Bleep from My Bleep

Pondering the small selection of books at the Dallas airport, I decided to buy "Dreams from My Father." What really sold me was that Obama uses the word "shit" casually, gratuitously, right on the second page. Bold, huh? I thought this was a family program!

Mexico!

So, by the way, I went to Mexico last week. With my sister. It was really, really great. We went to the Oaxaca coast and then drove to Oaxaca (the drive involved getting lost on foggy one-lane mountain roads, driving the rental car through a creek three times, and getting rescued by a banana man--but more on that when I get the pictures).

On our last day in Oaxaca, we went to Monte Alban, site of incredible ruins, where a Mexican child delighted in hitting us with her Sponge Bob Square Pants. In typical adventurous spirit, we decided to walk there, even though it's well out of town and we couldn't find a good map anywhere. (We made it about 3/4 of the way and then there was no shoulder on the road, so we took a rattly bus and then a cab.) Right before we got on the bus, we stopped at a chicken stand, where I had a long conversation in Spanish (long for me, as a non-Spanish speaker) with a man with a cleaver who thought we were French.

Here I am with the pollo man:


Here is Jane at the site contemplating the ages, as we were advised to by our guidebook writer (whose information was so spotty and inaccurate that we started calling him Jayson Blair):


We stayed at a really nice hotel in Oaxaca, and every afternoon we
had a work/chat/cerveza session on the roofdeck right outside our room. Here is Jane on the deck, with an impending thunderstorm in the background:


The hotel had a resident rabbit, and after the impending rainstorm struck he hopped out toward us totally waterlogged:

A few minutes later, two hotel employees, separately, came out with a towel and tried to dry him off. They looked like boxing coaches toweling down their fighters, so we started calling the rabbit "Champ."

Daemon

One of my friends has recently become interested in the concept of daemons from The Golden Compass, etc. Daemons are sort of animal familiars, who are both separate from you and somehow part of you too, like the childhood dream of having a twin who would be your best friend. So I was asked what my daemon would be, and I knew immediately that it would be a small silver-gray animal, a cross between Kitcat and Lambie, with some miniature mammoth (a la Madeline L'Engle) and a dash of the Spaceship (my old small silver-gray car) thrown in. I've just always felt that this was the right look and feel for things.

Exhibit A:

Exhibit B:


I wonder what this says about me.