Last week was the thirtieth anniversary of the coup d'etat that put General Videla and power and led to seven years of dirty war and dictatorship in which 30,000 people "disappeared". It's a time of reflection, of making the past present, refusing to forget, saying "never again". It's also a time when political groups and figures make a bunch of ( Read more... )

I went to my first welding/metal-working class yesterday. This guy Alvaro from another cultural center is teaching us for free. We have an arc welder at Tucuy Paj, so this should be helpful in making a bunch of useful stuff like shelves, tables, benches, etc.

. . . goes to this wierdo vampire/witch who's running for Governor of Minnesota right now. Well, I'm not really going to vote for him, but his website is worth a laugh. This came to me through Al Pieda mail.

Jonathon "The Impaler" Sharkey for Governor

Is this guy serious?

Didn't do anything special for my birthday. There have been other parties going lately, so it didn't seem necessary to plan one just for me. I did make it to a screen-printing workshop and learn how to do that. Cristina wants to start screen-printing in Tucuy Paj. The materials seem kind of pricey to me, and I'm not confident about the market ( Read more... )

This journey was not made by a hobbit, but instead by yours truly. I arrived back in Buenos Aires and quickly decided the heat and mosquitos were insupportable. Stuck out my thumb and eventually made it to Córdoba. Worst time hitching of my life though. No one wanted to pick me up. I really couldn't believe how long I stood in some spots and ( Read more... )

We're back in Buenos Aires. Some trip totals ( Read more... )

Well, it would sound like a bad joke if it weren't true ( Read more... )

. . . except maybe for dinner. No, no, really I love kids, little angels of light that they are. Little bouncing, yelling, jumping, kicking angels of light on a seventeen hour train ride. It wasn't just the kids that made the ride from Bariloche to Viedma, from the Andes to the Atlantic, fairly miserable. There was a definite sensacion of being ( Read more... )

A girl I barely know who used to work at the Casbah Tea House in Tucson sent me this link:

www.commonvision.orgLooks like some good work in sustainability and education mixed with some silly hippie shit. But Emma, who disdains "drippie hippies" (her term for "Hey, peace and love, man" types who seem to care about the environment and left politics ( Read more... )

Emma and I hiked up Cerro Catedral, outside of Bariloche, a few days ago to camp. The camping area at the top is absolutely gorgeous, a 1700 meter high bowl rimmed by craggy peaks on three sides with a lake in the middle. One of our days there we decided to hike up and over one of the ridges to look at the panorama on the other side, a beautiful ( Read more... )