Vamos

Vamos a Buenos Aires en 2-3 dias para mirrar los posibilidades de nos vidas ahora.  Hay muchos.

Grayish-brown, more organic mud.

Vacation went well until the last day when I had to organize all my stuff and leave in forty minutes.  I've immediately landed in a new sausagefest with Damien, who lives in Epuyen and is engages in various bio-construction activities in the area.  This week we did the finishing work on the adobe walls of a kitchen-and-bath annex beside the yurt of Julio the tentmaker and his partner.  They have a new baby, which I guess makes cooking and cleaning in a tent less fun and more impossible.

Finishing adobe walls is done by mixing three parts sand to one part clay, adding water and straw to the desired consistency, and smearing that shit on there with hands or tools.  It doesn't stick automatically but I gather from Damien that I caught on rather quickly my first time.  I drew heavily on my experience finishing drywall, but brown mud is much more fun because the finished surface is round rather than flat, which leaves much more room for error and art.

My boots have new soles!

This is inordinately exciting after 2 months of worrying that I would have to go barefoot.  It only cost about 40 bucks and took 3 days.  Now to see if it lasts...

Officiality often adds unnecessary freight to situations.

It's impossible not to make plans, and it's impossible not to change plans.  Max and I regularly adjust our plans for the next thing.  A new plan can knock our thoughts out of the narrow ruts we otherwise track: "We don't have enough money for anything." "We have to work really hard all the time." "We have to stay here." "We have to get out of here."  It's amazing how the possibilities of the world open up after we have a change-of-plan conversation, even if our decision is to not change things (as we were previously planning to.)  It's impossible not to tell other people about plans.  Telling makes them feel official, even inevitable, so we are compelled to share the changes as well, just so as we can actually believe them.  Living out of a backpack necessitates this; permanence is an illusion anyway.

Diary of Some Socks

In my box
In the flood zone,
I don't know how.
Wore them here,
One got chewed out.
4x darn
Good plastic yarn.
Forgotten up there,
But now she can wear them.
And I can feel good about it:
 I'd give you more than old socks
 If you asked.

¡Thanks For The Stuff Mom!

Taking a vacation with Max's dad Kevan.  Same place, but different headspace: every day what can I do to be happy and relaxed, rather than work for food and dry backs.  Blanca Rosa, La Nona, Rekó, Piltri, Shanti.  This month I like Bioconstruction, next month I like English education.

"A la gallina, todo es igual."
-Don Cheno

"There's a cow somewhere."
-Max

"I don't know the meat and potatoes of it, I just know you should eat it."
-Tim K

Leche

Yo quiero comer y comer y comer,
No es importante como o donde,
Solo que estoy haciendo
Algo con leche.

Mi druga es blanca,
Fria o calentita,
Yo solo queria
Grasa de leche.

My vocation is a religious presupposition;
Everyone's sure they know my position.
I'll lie but never fly higher
Than the sky from which I'd die trying.

Some Thoughts On Permanance

When I was so young that my memories are mostly in pictures, my dad was renovating our house to remove a carefully-mitred, plastic-brick-veneer half-wall from our living room.  As he didn't have matching oak flooring at the time, he patched the resulting gap temporarily (and I remember him explicitly classifying it as such) with particle board.  -17 years later in discussion of another small extension of the same floor, my mom stipulates that she wants it done right this time, "Not like over there."  Without hesitation I respond, "But that's just temporary."

Last year while visiting some friends in ME, I assisted them in accepting the dubious gift of a neighbor's broken hot tub.  The brothers and I intended to place it roughly in the intended location in front of the house until such time as it could be hooked up.  -Their mother, realizing the probable permanence of the situation, comes out and insists that we carefully level it and orient it properly.  "But why," we protest, "it's just temporary."

Everything is permanent: I'm just sewing this patch on 'for now', but I'm not going to do it 'for real' until this one breaks (and it still hasn't.)

Everything is temporary: I want to hang this axe 'forever', but when it does fly off the handle, even if it's tomorrow, I can rehang it.

Una Structura Segura

Esta Semana estamos haciendo un invernadero en la chacra communitaria Rio Azul.  Es muy grande, 20m de largo, 4m de ancho, 3m de alto.  La familia en Los Repollos tiene un tiempo dificil ahora, y vamos a otro lugares, possible a Rio Azul para unas semanas.  Los dos dias pasado hice un poco de calor (para invierno official, 2 semanas adentro ahora) perfecto para trabaja duro en mover truncos y piedras al sitio.  Max y yo queremos permanecer en Sudamerica hasta Marzo, por supesto, no hay plan seguro.