poco a poco

Here’s a random list, a little picture perhaps of what I’ve been up to…
I’ve been:
-Listening to a lot of great Spanish music and dancing alone in my room..
-Eating a lot of hot-dog burgers (hotdogs sliced on a burger bun with onion, tomato and condiments, excellent as it turns out, give it a shot)
-Fielding a lot of questions from my roommate’s nephew about how many people sleep in my bed due to how many pillows I have (there are 3)
- Dar(ing) the Vuelta aka walking around my town chatting with people.
- Accepting plastic flowers from taxi drivers…
- losing my enthusiasm for doing my own laundry, my hands hurt and I am ruining my clothes. I may have to start outsourcing it.
- accidentally getting into Glee (thanks KC), consequently singing in my room a lot.
- Learning to play guitar! My fast-track guitar books arrived! Thanks Beasleys!
- Skyping with my friends and family a bit. Good times.
- Getting PUMPED up for the big 2-4.
- Feeding leftover meat to Rico to try and buy his love and loyalty (it worked with Loba…)
- Drinking a lot of tea, I may be a tea person now.
- Picking up crying children who’ve fallen in the street and putting them on the sidewalk to finish crying in a safer location (my guide book advised me against this; turns out Guatemalans are not keen on strange gringos picking up their children but I couldn’t just leave her with her skinned elbow to be hit by a car…didn’t seem right; hope this doesn’t come back to haunt me…yikes).
- looking for chocolate bananas like it’s my JOB. I don’t know when Jacaltenango decided that ChocoMangos were the new thing but, I don’t like it.
- Killing cockroaches and being eaten alive my mosquitoes. The new fragrance I’ve been sporting is, “OFF, deep woods” if you want to experience what it’d be like to be around me…just take a whiff of it; I would say it’s my most notable characteristic of late.
- Peeling…I got burnt out at the Pila doing my laundry because I’m dumb and thought it was early enough in the morning that I didn’t need to put on sunscreen. FALSE.
- Watching a lot of movies in Spanish…I don’t know if this is helping my Spanish or just confusing me. I figure it can’t hurt right?
- Thinking a lot about the future and what I want to do with my life. Jury’s still out.
- Missing my friends and family A LOT!
- Getting worse and worse at doing crossword puzzles. I hope it’s because I am thinking more in Spanish…yes. That’s what I’m going to attribute this loss to…
- Not eating whole bags of marshmallows. WINNING!
- wearing black velvet hair scrunchies. It’s pretty boss.
- being handy. I screened-in my windows with mosquitero (screen material) so now I can keep my window open without opening a mosquito juice bar in my room.
- doing lots of Kristin-y organizational things, spreadsheets, word-documents etc. to organize all of my healthy schools contact information and directions etc. good busy-work; I actually feel like I’m doing stuff… for like a second.
- Listening to a lot of Demetri Martin. He’s a funny dude.
- wearing SPF 60+ on a regular basis (you’d think after 23/24 years I’d be aware of my fragility in the sun…I’m learning.)
- Running out of my trial version of Microsoft Office, if anyone has a product key for Microsoft office or word or whatever…and still has some installations left on it for a PC with windows XP that you’d like to donate to me…that’d be really nice and I’d like it a lot. You could email it to me…for my birthday?
- breaking off the metal part of an extension cord in the power outlet in my room…I feel like this is dangerous but I don’t know what to do. I don’t have needle-nose pliers to try and get it out, nor do I know where the fuse box that controls the power in my room is…
-making my bed every day.
- Eating yogurt that’s 2 days past the due date…this is very unlike me under normal circumstances... Waste not.

Other stuff:
I have just returned from the Huehuetenango welcome party. We went to some pools this Saturday and then out dancing at a place called Escape….which was really fun. I am not much of a dancer but I’ve been practicing a lot in my room so I figured it was time to take these moves out in a public venue. Cut a rug.
I also designed a T-shirt for all the Huehue volunteers that I think is pretty rad…I’m not sure how well-received it was…I don’t think the volunteers who’ve been in-site for longer than I have liked it very much. They're were other shirt ideas too...the ones i remember said somethig about following sheep-poop and mountains looking like buttcheecks, and I heart Taco Mansion… which, while i do like taco mansion...I just dont think that i would...wear it...ever haha. My design was a V-neck that said Huehue (where we live) on the front with a little mountain logo and on the back it said, “it’s far out, man” with a hand doing a peace sign…because we’re really far away and also far out in the, “neat” sense...right? I think it’s the cat’s pajamas and I really want to make and then tie-dye them…so…there’s that.

Oh and if anyone could translate “cat’s pajamas” for me? I use it pretty sparingly but I have no idea what it’s really saying…I just assume it means “cool”…

Lauren surprised me in Huehue at the Welcome party! It was really sweet! I was completely surprised…may have got a little misty-eyed when she jumped out. It was necessary. And then when we started walking to the buses to catch one to the pools we ran into Claire! It was almost a San Luisito (training town) reunion; we were only missing Brent. I can’t wait till we are back in each other’s arms at reconnect in a couple months!

I am still reading the book, “why girls are weird” and I found that if I just imagine that Chelsea Handler (comedian) wrote whatever book I‘m reading, it’s like 20X funnier. So I’m going to start doing that. Laughing is my favorite. Harry Potter’s going to be a RIOT.

I saw a really creepy advertisement that told me that a toothbrush is full of bacteria after like 3 months of use…I’ve had mine for 4...and now I’m scared. Will be buying new toothbrush this next weekend…fear marketing is my enemy.
Speaking of which, does anyone remember that commercial that was on in the US for a while where this guy was like jumping into his bed and it stops him mid-air and says something to the effect of, “do you know how many germs you’re diving into if you haven’t washed your sheets with Clorox?” and then like, black-lighted the bed to show you a “dramatization” of millions of little microbial germs living in his bed? Because that commercial really freaked me out. And I don’t have any color-safe bleach or even know if when I wash my sheets by hand if it will kill all the germs! I’m freaking myself out now. I’m not even really a germ-a-phobe. I’m going to stop.

I just disinfected a whole bunch of lettuce and plan on making myself a delicious salad tonight…cross your fingers with me on this one…I’d really like to count this as a win and not something that translates into me being sick for an extended period of time. That would really suck.

Until next time, I have some shout-outs.
- Happy Anniversary Dad & Kathleen! (2 years!)
- Dave: I hope you had a great time at PROM!
- Beasleys: Thanks so much for the Guitar books!
- KC: congrats on your end of service! Jacal misses you!
- Robert: congrats on Chile!

Now I’m regretting starting the shout-outs because there are like a million people I’d like to acknowledge but I’m afraid to start in case I forget someone and feel like a butthead.

To all of you wall-posting, blog -commenting, phone/skype-calling, emailing, real-mailing people:
I miss you guys. I feel really lucky to have such wonderful people in my life.