Holding the previous article's neck down with my foot for such a long while, I nevertheless naturally managed to do some things with my other limbs. Without question the cutest is this guy:
Nikki and I got a dog. I was worried I'd give in to one of the many nonhousable animals she asks for on the regular1, but as luck would have it we ended up with indeed a canine; bichon habanero, or Havanese. We styled him "Pelin", after the wormwood-laced Romanian wine that so often accompanied Mircea at his baths.
He's great to take exploring, of which there's been plenty. If one ceases to understand the world, what better balm than to try to move wider, walk deeper? I'll hail luck again at the thought of having so far avoided the many snakebites, spider bites2, slight-brushup-against-some-caterpillar-nervous-system-collapse, landslide-escort-off-the-road-into-some-crazy-ass-ravine...you know, the common nicks and cuts that happen here. I haven't even been too badly accosted by buskers. But what is a lot more interesting at this point than how (or how not, even), pardon me; firstly there's the curated jungle:
And one of the best municipal crests I've yet seen:
Studies in the Eternal Children's Cloudforest (which yes! does exist, o land of fairytales fighting for space to outdo one another!):
What shall we take, the Calender Trail or the Trail of the Bats? Easy decision if you ask me.
But no, there weren't any. What were: bellbirds, toucans, coati --and a great tribe of them3, too--, all manner of lizards and geckoes and damselflies and their better halves. Perhaps most importantly, there was a perfectly clear, felt-lined silence on which was laid the filigree of the forest's sounds.
And then there was coffee.
A great deal of coffee, as per usual, but more...exploratory of the traditional than my own tradition. Some things I've learned: that coffee dried with the fruit retains a honey capable of wildly changing the flavor of a brew (and that thus far I don't exactly like it), that some fruits are bright yellow rather than red, that some of the world's most poisonous snakes happen to like to sleep wound up in the trunks of coffee plants, and that despite the numerous and occasionally humorous attempts at improving on the standard chorreado, I still like it the best.
Speaking of originals, here be the ruins of Ujarras, and here's the original, ha, indian name for the place, searched high and low over the supposedly omniscient internet without success, to the degree that some monstrous pdf of the linguistic permutations of the Cabecar moontalk was pored over until finally I broke down and drove the ~two hours back to the place to take a picture of its namesign, also previously absent online. 1681 with some early 20th century restoration.
Said restoration being a little shoddy, it's nevertheless a pleasant place, if for the attendant wisterias and bromelia-pocked cypress, the flowers-within-flowers-within-flowers of the purlieu I've come to love the most, and so love quite a lot: where the forest meets the jungle.
But more of that later. For the now-of-the-then, I mean, as much of then as we have time for now, presently as it was, I've been playing around with the usual machines plus a new sort, incumbent with about as many problems which are about as maddening as their brethren, if less...impactful. As so:
The newfangleds are so impressive as to have errors and eyesores prepared and hotkeyed:
Meanwhile the local pok nexus of sewingery and millineura has the cutest mouselet murals ever.
Burt Plantcaster's been taking on a lot more friends and fambly, and the balcony garden takes a good eight liters a day of water, by now. Burt's special distilled grog not included, ofc.
I've also been training for boxing. One year, first gloves I bought are still intact, taken a cracked rib, given...well, not much, but one particular right hook sent the trainer for his tylenol, and I'm certainly better than I was.
I'm better than I was a year ago in many aspects. It demanded rather a lot of time and concentration, often away from what are still great focuses for me, like writing, but I do feel something like stable. It might be a stable oscillation, but the extremes of suddenly finding life so different are becoming pleasant to accept, to search for, even.
The bimbo has been helping me a lot, especially through her steady resilience and dedication to keep on walking. Hell, even her less successful attempts at confronting so much change have taught me plenty. And when that boxing trainer isn't training, he's probably with me, knitting out a story about working the coffee plantations or showing me new places to view the valley, to see the people.
So there it is, and there it was; a year of many new things, and a great deal of luck. I've lost forever, but have not broken, and will keep turning again and again to the wind.
