Win!

I verified my novel last night--more than 24 hours ahead of the midnight, November 30 deadline--at 50,608 words.

I almost don't want to talk about this experience because I don't want to jinx it.

Think of the one productive thing that you've always wished you could do but have always been too busy, lazy, or intimidated to do it. Now let's say that someone applies just the right amount of pressure, while removing all of the mental obstacles. There's no reason to say no.

Right now, the novel I wrote is not a masterpiece, by any means.  Two of the main tenets of NaNoWriMo are "No Plot, No Problem," and "Write First, Ask Questions Later" meaning, basically, that it's an exercise in getting lots of words down on paper, not in being your harshest critic. Over-thinking every word is one of the number one things that holds new authors back. You can't afford to get mired in a cesspool of self-criticism when you've got to write 1,667 words every day, which is the second great thing about the whole experience.

Having a visible daily goal, with a monster end-goal in sight (and a group of hundreds of thousands of other people trying for the same goal) makes an enormous difference. Even with all these incentives, it's incredibly difficult to set aside such a huge hunk of time that could be spent doing just about anything else, but it's really rewarding to look at your word count for the day and see that you've written not just one thousand, but three thousand words.

So... what to do with my novel? It needs so much work before it could ever be anything like something someone would want to read. (And I haven't even written the end yet.) But, cheesy as it may sound, I feel like now I'm better equipped to get it there.  And there are more ideas stewing in my head for something else. I'm so glad I did this. Period.

Orange Ginger Cranberry Sauce

Is it a little excessive to make an entire Thanksgiving dinner for just two people? Probably.

Well, actually, yes.  Because there's no way on earth we can eat an entire ten pound turkey. But no one can stop us from trying because this is America.

Anyway. I am ECSTATIC to be back around my sharp knives and cutting board and shiny red mixer and millions of beautiful hand-me-down pots and pans and I have already started the madness.  Yesterday I made fudge.  Today I made the brine for the turkey (I used the recipe from PW). A pumpkin pie is currently in the oven. And I invented my own cranberry sauce recipe because I couldn't find exactly what I wanted online. All cranberry sauces are basically really simple, but this one turned out pretty damn good if I do say so myself.

Orange Ginger Cranberry Sauce

1 bag fresh cranberries
Zest and juice of 2 large oranges (separate)
3 tablespoons grated fresh ginger
1 tsp olive oil
1/2 cup sugar
3/4 cup brown sugar
1/4 cup honey
1/2 tsp cinnamon
1/4 tsp ground cloves

Wash cranberries and inspect for stems and squishy berries. Discard anything icky.

In a large sauce pan, briefly heat olive oil over medium heat. Add ginger and orange zest and cook until they begin to sizzle.  You don't want them to heat too dramatically or start to change color at all, just to get nice and hot.

When ginger and zest are hot, add the juice of two oranges and stir in the sugar, brown sugar and honey. Allow to dissolve slightly.

Add cranberries and bring to a boil over medium-high heat.  When the mixture boils reduce heat to medium and continue to stir it until the cranberries start to pop and become soft.

Add cinnamon and cloves. Simmer for five minutes or until the sauce thickens, stirring occasionally. Give it a taste and make sure it's not too tart; add sugar or spices as necessary.

Allow to cool completely. I dare you not to eat this on a turkey sandwich. I dare you.

Mexican Mail Fraud

We fly back to the States tomorrow. I can't believe that our time here has gone so fast (and that Tim's fellowship is over--he's like, a normal person now! Pfft.)

This is the view today. It's NOVEMBER.

Reasons I do not want to leave Uruguay yet:

1. It is summer in Uruguay
2. I totally dig all of our friends here
3. Waking up to this amazing view from my living room, every single day
4. The steak: seriously, there is no beef like this beef.  This beef sings songs in your mouth. This beef woos your brain. And there is no "well done" here.  There is only "jugoso" and "a punto": i.e. "rare" and "less rare." Ohhhhhhh... I can't leave!!
5. Anyway... Cheap movie tickets
6. My electric kettle: it changed my life.
7. Lack of awful bullshit rhetoric-machine on the television 24/7
8. There are bookstores on every corner. Even if they're not in English, I don't care.

Reasons I'm looking forward to going back to DC:

1. Access to my full wardrobe
2. Mexican Food (are you ready, Jana?)
3. Access to Netflix, Amazon Prime, and Hulu streaming (which you can't get outside the US without a VPN)
4. Access to my cellphone: I've heard my parents' voices like, twice in the past three months. Also, I need to uh, plan my wedding.
5. Wedding dress shopping
6. We might be getting a cat! A cat!!

Ok for real, I'm not looking forward to going back to DC at all. I can basically live without most of the stuff in the States that I don't have here, except the Mexican food and the people I miss. And my sharp kitchen knives. I really miss my sharp kitchen knives.  And I basically never want to hear another word about American politics ever again.  Just vote, people.

Most of all, winter in DC sucks. SUCKS, I tell you. I was super-miserable the first month here in Uruguay but now that I've adjusted I soooo don't want to leave yet.  Just give me another month or two, ok? And maybe mail me some tacos and enchiladas.

Time Travel for Amateurs

I'm reeeeeally supposed to be getting caught up on my novel after spending three days sitting on the beach and eating steaks, but I had to share this because it's too incredible.  Look at these two pictures and then take a look at this article that Tim sent me today from Montevideo's newspaper, El Pais.  

In case you don't speak Spanish (welcome to the sad, pathetic club) the general gist is that 40 years ago today, about 100 yards from my house, there was a terrible helicopter accident that killed 8 people and injured 40 others while a crowd of thousands watched.  This morning in Pocitos (we are right on the edge of the neighborhoods of Pocitos and Buceo) there was a memorial for the victims of the event--both those who died and those who were traumatized by it.

This from the illustrious Google Translate: "That day, as part of the 154 anniversary of the Navy, test on the capabilities of helicopters in rescue work was scheduled. The event generated great expectations. About 20,000 people attended."

First, I just think this old photograph is amazing. That's where I live. From where I'm sitting right now, I can see where the photographer who took this picture was standing!

Photo credit: El Pais

Second, I'm totally one of those people who walks around freaked out by the idea that there are skeletons inside of all of our bodies.  So along the same note, I'm totally, insanely fascinated thinking about what took place on the ground we walk all over every day.  In Uruguay it's an especially fascinating exercise.  For better or worse, even the mall sits on the site of the prison where thousands of political prisoners were held and tortured during Uruguay's military dictatorship. You have to walk through the prison gates in order to get in. And, "The former prison administration building now houses a McDonald’s and a Don Pepperone restaurant with patio seating." There is an admitted element of the grotesque to all of this, but it is impossibe not to find it interesting, and important--I think--not to forget.

I was admittedly a little bored by Uruguay when we first got here and it's my own fault for being that way.  This is not a place that flashes its history around on its sleeve and makes a tourist attraction out of everything. However, once you begin to learn the history of the place, you understand why and you can't help but appreciate how much people here value their day to day lives. It's kind of nice that Uruguay doesn't pretend to be reducible to just one souvenir image: the Eiffel tower, the White House, the Hollywood sign.

Uruguay is a small country. It's incredible to think how an event like the one in the photo above would have affected people and what they might have thought, especially taking place as it did during a time when Uruguayans were "disappearing"because of their political beliefs.

This is why I love to travel. I love to see the beautiful and absurd and sometimes horribly sad things that happen in the world and how other people deal with them. Seeing a picture like this makes me wonder how many people who were there that day--standing on the beach I look at every day--I've passed in the street, and if they look at my building and think about how it wasn't here once. It's like traveling in time as well as space.

Idle Hands

Humble beginnings, on the floor of the sunroom in the first apartment.

When I first arrived in Uruguay it was still late winter here (in August! Inconceivable!).  It was cold and gray and dreary and I realized about three days in that it was stupid of me not to have brought some sort of knitting project.  The whole point of knitting, as far as I'm concerned, is to keep you warm while you space out and watch TV.  And I'm totally incapable of watching TV without doing something else at the same time.

Within about two weeks I couldn't stand it anymore and I started to look for Uruguayan yarn stores. It turns out there was one only a couple of blocks from our first apartment.

My grand ambition was to obtain some some of Uruguay's incredible locally-produced yarn and make some sort of gorgeous, luxurious... thing.  But what they prefer to do in the yarn stores here is produce the gorgeous things themselves, and sell them--already knitted.  Then they sell expensive bamboo yarn and cheap acrylic yarn on the side. Please note the bright, insane, synthetic colors of this blanket.

"Cathedral" edging

For a while now I've wanted a granny square blanket, because they're so deliciously silly and fun. This turned out to be the perfect project on one hand because crocheting a granny square allowed me to keep my brain busy with lots of different colors, and only required me to buy one needle instead of two (This is the worst. logic. ever. As knitting needles come in pairs).  It was not so perfect because crocheting a granny square blanket means that you essentially make a hundred million little coasters, which you then combine together at the end.  I started this project because I was cold and wanted a blanket.  The only way to be warmed by it during the long process would be to put them all in a big pile and then burrow under them.

Anyway, the pattern I used was this Summer Garden Granny Square, which is not a normal, plain jane granny. It was also sort of interesting because, did I mention, I haven't crocheted a damn thing since I was 8 years old? Even then I'm not sure what I did could be properly called "crochet."

However, through the patient tutelage of the internet (hurrah internet!!) and a decent amount of frogging and re-crocheting, the thing is finally done!

It is now spring in Uruguay and essentially too warm for a blanket, but it's sort of pretty.  I'm trying to decide what to do with it now.  It's not really the granny square blanket I always dreamed of... any takers? Should I donate it? Is anyone pregnant?

Donezo.

10 Kilometers of.. Well ok.

Somewhere in the last couple of weeks Tim convinced me to run a 10K with him.

This is something people in Montevideo do all the time.  Tim ran in the Reebok 10K two days before we left for Peru, giving me nightmares about sprained ankles and shredded tendons; but he came back from it all sweaty and proud of himself (and wearing the ugliest neon yellow shirt I have ever seen).  I'm not really sure why I said yes to doing running in the "We Run Montevideo" Nike 10K, since it's something I want to do never, but Tim paid my entrance fee for me and I couldn't back out. 

So. What is there to say about it? In that snobby, obnoxious way that I have, I sort of feel like these are the kind of activities yuppies participate in (I'm not talking about you, Elsa!). I can't help it. I don't really understand why you would pay to exercise when you could just go out in the country and hike around for free.

Then again, after having participated--with 9,000 other runners--I can also see that having a common goal with a lot of other people is (even if the goal is sort of ephemeral) kind of incredible. I would never want to hike with 9,000 people.  This is just a whole different animal.

Uruguayos are way into this.  There were people of all different sizes, ages and abilities running (and rolling, and propelling themselves forward on crutches!).  And along the route, which took us along the Rambla, which hugs the rio, and then through the city, where people were lined up, cheering and drinking their yerba mate, banging pots and pans, and generally being very encouraging.  "Vamos! Vamos! Mas rapido!"

At one point along the route there was even a group of Uruguayan Candombe drummers, which is the first time I've had the chance to see them since I've been in the country. So insanely cool.

Anyway, because I am remarkably lazy, I/we hadn't trained much for the race. Once again we made it as far as day one, week two of Couch to 5K (where's my medal for that?).  But it really didn't matter all that much; we did fine.  My official time was something like an hour and 25 minutes, which you can check out here (and Tim's too) if you're so inclined. Not surprisingly, there weren't a lot of other "Smiths" or "Carpenters"in the race.

I'm not sure I'll ever do that again, but I'm not sure I won't. It was definitely satisfying and fulfilling to cross the finish line, and for an hour and half worth of activity, that's not something you can say about watching television or wandering around Best Buy. (But you can say about naps and drinking margaritas: two more things for which I have neither received, but for which I deserve, a medal.)

NaNoWriMo

Did you know that November is National Novel Writing Month? Well, until two days ago, neither did I. At least not in any way that had any affect on my life.  Then I read someone's facebook status and found out that NaNoWriMo (as it's less formally called) is celebrated by pushing yourself to write an entire novel in one month.

And for some reason I decided to participate.

The rules are pretty simple (hot from the NaNoWriMo website):

• Write a 50,000-word (or longer!) novel, between November 1 and November 30.
• Start from scratch. None of your own previously written prose can be included in your NaNoWriMo draft (though outlines, character sketches, and research are all fine, as are citations from other people’s works).
• Write a novel. We define a novel as a lengthy work of fiction. If you consider the book you’re writing a novel, we consider it a novel too!
• Be the sole author of your novel. Apart from those citations mentioned two bullet-points up.
• Write more than one word repeated 50,000 times.
• Upload your novel for word-count validation to our site between November 25 and November 30.

However, nowhere in the rules does it say that the novel has to be any good.  The point is output rather than quality.

So.  That's that.  I'm on day three.  I'll be posting my progress on the blog, here, or on the link at the top of this blog.  I make no claims that it's any good at all. But since I have to write something like 1,667 words a day, I'm going to pretend that this will keep me accountable.

Please do not ask why I picked "literary fiction" as my genre of choice. I really, really, should have gone with "zombie apocalypse averted by magical Amazons on unicorns."

Next year.

Pictures of People in Front of Real Things That Look Like Backdrops

I've spent an unacceptable amount of time thinking about what to write about our trip to Peru.

We've been back over two weeks and I've sort of just been holding it and chewing on it in my brain like a piece of gum.  There's no way on earth I could ever fit all of our Peru trip into one blog post, and even though I wish I could have posted about it every day that we were gone, the fact that I couldn't access the internet easily was one of the best things about the whole trip.

The fact of the matter is that the trip to Peru, even with all of the hiccups and bad parts, was the best trip I've ever taken in my life.

Before we left I was pretty much not very happy about life in general. I'm pretty good at being unemployed because I'm the kind of person who never gets bored.  But I'm also the kind of person who needs a comfortable home to not-be-bored-in and for our first month in Uruguay I hated our apartment with a violent screaming passion. It started to wreak havoc on my self-esteem.  I felt like I wasn't accomplishing much, I felt stagnant, and I felt penned-in.

We've been planning for, thinking about, worrying over, getting in turns excited by and then disappointed by this Peru trip for so fucking goddamn long that finally putting our feet down in Cusco was like walking on the moon. And that wasn't even the most important part of the trip.

Our first day in Cusco both Tim and I slept pretty much the whole day.  This isn't really how you would think we'd react to something we'd been anticipating for so long, but we'd been traveling for over 24 hours, we hadn't eaten well, and we went from sea level to over 11,000 ft in altitude.  I had a migraine, of course.

However, as soon as we recovered, and within about twenty minutes of walking into the city, Tim and I both felt not only like we wanted to live there, but like we already lived there. I've never felt anything like that about a place in my life. Cusco has all kinds of faults and uncomfortable truths about it, but it also just felt like home. We both wondered, immediately, if there was a consulate, or any way Tim could get a job there (there's not).

Anyway, we spent the first four days or so walking all over the city, eating and getting lost, taking pictures and running out of breath.  We took a bunch of tours and politely declined our travel company's suggestion that we go white water rafting since it was freezing cold and, well, we can do that anywhere.

On the 9th (I think), we started up the Inka Trail.  Our guides came and picked us up at 6:30 in the morning and we drove for about an hour to pick up the rest of our group and have breakfast, and then drove for another 30 minutes or so to KM82 to start the trail.

Day 1: The easiest day of hiking, except for the rain and the fact that we didn't have enough porters, so we all had to carry more gear. Because of the missing porters we didn't end up eating lunch until probably 2:30 in the afternoon, which is difficult to manage when you haven't eaten since 7:30 and you're hiking with a big pack. Still, I was sort of relieved by the spontaneity of it because it meant that not every group has the same cookie-cutter experience. And we were too awed by everything to worry about pain or hunger.

At the top of Dead Woman's Pass

Day 2: The hardest day of hiking. Tim got really sick the night before and we had to hire a porter to carry his bag (and I got lucky that he took some of my gear too). The hike on this day is nothing but straight up for about five hours, up to almost 14,000 ft, with no stopping for lunch or to look at ruins. Then when you reach "Dead Woman's Pass" you hike down steep stone stairs for about two hours down to camp at about 11,500 ft. Tim looked like a ghost all day he was so sick.

Some of the ruins on Day 3

Day 3: This is the longest day of hiking: ten hours, but you stop and look at a number of ruins, and have a nice leisurely lunch break. You have to cross two passes this day, but end up lower than you started, at about 9,000 ft.  On this day you hike on the most incredible Inka road, where the stones are lined up perfectly like teeth, and the mountains are unspeakably gorgeous. It doesn't even matter that you've hiked for ten hours.

Day 4: Machu Picchu. We got up at 3:45 in the morning for breakfast and to gather up our things. There are no porters on this day so you have to carry everything yourself (which we had been expecting to do all along, but was a big surprise for those who had hired porters expecting them for the full four days).  It's about a 2-hour hike from camp into Machu Picchu. This was by far my favorite part of the hike. It was too misty to really see the sun rise, but it was incredible to watch the mist lift off of Machu Picchu.  There really aren't words to describe the feeling of accomplishment, or to describe the feeling of resentment you feel for the people who take the train, who have energy and smell nice and slept in beds and take up too much space after you worked so damn hard to get there.

For about 45 glorious minutes you get to look at Machu Picchu with hardly any people in it. And it's just breathtaking.  And then the trains start rolling in, and with them come literally 2000 people and it's almost impossible to walk from one place to the next and you kind of start feeling a little greedy and hating humanity a little bit.


But here's the thing, even with no Machu Picchu, I needed that hike SO BAD.  I needed so badly to do something hard, and painful, and dirty, and occasionally a little bit awful (the toilets y'all, OMG) and because of that awfulness actually pretty funny, and to meet some great new people, and to really just scoop my whole brain clean.  Every single minute of the trail, even the bad ones, was fun. It sounds terrible and hard, and none of us got to shower for four days and the entire time, at every single meal, someone talked about diarrhea, and Tim told me afterwards that on the morning of the second day he woke up and his feet were swollen so badly he almost couldn't get his shoes on and neither of us knows why... 

BUT: I also saw some of the most beautiful, mysterious and impressive things I've ever seen in my entire life, we played Uno every night with the tiniest deck of Uno cards I've ever seen, I ate the best trout I've ever had, I slept soundly and woke up refreshed even though we were getting up at 5:45 every morning (if you know me, you know this is insanity), Tim drank tea!


The day before we got on the plane to fly to Peru we had a moment where we were both so convinced something would go wrong, and almost convinced that we wouldn't even be able to enjoy ourselves, that we wished that it was already over. This should indicate the fever pitch of insanity we'd both reached before we even left.  But this sense of anxiety completely dissolved up on the trail, never to return.

The number one question people in Cusco ask when they hear that you hiked the trail is, "would you tell someone else to do the trail, or take the train?" or, "are you glad you did it, or do you wish you'd taken the train?"  The answer is that I would absolutely do it again and I don't even want to talk about the train. I know that a couple of hundred people do it every day and I'm supposed to be jaded and think it's touristy and somehow not "genuine," but all that muscle pain was certainly real and that was the best, coolest thing I've ever done. Period.