Videos & Pictures Over Yonder

I have decided to give up on putting pictures and videos here for now- I just don't have the patience!! (Thanks for the link though Howard, I will figure it out one of these days.)

In the mean time, click here to see a video from Ezra's Guatemalan Grandma's 44th birthday.

Click over here to watch Ezra drive a helicopter with no hands!

Ezra running around the back patio is over here.

I have also gone ahead and created a Picasa album with photos from Guatemala which you can find over here.

So much clicking to do! I certainly prefer to just put the gosh darned pictures here on the blogeroo. Someday. I figured out that the problem is that my new spiffy camera is just too spiffy for blogspot.

But in other news: we are back in the U.S.! What the? I know, here I am finally showing you life in Guatemala and we are no longer there. What happened? Many things. I will just list them because I don't want to go into it right now:

1.) no plumbing- this wasn't as much of a big deal when I lived there before, maybe due to the washing machine we'd had, maybe due to not having a little boy who didn't like to bath in cold water. To give my sweet boy a bath I had to lug pots and pans from the kitchen to the pila to the kitchen to the bath basin (see photos). Basically no plumbing meant approximately 2-3 hours more work daily.

2.) extreme rainy season- I had mentioned before that Ezra's grandpa's house was flooded this past summer, and the rains never stopped. When your mode of transportation is a motorcycle unending rain storms put a real damper on things (ha ha). We couldn't leave the house, meaning on top of all the extra work there weren't fun outings to distract myself. Also, there was no dryer so the clothes were perpetually damp, leaving them smelling less than desirable. Oh and there were several leaks in the roof, meaning constant puddles of rain/mud (coupled with the duck sh*t=major bummer).

3.)fixer-upper house- no one had lived in the house for years so it was pretty filthy. Every room needed to be painted, the floor was always in need of cleaning, the yard was full of random garbage, it took sometime to acquire a proper kitchen (see photos), and on top of all this to complete the projects I relied upon Cristian purchasing the supplies which meant bugging him daily which annoyed him and annoyed me and leads to number 4.

4.) cultural differences- if I say I'm going to do something, I do it in pretty speedy timing. Cristian? Not so much. There's always some reason (excuse) why he couldn't do something that I asked him to do. It got really really really old. For example when I needed my wisdom tooth removed I had asked him to call the dentist because he's much better at speaking Spanish than I am and the dentist had to tell me where his office was and I don't know Chiquimula like Cristian does. Anyhow way to long passed with me in way too much discomfort so finally I called and made an appointment and took down some directions that I thought might lead us there. We drove around in circles for 20 minutes looking for the dentist because my directions didn't make sense and then finally Cristian called the dentist as I had been asking him to do for weeks. The gutters were leaky and he waited until it was POURING rain to fix them, etc. The leave-it-to-the-absolute-last-minute technique severely stressed me out. I like to do it and move on, not think about it for weeks/months. On top of this he was constantly late, indeed very late and I just couldn't get used to it. I've had perpetually late friends, but not the man who I am living with trying to make it work for the sake of our son. Can't do it.

5.) business plan met several dead ends- I wanted to start a little English school, remember? The vacant room attached to the house would have been perfect, and I even had some potential students! But then the owners of the room decided I couldn't use the room for no good reason, and I was left with the prospect of putting it in our house. However, due to the aforementioned reasons (especially the leaky roof, how much can I charge someone to learn English sitting in a mud puddle?) this wouldn't have been possible until much more work was done on the house, which meant bugging Cristian, which might have made him do things even slower... I will never know.

Other contributions included: no friends in town, hardly any interaction with extended family, extreme littering and pollution (Ezra and I gazed down at the river from the bridge one day and were almost hit by a bag of garbage a woman threw into the river next to us- when Ezra asked me what was that, how do I answer?), poor eating habits (kids eat sweets, chips, and coca cola all the time- Ezra fell right in), very little stimulation (no parks, no museums, no events, just housework and cold showers), no libraries (only Christian book stores) and no internet at our house to allow me some communication with friends and family.

It was actually the internet that spurred the final showdown that lead to our departure. Since arriving in Chiquimula I made it very very clear to Cristian that I wanted to have the internet at our house so that I could keep in touch with people. Two months went by and I still didn't have it. I needed to buy a modem and Cristian had said that a friend of his sold used ones for cheaper. Since money was tight I was waiting around for him to call her. Days, weeks passed and everyday I asked him if he'd talked to her and everyday he hadn't. Many days he complained that there had been no work and he had spent the day sitting, reading the newspaper, even napping. Why can't you call you friend about the modem in all of this time? I asked. My battery was dead/I didn't have any minutes/etc. he would answer. And when I asked him he would get really irritated and often times huff off into the yard and refuse to talk to me. So one day I told him he should move out because it didn't seem like we were happy living together. He didn't have anywhere else to go (so he claimed) so the next day while we were out he removed everything from the kitchen and made it into his private bedroom. If you've already looked at the photos you see how far my kitchen came along, but let me tell you it was an uphill battle to get it to that state. But then all of a sudden I didn't have a kitchen again and I was expected to prepare food on a tiny table with no room to do anything. It was too much. I spend a lot of freaking time in the kitchen and with the new arrangement I knew I couldn't be there another moment. So I threw the damp laundry into my backpack and the toys and books into the suitcase and we left for the airport while Cristian was at work. I do feel very bad about leaving without saying goodbye but I was nervous that he would try to a.) take Ezra or b.) talk me out of it. It had been a rough road and I wanted it over.

So, here we are in Minnesota, back in Hackensack under the protective wing of my mother. I don't feel that much better just yet because I don't know what the heck we're going to do. I feel pretty lost, and it's a very nerve racking thing to not have a plan of action. I am hoping that something will come along soon, it's just hard because here in the tiny town of Hack there's not much for employment opportunities but I don't have any money to go anywhere else.

My plan for now is to try to do a bunch of little things to make some money like sell stuff on ebay and make funky baby pants to sell at a little boutique. Any body have any other ideas for making money?

I've felt pretty down, about leaving Cristian so abruptly and I'm still worried about him but he's not answering his phone. I don't know if what I did was right, but it's the situation so I'm just trying to move on to the next thing, whatever that may be.

My horoscope tells me to... "keep a running list of all the ways life delights you and helps you and energizes you. Describe everyday miracles you take for granted . . . the uncanny powers you possess . . . the small joys that occur so routinely you forget how much they mean to you."

Maybe I can have that ready for the next post.

Happy Fall folks.