random notes

i accidentally swept a frog off the porch the other day. pretty sure that was a first.

excerpt rss feeds are useless when you spend a lot of time offline in the hammock doing your reading. i am rearranging my subscriptions so that the full feed sites are first to read. does anyone have a recommendation for a good full-text feed news site?
i am trying to make food at home more. i love the food here, but fried plantains and mango con leche are pretty close to the milkshakes and fried banana sandwiches that gave elvis his corpulence.

a FAQ from the last few months is whether i think i am going to get bored here. the short answer is no. for one thing, i have a lively imagination that keeps me entertained wherever i go. for another, there are many interesting people here, lots to do, and a constant stream of new people coming and going. will i miss all the culture of the big cities? perhaps a little. but you can’t have the interesting things in a city without the traffic, congestion, pollution, crime, stress, and general unpleasantness of the city, and those are much more the daily reality than the moments of inspiration you get living there. anywhere you go, you have tradeoffs. also, the “culture” of a big metropolis thinks very highly of itself. in other words, its importance in my life is overrated. for example, if i never went to another gallery opening in my life, i’m not sure i would notice the loss. i can get all the movies and music here. maybe not the live shows, but i can count on one hand the number of bands i have been to see in the last five years that have really blown me away.

the restaurants and markets are good here, but of course there is not the same quality or variety to be found in certain types of foods. then again, i don’t have the same food cravings that other people do. if you are the type of person who absolutely must have a pastrami sandwich on rye with a kosher pickle at regular intervals or else you will die of deprivation, you might not like it here. then again, maybe you can get that here and i just don’t know about it yet. a couple of days ago i had a really excellent plate of carpaccio at the local italian delicatessen, and they might have pastrami.
then again, i have only been here a month.