what $12 buys you today in Bogota

It's "change the flowers" Friday and the ever-wonderful Ruth showed up with all of the following:
She was apologetic because she spent $12 this week instead of the $10 last week.

(See those wonderful tall vases? I bought those on the embassy field trip to the glass factory. They were a steal and they have so many tall, dramatic flowers here that I had to have some tall vases to showcase those babies).

I re-purposed some flowers from last week and used these adorable little vases I also got at the glass factory. I have them lined up on my kitchen window and they're so bright and cheerful.

And finally these are the flowers that Ruth bought two weeks ago. They are still so beautiful that I can't bear to throw them out. They started architecturally as just the green stalks but have opened to these wonderful white flowers over the course of two weeks.

P.S. Ruth also brought her pressure cooker from home so she can make us some beans today. I love this woman.

Jimmy's very own personal tailor

One of the many benefits of living in Bogota is that you can have custom-made clothes made relatively inexpensively. Jimmy needed a couple more suits, so he bought fabric he liked at one of the seemingly hundreds of fabric stores around here and is having a tailor make them. Last night was the first and only fitting before the first suit is ready in a week. Clearly there's a long way to go between the first fitting and the final product!

Wednesday musings

1. I got my first haircut in Bogota yesterday and I love it, even though it's a lot shorter than it's been. Mac told me it looked horrible - stab to the heart - when he got home but Jimmy said he loved it. Even if he was fibbing, I'm sticking with the big guy's opinion.

2. It's very difficult, perhaps even traumatic, to get your hair cut when you don't really speak the language. This salon is small and even though I was speaking Spanish - albeit awful Spanish - everybody thought that English would be the only thing that came out of my mouth so they assumed they couldn't understand me. I hate that.

3. Today I'm going on a field trip to a pottery factory followed by lunch with some other people from the embassy.

4. I've now heard that we might take delivery of our sea shipment by late next week. I also just found out that there is no record of our sea shipment that was sent from long-term storage in Washington. We're working on finding out more on that today. I also also found out that our car has made it to the port in Cartagena and paperwork is being processed for us to get the car. That should take awhile though.

5. Mac is attending his first Colombian birthday party Friday afternoon after school. A bus is taking the children from school to the party place and I just have to show up at 5pm to bring him home. I love these kinds of parties.

6. Ruth kept Mac last night while Jimmy and I went out for dinner. Although I've told her repeatedly not to hand wash the dirty dishes in the dishwasher (since I run it every night), she clearly believes the dishwasher is nothing more than a holding facility for dirty dishes until you have time to wash them. The dishwasher was full of dirty dishes when we left, but when we came home, they were all washed, dried and put away. That and her calling me Senora all the time when I've repeatedly told her not to are the only faults I can find, so I can live with that. But woman, let the dishwasher do its job.

7. I'm in season three of Lost. Still addicted, still loving it.

8. Mac doesn't have a regular homework schedule at his current school. He's supposed to read everyday, he had one Spanish sheet last week and there's a weekly spelling test. The big assignment every week is an assigned topic "project" in this big folder. Each student can do whatever he wants on two pages of the folder and then he presents it to the class. Last week was "who is my family?" so Mac did a word search game of different people in our family on one page and on the other, a list of the names in the word search along with out-of-order photos of those people that you had to match up. Two games for the price of one. This week is "who were the ancient Egyptians?". We've got maps, pictures of the Pyramids and a sarcophagus, and "Mac" written in hieroglyphics. I feel like we're doing a science fair project every week!!

Labor Day

We lucked out with today being a holiday for Jimmy and a teacher workday for Mac. Since he attends a British school, the only shared holidays will be some of the Colombian ones and US Labor Day sadly isn't one celebrated by Colombia.

So how are we spending our holiday?

For starters, we've been lazy. It's now 10:05am and 2/3 of us are still in our pajamas. Jimmy, who slept in until 9am (!), must be feeling energetic because he's had his shower and is now out the door to go have the tailor measure him for a custom-made suit. He's had two custom-made dress shirts made here and they are spectacular and relatively cheap to have done, so we're moving onto suits now.

Mac is watching Aliens in the Attic for the third time this weekend before we have to return it to Blockbuster.

And me? Well I'm writing you and thinking about the lunch Jimmy's promised me at the Chinese restaurant near here. I made shrimp spring rolls last night that were so fresh and divine, if I do say so myself, and I have now got Asian food on the brain. We heard about a great Chinese restaurant, and we're off to give it a try once he's finished being measured.

I hope you're having a great Labor-free Day wherever you are!

what $10 buys you in Bogota

Ruth and I have established Fridays as "replace the flowers" day around the apartment. We have one borrowed vase, two that I packed in our air freight (knowing that flowers are cheap in Bogota), and 4 old milk bottles that we bought at a little junk shop the first weekend we were here (again, because flowers are cheap and I didn't want to wait until our sea shipment arrived to enjoy the bounty).

Because the weather is bad today, Ruth took the very good initiative to buy the flowers on the way here. She spent about $10 and came home with all this. I cannot wait until our real shipment gets here with all the vases we own - we're going to have more flowers around this joint than we know what to do with!

P.S. I can count. There's one other vase with flowers in it from last week's purchase. The flowers last so long here that the six vases we filled today have had the same flowers in them for over two weeks. I finally dumped them all yesterday in anticipation of "replace the flowers" day.

lost on Lost

So I know I'm about 7 years behind the rest of the world, but I have just gotten myself addicted to the now off-the-air Lost series. We don't have cable TV or our household effects yet, so that means we're stuck watching the DVDs I packed in the suitcase for Mac (a couple of Star Wars films - no thanks) and the DVDs that Jimmy had in Afghanistan that he mailed here to Bogota.

Those DVDs include a season of Rescue Me, all the seasons of Arrested Development (one of the funniest tv shows in history), a season of Weeds and some other miscellaneous films. But the treasure of the bunch, I've just discovered, is all 6 seasons of Lost.

I sent Jimmy the first season or two of Lost in a care package after reading people's comments on Facebook about how they were hysterically anticipating each episode of the last season ever of Lost. I figured the show would be a good diversion for Jimmy in a war zone, but quite frankly, I didn't think I'd be interested in it.

Until Saturday when he suggested that we watch an episode or two.

That's all she wrote.

I am addicted. Hook, line and sinker.

I'm already done with the first season. This is alarming because there are only 5 more to go and what am I going to do once it's over?

I'm already done with season one because I am staying up too late to watch episodes, despite the fact that the alarm clock goes off at 5:30am no matter how much I had to know whether they could open the hatch. Then I'm good for a couple more episodes in the morning after I get Mac on the bus. Because after all, what can I do at 6:22am besides drink coffee and cry when Claire's baby gets stolen from her?

It's pathetic, I know. Trust me, I'm living in Loser-Land and I'm very well aware of it.

I love Matthew Fox as Jack on Lost as much as I loved him as Charlie on Party of Five. I know - it's another trip to Loser-Land to admit you watched Party of Five. What can I say? I'm a sucker for a tv drama mixed with a little comedic relief and shaken up with a little romance.

The only reason I'm not watching more Lost right this second is because the embassy is sending over a contractor to fix some things in the apartment and I don't want to have to interrupt the first episode in season two.

But if you'll excuse me, I'm going to get the DVD loaded, just so I'm mobilized for quick viewing at the earliest opportunity.

Ruth and spaghetti sauce

Today I asked Ruth to make a pot of bolognese sauce for our dinner. I'm sure there are a lot of things that can go wrong when making a pot of bolognese sauce, but I have never tasted bolognese sauce that has zero taste of tomatoes. In my new local parlance, there was nada tomato-y about this sauce. What did she put in there????

Clearly bolognese isn't one of her strengths, but she more than made up for it by going all over creation to buy a gorgeous and humongous bromeliad (after a couple futile attempts at floral bouquets) for Jimmy to take to a dinner tonight as a hostess gift. That, my friends, was worth the price of admission today!