskly that one of the passenger doors flew open. Fortunately I, not my un-seat-belted three year old, was sitting on that side of the car. I started asking each driver for his personal card when I got out of the taxi -- just so I'd know which driver not to ask for.

Why would a sane person ever inflict this not just on herself but on her children? In a word: No car. For months and months after we arrived here, we had no car. OK, maybe it was two and a half months. It felt like years. I grew up on a farm in rural south Texas; I've been driving something -- usually something very large and often pulling a cattle trailer -- since I was twelve. It rankles my free-spirited American soul a) to have no vehicle and b) to put my life in the hands of someone who's never been instructed in the use of a brake pedal.

And my husband wondered why I was tense, stressed-out, and grumpy when we first arrived? I spent so much time in taxis the first couple of months here that by about the second week, as soon the dispatcher heard my voice, she'd immediately say, "Mrs. Kelly? Condominio San Rafael? Someone will be there in five minutes."

But then, just a few short weeks ago, I had the happiest day of my life. Until that moment, the place of 'happiest day' had been held, no contest, by the day my first child was born. It was easily eclipsed by the day our car was delivered. I still sometimes jangle my car keys next to my ear just to hear that happy sound.

Today, I was sitting -- in the driver's seat in my car! -- at a stoplight. The stoplight was red. Five -- FIVE -- taxis sped past me through the left turn lane. Two went left, two went straight ahead, and one turned right. None of them slowed a bit. And I don't know why, but no one died.

As soon as our car arrived, I made it immediately and abundantly (and very diplomatically) clear to my husband that since we only have one car, it's mine. Never mind that he's the breadwinner and actually "needs" to go to work. He can take a taxi!

Chicken Soup for My Soul: Visions of Mayhem Dancing in My Head

2008-10-03T09:28:00.004-06:00

San Jose, COSTA RICA -- I am not a morning person. To put it mildly. My mother swears that once when she tried to wake me up early for something, I yelled mean things (her actual phrasing was "obscenities," but let's move past these petty details) and threw a pillow at her.

I have no memory of this. I have very few memories of anything that happens before 9 or 10 a.m., it's all a sleepy, miserable blur. On those mornings when I have been required to rise early, I have been known to fall asleep while walking, while talking, while driving, while attending important meetings at work (resulting in a lot of drool on my notepad. Not a way to impress the boss). When I was still working in an office, I would often have to disappear into the bathroom to take a five minute nap in private, after my boss objected to naps taken at my desk or on my computer screen. And this after 4 or 5 cups of coffee.

I just don't do mornings. I'm like the anti-Nike slogan: Just DON'T do it.

So, here we are in Costa Rica, on the outskirts of the largest city in the country. Of course we have neighbors: chickens.

"Oh, how sweet and rural," you think as you see them pecking cheerfully away under the swings at the playground, or fluttering into the brightly colored tropical foliage after some noxious tropical insect, or perching proudly on top of a wall.

You know what I think when I see those chickens? Chicken Soup. For my soul.

I have never before wished violence on another living creature -- I can't even stand to squash bugs (Well, I'll swat mosquitoes, but as harbingers of death, they don't count). But these chickens.... I lie awake at night dreaming of ways they could meet their end.

And why am I lying awake at night and into the wee hours of the morning? The rooster is on an hour timer.

Never having lived with chickens myself (aside from the few times I visited my grandparents growing up), I was not well acquainted with this aspect of their personality. Like most people of my generation, I believed what the nursery rhyme tells us:

Cock crows in the morn

To tell us to rise

And he who lies late

Will never be wise.

For early to bed,

And early to rise

Is the way to be healthy

And wealthy and wise.

Although, since I've already found reason to disagree strongly with the second part, I should have had my suspicions about the integrity of the first part of this little bit of wit and wisdom.

Cock does not crow in the morn. Or, more specifically, he does crow in the morn, but he doesn't stop there. He crows in the morn, at noontime, at even time, at night time, and most especially at that time that's after night and before morning when no sane person should be doing anything but communing with his pillow. That's when cock crows.

Our house is quite solidly built of concrete to withstand monsoon, earthquake and flood. No problem. The windows are the problem. They're just a thin pane of glass and all outside sounds sound like they are actually inside with you. And since the rooster lives just on the other side of our wall, I feel like he's right in bed with me. All night long.

My kids have noticed this too, and have been waking up at odd times: 3 a.m; 4:30 a.m; 5 a.m. They think it's time to go for the day and don't go back to sleep. Especially the little one. You can imagine how happy this makes me.

But, I've kept all these thoughts to myself, thinking that since I'm a foreigner here and a gringa to boot, I'd better just find a way to gracefully accustom myself to the way things are done here.

And then I talked to my landlord, a native Tico, the other day. We were outside and heard the rooster, and Don Manuel (a very gentlemanly, soft-spoken man) cursed fluidly in English and in Spanish. "That *&&#%%&@~!!!! rooster!"

My eyes were wide at the depth of his apparent hate -- not in surprise, but because I could tell that he, too, had been plotting death for one of God's little creatures.

"Do you know what the lady in house number 8 told me the other day?" He continued, clutching his head, "She said that rooster got into her courtyard! And do you know what she did?!" I shook my head, I didn't know, but I could tell it was something awful. "She took it back to its owner!! I told her, 'Lady, why didn't you strangle it? Why didn't you bring it to me and let me strangle it?'"

"Why didn't she toss it in front of a car?" I added.

"Exactly!" Exclaimed Don Manuel, and I knew I had found a soul-mate. "No! She had to take it back home! If ever I see that bird...." His voice trailed off, but he had a dreamy look in his eyes, and I knew he, too was envisioning a fitting end for that animal.

It appears we have formed a silent agreement, Don Manuel and I. So, if, the next time you see me, I appear both full and happy you will know that our fondest wishes have been fulfilled: chicken soup for our souls.

What happens when the smoke detector goes off in Embassy housing

2008-09-21T22:36:00.002-06:00

Escazu, COSTA RICA -- I hate to cook; let me just be frank. Eating: yes. I love it. Cooking: I'd rather listen to children scream. Of course, when I cook, I do get to listen to children scream. Maybe that's why I hate it so much.

So I have this theory about cooking: the hotter the temperature, the faster the thing will cook, and the sooner I'll be done (and the sooner the children will stop screaming). So I cook everything on my stovetop on heat level "10": eggs, meat, rice, delicate soups and sauces. Under my iron fist it all chars beautifully. And quickly.

Of course, it always burns. Whatever 'it' is, it always burns. This week it was pork chops. And this is what happens when you burn pork chops on the stove in Embassy housing.

First, the smoke detector goes off. Actually, several smoke detectors go off because the Embassy puts them in Every Room. Not a bad thing, I'm sure. Unless it's a false alarm.

Second, I shut off the smoke detectors by dragging a chair underneath them, detaching them from the ceiling, removing the battery.... you get the picture. Several times I do this. You'll notice that I haven't yet turned off the stove. Heavens no! I've got to get that pork chop cooked! (My housekeeper is smarter than I. She turns off the stove.)

Third, I hear another alarm upstairs. I dash upstairs as fast as my gimpy leg will allow (takes about 5 minutes to manage one flight of stairs), punch in the code, and cancel the house-wide security system alarm.

Fourth, the phone rings. It is the guard at the front gate, who fires rapid and very concerned Spanish at me. With a blank look, I hand the phone to my housekeeper and I learn the Spanish word for smoke: humo. I am to hear this word several times in the next few minutes.

Fifth, the doorbell rings. It is a guard from the Embassy who fires rapid and very concerned Spanish at me. With a blank look, I step aside and let my housekeeper explain. Again I learn the Spanish word for smoke: humo. They both refrain from using the Spanish word for idiot, which I later learn on my own: idiota.

Sixth, the phone rings again. It is the guard at the front gate. Again. Who fires rapid and very concerned Spanish at me. With a blank look, I hand the phone to my housekeeper, and I learn that the guard is a really nice guy. My housekeeper translates into slower Spanish for me, and I understand: he was just calling to say that if I ever have a problem, he's just a phone call away.

This does not change the fact that I feel like an idiota, the pork chops are burned to a crisp, and my house is full of humo.

The children come home and start screaming. But I make them eat it anyway: I worked hard to prepare that charcoal, and by gum they're going to enjoy it, humo and all.

SPI Update: Into the Attic, Part II

2008-09-10T21:03:00.004-06:00

The Other Side of Rural, TEXAS -- After a good, solid wrestle with the extension cord (I'm still alive, so I guess I won), and a long and painful crawl, I made it to the rat poop Mecca: the stove pipe hole.

It turns out that only a modest portion of the full amount of rat poop had actually rained down on Michael's head. The foundations of what must have once been a towering pyramid still remained, and it took me two trips into the attic to make it all go away.

It was as I was triumphantly retreating (and battling the extension cord) at the end of my second trip that I found what I had feared all along -- the source of all evil: rat townhouses.

Several generations of rats seemed to have lived out their pointless little lives here under the eaves of the Sunny Porch Inn. Little nests made of neon red yarn, paper doilies, cotton batting, wall paper (wall paper? What wall paper? There wasn't any wall paper in the house!), the bone from a T-Bone, and, of course, rat poop huddled between the rafters. One enterprising family had made their nest completely out of mud dauber nests. Sort of pathetic looking, really. I also found the rat central sewage system (I knew we should have gotten a bigger shop vac) and Rover.

Rover was wedged way, way, way back under the rafters, and seemed to have expired in the middle of the central sewage system. He was quite mummified and very stiff, his little feet were splayed out as if he had dropped suddenly dead in the middle of a sprint. The question is: was he running to the bathroom or away from it when time caught up with him? Was this a case of too little too late or too much too soon?

Anyway, he was dead. The tip of his tail broke off when I picked him up. Or rather, when the shop vac picked him up: Thank goodness for the extensions on the shop vac. Suction from the vacuum was just enough to pry him out of his final resting place (well, not so final after all) and carry him across the intervening space so I could dump him through the stovepipe hole into the living room below. More bits of his tail broke off and went skittering across the floor.

Rover eventually ended up being unceremoniously tossed onto a veritable mountain of things -- like the rat poop we shoveled out of the house -- destined for burning once the drought breaks (Say, next February. Or possibly the February after that. This being Texas, there's no guarantee the drought will ever break.). He will at least have a monumental funeral pyre befitting the mascot for the SPI.

The SPI was mostly clean; the attic was mostly clean. It was time to take the next step towards habitability: laying insulation in the attic.

Oh, boy, and I thought vacuuming rat poop was fun! What a great job that would be!

In case you're ever faced with a similar unpleasant task, here's my foolproof method for getting off the hook:

1) Have knee surgery;

2) Move out of the country.

It worked for me. Kathryn and her husband Doug weren't quick enough at getting either a surgeon or a passport, and they got to pull that duty.

Thanks, guys!

There are Ants in My Microwave OR "Toto, I Don't Think We're in Kansas Anymore."

2008-09-10T20:54:00.004-06:00

Escazu, COSTA RICA -- I'll bet you don't have ants in your microwave. Or, if you do, it's because you put them there (stranger things have happened).

I, apparently, have a small colony inhabiting the innards of my microwave. Whenever I open the door, 15 or 20 of these tiny denizens greet me, cheerfully waving their tentacles and scurrying about purposefully.

In response, I offer them a grim smile, insert my coffee cup, and turn it on. The results? Well, as Timothy so succinctly puts it, "They evaporate when we toast them!"

A few other clues we're not in Kansas (or Texas, as the case may be) anymore:

** A few days ago when my boys got off the bus, the bus chaperone (yes, the bus chaperone. That's all I know.) got off along with a third little boy. The chaperone gestured and spoke rapidly as my boys and I watched in confused amazement.

This new boy dashed into my yard. He dashed out of my yard. He dashed into the street. He dashed out of the street. The boy ran in a circle. The boy pulled down his pants and peed on my curb. And the chaperone's feet.

Then the two of them got back in the bus and they drove off into the sunset.

** I just gave my housekeeper a raise: now I pay her three dollars per hour.

** I went to the grocery store today where I bought mayonnaise in a plastic bag and paid $6 for a jar of jelly.

SPI Update: Into the Attic

2008-09-09T20:37:00.004-06:00

The Other Side of Rural, TEXAS -- I was right about getting to volunteer to vacuum out the attic.

Woo hoo.

I could just imagine how much fun I was going to have. If 50 lbs of rat poop fell out of one tiny hole in the ceiling, what could I hope to find still up there?!

I repeat: Woo hoo.

I envisioned a layer of rat poop 4 or 5 inches deep over the whole attic floor. I was sure our shop vac wasn't big enough; but then, there was no way we could get a shop vac big enough. A) They don't make one that big; and B) We were limited by the size of the access hole into the attic.

First, I had to suit up. I had had quite a close enough encounter with the bubonic plague during our last little sojourn at the SPI, so I opted for a high quality air filter -- the kind that you could safely wear during an Ebola outbreak. I chose it specifically because it said it filtered "organic material." Don't forget the bandana, tied babushka-style over my hair, to keep out the rat poop, and the plastic goggles. A long-sleeved men's shirt (approximately 24 sizes too big for me), jeans, knee pads, heavy leather work gloves, and tennis shoes (only because I didn't have any boots) completed my fashion ensemble. I'll post the picture eventually, or maybe you'll just have to wait and see me on the cover of Cosmo. Yeah, I looked that good.

We left the kids at home for this little adventure at Camp Rat-a-Poopee.

So, while my sister Kathryn and sister-in-law Jen picked up approximately 2 tons of paper trash, scrap metal, bricks, rodent carcasses, bottles (glass and plastic), barbed wire, and brush from the yard, I screwed my courage to the sticking point and climbed into the attic.

It was clean.

Well, almost. If you are willing to overlook several hundred pounds of mud dauber nests which, after about 10 minutes I was completely happy to do. There was a fine layer of dust everywhere, but no rat poop. At least not near the entrance.

So, I laid down my yellow brick road of plywood across the rafters and crawled deeper into the belly of the beast, pulling the shop vac (I had rigged it up with a "headlight" so I could see), extension handles for the shop vac, and 6 miles of extension cord.

There is one thing I will say in men's favor (well, actually there are a lot of things, but this one is to the point): They would never put up with the type of behavior from extension cords which I and countless other women routinely accept as normal.

The instant I plugged the cord in inside the house, the cord, which had been neatly coiled by my father, began to unwind and tangle under its own steam. I opted to ignore this poltergeist activity in the hopes that it would stop.

Ha! That just encouraged it. By the time I got the body of the cord up into the attic, it was a writhing, tangled mess -- It was looped several times around various parts of my anatomy, and I'm prepared to swear it tried to pull me out of the attic. I finally wrestled it off my arms and legs, pried it off of my neck and threw it onto the rafters, watching it closely all the while for signs of attack. Instead, it promptly leapt out of the access hole and coiled neatly on the porch below.

I hauled it back up, and it came unplugged.

I climbed back down, plugged it in, climbed up the ladder (keeping a firm hold on the cord so it wouldn't make a break for it again), looped it twice around the ladder, stuck out my tongue at it and said, "Nyah nyah, nyah nyah nyah!!!!"

It got back at me by twisting itself into knots; wrapping itself around the wheels of the shop vac; getting stuck under the plywood, on nails, and on protruding mud dauber nests; and taking every opportunity to twine around my legs, neck, and waist.

I do not like that extension cord.

Now, I have seen both my father and my husband handle extension cords. They do not have these problems. For them, the extension cords lie docilely, quietly, not moving until told to do so, and then they go exactly where they're wanted. You can almost see the tail wagging. Are there secret commands I'm not aware of? Do men have a telepathic connection with these things? I've never seen an extension cord try to strangle my husband; I, however, routinely face death by electrical cord whenever I run the vacuum cleaner.

Now the question is, is the problem with me, or with the extension cord?

Don't answer that.

And Now Back to our Regularly Scheduled Rat Poop

2008-08-28T10:36:00.007-06:00

(Back to) The Other Side of Rural, TEXAS -- So, we started cleaning out Sonny's house, which my sister-in-law Jen promptly dubbed "The Sunny Porch Inn." At this point, a rather an over-optimistic description, but it certainly gives us a goal.

The current defining characteristic for the SPI (Sunny Porch Inn): rat poop.

There was rat poop in the bedrooms, rat poop in the living room, rat poop in the bathroom and the closets. Rat poop in the carpet, on the floors, on the windowsills, in the drawers and light fixtures. And there was rat poop in the kitchen.

Oh, my, was there ever rat poop in the kitchen.

There was a large cabinet in the kitchen which housed a sink and cabinets and drawers. It was full of rat poop. By 'full' I mean: "Be careful when you pull out the drawers that the rat poop doesn't slosh over the sides." But the rat poop wasn't JUST inside the cabinet; once the cabinet had been removed, we had to use a SHOVEL to scoop up the rat poop that had accumulated under it. My six-year-old niece helped.

Did I mention we brought the kids along? Again, like spraying mesquite, this was an activity that was, perhaps, not best suited for young children. In fact, in retrospect, I realize it was an activity not best suited for anyone not wearing Nuclear-Biological-Chemical protective gear, an oxygen tank, and a protective face mask. But, this is Texas. The kids wore shoes.

Oddly enough, the children's interest began to flag after a couple of hours of sweeping rat poop, picking up rusty nails, prying up linoleum in the bathroom, and knocking down mud dauber nests. The mud daubers were the other main inhabitant of the house: they look like black wasps (although they don't sting), and they build nests out of mud that look like tiny adobe houses plastered onto the walls and ceilings. Well, I say tiny. Some of the nests were the size of softballs.

So, to revitalize and encourage us all, we decided to call our experience "Summer Camp."

I'll bet you never went to a summer camp like this. We were Camp Rat-A-Poopee; our campers ranged in age from 4-8, and we had lots of fun and games! Our team events were: removing bathroom linoleum with crowbars (the "Tiler" team), picking up rusty metal and broken glass in the front yard (the "Trash Masher" team -- they got to wear latex gloves) and removing and picking up rusty nails in the house (the "Nailer" team. This was the most popular job and there were some energetic contests for the limited number of claw hammers). We did not, however, offer swimming. Even I shudder to think what that might have entailed; the septic tank is very inexpertly buried just off the front porch.....

We even had a camp cheer and a camp song. Our cheer was based on the two noises most frequently uttered while cleaning: Ew!! (for rat poop) and Ooh! (for mud dauber nests):

Ew! Ooh!

Ew! Ew! Ew!

Ew! Ooh!

Ooh! Ooh! Ooh!

Gooooooo Camp Rat-A-Poopee!

(Shouted of course, with a great deal of gusto and the appropriate facial expressions.)

Our camp song was sung to the tune of "I'm Looking Over a Four Leaf Clover:"

I'm looking over

My dead rat Rover

That pooped on the kitchen floor!

He pooped in the hallway, he pooped door,

He pooped all over the bathroom floor.

No need explaining the poop remaining,

He pooped in the carpet too!

I'm looking over

My dead rat Rover

That pooped on the kitchen floor!

These two little interludes energized us quite a bit.

And we even had a real dead rat Rover, our camp mascot, I guess you could say. He didn't do much, though; just lay there looking stiff. Bits of his tail broke off and got kicked around in the living room for a while. We found him much later in the attic. More on that to come.

Once the top layer of rat poop had been removed from the living room, my brother Michael started prying off the hideous wooden panelling from the walls and ceilings in the living room. We noticed a slight discoloration and distortion in one section of the panelling which, we correctly surmised, was covering up the hole in the true ceiling for a stovepipe.

We did not correctly surmise the cause of the discoloration. We naively thought it was water damage from rain leaking through the stovepipe hole in the roof.

It was water damage, of a sort, but not from rain.

This particular location was, in fact, Rat Poop Central; the Mecca for all rats in a six county radius. It made what we found in the kitchen look positively sparse. The rats must have been 'visiting' here for decades; it was probably a main tourist attraction for "Rat Family Tours:" they'd ride in their little busses up to the front porch, swarm into the attic, and gaze in wonder at the Eiffel Tower of poop perched in that one little spot. Gallons of poop. Acres of poop. Pounds and pounds and pounds of poop.

And it all fell on Michael when he pried off the panelling. Rat pellets poured out, rolled down, clattered all over the floor, and made a mound ankle high in places. Michael was standing more or less right under the hole, but the panelling blocked the worst of it. Sort of.

Shortly after this little episode, Michael decided he'd had enough fun and games for one day, and went home to wash the rat poop out of his hair and ears and clothes and shoes. The rest of us were not far behind. We left the SPI enveloped in a swirling cloud of dust and, well, rat poop. The kids and I sat on the tailgate of the truck as we drove home, trying to air out, and shouting Ew! a lot. I fully expected us all to come down with the bubonic plague the next day. Imagine my relief when we didn't die. Still, we probably should have given the CDC a courtesy call.

When I got home, the first thing I did was to shower. Fully clothed. In the yard. I was just too filthy to even get into the bathtub until I'd washed off first.

The next day, we bought a shop vac. Because someone was going to have to go into the attic to clean up the acres of poop that were still up there.

And I had a feeling it was going to be me.

How to Get to School in Costa Rica

2008-08-26T10:08:00.002-06:00

Escazu, COST RICA, August 19, 2008 -- Today is Tuesday, the first day of school for the boys. Why Tuesday? Because last year, when the school schedule was set, no one knew for sure if Mother's Day would be celebrated on the 15th (Friday) or if it would be moved to the 17th (Monday), which it sometimes is, but not always. So, to be safe, school started on Tuesday. Mother's Day, by the way was on Friday and is a national holiday here. Not a bad idea.

So school started today. At 7:30 a.m. The bus was supposed to come at 6:15 a.m. I spoke to the bus guy last week. In Spanish, which I don't speak. But even so, I'm quite sure he said 6:15. The bus didn't come at 6:15. It didn't come at 6:30. It didn't come at 7:00 or 7:15. I called. Donde esta? Five minutes, he said. So we waited 15 minutes, and then I called the school. Oh, yes! One of the bus lines was delayed, I'll check on his progress and call you back.

In the meantime, I had been working another angle: trying to call a taxi. Not too hard. But, oh, wait: there are no addresses. How do I tell the taxi where to come? I'm smart: I went to the guard house for our condominio, and asked in my best, most polite gringo Spanish if he would please call a taxi for me. Taxi? Taxi? I don't have the number for any taxi companies. So, I went back home to get the number. I brought him the number. He dialed the number. Sorry Senora, it's impossible; I can't get an outside line on this telephone.

Hmmm. I hope there's never a fire.

So, I went back home and tried a few more taxi numbers and got either no answer or "estoy occupado," or indecipherable messages in Spanish. All the while, Timothy is lying on the wet driveway reading, Benjamin is tossing his snack bag against the house and occasionally running into the street, and Jonathan is sprawled all over the floor inside reading a book. At least they're not in my way.

About this time, the driver shows up to take my husband to work. Oops. My husband forgot to tell him he had the company car today. Never mind, since the driver was here, I pressed him into service, asking him to call a taxi for me. He tried three numbers with no success, and, clearly more interested in getting back to work than helping a crazy gringo lady with three kids, he left.

By now, I realized that if I persisted in clinging to my American-cum-German heritage ideas about how the world should work (i.e. that a school bus should show up on time, taxis should come when called, and company drivers should do just that), I was probably going to go into cardiac arrest by lunch time. So I let it go and started trying to enjoy the farce I unwittingly found myself starring in. The Costa Ricans have a saying: pura vida. I don't have any idea what it means. But in the few days I've been here, that phrase has already been tossed at me several times, usually with an expressive shrug of the shoulders and a smile when things don't run exactly as scheduled.

The Middle East runs on "In sha'allah. Bukra. Mumkin." (God willing. Tomorrow. Maybe.); Israel runs on "Rega" (Just you wait a minute.); Germany runs on "Jetzt!" (Now!). Costa Rica runs on "pure living." Whatever that is. But frankly, it doesn't sound too bad in comparison.

Anyway, after 2 more phone calls (thankfully in English) I tracked down the number for a private taxi company. And then I called the school because by now, it was after 8 a.m.

"Your kids didn't come on that bus? That bus arrived at school already; those kids are already here." Well, not all those kids. I had two of them in the driveway and one inside. So I called the taxi. He came, in a 1972 Ford Pinto. No seatbelts, and I quickly learned that the bedspread on the back seat was there to protect passengers from the soaking wet seat back there. It rained for 6 hours yesterday afternoon, and either his window was down or his car leaks. When he drove up, Jonathan took one look at the car and asked how I knew it was a taxi driver and not someone who was going to kidnap us.

Frankly, I didn't have a good answer to that question.

I didn't care. I gave him the directions I had gotten from the school, and we were there by 8:30. On the way, we passed three goats on the side of the road and a herd of cows on the hillside and several busses carrying advertisements for medication to correct certain specific medical conditions pertinent to the male half of the population. Thank goodness Jonathan doesn't know he can read those words in Spanish. Then Alejandro -- the taxi driver and my new best friend -- took Benjamin and me to Benjamin's school, and brought me home. He's coming back in 15 minutes so I can go get Benjamin, and I've already asked him to come back tomorrow morning. He might even come in time to take the boys to school, although the school has assured me that the bus will come at 6:15.

Who says you need fluency in a language? So far today, using only 4 verbs, 2 personal pronouns, and an odds-and-ends handful of nouns I picked up somewhere, I've negotiated with 2 taxi drivers, the guard at our condominio (about 5 times), the taxi dispatch, 3 more guards at the school, 2 preschool teachers and the administrator, the guys who just came to bring bottled water, and the guy who is now crawling past my bedroom window and onto my roof to fix a considerable leak in our living room ceiling.

Speaking of leaks. When I say it rained for 6 hours yesterday, please don't make the mistake of thinking that it misted, rained gently, or even rained "really hard" yesterday for 6 hours. It poured; not cats and dogs, more like tigers and wolves. The heavens opened up, and for 6 solid hours (and then again in the late evening) all the fury of an angry tropical rain spent itself over our house. I think world sea level is going to rise an inch or so by the time all this water makes its way to the ocean. It was the kind of rain that in 15 minutes will turn any flat area into a non-navigable lake and any hilly area into a raging torrent, the kind of torrent that rips up asphalt, rolls small boulders into the middle of the road, and carves canyons the size of the Grand into every hillside. It rained like that for 6 hours yesterday. It wasn't even a storm. Just rain.

Our home has a tin roof and several large skylights, so the cumulative noise effect of tons of water dropping onto our house is rather like being inside a jet engine while it's running. We have to shout to make ourselves heard across the kitchen table (which is nowhere near any part of the roof) and it's impossible to talk on the phone.

One of our skylights (it's about 8 feet square) is leaking. Just a small leak on one end, but there was so much rain, that by the time I found the leak there was about a gallon of water on the floor. I don't have that many containers, so I took the trash bag out of my single trash can (the garbage sack is now pirouetting all over the kitchen floor) and placed it under the worst leak. I collected nearly 2 gallons of water.

It sounds like the guy on the roof just dropped the ladder up there. There may be more leaks to fix now.

*******

And the bus driver just called. He still can't find our house, and it's raining again, so I can't hear (or understand) a thing he's saying. I could hear him negotiating with the students in the bus, asking if any of them speak English. He found one I could communicate with him, and I offered directions to our house. Again. I suppose third time's the charm because the bus just pulled up and is disgorging two wet elementary school students who bear a striking resemblance to my kids.

And just think, we get to do it all over again tomorrow!

It's Tuesday so it Must be Costa Rica

2008-08-22T10:42:00.008-06:00

We interrupt our regularly scheduled program on cleaning rat poop out of the Sunny Porch Inn (see previous posts) to bring you this special update.

Escazu, COSTA RICA, August 17, 2008 -- We arrived in paradise on Tuesday, August 12 in the middle of an absolute downpour that lasted all afternoon and most of the night. For someone who has just spent nearly a month in drought-stricken South Texas (even the 2 hurricanes that passed through while we were there didn't do much to lift the drought), it looked like a profligate waste of water. And to think it does that every day here during the rainy season (which lasts about 8 months of the year).

Our home here is amazing -- spacious, bright, beautiful. I feel so colonial: There's even "maid's quarters" (a tiny bedroom and a bathroom with no hot water and a window that won't open) off the laundry room, which is right off the kitchen. We will have a maid (there's no way I can mop the 6 acres of floors in this house every day, which is what it seems to need), but she won't live there. I think that's going to be one of our guest bedrooms.

I really do feel like I'm in paradise so far. I think our condominium (in the U.S. we would say "gated community") is surrounded on all sides by barrios and businesses, but all I can see from my 2nd floor window are trees and what looks (to my untrained eyes) a lot like jungle. In the mornings, before the clouds roll in, I can see the mountains to the north of San Jose (Escazu is a suburb of the capital). The air is clean and almost crisp; the mountains are carpeted in thick, dark green, the fluffy white clouds which will turn into rain in the afternoon are just starting to peek over the hills, and there's a Wal-Mart just 2 miles away. There's also Office Depot, Ace Hardware, Pizza Hut, Tony Roma's and TGIF. I've even seen signs that Domino's Pizza has a presence here (in the form of a pizza box discarded alongside the road). I wonder if they deliver and how do you say "extra large pepperoni" in Spanish?

But here's the rub: how do I tell them where to come? There are no street signs in this country. None. People keep asking me where I live and I say "I have no idea," because I don't. Printed address labels were presented to us when we arrived. They say something like: "Condomino Santa Maria, 300 meters east of HiperMas (that's Wal-Mart) on the hill next to the auto shop." That's my address. I'll have to take a map with me if I ever go in a taxi and get the driver to mark my location when I get in the car.

The best part of paradise so far: cheddar cheese. Fourteen years I've lived overseas without cheddar cheese. It may be the most popular kind of cheese on the planet (I take that statistic from a Monty Python skit), but no place I've ever been has it. They have 3 or 4 brands here, and I've been through about 2 pounds of it already.

The worst part of paradise so far: the sun comes up at 5:30. Every morning. And it sets around 6. Every evening. The sun comes UP around 5:30, but the roosters and dogs get going by 4 a.m., and it's usually good and light by 4:30. Every morning. This morning, on top of that, there was a family of birds that sounded like it was doing construction on our house at 5 (I'm sure they had several hammers and maybe a little saw), and they were joined by a second family of birds having a major domestic disagreement at 5:15. I think that to stay sane, we're going to have to revise our understanding of "early morning" to something like 3 a.m.: if you get to sleep past that, you've slept in. I'm also going to get some very noisy fans to put in the bedrooms, because sometimes the roosters get confused and ratchet up to full throttle at 1 or 2 a.m. and don't stop until noon.

And speaking of wildlife, Jonathan has already had a close encounter with some kind of tropical wasp (black and white, makes your arm swell up to the size of a sweet potato and leaves a bite hole the size of Nebraska); I spotted a chicken on the playground outside our house this morning (and what do you know, there it is again. Actually, I think this is a different chicken, so mark that down as TWO chickens); we passed a dead possum on the road this morning; and at church, the lady behind us was holding a chihuahua, which was wearing a blue coat. (The dog was better dressed than I was.) So, if this is life in the city, I wonder what it's like out in the sticks??

The Sonny Porche Saga Draws to a Close

2008-08-10T21:24:00.007-06:00

The Other Side of Rural, TEXAS -- Sonny seems to have been unfortunate all the way around with mechanical implements. There was a small yard around Sonny's house, and, being a good renter, he took care of it the best he could. He even mowed it occasionally.

This was a dangerous activity however. This house is at the back of the back of beyond, where the standard rules of civilization are often relaxed in favor of convenience. Before Sunny moved in, it had been inhabited for almost 5 decades by a bachelor whose idea of "taking the trash to the curb" was to burn the small stuff and toss the larger things (wheelbarrows, washing machines, baling wire, dead rodents) out into the yard. In any event, the nearest thing to a curb was a quarter mile away, and there's no trash service anyway.

During one of Sonny's mowing expeditions (perhaps not such a bright idea after all) something became entangled in the mower blades. Hardly surprising. So, Sonny turned the machine over to fix the problem. He forgot, however, to turn it off first. I'm not sure how many fingers he lost, but it was more than one. I wonder if he went back to the veteran's hospital?

There's not much more to tell about Sonny. He played the guitar (one with a Hawaiian beach scene air brushed on the front), and once sang me a sad love song he had written for his lost love; I was in no way a stand-in for her, I just happened to be a convenient audience. And he must have been a hard drinker because when we finally got around to cleaning out his house, we found that he'd used half-gallon whiskey bottles (all empty) as door stops in every room.

Sonny and his mama are gone now, and the house has been empty for a long time. Well, not completely empty. A small army of rats moved in (perhaps before Sonny moved out), and just warn the CDC that if bubonic plague breaks out in the near future, look to Sonny's house as the vector.

Wait till you hear what "cleaning" this place entailed.

Guns 'N' Neighbors: More of the Sunny Porche Saga

2008-08-07T19:56:00.003-06:00

The Other Side of Rural, TEXAS -- Life with Sonny wasn't all fun and games with the go-cart, however. It seems he had a hidden side, full of dark, turbulent passions.

He loved a woman.

I think she was a waitress at the La Mancha Restaurant, and she must've been quite a looker because Sonny's neighbor cast amorous looks in her direction. But Sonny dealt with his rival in his typical "take the bull by the horns," "stick the screwdriver in the spark plug" manner.

He shot him.

It was just in the leg; apparently, Sonny couldn't see much better than his mama. Maybe his glasses were fogged up. But, in any event, he missed all the vital organs & just hit him in the leg.

The wheels of justice turn, even in Rural, Texas, and Sonny spent some time behind bars in the Big House for his little peccadillo. (In Texas, if you're gonna shoot a man for something like this, it's generally accepted that you should at least catch him in flagrante delicto; even in Texas we have standards.) But, being a dutiful son, he didn't want his mama to worry about him.

So, he told her he was going to the Veteran's hospital so he could have the metal plate in his head adjusted. For three years.

She believed him.

Guns 'N' Roses: The Sunny Porche Saga Continues

2008-08-05T08:52:00.004-06:00

The Other Side of Rural, TEXAS -- (I thought I'd better start putting a dateline in my blogs. Sometimes even I don't know where I am.) This one would actually better be described as "Guns 'N' Mesquite," but not everyone knows what mesquite is. Or huisache (pronounced "wee-satch" in Texas). They both have thorns, grow like weeds, and, if left unchecked will slowly (or not so slowly) fill a pasture with their kith & kin, making it generally impossible for cattle to graze, grass to grow, etc. Huisache is worse than mesquite: mesquite, if left alone, will grow into a fair-sized tree, and early Texas settlers, I'm told, used the seeds (or the pods around the seeds) to make jelly. The wood is also an amazing flavoring agent for smoking meat or barbecuing.

Huisache, well, I don't know of any uses for huisache. So we try to get rid of it. Bulldozing and shredding are common frontline tactics. But, unless you keep up the shredding at regular intervals, it just keeps coming back. So, another frontline tactic is to mix a noxious weed killer with the right amount of diesel, load it into a hand-held (or truck-mounted) sprayer, and tromp forth into the wilds, spraying every thorn you see.

This was a regular summer chore for the kids in our family, and if you're thinking "That doesn't sound like something kids should be doing!" You're right. But, this being Texas, it's a normal past-time for lots of kids (ages 8 and up, mostly); along with baling hay, running tractors, shredding, driving trucks, branding cattle..... and all sorts of other things that, in more civilized parts of the world are done only by bonded, licensed, insured adults who are receiving at least a minimum wage payment (with benefits), and who are wearing a wide range of protective clothing.

We wore boots in case we ran into snakes.

But the snakes turned out to be less of a bother than the neighbors.

My brother Michael (why do the interesting things always happen to Michael?) was about 8 at the time and he was spraying up near Sonny's house. Sonny wasn't home at the time, but his mama was. She was sitting on the front porch either crocheting covers for tissue boxes or making fig preserves. Judging from the number of tissue box covers and fig preserves she gave my parents, both of these activities were full time jobs for her.

The fence line for the pasture Michael was working in ran just a few yards away from Sonny's front porch, and that's where Michael was working. Mrs. Porche was approximately 200 years old and blind as a bat (she had to be, to use the neon-red yarn she favored). But apparently she could hear well enough. Sort of.

"Who's there?" She hollered.

"It's me, Mrs. Porche; Michael, your neighbor."

"Who?" She hollered again.

"Me, Michael, your neighbor!" Michael shouted from 10 yards away.

Mrs. Porche picked up a shotgun. "I don't know who you are, but you'd better get off my property!" She bellowed back, cocked the gun, and fired.

Fortunately, since she was blind, she missed.

She cocked the gun again, and Michael, not trusting to blind luck again, dropped the sprayer and ran.

All the way home -- a good mile, across rough ground, through two barbed-wire fences, a cattle tank, several acres of huisache, and a herd of cows. I don't think he even stopped to crawl through the fences; he was trailing a length of barbed wire when he got home.

My parents found some other places for Michael to spray after that.

I think my dad went to fetch the dropped sprayer. I'm willing to bet he called first.

(And tomorrow our story continues with a new episode: "Guns 'N' Neighbors")

And so it begins

2008-08-04T12:22:00.004-06:00

Eight grandchildren. Three children, three in-laws, and 2 grandparents.

Sixteen people under one, four-bedroom roof.

Our minds working as one, my sister, sister-in-law, and self proclaimed that we would be remodeling Sonny's house for future use as a camphouse or overflow sleeping area.

Before I tell you what, exactly, a remodel involves, let me tell you about Sonny's house. The metal numbers tacked up over the door lead me to believe it was built in 1954, probably by my grandfather. A Mr. Rice lived there at the beginning of my consciousness. Some time after he died, Sonny Porche (pronounced 'sunny porch', of course) moved in with his mama.

Sonny was in his 60s when I met him. He wore brown plaid shirts with plastic mother-of-pearl snaps; pointy toed, shiny, high-heeled cowboy boots; and a plastic straw cowboy hat with a pink chicken feather in it. He paid my parents minimal rent for the two-bedroom house, and some of the most memorable moments of my childhood were the days he'd come to pay the rent. He usually brought his friend Cordell, who also wore a plastic straw cowboy head perched firmly on his head, but I rarely had a chance to see more of Cordell than that because no matter how hot the day or how long Sonny stayed visiting with my parents, Cordell never left the truck. He sat in the truck -- motor off, windows up -- parked in the sun. And in the heat of a South Texas summer, surviving just 30 minutes of that was a feat that even my young mind recognized as nothing short of miraculous. But Sonny was usually there a lot longer than 30 minutes.

For example, there was the time Sonny helped my brother Michael 'fix' our go-cart. (I can't believe now that my parents let us ride that thing -- without helmets! -- but, boy, was it fun!) Sonny examined the recalcitrant machine and decided the problem was with the spark plugs. So, my dad being absent at the time, Sonny stepped in as the man of the situation, and took charge by grabbing a screw driver.

"OK, fella. Give 'er a pull!" He called, sticking the point of the screwdriver into the point of the spark plug.

"But, Mr. Porche, I'm not sure that's a good idea." Michael was a bit more cautious.

"Naw, this'll fix it up. Let 'er rip!" He said, indicating that Michael should pull the starter cord.

So, Michael dutifully yanked the starter cord.

I wasn't there, but to here Michael tell it, Sonny's arms and legs flew out in different directions, his gold front teeth sparkled blue with electricity, and his pink chicken feather went up in a puff of smoke.

When he'd picked himself up off the ground, fanned himself a few times with his smoking hat (which he then replaced firmly on his head), Sonny picked up the screwdriver again and re-applied it to the spark plug.

"OK, son," he said, his voice quavering slightly, "Yank it again." He clamped one hand on top of his hat for safety. "But this time, pull it real slow."

And through all this, Cordell never left the truck.

Maybe he was smarter than we thought.

(Tune in next time for the "Guns 'n Roses" installment of the Sonny Porche saga.)

Zagreb Traffic Moment

2008-01-17T15:30:00.000-06:00

I was driving my son to preschool recently, and I tried to turn left.

But I couldn't, because an oncoming car had already turned and was stopped, exactly where I wanted to turn.

The oncoming car was stopped, because it was blocked by a delivery truck that was trying to pull off of the sidewalk and into the road.

But the delivery truck couldn't move, because a car was blocking its path. The car blocking the delivery truck wanted to turn exactly into the the space occupied by my car.

My car couldn't move back because of a long line of cars behind it. It couldn't turn left because of the above-mentioned problem. There was no right turn (there was a sidewalk on the right, which is generally considered an acceptable venue for short travel spurts, but the sidewalk was full of parked cars) and it couldn't pull forward because a bus was in the way.

The bus couldn't move because a trash truck in front of it was having difficulty pulling on to the road from the right: cars parked along both sides of an access road had left between them space equal to the width of the trash truck plus six inches.

So, we all sat and waited while men piled out of a nearby pub to offer suggestions, the trash truck pulled in its mirrors, and the driver inched forward at the speed of basalt. I saw the bus driver flick a cigarette out the window.

We were late to school that day.

Ahhh, Slovenia!!!

2008-01-14T15:29:00.000-06:00

We spent most of Saturday at Terme Čatež on the "Thermal Riviera" just inside the Slovenian border. Clean thermal water (about 32 degrees Celsius) fills endless indoor pools: baby pools, wave pools, pools that look like rivers, pools that extend outside, pools with waterfalls, and pools with slides. The best part, of course, was that the boys tired themselves out completely. A side benefit was that I had a great time.

I always love going to Slovenia; as soon as we cross the border, the sun inevitably comes out from behind a cloud, and what were straggly fence lines and scraggly fields in Croatia shake themselves out to stand up straight and tall. If Croatia was the fulcrum of Europe in the medieval wars with the Turks (and it was), Slovenia was on that edge of the lever which leaned definitively towards the Austrian Empire. Some of the orderliness and general prosperity of the Germanic mindset seems to have taken root in Slovenia in a way that it never has in Croatia.

Of course, the Croats had a much harder time of it than the Slovenes since, during the Turkish predations of the Middle Ages Croatia absorbed most of the onslaught, suffered most of the raids. The Croats still seem to feel this on a rather personal level; one Croatian I know pointed out several hilltop churches in the Zagorje, mentioning casually that they dated from the time of the "Turkish Threat." I had only lived here a few months at the time; I thought she might be referring to something as early as WWI. She was actually referring to the 15th and 16th centuries.

It's odd for me, having been born in a country that is so proud of having existed for "more than!" 200 years "already!" (exclamation points a necessity), to consider that some of the memory of this part of the world extends to the "Turkish Threat" and beyond. In fact, Byzantium itself is still present in places, and even further back, remains of the Roman Empire peep through the overburden of centuries.

It's been this way every place we lived; I felt it most palpably in Israel, where it was really impossible to understand current local politics unless one understood the position of 'X' group or 'X' village under the reign of the Nabateans or the Romans or the Persians or the Turks -- or sometimes all of the above and then some. But even in Germany, references to this Medieval king or that Roman fort were always cropping up, somehow defining some facet of the here and now.

It's easy to believe that history began when I was born. Or just maybe it began when my parents or grandparents were born. But their stories! Ah, their stories go back much much farther; even in the U.S. And in this corner of the world, where family histories are rarely severed as completely as an Atlantic crossing could do, the stories go back generations and generations and encompass not just families but villages, cities, whole regions.

Those stories are the best kind of history, I think: They're the truest (not always the most correct, that's a different issue); stories of how people lived and died, how they struggled and 'made it'. Or didn't make it. These are stories that mean something; that give me an understanding of my place in the wider world.

And that brings us back to the idea that history began when I was born. And I'm afraid that for my children and my children's children that may become the truth, and they'll have no idea who they are in the big picture. We are losing our connection with the 'grandparent' generation in my family; my children won't have any stories except the histories they hear in school. And those histories may be quite correct, but if there's no truth in them, what's the point?

Winter Lace

2007-12-22T14:45:00.000-06:00

We went for a walk in the forest this evening. It's been foggy here for the past week, and the temperature has never gotten above freezing, resulting in the most glorious display of frost I've ever seen. Every twig, every branch, every clinging leaf was coated with ghostly, glittering diamonds, some almost an inch long. Frost crystals that have been slowly growing for days coat the surface of every thing exposed to the air. At a touch, they crumbled on my glove into brittle splinters. Up close, they look like snowflakes writ large. From far off, they look like a fairy veil draped over the sides of the hills.

Driving in Zagreb, Croatia. Yikes!

2007-12-20T03:21:00.000-06:00

(This is a piece I wrote for fun some time ago. It was an easy way to open up my blog. Welcome!)

Shortly after our arrival here, I learned what may be the single most significant phrase in the Croatian language: “Osim Tramvaj” Trams only. I decoded these two mysterious words just about the time I drove my car into the middle of the largest pedestrian area in downtown Zagreb. Surrounded by pedestrians, and faced by an oncoming tram, I had a revelation about what that cryptic, 6-inch high sign I’d passed two blocks back meant. It was quite a challenge to turn my car around — across two sets of tracks, into the square, scattering pigeons, through throngs of pedestrians (who didn’t seem to notice my car or try to move to avoid it), and with a tram bearing down on me. No one died, however, and I’m learning that any trip into downtown Zagreb which does not result in loss of life or limb — no matter what else happens — is a Very Successful Trip.

Let me describe a typical Zagreb street scene for you: In the far right lane is a tram — the tracks are exactly flush with the road and the trams travel on the road. Or do the cars travel on the tracks? A metaphysical question you don’t have time to ponder because the tracks are turning left in front of us, and the tram is about to take off the front bumper of your car. As the tram passes, hundreds of pedestrians take advantage of the slowing down of the rest of the traffic to rush into the street, rather like a herd of wildebeest. Are we at a crosswalk? No, we are not. But the pedestrians are crossing anyway. Slowly, traffic starts to move again. There’s another tram ahead of us, but for now, the right lane is clear, so a caravan of cars quickly (and illegally) fills the far right lane and zips past us (at about 50 mph) on our right to gain a few car lengths. Watch out! That man wearing bedroom slippers, using a cane and walking his poodle is shuffling out in front of you! Finally, we catch up to the tram again; I think it took some paint off our right hand side when it passed us. Fortunately, and rather unusually, the lane we’re in is wide enough for an entire car. Except, the traffic ahead of us seems to be moving slowly. No, it’s stopped completely. Why is that man leaving his delivery truck in the middle of the road!? Oh, these people are parked in the middle of the road. Of course! Why didn’t I think of that? And now the tram is turning in front of us from the other direction. Are there signals? Is there any warning? No there is not. Are there pedestrians? Yes there are. Never at the intersections, but everywhere else: walking, shuffling, pulling hand carts, talking on cell phones, stopping in the middle of the road to talk on cell phones, standing in the middle of the road to point out the sights to their children..... If you’re breaking out in a cold sweat at this point, you’re starting to catch on.

And that’s just downtown. Zagreb itself lies on a very flat plane next to a river, but just north of town, part of the Alps trickle into and out of existence. And, being the Alps — even if just the tail end of the Alps — they do it in pretty spectacular fashion. The hills are certainly higher than anything I’ve ever lived near, and they all seem to shoot straight up. Driving in the downtown area is LOTS more fun than driving in the ‘country’. You Could Not Believe the “country” roads here: I’ve been driving them for a couple of weeks and I still don’t believe them.

The main roads are actually pretty good: it’s usually possible for two cars to pass. If you’re careful, you won’t even lose any paint off the sides of the car. Unfortunately, these roads don’t take you anywhere you want to go. All the main roads in the hills north of town (where we live) run north-south. Which is fine, if you want to go north or south. However, I frequently want to go east or west, and this leads to problems because it becomes necessary to take small, back roads. The first time I drove on my own (to my son's preschool, which lies, unfortunately, west of here), I got hopelessly lost — and this was with a map and after following someone the first time.

In desperation (after having passed the same intersection — and the same women sitting at the bus stop — 4 times), I ended up turning down a road that gave me nightmares for three nights: 3 inches wider than my car, high stone walls on either side, hairpin curves. And this was a two-way street! I know, because I met an oncoming vehicle which was on-coming at about 60 mph! I’ve since found a better way to drive to Timothy’s school: the narrowest stretch of road is a good 8 inches wider than my car, and in many places, it’s possible for two cars to pass — if one of them goes into the ditch. Except there are no ditches: all the roads are bordered by stone walls, fences, buildings, or sheer cliffs.

Shortly after we bought a car, I went on a short exploratory side trip near our house, just to get some idea of the lay of the land (and to find some new east-west routes). I vow I will never do that again. I ended up on a road that was exactly the width of my car and which, after leading me past a picturesque (read: falling down) half-timbered building, seemed to plunge over a cliff. My palms got sweaty on the steering wheel looking down that road. I could see houses farther down, with cars parked in front of them, so, theoretically anyway, it is possible to drive down there. But all I could think as I looked over the edge was, “If I go any farther, gravity is going to win, and I’m going to shoot off into space like Evel Knievel.” Never argue with gravity. It’s a cosmic force. So, I used the wide space in the road formed by a parking space (you’d call it a curb) to turn the car around, and I’m never going back.