Last week the high temperature for the entire day was 59°F (15°C). This morning, at 9 am, it’s 79°F already and the forecast high is 87°F (31°C)! Furthermore, we’re on the top floor of the building, so we get the full blast of the sun. We haven’t yet hauled the AC unit from the porch into the bedroom – it’s a big momma and probably dusty as hell too from a winter spent on the back porch – but last night we needed not one but two fans in order to fall asleep. ...

It’s a sunny Sunday morning, I’ve finished the mystery novel I started yesterday, the cat’s been on my lap for nearly 45 minutes, I’ve not yet had breakfast and there’s still two hours to go until I need to be at Meeting. What to do? Hmmm, make some muffins. Banana muffins. So I go to the kitchen, check the bananas that have been loitering in the door of the freezer for the past several months—and there’s only two. I need three for this recipe. What to do? ...

No, not basketball: the Green Fever that has seized Chicago, that most Polish – or was that Mexican? – oops, Irish of towns. Last weekend the city dyed the river green and held the downtown St Paddy’s Day parade on Saturday and the Sout’side Irish had their parade on Sunday. Last night, which was the actual holiday, there were once again green-bedecked revellers out in the streets. We celebrated Ireland’s national day by going out for Indian food on Devon Ave. with our friends Max & Cynthia. We sweated our way through spicy south Indian curries and dosai. I drank not one but two mango lassis, the first because I was hungry (it arrived before the food did) and the second because my mouth wouldn’t stop burning. ...

My brother-in-law has a knack for finding marvellous books. The most recent of his book-gifts is Blankets, an autobiographical coming-of-age story set in a small town in north-central Wisconsin. I mean, who would ever think there would be a graphic novel about growing up in the cheesehead boonies in the 80s and 90s—and that it would be really entrancing? Craig Thompson wrote and illustrated the story. His childhood experience was pretty rough. He really didn’t fit in anywhere: he was a farm kid who preferred drawing to sports; his family was extremely evangelistic; and his hometown was so small that it made Marquette, Michigan (population approx. 21,000) seem large and intimidating. ...

I know that our “bleaders” have not been waiting with bated breath, but I’m still excited that the pictures from my trip to Ecuador in January are now available to all. Thanks to Christian’s technical skills, with just a few clicks you can marvel at aereal views of volcanoes, wince at the sight of roasting guinea pigs, check out the local handicrafts and be dazzled by multi-hued flowers. Enjoy! Susan Kudos! To the photographer and her “able technical assistant”! I like the shots you chose to share (out of the many more that I know you took) and the way you’ve sorted them into something meaningful for the viewer. Love, Mom ...

It’s a peril of living in another country: you notice things the locals don’t pay much attention to. Every nationality has characteristic errors of spelling and grammar. Germans like to refer to a “Happy End”; French are liable to ask “please to” do something. Here’s a couple of errors that I think are characteristic of U.S. citizens. misplaced first-person nominative. “He’s been very kind to John and I.” It should be “to me”, not “to I”. They have some strange thing they teach in schools here called “sentence diagramming” but apparently it can’t get rid of this tic. Maybe it even makes it worse. Somehow there seems to be a notion that “me” is deprecated, to be avoided. past tense of “to lead” should be written “led”. The “lead” that rhymes with “led” is Pb. I suspect people want “lead” to be conjugated the same way as “read”. I don’t really mind these quirks. I know I’ve written “it’s” when I meant “its” and probably vice versa. English has too many strange rules and weirder exceptions. It’s just interesting to see what mistakes otherwise well-educated people make and it’s particularly interesting when those mistakes reveal nationality.

I’ve been concerned for a while about my ever-weakening German language skills. For example, a year or so ago, a former classmate from Carl-Orff-Gymnasium was in town for an Accenture training and we went out for tapas to catch up. I was incredibly embarassed to find that in addition to having lost vocabulary and making lots and lots of grammatical errors, I was losing my accent! My accent, which I had worked so hard to achieve! ...

Perhaps I’ve been reading Julie & Julia too much lately, but I can’t help but be grumpy when all in the past 24 hours: my boss, whom I adore and really depend on, tells us that she’s leaving in mid-February to go work for World Relief (damnit!!). I give myself a nasty little gash on the thumb while cutting potatoes with one of the very nice but hyper-sharp Global knives I gave C for Christmas, and it still aches even now. (Last night, when replacing the bandaid, it started bleeding again immediately – 3 hours after the original gashing! Those are damned sharp knives.) I wake up before 6-effing a.m. on a Saturday morning with a headache (in addition to the aching thumb) and can’t fall back asleep. I know that none of these matters are particularly earth-shaking, and that yesterday work otherwise went fine, I made my train, I even got to work out, the weather was good and the dinner we made was very tasty, but at 6 am on a Saturday, my sense of proportion gets out of whack and the negatives outweigh the positives. ...

Today saw us off to the markets in Gualaceo (pop: 12,000) and Chordeleg (pop: 5,000), two small towns east of Cuenca. After driving through a canyon, we stopped to visit Crisitina, a mestiza who specializes in ikat weaving. The whole time we were with her, she never stopped weaving, even for me to take a picture of her. In Gualaceo we saw ceramics, a fruit & veg market (where I saw fingerling pink and white potatoes! Can you imagine?), and a meat market, with roast chanchos (pigs) and cuyes (guinea pigs). Chordeleg is a center for jewelry making, particularly gold and silver filigree. Filigree doesn’t appeal to me personally, but the work is extremely impressive. ...

Thank God we came to Cuenca. The altitude – 7500 feet, I think I remember – is hugely better for Mom, and probably for me as well. The city is built on a more manageable scale than Quito, and also is just a lot prettier. Better architecture, heaps more historical buildings, better maintained buildings, and more green space. Plus our tummies are doing so much better… it really improves one´s mood not to be ill. ...