Note: People clicking over from LP and other points, I nearly always blather on a bout my observations of Chile. Today’s a different kind of day. If you want to see the normal stuff, click around. Or check out this story about my encounter with the medical establishment here.

Point one:

I have these friends, these crazy, energetic, creative friends. And they have projects galore and all of them could use a personal assistant or a giant whiteboard on which to write down all the fabulous whirlwind of things that they juggle throughout the day where a day includes 24 hours because some of them also don’t sleep terribly much.

One such friend is Tina. Tina is tinaseamonster. We worked together a lifetime ago, me writing about environmental law for a publishing company and her doing the fun part of publishing, the pagemaker part, and the web part (this was a long time ago, spring chickens we are not).

Tina has energy. Energy to do stuff, to make stuff, to think stuff, and to talk about stuff.

She talks about a lot of stuff, including television zombies, something I know nothing about. She and some friends recently launched another podcast, doomhouse, and asked me if I’d give a blather about what it’s like to love another country. And so I did. So if you’ve ever wondered what I sound like speaking English, click over and hear the audio that accompanies this nifty masthead.

Point two:

While I was in New Zealand, I got a set of emails and blog contacts from a woman named Beatriz Burgos, a journalist who works for a magazine that one of the Internet providers here in Chile puts out. Punto Net, it’s called, and some of you may receive this magazine, or may leaf through it at your suegro‘s (inlaw’s) house or whathaveyou. At any rate, Beatriz and I had several email exchanges, though we both would have preferred to have the interview either in person or on skype, but with distance and post-earthquake communication breakdown, it was not meant to be.

In the end, there’s this (OMG) four-page article about me, and my blog and the funny things I say about Chile and Chileans. If you read here, you pretty much know what she says, but she strings it together very well, and the article features a whole bunch of my photos as well. It’s in Spanish, and very strangely, does not exist in a virtual version, though I keep thinking I’m going to head over to Max Oover (that’s Max Huber to you) and get it scanned. In the meantime, if you run into me, feel free to ask me to see it, since I’ve been carrying it around for days thinking I might end up at Max Oover, which I never do.

In the meantime, look at the silly (taken with my computer, thus the mirror image).

(Title, The strange (and Chilean) world of Eileen.

Also, my living room is light blue, not pukey as it appears in the picture.

Point three:

Vivek Wagle and I go way back. The preceding is false. I am familliar with him because he was one of the judges or maybe coordinated that blogging contest I was a part of (oy, remind me never to do that again, my nine-year-old self does not need to be resurrected), and I know him through blogsherpa, Lonely Planet’s write-for-recognition program where I let them legally take my content and repost it on their site. He’s a fancy editor at Lonely Planet and will certainly never read this, but if he does, I hope he considers my latest email where I tell him I can’t wait to do something for Lonely Planet that actually has a price tag on it.

Anyway, Vivek contacted me recently and asked me to write a guest post about Chile, post-earthquake. I pitched back that I wanted to talk about the psychological part, how people in Santiago are using talking about it as a kind of self-therapy. He said yes, and bob’s your uncle (only he didn’t say that part).

I don’t think Lonely Planet needs a giant graphic here, but you know where to find them, and here’s the link to the guest blog post. Thanks to them for giving bloggers a chance to say what they need to on a larger stage than we might otherwise get to perform on.

Point four:

There is no point four. Just how full of myself do you think I am?