finally posting again

Well it's been too long, there's so much to tell and I'm going to end up giving a wayyy too short summary because to try and reconstruct the last two weeks in their entirety would be a mighty and probably impossible attempt indeed. The day after my last post, I went to pick Lincoln up at the airport in the early morning and then spent the day with him and also with all the leaving people. Saying goodbye to Rosie was very hard. Lincoln and I had a great and very relaxing two days and then MDJ came and we spent a couple of days in Stgo, a couple in Valpo (as the first real guests at the very nice new B&B Yellow House Hostel: their site is here) and Zapallar (where we had Christmas day) and then finally a few days in Pucón in the south. We had great weather overall and even in Pucón, which was lucky because they get a lot of rain down there. It was really wonderful to have the family down here, they got to meet Vale and Gaby and my host family and we had a great time. Traveling with family is very different from traveling with friends, I realized, because we can fight all the time and in the end it doesn't really matter; we still have a good trip. I got to talk to Mom and Dad about things I never really had before and that was also cool, it felt like a big growing-up step. I was very sad to see them go on the 31, because I realized then for real that I won't see them again for longer than I hadn't seen them before. That sentence was pretty tortured, I'm sorry.

But I didn't have too much time to be sad because I had to hustle over to Alcántara, where Vale and her aunt picked me up to get ready for a New Year's party at some friends of her aunt's. It was a costume party and I went as a sultan thanks to Vale, who rigged me up some fancy pants and bought me a very nice sultan hat complete with brooch and feather. It was a fun party, if a little weird. Everyone there would be in the ex-frat/sorority mold were they from the States, they were all really rich and knew it and for one of the songs we danced to the chant started, "Whoever doesn't jump is Bachelet!" That is, if you're not dancing, you're a dirty socialist. HAHAHA...oh, wait. Well anyhow they were nice to me and we all got really drunk and everyone hugged everyone at midnight and then we watched the fireworks downtown, which we could see because we were high up enough on the hills (you basically don't live high up unless you're loaded). They were great. I spent the night and all the next day in Vale's aunt's house, recovering with the adults from the night before and playing Playstation with their kids. I didn't leave the house or even really a prone position (with breaks to change location) until about 9, when we went to Bravissimo and her uncle treated us all to heaping amounts of ice cream. I got home around 11:30, exhausted, and found Francisco using my computer for a work report; his has finally pooped out, it seems. So I went to bed and woke up this morning and took my blood pressure for the first time also in too long, which reminds me that I need to put the readings from this morning onto my spreadsheet. So I'm going to do that, and cut this off. Sorry again for not posting at all the past couple of weeks and I promise to get more regular again starting now. Oh, and HAPPY NEW YEAR!