Farewell

Farewell to thee! but not farewell To all my fondest thoughts of thee: Within my heart they still shall dwell; And they shall cheer and comfort me. O, beautiful, and full of grace! If thou hadst never met mine eye, I had not dreamed of living face Could fancied charms so far outvie. If I may ne'er behold again That form and face so dear to me,  Nor hear thy voice, still would I fain Preserve, for aye, their memory. That voice, the magic of whose tone Can wake an echo in my breast,  Creating feelings that, alone, Can make my tranced spirit blest. That laughing eye, whose sunny beam My memory would not cherish less;-- And oh, that smile! whose joyous gleam Nor mortal language can express. Adieu, but let me cherish, still, The hope with which I cannot part. Contempt may wound, and coldness chill, But still it lingers in my heart. And who can tell but Heaven, at last,  May answer all my thousand prayers,  And bid the future pay the past With joy for anguish, smiles for tears?   Ann Bronte- {May you rest in peace Abuelo.}

Friendship

If you are lucky, you will meet someone in your lifetime who will make you do this...

 And they will gladly do it with you.  No matter what you both look like.  No matter who is watching.

That same person will also make you laugh so hard you cry (even though it all started because she spit a mouthful of beer out while laughing and it sprayed everywhere.  It got in your eye...and your shirt, pants and hair.  (But you can't really blame her, you really are that funny).

 

And when your dance partner is nowhere to be found (probably on purpose), she will fill in for him...fantastically!

 And you never have to worry about bad breath.  She always (and I mean always) has a piece of gum, or twenty, on her.  Sometimes floating loose in her pocket and sometimes in the huge jumbo pack she keeps in her purse.

 And on top of having fresh breath, she will be the God Mother to your youngest child. She will take the job seriously (you knew she would)

And neither you, nor your daughters, could ask for a better sidekick to go through life with.

Because she isn't afraid to tell you the truth, even the hurtful kind, because she knows your friendship can handle it.  And it's because she knows you better than you know yourself sometimes.  And she is usually right.  Though, you can always agree to disagree and there are no hard feelings.

Because even though she hasn't been in your life for the longest amount of time, she has been there for some of the hardest times.  And no matter how hard it got, she showed up.  Ready to deal with whatever life threw at us that day.

Because she has also gotten to share in some of the greatest moments of your life.  Cheering loudly as only she can.  Crying tears of happiness when even you couldn't summon them. She is your biggest cheerleader.  Your biggest fan.  Your biggest support. 

Most of all, she is always there.  Always.  

Sometimes you will call her up to talk about what color pillows you think should go in your living room when you re-decorate.  Even though you have already decided on red and you really just want to hear her voice.  Even though you just got home from seeing her 2 hours ago.  And she will gladly talk to you...for the next two hours.  About nothing but she will keep you company because she knows how lonely the hours between nap time and bedtime can be when your husband isn't home.  

She will be your babysitter when you need to run to that doctor's appointment, or when she finally makes you go get your hair done (yes, she makes you), or when she decides that you and your husband haven't had a date night in too long.

She will be your chef when you just don't feel like cooking dinner when the husband is out of town (well, chef may be too strong of a word for making Chinese Chicken Salad.  But she does all the chopping and mixing).  She will bring it over and share a meal with you so you don't have to eat alone.  Again.

When the girls are out of control, she will bring her daughter over and let them all go wild together.  It doesn't solve the misbehaving, but at least they have a friend to do it with and you have a friend to ignore it with.  And drinking a glass of wine with someone always tastes better than doing it alone.

She is your park date, your double date and your I want to go the mall and window shop date.  She is your sounding board, your sanity and your closest thing to a sister.

She is your everyday and on days like today, you miss her!    

But I am thankful that I found her, even though I now have to miss her. Because you only find friends like her once in a lifetime.  And I am so grateful for my once in a lifetime.

(Sorry I made you cry S)

And it's always an added bonus when your husbands get along.  

HOMY

I mentioned awhile back that I love to shop.  I love to bargain shop.  Getting a good deal, while indulging in one of my favorite pastimes, is heaven for me.  But here in Chile, that is very hard to do.  If you need to refresh your memory as to why, click here.  Or I can sum it up and tell you that there is no bargain hunting to be done at the southern tip of the world.  Things are just so expensive here.  Everything is imported and even if things are made locally, the things they use for materials may have had to have been imported, hence the cost goes up.  Or they just like to charge twice as much because they can.  And there is no such thing as a Sale.  Oh sure, the stores advertise them, but when you go in you realize that the "Hasta 40% Descuento" (Up to 40% off) means that one thing in the whole store is 40% off and nothing else is even remotely on sale.  They do not do end of the season/preview of next season/Christmas/it's our birthday/just for the heck of it sales.  So, you either have to suck it up and pay full retail or, heaven forbid, not shop.  For the past 10 months I have chosen  the latter and it is killing me.  Seriously, it is slowly eating away at my soul.

But now, I have to shop.  OK, have to is a bit strong of a statement.  I choose to shop and pay what I have to since we are moving and have somehow ended up with an extra bedroom and a small room/large closet in the new house. The large room I am turning into a playroom for the girls, the smaller will be their creative space.  Money be damned when I can finally get all of the girls toys and crayons out of my living room!  And my bedroom.  And the linen closet.  I can even unclutter their bedrooms and stuff it all in a room specially designated for toys and making messes.  I have been dreaming of this day since right before MadHatter was born and she had already invaded my house.  I had an excersaucer in my living room and a swing in my kitchen and I didn't even have a baby yet.  It was killing me slowly, for if you must know anything about me, it is that I am a neat freak.  I need order and organization.  I need space and no clutter.  And that just doesn't mesh with having kids.  So I have tolerated it for the past 4 years.  And I have done it by driving everyone batty (especially B).   But no more.  I am going to finally get the playroom I have longed for (and I am sure my girls will like it too).

But the problem is, where do I go to get the things I need for said playroom?  There is no Target, no IKEA.  There are specialty shops that I could go to and  I know I said expenses be damned but let's be realistic.  I am still me and will never bring myself to over pay.  So I had a bit of a dilemma.  And then I remembered HOMY.  With a name like HOMY what would you guess I could find there?  Yep, not much of a stretch - things for the home.  So MadHatter and I made our list and headed to the store.  (Stinkerbell was napping and I wouldn't let her loose in HOMY to save my life without reinforcements anyway.  She is a bull in a china shop).

One word sums up HOMY - IKEA.  The concept is almost exact.  In fact, it is so close, it actually made me a bit homesick.  My girlfriend S and I spent a lot of time at Ikea.  The girls would go to the play place/babysitter and we would wander until lunchtime.  We never really needed much - just went for ideas, or things we could find that we didn't even know we needed, or mostly if I am honest, for lunch.  IKEA's meatballs rock.  I still miss the meatballs.  HOMY doesn't do them and an empanada just isn't the same.  But I digress...

Shopping at HOMY is like being back in the states, except for the prices.  These are no IKEA prices.  But you take what you can get.   And I did.  Well, sort of.  I made a list of all of the things I wanted to get and now will cull it until I have just the perfect things for the girls playroom and creative space.  I am so happy to be shopping again I just couldn't let it end in one small trip.

I will  head back to HOMY next week when we are getting ready to move things into the new house and I can set the rooms up before all the other clutter shows up.  One nice thing about moving next door and having the keys a full 6 days before the moving company comes to pack you - you can set up some of the rooms without the clutter of boxes and paper all around you.  Can you tell I am a bit excited??? (All pictures are from my iPhone so the quality is not great).

This IS HOMY right?  Not IKEA????

No meatballs here but still a great lunch place.

They even do the small house concept.  A whole house in 500 sq. ft...

MadHatter picking out her new things.

Not exactly cheap like IKEA though.  This bookshelf runs about $20
I think it is about $10 in the U.S. 

And they had so many great kids spaces.

I totally felt like I was back in Orange County at the IKEA.  I could almost taste the meatballs.

House Hunters International

We all know how I feel about moving.  I do it a lot and actually enjoy the house/apartment hunting, the cleansing of clutter that comes with packing and the best part, the setting up of a new home.  Which always includes shopping and shopping is one of my great loves.  But, we also know how I feel about this move.  The forced move.  The "I haven't even been in my house 10 months and I have to do it all again?" move. But I have gotten over that.  That isn't why this move was proving to be harder than the others.  It is because the business of house hunting is really different here in Chile.  I mean, so very different.   At least this time I knew what to expect.  Or so I thought.

Last year when we came in we knew we had 4 1/2 days to find a place.  I am control freaky enough to know that there was no way that I was going to go back to California and pack up my house if I did not already have a house to move into.  I also knew there was no way I would let B pick out the house without me after I left (he stayed for a bit to work).  Not because we don't agree on what we like (in fact, we have freakily similar taste) but because he doesn't live in the house the same way I do.  And by that I mean, I live there, he just visits us on weekends and some late nights when he is in town.  He just needs a kitchen, a bathroom and a place for his bed.  He doesn't pay attention to the fact that our 18 month old daughter (at the time) could never keep from killing herself on the drop sided staircase that looked so cool.   So, 4 1/2 days.  We were expecting it to be a whirlwind of house, house, house, lunch, house, house, drinks, dinner.  Repeat for 4 days.  Nothing even remotely close to that occurred.

The day we came in the real estate agent had not lined up a single house for us to see.  Nothing.  We had just flown all night, freshened up at the hotel and were ready to get this adventure started.  A bit jet lagged by the 5 hour time difference, but fueled by the excitement of finding our new home.  And yet, we did not see a single house that day.  I couldn't understand how this had happened.  They knew we were coming, they knew we were here a short time.  They knew we needed a house.  But the need didn't matter.  It's just how things are done.   We saw a total of about 10 houses in 3 days - respectable.  Especially when you consider we only saw 2 houses the second day we were here.  Making that a grand total of 2 houses in 2 days.  Sounds more like vacation for me but when you factor in that B was also working and I had no car, I had a lot of hotel time.  Then we fired our real estate agent and found one that showed us everything she could in the last 2 days.  We found a house.  I went home happy.  (I will skip the fact that they then sold the house we rented out from underneath us and we had to go call back all of the other houses we might be happy with to find one that still hadn't rented).  UGH!

But I still haven't really made it clear to you how it works here.  Because I still wasn't so sure myself before the last 2 months.  Now I know only too well the system here.  And it still doesn't make sense to me.

Here is how it works in Chile.

1. The house is put up for rent and an agent is signed to represent the seller.  This sounds familiar.

2.  The house is listed on the agents website and probably the real estate site used by almost everyone (very much like realestate.com).  The site has a lot of listing by many agencies and is highly searchable - but it is worthless.  Half of the houses were rented 6 months ago and no one took them down, the other half aren't really available (just checking to see how many bites they can get), and some are actually available but are listed 3, 4 even 5 times with different prices, sq. footage and number of rooms.  And there are no locations listed, no addresses, and certainly no open houses. You really don't get a good idea of what is available and find you can't do this on your own.  So, you get an agent.

3. You have your agent.  Now you can go out and see houses.  But you can only see the houses that your agent represents.  You love the white brick on the corner that has a sign up for rent?  Sorry, listed by another agent.  You will not get to see it.  Not without hiring them.  You either end up seeing only what your agent has, or you have multiple agents.  We had 5.

4.  There is no thing as a lock box here and the real estate agents do not have keys to the houses they represent.  You make appointments with the people who are currently renting the house (or the owners if they live in).  And they are not really happy to be showing the house so you are at their mercy.  Really.  They have to be home to show the house to you, not the other way around like I am used to.  Uncomfortable in a lot of situations.  And you had better be on time - not early, not late - or you are not getting in.  Even if they are home.  They will tell you that you missed your appointment and you can make another.  It makes for a lot of down time and I now appreciate the 1-2 hour window you get in the U.S.  This is the only time in Chile that they are punctual.

5.You also aren't told locations of houses, or even areas that they are in.  Safety issues and that I understand but it makes it hard to rule things out.  Why waste time if the house is on a busy intersection (many that we saw), so far out of the way it would take me forever to get anywhere (a couple) or that it backs up to the busy mall...You are told to meet your agent at their office or an gas station and then you follow them to the house.  You may also not have been told locations because even the real estate agents that have the houses listed don't know where they are.  We got lost. Multiple times.  While following an agent to the house.

6.  Don't expect to do any of this on weekends.  The real estate agents don't work on weekends.  The renters/owners that have to show you the house have plans on weekends and aren't home so it's confined to weekdays.  Around busy schedules.  Are you seeing why we could only see a house or two a day?

7.  You are lucky enough to get into a house.  You are so excited you don't even care what it looks like anymore - you actually got inside.  And then you realize that there may be a reason the renters didn't want to show it.  They don't want anyone to know that they have beat the living daylights out of the inside of this house.  They are trashed.  Very few that we saw were well taken care of.  It's sad really but I guess that happens in the U.S. too.

8.  And now you have found something, within your budget, that you can live with.  There are a few minor tweaks that you need to have done...The 20 year old carpeting (at least it looks 20 years old) needs to be replaced and the walls need to be painted since they let their kids draw on them for the last 5 years.  Simple fixes.  They say yes, that can be done.  Then call you back the next day and say if they are going to do that work, then you have to pay an extra 200,000 pesos a month.  For the life of the contract.  That's $400 a month - for 2 years.  $9600.  For fake wood floors and some paint.  Thanks, we'll pass.

9.  You find another house that might do it.  It is slightly out of your price range but since it hasn't rented in awhile so you offer them what you have set as a budget.  Nope - they RAISE the price.  Not kidding you.  This happened more than once.

10.You keep doing this for 8 weeks.  Over 30 houses.  You are exhausted, frustrated and sure you are never going to find a house.

And then you find a house.  Not through an agent.  Not on the website.  Your neighbor tells you that the neighbor on the other side of her is moving.  That they already bought another house and need to either sell or rent theirs.  She has the keys to the neighbors now empty house and the OK to show it to you.  The house is nice, it has been taken care of, and it fits your things.  The budget is hammered out and you get the keys.  You are now moving next door.  Literally.  After all of that, you are moving next door.  And the rest was just an exercise in patience.

A strange side view of our new house.... - Our old house is on the right side of the white one shown here.  

Laguna San Rafael

(The final of the three posts on our trip to Patagonia)

On the last Thursday in December we awoke at the ungodly hour of 5:15 am (I am not a morning person, can you tell?) and once again picked up the pajama'd sleeping girls and took them on a trip.  This time we would be spending the day on a catamaran, not a plane, which made it a bit more comfortable.  The catamaran that would be our home for the day was spacious and with only about 30 of us on the boat, there was plenty of room for the girls to wander around if they got bored.  Which surprisingly, none of us did over the course of the 16 hour trip.  Yes, 16 hours.  On a boat.  With two toddlers.  It could have been horrible, but wasn't.  They were amazing and so were the sights.  We ate, we slept, we played games on the iPad.  We watched a documentary, we played Bingo and we did it all as we crossed through the Laguna San Rafael National Park.

The Laguna San Rafael Park is the largest in the Aisén region and it includes the entirety of the Northern Patagonia Ice Field.  The Ice Field is a remnant of the Patagonian Ice sheet that covered all of Chilean Patagonia and the westernmost part of Argentine Patagonia during the Ice Age.  Covered it in a sheet of ice that has been retreating now for thousands of years, and is still the second largest continuous sheet of ice outside of the polar regions.  And it is splendid, blue, shimmering ice.  Sheer and opaque at the same time.  Blue and white and gray.  Pure.  And getting to and through the ice fields is no easy feat - hence, the slow 16 hour boat ride.  At first, it was easy going but I learned that it was just because we were still in the open waters just outside of Puyuhuapi.

Good-bye civilization.

After passing the last bit of civilization we would see until docking we started our passage through the winding fjords (channels) that would lead us to the most impressive sights we had seen yet on this trip (and we had already seen some impressive sights - see Puyuhuapi  and The Lodge and Spa at Puyuhuapi).  The tallest of the Andes mountain peaks are located here, with the highest summit of all, Mount San Valentin (4.058m or 13,313 feet) about 2 hours from Puyuhuapi and as I went out front to see it as we passed I didn't take my camera out to shoot it.  Let's just say it is a pretty tall mountain.

And then it began.  We started to cross over into the Northern Ice Fields.  Randomly you would see a chunk of ice floating by...

 Then chunks would start passing by in groups...

and then they got bigger...

 and bluer...

Truly impressive and pictures really can't do them justice.  They were everywhere and you started to wonder how the boat was going to navigate through them all without hitting any of them.  These were not ice bergs but our boat also wasn't the size of the Titanic.  These "chunks" could have done some serious damage.  We did end up hitting one somewhere along the way, but it must have been small as we were on our way with engines running in no time.

And finally, we were there.  The San Rafael Glacier - huge and imposing even from miles away.  The San Rafael Glacier is largely in retreat, as are most of the 28 glaciers in the region and it is still around only because of it's elevation (about 3,600-4,900 ft) and the fact that it has a cool, moist, marine climate.  It is also one of only two glaciers that reach almost sea level on the Pacific Ocean side (San Quintin is the other).  And like other glaciers in retreat, it is impressive to see the huge pieces of ice break off and come crashing down into the lagoon.  And then to hear the huge cracking noise it makes.  Yes, you see it first and then hear it - making it difficult to catch on camera.  Because by the time you hear it and can locate where it came from it is already in the water (remember, you are starting at a huge white sheet of ice - and the piece breaking off is also white.  Makes it hard to locate).  And then the waves start.  Some pieces make huge waves, some barely a ripple.  Either way, it rocks your boat.  

We took turns getting into little rubber boats that launched off of the back of the Catamaran.  They held about 8 people each, plus the navigator (our navigator was the captain) and we took a 45 minute tour of the glacier area.  We got close.  I mean close.  About as close as you could get without being in danger of one of those ice chunks falling on you.  It was majestic.  It was quiet and it was once in a lifetime.  

A big chunk fell off, and the waves rocked us for minutes afterwards.

Tasting 30,000 year old ice!

Another boat from our crew.  That tiny dot - that's them.

 And then we got on the Catamaran for the trip to Chacabuco where we were sleeping for the night and catching the bus to the airport in the morning.  A great trip with a spectacular ending!  I highly recommend it.

At 4:

You live to hold my hand. (But only my left one).

Your imagination is out of this world interesting.  Complicated. Spectacular.
You love to sing.  In two languages.  Mostly songs you make up.

Jumping is like breathing.
You no longer nap but when you are tired, you go to sleep.
You are compassionate.

You can tell a story better than anyone I know.

Dressing up is an essential part of your day.  But only if you can put on accessories too.

You have astounded me by learning a second language in less than a year.
You are sensitive to the slightest injustice.  Towards you.  Towards others.
You will master the jump rope before 5, if you have your way.
You can be reasoned with.  Unbelievably well for your age.
Halloween is your favorite day of the year. (See dress up above) 

You are silly and funny and so much joy to be around.

You hate having your picture taken.  Unless of course you can make a funny face.
You cannot tell a joke.  It's always in the wrong order.  And you laugh too soon.
You are fascinated by policemen and jails.

You have misplaced the e, f and g in the alphabet.  You know they belong, you just forget them.  Always.
You can work my iPhone better than I can.

Your self control amazes me.  A small bag of candy can last you a week.

Coloring tops your list of quiet time activities.  Add scissors and glue to the mix and you are set for hours.

You are shy.  Painfully.  But you become a social butterfly after you break out of your cocoon.

You hate to say goodbye.
You are beautiful.  In every sense of the word.
Every day you are a new princess.  Sometimes prince.

You must dress yourself.  And it will be in a dress or skirt.  Pants will not work at 4.

You hate anything that makes you think you are learning something.

You are uniquely you.

Happy 4th Birthday to my sweet {baby} girl.

I love you more than my heart can hold.

I hope every wish you make, comes true!