snappish

I have internet in our jungle house now.  It took all this time and acts of equal parts contrition and might but here I am, catching up with you.  It's slow here, not quite dial up but not quite right, sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. And after all this time I've decided I don't need it as much as I once thought I did.

My friends down the road run a guest lodge and I am there sometimes either visiting or watching our collective kids run wild.  They also have easy access to the river and when it's as hot as it's been lately I take M up there to go for a cool off swim.  In case you are curious we also have cool off showers and cool off under the net experiences as well.  We actually call these things that.  So our big dumb puppy follows us the other day which means all three of us are in the river cooling off when some of the tourist folk staying at the lodge wander down for a swim. So we do our swimming thing and they laugh about our silly dog and my silly kid and we don't really talk much and life goes on as normal.  

So the next day I am at the market in town buying a few things for dinner when I hear someone calling my name. I look around and it's those tourists from the day before in the back of a taxi, they are calling my name and one of them takes out her camera and actually takes pictures of me while I am hauling my sweaty ass into our car with a few grocery bags like we are all buddies hanging out on an adventure. I mean, I guess in the philosophical sense we ARE all just buddies hanging out on an adventure. But I digress.

I know this is a touristed area, folks come here to experience the jungle, hell it's how we found this place ourselves.  But now that I live here and am not on vacation it feels different.  This is my real life here and my real life entails buying groceries at a shitty market down the road before driving home and cooking dinner on a shitty stove. I mean, there are good things too about being here but I'm just summing some of the less than good ones up for you here, and for some reason it struck me as odd that people I do not know would want to take pictures of something so mundane and for some reason I was now unwittingly part of their vacation experience, with them meeting weird local folk with weird local dogs and kids doing weird local type things.  With pictures. 

Or maybe I'm just being too sensitive.  

PS. If YOU came here to visit me you can take all the pictures you want.  That's different. See how that's different?

PPS. Maybe I'm the one with the problem.  

PPPS. I need to shut up already don't I?

PPPPS. We were sound asleep when the earthquake hit. It went on for quite a while in a house and a village and a country not built for such things.  Aside from a few broken things we are fine and so are our neighbors.  We'll learn more as the day goes on.  Scared me, though. This was by far the hardest one I've ever felt and I'm from California.