Since We've been Gone

You may have noticed there was a blog post drought.  Let's just say we were doing some under-cover spy work.  By which, I mean, we watched, with our legs under the covers, all twenty-two official and the one unofficial James Bond movies.  We progressed chronologically and ranked them the lot of them.  There was no method to this madness, we did not designate points for plot, Bond girls, villians, gadgets, or cars, which was often stocked with the aforementioned gadgets.  Instead, we simply laughed and cringed our way through the sexual innuendos and chase scenes.  Sean Connery is classic, I can't remember George Lazenby at all, and Roger Moore was quite good, but he should have stopped at three and not pushed-out seven movies.  We enjoyed Timothy Dalton very much and Pierce Brosnan is Pierce Brosnan, while Daniel Craig is raw in a good way.  Q was the most consistent and perhaps most beloved character, with the exception of the original Miss Moneypenny, Lois Maxwell.  In case you feared you'd never get the chance to accomplish this same feat, allow me to quote Mr. Bond with, "Relax darling, I'm on top of the situation."  Since I know you really don't care about our unscientific rankings and just wanted me to provide an inappropriate quote, voila.  Also, Andy perfected stove-top popcorn, which complemented this time in our lives perfectly.

Check it out.

Then we went to the wedding, and well, the day after the wedding we ventured to the Micro-Mercado to buy a new water tank and upon returning home, did not leave the apartment for the next week.  We just felt worn-out.  We slept until 11:30am each morning.  I spent a lot of time in the kitchen making bread pudding for breakfast each morning and rice pudding for snack time.  I consistently heated up whole milk for hot chocolate, and prepared raw cookie dough each night--except because I have no desire to see a hospital down here, I avoid the raw egg and use the poor substitute of water.  We tried to find a little Christmas spirit and attempted homemade peppermint patties, because, drat, without an oven, Christmas baking is limited.  Except, there is no mint extract in this country.  So we settled for vanilla extract. 

Our first round isn't pretty, but worked perfectly fine for a sugar hit.

A week and a day after the wedding, we left the house for pizza and ice cream.  Downtown there is a pizza place and an ice cream place with the same owner, La Fornace.  Ironically, it occurs to me that I think the name means something similar to an oven in Italian, precisely what we lack and long for, though that undoubtedly explains our eating there.  We've eaten there before, and conveniently, you can order pizza while sitting in the ice cream spot.  Andy had the salami pizza, which although he claims it tastes like spicy Canadian bacon, I couldn't help but recall the flavor as the same taste of the hot dog Max used to like microwaved and cut-up into his Stouffer's macaroni and cheese.  Andy had tiramisu ice cream, and I had chocolate, because I was too self-conscious to try pronouncing vanilla with Oreo in Spanish.  They came with a vanilla wafer with a delightful vanilla filling on top.  The ice cream tasted like a mix of ice cream and gelato to me, Andy can't discern any difference between ice cream and gelato period.  We watched the U-20 Ecuador and Chile teams square-off on television there.  Chile was up 2-0 at the half. 

On Monday 12/20, we had dinner with Guillermo and his family.  At the wedding, Jenny invited us over for dinner.  She asked if six was okay.  I answered, "Whenever."  She then asked if seven would be better.  I replied, "Whenever."  She affirmed seven o' clock and said Guillermo would pick us up.  Well, he called at 7:30pm.  We arrived at 8:00pm.  We ate at 8:30pm.  Jenny, who realized she lacked enough chairs for her family and ours, moved the dinner to her parents house.  Which, I did not realize when I told her she had a lovely home, and she replied, "Oh, it's my parents."  Or, when I handed her a hostess gift.  We made chocolate, non-peppermint patties that actually looked quite nice, and put them in one of our leftover containers.  Except, she set them on the table next to her, and we haven't seen or heard of them since.  We decided we'd try a new hostess gift next time.  Also, I made Christmas cards for the two couples, though it turned out there were three, but anyway, even though I lacked a red marker and anything other than a legal pad, they weren't half-bad, albeit terribly floppy.

Conversation went pretty well.  In attendance were Monica and Guillermo, Jenny and Henry with their daughter, and Guillermo's other daughter and her boyfriend Javier, who happened to be celebrating his twenty-seventh birthday.  The girls spent a year of middle school in the United States, so they generally understand English and can speak it fairly well.  Guillermo did an impressive job of both carrying the conversation and translating simultaneously.  They aimed to make us feel welcome here and like we had a support system, which was very nice of them.  Of course, I awkwardly showed my appreciation by launching into a ten minute discourse, in English, on the history of lacrosse, complete with arm motions.  It seems feeling that your face is beet red and burning is a good indicator for closing one's mouth, although, unfortunately I took the opposite option.  Andy and I are going to work on subtle or even not-so subtle attempts to pull the emergency break when one of us runs off track, and then particularly if we keep running.  For the record, because I have the slightest suspicion you would infer incorrectly, this has happened to both of us.

The food was delicious.  There was a chicken dish.  It reminded me of chicken marsala and Andy of goopy chicken.  So try to combine the two.  There was the same green rice we had at the wedding and still cannot figure out what the flavor is or why it's green.  There was a salad with lettuce, tomato, and green pepper.  There also was a surprising yummy dish that basically was a combination of deviled eggs and potato salad.  It was bite-size boiled potato pieces with hard-boiled egg and mayonnaise.  As I said, it was quite good.  For Javier's birthday we also had a cake which was ice cream surrounded by actual cake.  It was store-bought, but in actuality, Monica is quite the baker.  As of yet, we haven't been fortunate enough to try any of her baked goods, though we have bore witness to several delicious looking cakes, one being a pineapple upside down cake, which she sells.  In fact, on his trip back from the States, Guillermo brought me the ordered 72 oz. bag of chocolate chips and cocoa powder, and Monica, a KitchenAid mixer, which made for a heavy suitcase.

In other news, we read the third Chronicles of Narnia book in Spanish before we saw the movie on Wednesday the 22nd.  It's been partly-cloudy and consistently drizzly so much so that we've only done one round of laundry since Thanksgiving and the original scabies bout because surprise, Andy's scabies returned.  This country does not have the anti-parasitic oral antibiotic we need under any name, so we continued the cream treatment that thus prompted our laundry day.  (That, and our lack of underwear.)  Also, our Christmas spirit efforts continued by listening to carols and playing cards.