On The Road

I have never tried to blog on my mobile tablet device, so I am about to find out how it works.

The Yarn Harlot says she now only ever wears brown on airplanes, so given that she and  I seem to share a propensity for spilling coffe on ourselves, I decided to follow her brilliant advice.  The best part was that, since it would have been OK to spill, I never even did so all day!

I did take a picture of my knitting in LAX  (using the camera on my mobile tablet device) while we waited for our flight.  Let's see if I can upload it to the blog now.

*****time passes. I attempt to use a googleplus app to backup and access my camera roll on my mobile tablet device*****knock me over and fan me with a brick; it actually worked!

RIBBING FINISHED--about to begin K1, K1below vertical stripes

Seth and I were the only ones doing anything other than just sitting/eating or looking at their phones or other mobile devices (she says self-righteously as she taps away on her mobile tablet device on the coffeeshop's free wi-fi.

So we spent the night at the Grant Street Inn in Bloomington, Indiana. It was very nice and conveniently located. Of course most things are pretty convenient here as it's fairly small.  Actually it's a really lovely Midwestern mid-sized town.  Lots of nice shops in the downtown area.  One of which was a very nice LYS called Yarns Unlimited just off the courthouse square.  I had a moment of fear that it had closed because the street numbering was weird--even numbers on one block and odd on the next.  It is at 115 Walnut and there was an empty storefront next to 118!  Luckily we persevered.  I bought 3 skeins of locally dyed organic cotton/bamboo worsted weight yarn.  Ohh I'll take a photo! 

*******time passes, photo taken, photo uploaded ******

******oh crap,  just lost another 1/2 hour work on this--photos, writing, the works******

  We are here to meet a student to help get his bass all set up nicely and then we are stealing it to put it in the instrument competition at the Violin Society of America convention in Indianapolis.  Seth is 

almost done and the Soma coffee shop has gotten about 10 bucks out of me, and I  am about to throw this mobile tablet device in the trash.  I think it's time for some actual hands on leg warmer knitting time!

******* got Seth, got bass, ate a a sweet place called Finch's Brasserie, drove to "Indy", ensconced self on couch of adorable little VRBO 2 person house in a regular old real neighborhood just south of downtown , heated up ginger tea from Soma; now to find out if maybe this works better if not sharing wireless*******

Well, I got the links to work, but you just can scroll up and down at all. And on the MTD (mobile tablet device) there are no up and down arrows on the keyboard. I am going to try again to get the pictures in here.

*******manages to add 2 pictures in "only" 15 min.******

It is DEFinately time to put down the MTD and pick up my DPNs!!!

Ultimate Chile

After using a post title with a word like "penultimate" in it, you're kind of stuck with doing an "ultimate" installment even if it's a year and a half  three and a half years after the fact and you've done a million things in between and can't find the picture file where you had sorted out the last of the photos you thought you might use.  I guess I'll try to meet the challenge, but it's going to be pretty seat of the pants! Here goes:

Seth's birthday dinner in a revolving restaurant, consisting of more fish soup that had some specific name (to which there is a related poem) that I cannot recall, than you could shake a stick at.

2 buck duck bought in market in Chiloe and brought back in a basket on the plane.

Valparaiso market on New Year's Eve day

"Jumbo" on New Year's Eve day

Carts had gripper things that held them onto incline-alator!

Cool Chilean shellfish (Machas?) for New Year's Eve dinner.

Kate's lab's zebra-fish stock room.

New Year's Eve is a big deal there, too.  Remember it's the beginning of their summer vaction!

Kate and John's cool house and her gorgeous collage art.

 Best fireworks ever all along the bay that night, but couldn't get good pictures.

Night time harbour tour

Crazy long tunnel to the strangest straight up an elevator tower ascensor.

Valp'o market again

Last shot of cool graffitti art.

Penultimate Installment

Summer break is over here in Eugene, and I am still writing about summer break starting in Chile in January! The drive back to Valparaíso was uneventful. The high point of the drive was when we took some photos of a giant copper smelting plant which took about 5 minutes to drive through. Copper is used for all kinds of stuff from medicine to space shuttles according to the billboards along the road, and is one of the most lucrative industries in Chile.


Getting close to Valp'o, the traffic became pretty thick. When we had left there was almost none, but summer vacation was gearing up into full swing for the New Year! Charles and Reida showed up at Kate and John's, and we started a new segment of the trip together. First we explored the Casablanca Valley wine region for a day since we still had the car. Kate and John had to work so we were on our own for navigation, but there is only one big road out of Valp'o east towards Santiago, and that's the Casablanca Valley, so we did OK. We ate lunch at a vineyard calledIndomita . The architecture of the building was too much in my opinion, but the food, wine, service and setting were fabulous.



After lunch we had a bit of trouble getting across the highway to our other vineyard, Emiliana, and missed our tour reservation, but they still did a wonderful tasting for us. It was very civilized--sitting at a table with a bi-lingual hostess who poured us hearty tastes of their delicious bio-dynamic wines and told us about the discovery of the Carmenere varietal which had been thought extinct (and was in Europe), but which some visiting European vintner found among the Merlot vines in Chile. It's a delicious varietal; try it if you ever find it. It has more oomph than Merlot, but is easier to take than a big Cabernet or Pinot Noir. This was a lovely vineyard with guinea hens and chickens running about and flowers everywhere; I quite liked their building as well!



Another day while Kate and John were busy dealing with their real lives, Charles, Reida, Seth and I went traipsing about Valparaíso. The city is made of steep watersheds running down to the sea, which create a succession of hills. Each hill is a neighborhood with it's own particular flavor. The famous Chileno poet Pablo Neruda had one of his several houses/wives/mistresses in Valp'o, at the very top of the road system on one of these hills and it is now a museum. It is called La Sebastiana, and you can only take pictures through the windows to the outside (the views are quite lovely), but you really should patiently check out this website: http://www.fundacionneruda.org/imagenes_sebastiana.htm as he was one goofy quirky collector of a man. His houses and belongings were all partially destroyed/stolen by the Pinochet regime (they didn't like people speaking for the common man, and that was what he did) but this foundation retrieved/restored several of his houses around the country.

One day, as Reida and Kate are both very horse-y types (and Charles holds his own) we went on a little trail ride through the hills East of Valp'o at a place called Caballo Puro. They had some awesomely expensive horses there (not the ones people like us got to ride) and one of the hands told us (Kate) about them and all the security they have to have as horse theft is crazy-common. It was a pretty nice place with a nice restaurant and all, but they were a little disorganized, and maybe trying to rip us off the tiniest bit (that's just how things work some places), so Kate had to pull out her "Crazy (yet entirely fluent in Castellano) Gringa personality" to get things straightened out. It was awesome to sit back and watch her "negotiate." I had the nicest horse in the world (Mariposa --means butterfly, and also a kind of Lily), but I could barely move afterwards--oh my achin' knees! I did it though, and we did get a nice view of the landscape. Somehow John managed to slip out of this one. Hmmm.










Each day brought a new mini adventure it seems. On yet another day we headed down for a day trip to the quaint little fishing village of Quintay (notice it has all the letter of quaint right in its name!) which used to have a whaling station but since that is not so legal anymore, one of the universities in Santiago has turned it into a marine science research facility. That is where Kate was about to have her special summer course, which Charles was down there to teach part of, which led to this whole trip we all took to Chile in the first place. Being guests of Kate we got a nice long tour. Their main focus it seems is to help create methods of raising nursery stock of commercially important fish which can be released into their real habitats, thus helping maintain fisheries without the problems that come with many fish farming operations. They had pretty much figured out the conger eel (which is delicious and hearty and a favorite there, and which is not really an eel) and are now working on sea urchins! We saw tiny baby ones which I could barely even photograph they were so small (but they looked just the same!).

We just spent the afternoon in Quintay, but Charles and Reida went back after we left for the course of course and reported that the little restaurant on the beach was most excellent!

Then we headed back to Valp'o for New Year's weekend, when things really get going down there!

Summer in Winter

Seth and I just got back from 3 weeks in the southern hemisphere, in Chile. Although I knew intellectually before I went that it would be summer there, and managed to pack some sandals, I still took my long johns along! It turns out that Solstice in December means SUMMER Solstice with the really long days and nice weather and all. It really does. Wow. Now, I realize that many of you contend with real winter unlike those of us spoiled enough to live in the Pacific Northwest, but soggy, foggy, cloudy, soggy, foggy, cloudy, rainy weather is still not SUMMER. It was pretty darned cool to experience it for really truly.

I can't fit all 535 photos that I took on here, so I'll try to pare it down a bit! I may only be able to do a section of the trip at a time, or you will be completely overwhelmed. I can go onandonandonandonandon about it.

We stayed with a wonderful couple, Kate and John, who we know through Seth's dad Charles because they are scientists.

They are much more than just brilliant developmental scientists however. They are also incredibly fun, funny, generous, thoughtful, active and creative people with an excellent aesthetic sense (art pieces shown individually were created by Kate) whom I feel privileged to consider true friends now after spending so much time with them (it was that or arch enemies after that much time I guess).

They live in Valparaíso, a crazy steep, crazy colorful and generally a bit rough and tumble port city. It's Chile's largest port and was extremely important for trade ships in Pre-Panama Canal Days. It has astoundingly beautiful old homes, though many are in fairly poor condition.

Kate and John restored a 1910 (?) house which was built largely of Douglas Fir (they call it Pino Oregón there) which came down in empty ships from the Pacific Northwest as ballast!

You think it's hard to restore a house here, try doing anything quality construction wise in Chile.


To top it all off, Kate and John decided to put in this big solar heated water/ thermal mass system so they could have some heat stored up for winter (which theoretically does happen there also--similar weather to San Francisco). Kate learned how to do it and taught the maestros (carpenters). A woman in a plumbing store is pretty darned radical there. A woman teaching the maestros what to do is unheard of.

Chile, meet Kate.
















Valparaíso would have gotten pretty short shrift from us if Kate and John hadn't been there to give us pointers and the calm oasis of their gorgeous home. "Valp'o has it charms, though they are rather hidden at times," as John put it. The view over the bay was certainly charming. you could watch the container ships being un/loaded from Kate and John's cupola room.


They have a dry dock ship that sinks down 12 meters for the ships needing fixing to float in or out. The ascensores (inclines) reminded me of Pittsburgh, but there are 15 instead of two or three. They are all about 100-120 years old, and several don't function anymore, but the ones that do are SO much fun.
You really need them too, because walking up the steep hills over and over just ain't gonna happen.

I could go onandonandonandonandon, and we have barely gotten started. If you want to see a few more photos, click on the flickr link to the right under "links I like."

Chao for now.