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All Sorts of Thievery

In reference to Kim’s comment on this post, yes. I do think robberies are that common, but only in the big cities. But you know big cities. I’m surprised I lived in NYC for four years and never got mugged. (But I did get masturbated-on in the subway.) Thievery and crime are common in big cities. My blue-haired niece was mugged in Paris this spring. She and a friend were at an ATM in the middle of the afternoon when they were accosted by a gang of kindergartners who got all their money out of the ATM and ran off. You just have to be careful in big cities.

We’ll only be in La Paz for a few days and we will be very careful. As for while we’re on the trail, I read that we might run into some ranchers with guns who make us pay a “toll” before we continue on, but as long as we pay they will let us go, no problem. For the record, I am getting all of my information from the U.S. Dept of State Bureau of Consular Affairs. You can read it yourself and tell me if you think I’m running big colored crayons over reality. I might have a habit of doing that.

Besides. If we really have to worry about anything, it’s altitude sickness. (Do me a favor and don’t ever google “altitude sickness” when you’re getting ready to spend three weeks over 10,000 feet.)

This is very likely going to be the last time I post until … some time after we get back. It could be weeks. I have no idea what work is going to look like. I know I’m going to BlogHer ’11 less than a week after I return. No, I could not have planned those trips a little further a part, really, I would have if I could have. But it’s going to be fabulous and I am very excited about it.

I expect the next two weeks are going to be insane as we try to wrap up work, household, and last-minute Bolivia things. I just can’t keep every plate spinning, so I’m letting myself off the blogging hook. If I really had my sh*t together I’d have planned for some guest posts or re-posts of old favorites, and maybe I will magically pull my sh*t together enough for that before I leave, but I’m not going to bet on it.

Now would be a good time to add me to your RSS feeder if you haven’t all ready. Or if you don’t know what an RSS is, email me at aseriousgirl [at] gmail [dot] come and I will email you when I get back to the states and start blogging again. I mean, you’re going to be DYING to hear all about how this trip turned out, aren’t you? Won’t you just be quivering with anticipation? I sure would be.

And now I present to you:

712map

A map of South America. That I borrowed from this website. (I’ll take it down if they ask, I swear.)

Do you see Bolivia? In there between Paraguay, Peru, Argentina, Brazil, et al? That is where we’re going. Eleven days from today. (We’re going to have a safe and wonderful time. We’re going to have a safe and wonderful time. We’re going to have a safe and wonderful time.)

(This is me breathing.)

P.S. Dopey is in Kenya this month, helping to build a school for orphaned children. Dooce just back from Bangladesh, where she helped pregnant and birthing women who need medical care. I’m going for a freaking hike and I can’t even breathe. I think (hope!) this trip is going to be very good for me.

6 Comments

Frost, June 30th 2011 | Tags: , , , , , ,
Posted in bolivia, Daily Life

A Serious Sandwich

a serious sandwich

Whole wheat break layered with mayo, pepperjack, sliced tomatoes, red onion, avacado, fresh ground pepper and kosher salt. Served open-face.

Try it. You can thank me later.

1 Comment

Frost, June 29th 2011 | Tags: , , ,
Posted in food

My husband fixed the icemaker

There is something incredible about a man who can take apart a freezer-door icemaker, look at it’s insides, put it back together, and suddenly the icemaker that’s been broken for six months works perfectly.

I would marry him all over again.

work space

Mike in his impromptu balcony woodshop, June 18, 2011

3 Comments

Frost, June 28th 2011 | Tags: , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Daily Life, Marriage

Other People’s Photos of Bolivia

This is something we might see in Bolivia. A shop vendor and her child at the witches’ market in La Paz. They are selling dried baby llamas for good luck:

La Paz

Please forgive me, I can’t remember where I found this photo. If it’s yours, let me know so I can give you credit.

I found some beautiful photos of the trek we’re doing, the Apolobamba South, on Flickr. I won’t post them, but you should check them out. I’m still really nervous for a million little reasons, but oh my goodness. As long as we are safe and healthy the whole time, this is going to be an incredible trip. (I might be starting to get a little bit excited.)

1 Comment

Frost, June 27th 2011 | Tags: , , , ,
Posted in bolivia

There’s A Lot Going On

I have an intern. She’s fifteen, green-haired, and brilliant. She’s taken over RonAndRobertOnDivorce.com. In fact, she’s manning our entire social media campaign. The kid is so smart that half the time when I’m looking over her work I have to consciously hold my mouth closed or risk my jaw falling into my lap.

For the record, she’s also a lot of fun to work with. She’s smart and funny and she wears Doc Martens and listens to the Pixies and rocks her faded green  midnight-blue-with-turquoise-streaks* hair. She is one of the raddest chicks I’ve ever hung out with. And I hang out with some pretty rad chicks.

So I have an intern and that is fabulous. What else? Last weekend Mike and I catered a private film screening in a gorgeous house in Malibu and it was a huge success. I am super proud of us for pulling it off. The food was incredible – Mike planned the menu and cooked everything himself. His presentations were stunning. I cannot forgive myself for failing to take photographs of the table because you would have died. He served everything except the desserts on hand-painted Italian china and the desserts were served on antique silver. He cut beautiful, flower-like garnishes out of lemons and tiny red, gold, and green peppers. I’ve never seen anything like it. My husband is a god in the kitchen. Here are some crappy snap shots I took with my Blackberry while he was practice-cooking earlier in the week:

stuffed tomatoes

These have a fancy name but I can’t remember it. They are little tomatoes stuffed with lamb and goat cheese. So. Delicious.

endive salad

A little endive salad. These were so beautiful – the endive leaf is shaped like a little boat, and it’s filled with baby arugula, radiccio, sliced figs, goat cheese, candied walnuts, and a sprig of fennel.

He also served gorgonzola-stuffed bacon-wrapped dates, stuffed mushrooms, made-from-scratch spanakopita, crostinis with fresh tapenade, and the crown jewel was an onion tarte. For dessert there were lemon tarts and fruit tarts. Made from scratch. I’m telling you. Kitchen god.

We are both exhausted. Between last week’s catering gig, our jobs, social commitments, training for Bolivia, and planning for Bolivia, we are working from the moment we wake up until the moment we fall asleep.

Last night Mike and I took a night off from everything and watched four episodes of The Gates. It’s a ridiculous soap-opera about vampires and werewolves and it is mind-numbingly delicious. So we took a night off and watched four episodes while we gathered all our gear and cleaned it and folded it and sorted out what clothes need to be washed, packed our backpacks, ate dinner, and folded clean laundry.

See? Even when we take a night off we don’t take a night off. Though in all honesty, last night was perfectly lovely. It was fun to sort through our gear and I discovered all kinds of wonderful secret compartments in my hats and my backpack where I can stash emergency money in case we get robbed.

Which reminds me. We have to make our fake wallets. That way, if we do get robbed, we can hand over fake wallets with fake credit cards and fake drivers licenses and enough cash to make the thieves leave us alone. Brilliant, right? As long as they don’t search our bags. And if they do, we cross our fingers they don’t find all the secret compartments.

We’re going to be fine. I just have to remember to breathe.

*Ed: She changed colors. She’s a chameleon, that one.

6 Comments

Frost, June 24th 2011 | Tags: , , , , , , , ,
Posted in bolivia, Daily Life

Seriously Neurotic

I’m really sorry I haven’t been posting. I hate to start out with an apology, but I need do. I’ve also been an asshole friend lately, I know. Tonight? I totally flaked out on Thursday Night Family Dinner. I pretty much suck.

But my goodness, I need to take a minute and breathe. There is so much going on right now that when I think about it I want to cry. I’m completely freaked out about a million different things and even though I know, I really know (or I desperately hope) that everything is going to be ok, there is a part of me that’s terrified.

I cannot believe I am going to Bolivia in two weeks. Two weeks from Monday. I honestly don’t remember how I got roped into this, but somehow I did and now I just hope I make it through the twenty-hour flight without vomiting. I really hate vomiting. If I don’t vomit or have diarrhea on this trip, I will consider it a success. Of course, I also hope we don’t get raped and none of us are murdered, or killed by wild animals, or maimed in some horrible accident. But if none of those things happen, if we make it back to Los Angeles with our bodies intact and none of us ever having vomited or experienced diarrhea that shoots out of your bum and won’t stop, I will consider this trip a rave success.

We have eleven doses of Cipro, a water filter, and a stockpile of pro-biotics. Eleven is my lucky number and the rest of that stuff is for good measure.

I know we’re going to be fine.

And then I’m nervous about money. I hadn’t factored in the loss of income when we saved up for this trip, so it only occurred to me yesterday that perhaps we can’t quite afford this. I mean, we can, it’s going to be fine, things are just going to need to be a little bit tighter when we get home. It’s not a big deal, these are first-world problems, I know. In this economy, the fact that we can afford this trip at all is proof that we are doing just fine, but I’m the kind of person who really prides myself on having good financial management skills, so when I realize that perhaps I didn’t quite plan the finances as well as I thought I did, my ego hurts. (You can tell how upset I am by the run-on sentences.) Then I think about how irritated our employers are that we’re leaving for three weeks and suddenly I think I might have diarrhea so bad it shoots out my bum and won’t stop.

Mike and I had a major heart-to-heart last night because I’ve been very vocal lately, mostly during our training sessions, about how much I hate this and that I don’t know why the (expletive) we’re doing this. He told me again that I don’t have to go, that I really can stay home. He’d said he’d rather I stay home than come along and be miserable.

And I thought for a minute, I really took a moment and thought about it. The thing is? For all my anxiety and terror, I am pretty sure that, even though there might be some really horrible moments, even if we get robbed and we need to take an anti-biotic to stop the shooting-from-bum disease that is travelers diarrhea, there will most likely also be moments that are life-alteringly-beautiful. Yes, I realize “alteringly” isn’t a word, but I think this trip is the sort of thing that can help shape a person’s life. It will build character, as they say. I just pray to the Lord Almighty that we are re-shaped in a healthy emotional way. As in, we make it back to L.A. closer as a family than we were before, and with all our parts attached.

wiener dog

I’m betting you’ve missed the wiener dog. How could you not? Look at that face!

6 Comments

Frost, June 23rd 2011 | Tags: , , , , , ,
Posted in bolivia, Daily Life

Nervous Wreck

I have about fifteen minutes before I need to get back to work, but I wanted to pop in and say hi. I’m not going to bother editing this after I write it, which is something I have not ever done on this website ever. Not once. Please forgive the grammar, language, spelling, or other resulting ridiculousness.

We are very busy getting ready to leave for Bolivia – we leave exactly one month from today. I am nervous. Incredibly nervous. We haven’t done much training since Mount Wilson. I’ve practiced yoga a few times and we’ve been running three times, but that is not adequate training for a three week adventure in one of the poorest and least developed countries in the Southern Hemisphere.

Then there’s that. We’re about to spend three weeks in one of the poorest and least developed countries in the Southern Hemisphere. I’m all pissed off right now because we can’t afford health care, but you know what we do have? Two bathrooms. Air conditioning. Indoor plumbing. Paved streets. Weekly trash collection. Urgent Care clinics on nearly every block. We’re going to be staying in “hotels” in towns with fewer than six hundred residents and dirt floors. And none of us speak Spanish. Which actually doesn’t matter, because these Bolivians don’t speak Spanish either. They speak Aymara. Ironically, we’ve been advised not to talk to anyone who approaches us speaking English because they are most definitely a criminal who will take you to a pretend Official Looking Building where pretend police officers then force you to hand over your wallet, your passport, everything but the clothes on your back. Then they let you go.

We could have gone to Peru instead, but then we found out that in Peru, they don’t let you go. They cut your throat instead.

Anyway, I’m a little nervous. The good news is that the crimes happen in cities, not in the Andes, which is where we’ll be. We’ll stay in La Paz for a few days, but these crimes generally happen to people who are traveling alone. There are three of us, we will not ever separate (seriously, Mike is planning to accompany me even when I have to go to the bathroom – we’ll have reached a new and unfortunate level of intimacy after this trip) and because we are aware that these (and other) schemes occur, we’ll be more likely to avoid them.

I’m lucky that I’ll be traveling with two tall, strong, smart, careful men. I say “tall” and “strong” first because sometimes burly strength is more important than smarts. Sometimes.

Anyway, I’ll say it again. I’m nervous. I’m nervous about crime, I’m nervous about the altitude, I’m nervous I won’t have trained enough, I’m nervous about leaving work for three weeks. Ohemgee I am nervous about leaving work. That singular thought alone turns my stomach upside down. I’m a bit of a nervous wreck. How many more times do you think I can say nervous in this paragraph? Nervous. Nervous! NERVOUS. Ner-vous.

And…. that’s enough. Thanks for listening. I’m going to go do a couple of sun salutations.

7 Comments

Frost, June 11th 2011 | Tags: , , , ,
Posted in bolivia

Hi

Just a note to say I miss you. Life is very life-y right now. Will be back soon.

2 Comments

Frost, June 10th 2011 | Posted in Daily Life

Little F***ers

something aint right

Somethin ain’t right

Look closely. Does anything seem out of order to you? I mean, besides the giant backpacks and the briefcase on the sofa. And all the crap all over the coffee table. And the giant square pillow in the foreground. Do you see the three little balls of sh*t in the middle of the floor? That would be the dogs’ fault.

Or really, it is my fault, because I had the audacity to spend a few minutes picking out my outfit for tomorrow, in my bedroom, with the door closed, when I should have been feeding the little dogs. It was, after all, two entire minutes past their scheduled dinnertime.

It is also Mike’s and my combined fault because we’ve been meaning to rearrange the litter box area so the box is up high enough that the dogs can’t get into it and we haven’t done it yet. Because, you know, life. It’s busy.

Not to mention I should have scooped the litter box as soon as I got home. I knew it needed it and I didn’t do it because I just wanted to relax for a minute. In retrospect, I should have just cleaned the box and then relaxed, because it is amazing how cleaning up half-eaten cat sh*t completely depletes any recently acquired feelings of relaxation.

All of the dog-training books say not to let your dog watch you clean up their mess because it sends the message that you like the mess. I have read this a million times. It must also apply to a cat’s mess. I do not bother to take five seconds to crate the dogs before I clean the cat box because it’s too much trouble. Instead I let them watch me do it. Thus, sending the message that I think it’s super awesome to play with poop. And, in their little dog brains, I must be eating the poop, because why else would I be playing with it?

They sit there, little ears perked up, little tails thumping while I scoop the box, and I willingly teach them to play with the poop. It really is entirely my fault. But it makes me think. They spend a whole lot of time watching me in the kitchen. I wonder if they had longer limbs, would they try to mess around in the kitchen, too? Would it result in a cooked meal? Or a washed dish?

I mean, this could be really amazing. What if I got them a little, tiny, working vacuum cleaner. Something they could operate with their forepaws or push around with their noses. Do you think they’d start vacuuming on a regular basis?

shit eater

Hey little sh*t-eater. You need to start pulling your weight around here.

7 Comments

Frost, June 3rd 2011 | Tags: , , , , ,
Posted in Daily Life

Mount Wilson

We went for a day hike. All I knew was that we were hiking Mount Wilson, it was about a six-mile hike*, and we’d be home by 4:15 p.m.

We hiked from 7:45 a.m. to 5:22 p.m. We covered fourteen miles in just under ten hours, and gained almost 4,700 feet in elevation. Dave carried forty-seven pounds, Mike was somewhere around thirty-five, and I had about twenty-five pounds on my back.

It was beautiful. It was fun, but not in a day-at-Disneyland sort of way. The weather was cool and misty, the scenery was gorgeous, and the conversation flowed. We stopped often to take our boots off and let our feet breathe, have a snack, talk to other hikers. The last couple of miles hurt hurt hurt hurt, but when we finally got to the car I was grinning. I was filled with a fantastic sense of accomplishment. I mean, Holy Judas**, I hiked fourteen miles in ten hours and gained almost 4,700 feet in elevation. I AM A MOTHER F***NG BAD A**. I wanted to pump my fists in the air and shout Boo Yah! but I had only the strength to grit my teeth and take another step forward. A stiff-legged, painful, tiny, triumphant step forward.

I totally get why people do this.

trusty companions

My trusty companions

rock-eating tree

This is a rock-eating tree. Or that’s what Dave called it. I can’t tell whether the tree is growing out of the granite,  or the granite is pushing through the roots of the tree, but it is gorgeous. Here is a close-up:

creature face

What is going on?? Nature is amazing. Also, look closely. Do you see a little friendly monster in there? (Hint: He’s the tree part of the photo.)

red bark

This tree had the smoothest, loveliest red bark. All three of us had to stop and gawk at it.

misty mountains

My trusty companions in the Misty Mountains

thistles

I’ll give you a quarter if you can tell me what flower this is. And by “quarter” I mean “invisible pretend quarter”.

me n my pack

Somewhere between ten and thirteen miles into the day. I look happy, no? Sweaty, sore, and happy.

* 6.8 miles ONE WAY.
**Is it a sin to take Judas’ name in vain? What about Beelzebub? Can I say Beelzebub in vain?

10 Comments

Frost, June 1st 2011 | Tags: , , , ,
Posted in bolivia