is that a rock in your pocket?

First, get your mind outta the gutter. This might be what the security guard asks me when I pass through security on our flight to Santiago or Lima or San Francisco. 

Let's just get this out of the way: I ♥ rocks. And pine cones. And shells. And worn beach glass. Messages in bottles. Driftwood.

{this guy loves stones too : by jos van wunnik}

I'm the girl who lugs stones down from the mountain with her. (I can be kinda clumsy--even without a big pack or big belly--so casing the landscape for pretty rocks underfoot while I hike works out well.) When backpacking I try to stick with the smallish stones. I collect and whittle down the collection on the way. When we arrive home, I always find a surprise rock somewhere in my rucksack--along with the yellow rosary given to me by a dear friend, which has been traveling the globe so rigorously for the past three years.

S entertains my addiction to flotsam. One of the best presents ever: a huge piece of driftwood he brought back for me from a kayaking trip. How he balanced that fat birdlike beauty across his kayak on the windy waters is another work of art in itself. Obviously we won't have space or weight (it's about 15 kilos!) left to bring the wood with us; neither the bags of rocks I pulled from the cupboard last night.

It seems I have stones coming out of my ears. Last night I chose a double, mounded handful of my favorites, placing the heavy ones on a windowsill and the tiny not-gonna-part-with-these in a bag with the shells. Shells are light, right? Someday I hope to have a rock garden (along with our herbs, flowers and fruit trees), with swirls of shells in between. A shell mobile for the boy.

{black stone spiral by jos van wunnik}

Living our transient life and moving a few times a year doesn't lend itself to gardening, not even hard gardening. I'm not a hoarder by any stretch, and I know you can't take it with you. But maybe just one more stone. The one with the plant fossil, or the stripey striated ones like tree rings showing centuries of compression, or the ancient stamp of shell from the mountain's peak--reminding us that we were all under water once. That we know how to swim.

Do you collect anything? Do you frequently weed out your collected?

expanse.

{by tjasa maticic}

May your day be expansive. Like if you were the object of a painting, you'd let your arms and feet and hair would flow out beyond the frame. Rooted, perhaps, by a carrot or a sweet sweet melon into all things.

friday present: randoms.

It's been a couple weeks, since I've written one of these posts. Busy on the home front of moving (obtaining immigration visa, deciding to move + then acting on that whirlwind decision), though that should just be a different post altogether. So let's organize the thoughts, scattered leaves: This week I'm grateful for...

sockets. 
So many sockets. Most houses here have one single-plug socket per room. (At its heart, Puerto Natales is still a poor fishing village, riding the wave of Torres del Paine tourism and trying to learn how to grow.) Most houses are boxes built from scrap wood and tin; the guts of the house an afterthought. The electrical wires run on the outside of the walls, making for eye level sockets--one per room, if you're lucky. (You pay the "electrician" per outlet, and why pay more?) Then comes the extender plug (usually a three-sided danger toy), maybe another extender, then all the appliances plugged in, Frankenstein fashion. Yeah, you can call it a fire hazard. 

Not so where we live now. In a house with forethought: inset ceiling lights, closets, and more sockets than I've ever seen in all of South America. We have, for instance, five sockets in the living room. Three of which have three outlets each. We're only here another three weeks or so, but one of my fondest memories of this place will be the fact that I could plug my computer in anywhere--without unplugging something else, getting tangled up or tripping. 

{the moving night by luis argerich}

emptying.
Like I said, we won't be here much longer. We leave Puerto Natales on November 29. We're selling everything, so I have a good reason to make spreadsheets. I can sort by whichever column I like and filter the information as I please: Who bought what, who do I owe items to, who owes us pesos? It's overly organized, and I love it! Every day this week, someone has stopped by to take something away. It feels good to physically see less to-do items in our space. 

beach glass.
Even though I'm wringing out our home, I still want it to feel homey, livable. Right now I'm looking at a row of beach-combed glass jars. The amber one holds a duck's plume. I'll let the jars catch light on the windowsill another week or so before rolling them in newspaper and jeans. It's decided; they're coming with us to California's cold Pacific. 

{via happy mundane}

deep sleeping. 
Aside from the fact that last night I got to sleep with my guru again after six days, I'm happy that I'm still able to sleep deeply. Of course I wake up a million times in the beginning of the night to pee. Or maybe baby gets all wiggly right when I'm snuggling in and it takes me a bit to fall asleep. But for the most part when I'm there, I'm there. (I know this luxury will slacken soon, so I'll just enjoy it while it lasts!) 

Last night S had his arm draped over my belly, and baby kept swatting at his hand. Baby does this; when he feels pressure, he starts to nudge around in that area. I telepathically told baby to hit harder, but sleeping S still didn't feel a thing. This morning, on the other hand, while S was in full-on play mode with our kicking baby, I didn't even wake up. 

breakfast in bed. 

{via}

S is the morning bird, I'm the night owl and baby still gets to be both. Someday they'll share the early morning hours together preparing me great late breakfasts in bed. We'll eat feasts of yogurt and honey, fruit and Turkish toast in bed together, before going for a hike on a sunny, breezy afternoon.

What are you thankful for right now?

encyclopedic post : history meets mail.

{dancer with a bouquet of flowers : edgar degas}

About two years ago, I moved into a room of a hostel. Aside from sharing the kitchen and bathroom with backpackers and all the rampant earwigs brought by autumn, I didn't mind living there. It was a free place for me to be. (Plus I met my husband shortly afterward and spent most nights at his house.) When I moved in, though, during that dead dark of cold winter, the room was still being used as a storage closet. The hostel itself wasn't open yet.

What I remember most about moving junk loads into the room across the hall are the antique encyclopedias, burnt black at the edges and disintegrating. I flipped through their pages, their amazing pictures. Visions of framed word art and collage danced in my head. Alas, the owner of these books--whose previous house burnt down as the paper houses with shoddy electrical work are wont to do here--planned to restore the books. They belonged to her deceased father, who was a doctor on Tierra del Fuego. I handled her heavy heirlooms with care, and didn't nab any of the cool pictures I oh so wanted. I wrote about this ages ago here.

Fast forward... > hostel opens + the books are moved out to the weather, supine to Patagonia's beatings no joke > come end of summer, earwigs hatch; they invade everything, can't lift a sponge or touch a towel without shaking one or five out > the cleaning woman battles them every morning, crushes them underfoot, sweeps out their carcasses, cleans the now overgrown backyard + starts throwing away earwig-infested encyclopedias > I save as many as I can carry and stow them in multiple bags so the tijeretas don't crawl into bed with me at night. They really do that!

{another degas interlude (after the bath, woman drying her nape);
why? because the next package someone receives from me is from the degas page}

Now I use the pages to wrap presents. And every time I send a piece of mail wrapped in encyclopedia, I lament not mentioning (on the card already snug inside the package) where the paper came from. I imagine someone finding the book destruction offensive. Now I realize, the recipient might be scared to touch said package with all my tijereta rantings, but they're clean I promise!

And yet... there's some artful book maiming out there. Take Brian Dettmer's book sculptures for instance. Only a true logophile would create this masterpiece from Webster's Dictionary...

{i say it's synchronicity: webster two point oh}

Not that my ripping out pages and taping them to boxes is artful, but I do like doing it. And playing with the serendipity of the pages as they open themselves up to be torn. 

{anticipate the comfort : the new modern medical counselor : by brian dettmer}

OK, there's a lot of innuendo here, I hadn't anticipated. Not sure if you're catching it; the subconscious is a marvelous poetic thing. I think it's better to just end with some questions...

How do you feel about writing in your books? Or altering them in some way?

get calmer.

Don't get mad or grumpy or frazzled or fed up. Get calm.

S said this to me after I might have said something about him being my guru. I know that may sound funny, but he is the most present, patient and overall calm person I know. The fact that he sometimes has to deal with the flare-ups of this raging fireball phases him little. (Wish I could claim that those flare-ups never actually happen, but what can I say?: I'm a work in progress.)

{because everybody needs to be reminded to breathe sometimes}

The tourist season has started here, finally. It seems to start later and later every year. Not ideal if you work seasonally. But it also means that right now S is on one of his longer trips. This always requires adjustment, a wee transition to being suddenly sola. And after spending all winter almost inseparably together, it's easy to see how much I rely on him. It's bigger things, like sleeping with our baby's soft stuffed monkey instead of my husband. And littler things, like how S always asks if I have water. Or medium-sized things, like suddenly I can't remember how to put air in the tires.

Meanwhile, every day something else moves from the house. I clean out another cupboard. Set aside things to giveaway, find more items to put on the for-sale list. I shift the house around to keep it homey. A couple nights ago I created sound sleeping energy in our new bedroom. We sold our bed yesterday; and it does feel good to find less to get rid every day. While Serkan was still here, I imagined it would be impossible to move from our big bed to the little kid's bed that came with our mostly furnished house. That the room had been used too long for exercise and closet space. But it feels really good in there. It has the comfortable, safe feeling of a nook, because the bed space is pretty nook-like. It's where we slept the first month we moved into this house and where we (S+me or monkey+me) will sleep during this last month too.

In other festivities, some friends painted my belly for Halloween. While Halloween isn't near as festive as it is in California, I still like to try to dress up. We weren't even sure what we would do till the last minute. But it was fun getting ready anyway. I've always had a knack for convincing boys to wear skirts. Halloween night was no exception...

{impromptu dance party}

Eventually I was something akin to mama planet...

{circa 28 weeks}

We made Laura a mime and David was Heather aka me...

{happiness}

David's costume is really only funny if you live in this tiny town and see people wearing the same things all the time (like this puffy jacket + wool hat, sunglasses; the wraparound skirt on top of jeans works like a little extra blanket against the cold). Apparently this genius costume even fooled some people--immediately followed by their utter unnerving.

{scary halloween version of the movie: heathers}

 David's ultra smiley pose every time the camera shot in his direction completed the look.