Earthquake!

Today I felt my first earthquake! Very strange feeling. I am sitting upstairs in one of the cabanas and the whole building moved around a bit. Trippy!

The star is where the earthquake happened, and the small blue dot north of the star is near where I am:

It measured 5.8 on Richter scale! Wow!!

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I got to eat two great big feasts this week! I went to the community center in Eronga on Thanksgiving which was nice and fun. On Saturday we had a harvest dinner here in the bosque with some folks from the area, which was totally cool. Brian cooked a turkey and I cooked other things and other folks brought things and we ate a great humongo feast!

I meant to take pictures of all the food but I forgot, and then people started eating and the food got way less pretty. But, this is what we ate:

Smoked turkey yum! It was delicious. I made soup stock from it yesterday and that is delicious too.

Chickpea nut loaf, Risotto with chard stuffed into a pumpkin, veggie stuffing, gravy, mashed potatoes and sweet potatoes with garlic and rosemary (very tasty!), another rice-ish type thing, pasta with stuff in it, pumpkin/apple pie type thing, and apfelstreudal (amazing!).

We also made mulled wine and spicy apple juice (cider does not exist here...).

Very fun and I am still full!

People learned how to play Jenga which was entertaining to watch. Very good game for bilingual events!

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There has been some rain this week, which is a good change. It starts to get dusty here now that rainy season is over. The rains have gotten rid of a lot of dust for now. The air is a bit cooler than normal as a result, but that is an ok trade-off.

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Today I have been reading about saunas and cordwood building. Maybe we will do a test wall to see if the wood here is good to use for this style of building... it is very pretty! And it allows for adding bottles to the structure to allow for light to come through the walls, which would be neat and would recycle. Maybe maybe.

SALAD SPINNER!!!

Some of the most recent guests brought a very very VERY important tool with them: a salad spinner. I am so happy!! There are tons of fresh greens here to eat, and the season is slowly ending, so now I can make the most of all the spinaches and lettuces and kales etc without spending a half hour cleaning them. Here is me happily making salad:

Whoever invented the salad spinner is brilliant. They are impossible to find here, likely because salad is not often consumed. YAY SO HAPPY SALAD YUM!

In other semi-related news, I am definitely no longer a vegetarian. The dogs here killed another cow the other day (another cow, yes... the first one was old, and by the time we found out it was killed it was no longer usable), so we went to town and watched the butcher do his thing. Very interesting experience... similar to the goat experience in Tanzania. Quite graphic, so I won't post the pictures. Plus it was a calf, so it was intrinsically sad. Brian gave most of the meat away, and one of his workers kept some cold overnight for us to try the next day.

It was tasty. Definitely different than eating an adult cow. I prefer eating meat this way, though the dogs-killing-cow thing is less than optimal. It is nice to see the meat butchered, know exactly where it came from, and know that it isn't pumped with hormones and poison from factory farming.

So I've gone from vegetarian to veal-eating CARNIVORE!

The dogs now have a fenced in area where at least a few of them are at all times. They've begun to form an apparently vicious pack, even though they are sweetie cutie puppies around me. We've started to de-packasize them, and so far so good. Happy cows and dogs all around... except apparently dogs attacking livestock here is not totally uncommon. Different world! But, all in all, much happier cows than in factory farms. Cows here roam free and graze all day all over the place. Kind of cute.