I'm still standing

Hmmm... December 4. Yeah. September, October, and November were good. I've been busy at the new job, which largely includes writing new papers, editing old papers, applying for my next job (seriously, that's considered an acceptable work activity), numerical modeling, and overseeing an undergraduate research project. I've also been enjoying having an American kitchen back, including an oven that has not once thrown a fireball at me. (On the flip side, I succeeded in giving myself chemical burns on my hands one night thanks to a misguided evening cooking with hot peppers. I can apparently do dumb stuff in any country.) Keating has been doing well also. He managed to find a full-time job shortly after arriving and has enjoyed spending time with his family here in Western NY. We're both thrilled to have our beastie back; Asher is asleep next to me, saving his energy to demand another early morning walk tomorrow (Keating gets up with the dog. I flail my arms and mutter gibberish.)

I still have stories to tell from Mexico, plus new adventures here in New York. On top of that, it's good for me to keep writing something that doesn't include 50-cent words like "phreatomagmatic." (Dad read that word in my most recently published paper and wanted to know if I made it up. Answer: nope.) That said, it's time to recommit myself to updating my blog. Here goes.

Goodbyes

Tonight is my last night in Mexico. Trying to get everything ready for the move back to the states as well as complete work down here (I spent this last week in the field) has been hectic enough that I've failed to update this blog for a month. Fortunately (or not?), I have a stash of stories yet and will continue to make updates for a while. Who knows -- maybe I'll even change the "Life in Mexico" part of the title and keep writing. We'll see.

This past spring while in Cancun, my friend Jackie asked me what I missed most about the US. My mom was sitting with us and chimed in with "Her dog!" While I miss my puppy wildly (thank you again Mom and Dad for taking care of him!!!), that was not the answer that was springing to my lips. Family and friends, while greatly missed, weren't my top item either. The number one thing I miss the most about the US: flushing toilet paper. It is so nice when it just goes away after you use it instead of letting it collect for a few days and then having to empty the trash. Unfortunately, Mexican plumbing (like that in much of the world) is unprepared to handle flushed paper. I think that flushing some TP might be my first act back in the US, shortly after crossing through Customs and Immigration. I don't care if I don't need to use the facilities; I will simply walk into a stall, rip off a square of toilet paper, and merrily flush it away. It will be good.

In honor of leaving Mexico, I wanted to make a quick list of things I've missed about the US and things that I will miss about my temporary homeland, Mexico. In no particular order:

Missing the US:

1) Flushing TP. Yup... still number one.

2) Friends/family/dog.

3) The freedom of having my own car again.

4) The stars. The light and air pollution here is such that you can't see them in Mexico City.

5) Road berries. My mom gagged when I mentioned this one to her, but it' snot nearly as revolting as it sounds. When I was visiting Michigan in July, I had a wonderful time picking and eating wild raspberries along the side of the road while I walked my dog. There were at least 3 varieties, and they were all delicious.

6) Really good desserts/chocolate. Most of the desserts/chocolate down here are very bland and end up tasting a lot like processed sugar. I have not seen a single fudgy/gooey/caramel-y/decadent dessert down here.

7) Buffalo wings! Watch out Duffs! I'm coming back!

Missing Mexico:

1) Friends down here. They've been great. The people as a whole have made the entire experience worthwhile.

2) Public transportation. It can be scary at times and quirky at others, but it can also be a lot of fun. At the very least, it's pretty empowering knowing that you can competently maneuver around this city on public transit. It's like, "If I can do this, I can handle anything. Bring it!" And then I wave my jazz hands.

3) The food. Oh, tortilla soup, pozole, tacos al pastor, pambazos, elote, esquite, etc, what will I do now that you won't be a food cart away???

4) That amazing sense of (self-indulgent) coolness that comes from living in a foreign country. It's pretty darn cool. This alone is enough to get me past the occasional melt-down day when I just wish everyone down here spoke English. It feels great to do something that feels so different, and to be doing it in a foreign language.

5) My garden. It is scary-easy to grow plants down here, and my lilies, impatiens, ivy, mums, bougainvillea, etc. are absolutely thriving under my diligent neglect. I actually feel like an accomplished gardener!

6) The complete surreality that exists down here. I can round a corner and find myself facing a 6 foot tall bush molded into the form of a duck. Or my bus might stop in the middle of a 5 lane road and all of the passengers have to do a Chinese fire drill and board the bus behind us. Or accidentally finding a tarantula in the wild. Every single day has some hidden gem down here.

7) Looking up on clear days and being surrounded by majestic volcanoes.

While I'm moving back to the US for a new job, I will always have a part of me in Mexico. I've got a conference down here in November, continuing field work in March, and every intention to continue to work with Mexican volcanoes in the future. They certainly haven't seen the last of me here! For now, though, I'm tired and ready to see Keating again. He's been in the US for the last couple of weeks sorting out our new apartment, job hunting, etc. This time tomorrow, I'll be asleep in our new place, catching a few hours rest between my midnight arrival and my 8 am job start. Nothing like cutting it down to the wire, huh? That said, I'm off now to catch a couple of hours of sleep before my early flight.

Hasta pronto.

Keating visits the dentist

While we were in Michigan, Keating and I both went in to the dentist to get our teeth cleaned. This was significantly scarier for Keating than it was for me because of who our dentist was: my father. (That's right savvy readers: my dad, the die-hard hockey player, is also a specialty dentist. He also has been known to stash chocolate covered caramels in his underwear drawer. Never fear, he still has all of his teeth.)

I can imagine that there are few things more unnerving than sitting down in the dentist's chair and looking up into your new father-in-law's face, except maybe if it is your girlfriend's dad instead of your FIL, but I haven't subjected a boyfriend to that since college (sorry Andy!). Dad was very kind to Keating and didn't even take advantage of his opportunity to mess with his head. Instead, they decided to mess with mine.

I was in the front of the office hanging out with my mom and a couple of the staff when Jeanie, who was assisting Dad, popped in to ask me to come back to the operatory room where Keating was. As I stepped into the room, I saw Dad using gauze to stop some bleeding in Keating's mouth and a bloody scalpel on the tray. WTF??!? Fortunately there hadn't been nearly enough screaming to make me think something bad had actually gone down, like some fraternity hazing taken too far.

It turns out that Dad, whose specialty is gum surgery, had cut away some excess tissue on one of Keating's front teeth. The tooth in question is slightly recessed anyway, and the extra gum tissue made it look far more recessed than it actually was. With one quick flick of the wrist, Dad had done wonders to Keating's smile, making it look as though his front teeth had been straightened overnight. Keating's smile looks even more fantastic than before, and he can now brag that he survived losing a knife fight to his father-in-law. Boys have the strangest ways of bonding.

UFC: Michigan

My parents are probably two of the toughest people I will ever know. My dad, for instance, in pushing the big 6-0 and still plays ice hockey year round. Right now, he has a double header scheduled for every Monday night, and a couple of weeks ago ended up playing in a triple header when one of the teams scheduled to play after his last game asked if anyone could substitute for them. All this was while still getting over being sick and having to be at work early the next morning.

Dad's crazy dedication to hockey pales before my mom's latest test of will, however. On 4th of July weekend, she took a spill on the boat thanks to an unfortunate wave and bashed up her left knee. The next morning, with her knee now the size of her head and unable to bend more than 5 degrees, she decided to stop by the ER to have it looked at. Her knee was too swollen to get a good look at it yet with an X-ray, so she was sent home with an ace bandage and the recommendation to call the local knee specialist to make an appointment for later in the week. When she was the specialist a couple of days later, he couldn't find anything in her X-ray and asked her to keep limping around on it until she could bend it to 90 degrees for an MRI but told her that he thought it was most likely a deep bone bruise. I had already arrived in Michigan by this point, and Mom refused to let something as minor as a swollen peg leg get in the way of spending time with me; my first day in town she insisted on taking me shopping for a new pair of jeans since mine were miserably ratty (Thanks Mom!!!), not to mention about 6 other errands. She continued to go to work each day, walk the dog in the morning before I woke up, etc.

The day before I left to return to Mexico, we got a call from her knee specialist: he had just gotten back the results on the MRI and wanted her in there ASAP since it turned out that she had broken her leg in her fall roughly 2 weeks before. The angle and location of the break prevented it from showing up in the X-ray, but it stood out brilliantly in the MRI. My mom had just spent the last couple of weeks wandering around on a broken leg, and I'm not even sure if she bothered to take more than 2 Advil the entire time. She will now spend the next 6 weeks in a leg brace and using a cane (it was already clear to everyone that she wasn't going to hold still long enough to bother with the crutches. Plus, she was too short for the adult sized crutches they had available.).

My dad likes to claim that the only two things in the world scare him: flying monkeys and my mother. Given just how scary-tough she is, I think I might have to add Mom to my list, too!

(For even more background on just how tough she is, my mom refused to let the doctor tell her she had broken her foot until after my wedding last fall so that she wouldn't have to wear a cast to the wedding. About 8 weeks ago during a minor surgery trying to sort everything out on that same foot, the doctors realized that she had been wandering around with a nearly completely torn ligament in her ankle. She had been taking the dog on 2 mile walks. Daily.)

Get well soon, Mom!

Notes from the field 1: pre-field

Dear Future Self,

Having just gotten back from the field, it seemed like a good time to write down some things to remember for the future. First, though, let's backtrack to things you should remember from before going to the field:

1) You are very allergic to something you ate down here. Fortunately, your throat didn't seal up or anything, but the rash that produced the Melanie Griffith lips and the Dobby-the-house-elf ears was not cool. Never eat that again. Good luck figuring out what it was. Also, local meds don't seem to help much; keep a stash of Claritin in the house.

2) Buffalo is awesome, as are your friends and family there. However, trying to eat your weight in one weekend is a bad idea. Do not do this again. (You may have been too hopped up on the Claritin and Nyquil to recall this clearly, but it will make you ill such that you yearn for the gentle comforts of Mexican food again.)

3) When picking people up from the airport, just give up and call a taxi. Yeah, you can get there for under a dollar if you use buses and the metro, but something will invariably break down and make the trip last over an hour. Like when you went to pick up your visiting undergraduate field assistant and the metro got stuck for 20 minutes. Thank goodness her plane was delayed so she didn't think you'd abandoned her in the Mexico City airport! Just suck it up and pay the $10 to get across town in a reasonable time.

Got all that? Great! Next edition, we'll go over the things you should try to remember from the field. Hint: undergraduates and alligators.

Love,

Shazta (version June 2010)

Wonderful weekend

Sometimes, it doesn't take much to make a weekend wonderful. Such was the case with the weekend when Keating and I finally found cheddar cheese down here. This weekend was similarly low-key but wonderful.

For one of the first times since we moved here in December, I got to go shopping by myself. I'm not much of a shopper, so roughly 95% of my Mexican shopping experiences have been confined to grocery stores... as was this trip. For those of you concerned that I may have lost my mind to be so excited about going grocery shopping alone, let me explain. Keating is wonderful, but we are never more stressed with each other than when we are in a grocery store. You can actually watch Keating twitch just walking past a grocery store. It's amazing! While that should normally be enough for us to happily leave him out of the food shopping, we are stuck. Without a car, we have to carry all of our food for the half-mile hike home. It helps to have two of us along.

Without Keating along, I was able to read moisturizer labels (mine from the states was running out and the store doesn't carry my brand), find a yoga mat, and even pick up some exfoliating body scrub and a replacement lipstick. When I got home I had a wonderful time pampering myself and feeling incredibly indulgent. Spoiling me further, Keating decided to cook dinner so that he could work out a Buffalo Wing Pasta recipe he'd been thinking about. Pampering and Anchor Bar wing sauce? Amazing!

The next day, Keating and I made the long walk to the town's central plaza where we enjoyed amazing Mexican food. If you haven't tried tacos al pastor, you need to find yourself a legit Mexican restaurant. Get a side order of grilled baby onions and guacamole, and finish it off with a cold Victoria beer (Keating) or horchata (me). We wandered the local markets and visited a book store to buy Spanish translations of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone and Narnia: The Magician's Nephew to help us with our learning. The weekend reached dizzyingly perfect heights when we got to play with 2-month old chihuahua puppies in the plaza. Cuteness overload!

For dinner, we ate candy and read in bed. Come to think of it, Keating had eaten ice cream for breakfast (we were having a power outage and didn't want to see the ice cream go to waste). Isn't that one of the advantages of being a grown up: getting to eat junk when you want to? That, and staying up late.

Anyway, we had a wonderful weekend. (Even though I didn't get to steal one of the puppies.)

The problem with Saturdays

Yesterday was Saturday. Weekends and normally wonderful things, but Keating and I have noticed a serious trend here on Saturdays: the alley on the other side of our wall turns into the site of a wild street party. This wouldn't be that big of a problem, except that last night's gala went until 5 am and was louder than the front row at a metal concert, with the music and yelling. As a result, Keating and I got approximately 2 whole hours of peace last night. Why only 2? Well, that's because someone in the neighborhood invariably starts shooting off fireworks at 7 am on Sundays. The consistency is such that I'm beginning to wonder if it isn't part of the local priest's plan to get more people to early mass. Or maybe he's just that excited about Sunday mornings.

On the plus side, it is still far quieter here than it was at our last place. That, and we have yet to have been afraid that the fireworks would set fire to this apartment, something I can't say about our last place. Here, we only have to worry about our own problems with fire.

Grillin' in the garden OR More trouble with fire

Last night, I asked Keating to grill up some spicy sausages for dinner while I made up some spaghetti. Thanks to genetics, Keating is blessed with awesome grilling skills -- I'm pretty sure that a little bit of charcoal and lighter fluid runs through the veins in his family.

Our new apartment came with a small grill, so Keating happily set up shop in the garden while I went to work cutting tomatoes for the sauce. A few minutes later, I hear muffled obscenities floating in from the garden. Keating dashed into the kitchen, looked around quickly with a flustered look on his face, and ran back out. I don't enjoy cutting vegetables nearly enough to not wander over to see what all the fuss was about. As I nonchalantly rounded the corner, prepared to ask if I could help him with anything, I glanced out the garden door. And froze. The garden was quite clearly on fire, with bright little flames jumping up from the grass. I quickly grabbed a pot of water, but Keating had used his previously unknown (by me) locker-room-style towel whipping to put out the blaze before I could get back. (I lamely pored the water where the fire had been.)

It turns out that Keating had been having trouble getting the charcoal to light. This may seem odd, even disgraceful, for a member of his family, but he had a pretty decent excuse: the charcoal was Mexican-style, or untreated. When he tried to put some more lighter gel on the charcoal (couldn't find lighter fluid at the store and didn't want to siphon gas out of a neighbor's car), the gel lit. The problem was that it wasn't just the gel on the charcoal that went up in flames, but also the gel on/in the container. Keating's attempt to put out the gel fire only ended up spraying flaming gel across the garden and igniting a seat cushion and a large patch of grass.

Needless to say, the sausages were cooked on the stove and we are working on figuring out where to get the vinyl seat cushion reupholstered. On the plus side, dinner came out well and we were able to have a long laugh over it all... after a bottle of wine, anyway!

Ovens are still evil.

I whined several weeks ago about doing battle with my oven in an attempt to bake celebratory brownies. Little did I know the true terror of a Mexican oven! I made brownies again, this time to celebrate our move to the new apartment. Thanks to the resulting fireball, I singed off some arm hair and some hair from the left side of my head (you know those frizzies that never go away? Gone.), and my eyelashes on the left side are now half the length of those on the right. Part of what really sucks about singeing your eyelashes is that the burnt ends curl up and work like little velcro bits until they give up and break off, so I had about 24 hours of my upper and lower eyelashes sticking closed when I tried to open my eye.

Keating kindly pointed out that the brownies still came out great and I didn't burn any skin, so all is apparently still well with the world. I think it will be his turn to light the f-ing oven next time.

The Kitchen

True story: when I was in the 8th grade, I had to ask my mom how to use a toaster so that I could complete a writing assignment. In my defense, I knew perfectly well how to use the toaster oven in our kitchen and had no idea that we even owned a regular toaster, tucked into some back corner of the pantry. Mitigating circumstances aside, I was not terribly familiar with the kitchen. In fact, I was pretty anti-cooking, which is hard to explain since my mom is a fabulous cook who never seemed to mind cooking family dinner each night. Anyway, I could barely boil water up until I moved out of the dorms and into a rented house after my sophomore year of college. I was suddenly faced with a dilemma: learn to cook or starve (and the follow up: learn to cook decently or suffer from indigestion or food poisoning). I learned to cook.

Since then, I have fallen in love with occasionally experimenting in the kitchen. (Regular meal cooking is ok, but not all that fascinating when I get home late and am too tired to think about it much.) Over the years, friends have been subjected to bananas foster (Sunday dinner crew at Tech), cornish hens stuffed with cherries and wild rice (Abby), stuffed porkchops or chicken breasts (too many of you to count, really), zucchini boats (Keating probably sees these in his sleep), and endless loaves of banana chocolate chip cherry bread (I'm looking at you Marty -- it's just not that same now that I never find old, black bananas in my office mailbox anymore. And no, Mom, I didn't forget the nuts. I intentionally leave them out.), etc. While I love cooking, I will never be at risk of receiving my own cooking show, and all of my meals come with the promise that if it came out plain bad I will be the first to call for pizza (Andy: do you still have nightmares about that lamb stew back in 2003? I do. Note to others: never cook up something that you find in your freezer when you move into a new place, even if it was left there by a kindly older couple.).

Moving to Mexico has provided me with exciting opportunities to try new ingredients and cooking styles. A couple of weeks ago, I made parmesan breaded chicken breasts stuffed with apple and goat cheese. Fabulous! A couple of nights ago I made pork chops with a lime sauce. Edible! For Christmas, I stuffed a turkey with tropical fruits (some of which don't even have names in English) because I couldn't find what I wanted for "real" stuffing. The turkey was awesome, the stuffing inedible. We have been through tacos, quesadillas, rice, and appalling quantities of refried beans.

While I'm enjoying the challenges here, every meal must still be approached as a contest of wills. Every day, I must challenge The Oven.

Mexicans apparently don't like cooking with ovens. Most food around here seems to be prepared in a skillet or something similar. It took me a couple of weeks to even find a mixing bowl for less than the cost of my firstborn child, and oven-safe bakeware appears to be a local joke. Nothing related to oven-use even came with our otherwise fully-furnished apartment.

I have learned why.

The Oven is...fussy. I don't believe the temperatures on the dial (why should I? The burners on the stove operate at "on" and "off" and don't even bother with gradational marks on the knobs). I knew I was in for a battle when Keating and I toured the apartment before we moved in and our landlady showed us the pile of matches she had provided. The Oven must be hand-lit. Instantly, my head was filled with visions of exploding my kitchen, or at least burning off my eyebrows. That Christmas turkey mentioned above? It was pretty much a miracle that it came out ok after I succeeded in launching a fireball 2 feet out of the front of The Oven while trying to preheat. Keating, who missed the fireworks display, had to calm me down and re-fire The Oven.

No meal in our apartment comes without the risk of becoming Dinner and a Show. I think I've mastered the art of lighting The Oven, but I still get a little nervous every time I have to do it. I would give up on The Oven, Mexican style, but for one thing: the grocery store sells brownie mix. Keating and I have committed to making brownies to celebrate my first paycheck down here (yes, that's right...6 weeks on the job and still no paycheck or ID card to allow me into the building). Wish me luck. Because when that paycheck comes in and I attempt those brownies, they'd better come out ok. That's one battle that if The Oven wins will really ruin my day. And I might just have to get even.