Blog

Painting badly (sort of) on purpose

Many years ago, I was visiting my family in San Francisco, and my nephew, then small enough to...

Fever Dreams, Painting Badly

Laying in bed in a feverish haze, thank you science, my overreactive immune system (and a 3rd...

6+ months post breakthrough COVID, and an idling motor

And on Day 111, she could smell. No, really smell. Smell that the honey-scented soap that she...

Quantifying the unquantifiable, Getting Better after Breakthrough Covid Infection

Of all the household tasks, perhaps the most vexing is the putting on of the duvet cover. For...

Breakthrough Covid Infection/Infección Irruptiva por Covid, post double vaccination with Sinovac

One of the many tasty things I ate that I could not taste. I could feel the lime though. Read on...

Santiago, where the air quality really is a thing

When I was making my list of all the things I'd like in a place that would be my home from April 2004 to August 2005 (which was how long I thought I'd live in Chile), I considered many things. Safety. It had to be a place where I had a reasonable expectation of...

Redditors be darned, I went to the feria again, now with “exotics”

For reasons that are perhaps only clear to the gods of Reddit themselves, I got some 2500 extra hits on my blog over the course of a couple of days, due to (I guess) someone in Ecuador getting fleeced in the food purchasing department, and someone else holding out my...

On being the Brussels of Latin America (So sorry, Bogotá)

Everyone wants to be the New York of somewhere. Take Buenos Aires, for example. People want it to be the New York of South America. When I was in Copenhagen, and felt like people were being snooty in my direction, I got the feeling they thought they were the Paris of...

Celeste and Calipso, two friends I can’t tell apart. A tale of color terminology in Chile

Several years ago, I was in the locker room at the gym, and I must have left my (second-generation, I think) iPod Nano on the bench. When I looked in my pocket for it later, it wasn't there. I was disappointed at having been so lax about something a bit pricey, and...

Feria report, the overpurchasing granny cart edition

Sometimes you will go to the market when you haven't gone in a while. I was in La Serena last weekend and running around the weekend before, so I didn't get the chance. But I made up for it this week. The phenomenon that followed harkens back to the mistaken action of...

Do you agree with sleep easily? Parsing conciliar el sueño in English.

One of the English expressions that made my students laugh, back when I used to teach a whole bunch of people from all around the world, was "to fall asleep." On the one hand, with any luck at all, you are not falling anywhere. On the other hand, there is this...

El incendio en la calle 18/The fire on 18th street.

This is a building I had/have an unnatural affection for. This photo is from a couple of years ago, it had since been vacated (and the restaurant inside, named for the street it is on, moved, strangely, across the street to the street Farnor Velasco). What you see...

Catchypoon, a story of language, free association, and kids’ games

You may recall that not that long ago, I went to Suriname. I was thinking about this today because I really want to go to French Guiana. If you know your geography, that's not a free-association, so much as it is a geographic connection. But despite the capital city...

Language learning is easy, or is it? A tale from Chile.

Which one is it? Are they not trying hard enough to learn Spanish or is my life just easy? If learning a language is easy, why hasn’t everyone done it? And if it’s so easy, then why do we have to try hard?