el otoño....yuck

I've been really lazy as of late (as if you couldn't tell by my lack of updating). I suppose that the old adage "No news is good news" does not apply when one is living in a foreign country. That said, I promise to try to update more often.

Had a new experience last week: actually felt not one, but two earthquakes. Chile is one of the most seismically-active spots on the globe so I am surprised I hadn't felt one earlier. I was sitting in my room, typing on the computer late one night when I felt the floor buckle just a tiny bit and then the windows were rattling for a few seconds. Then it happened again the next afternoon. I looked on the internet; they were all a little over 4.0 on the Richter, which is nothing, really. The south of the country has had a few more severe quakes over the past month, and a couple of people were killed in April down there.

The weather has been dreary the past few days, and the smog has gotten really bad. You see everything through a disgusting fog. Now I know what Victorian London must have been like. I feel like I'm living in some Charles Dickens novel. I half expect small children with sooty faces wearing page-boy caps to come out of alleys when I walk to the Metro. There was a sprinkle of rain this afternoon, and the cloud of pollution hanging over the city cleared long enough for me to catch a glimpse of new snow on the Andes. Winter must really be around the corner now. I've checked the average temperatures, and the daytime highs never go below 55 during the winter, so it shouldn't be too bad. The only thing that might cause a problem is the dry air. I might be very wrong on this, but I always equate dry air with feeling a lot colder than humid air.

I made a pumpkin pie for Nora on Mother's Day. I thought it appropriate as it is fall here now. I found canned pumpkin, imported from the USA, at a "Jumbo" near school. Jumbo is basically the Chilean equivalent of a Meijer, and it has a fairly good selection of imported foodstuffs. I was disappointed to discover that ready-made pie crusts do not exist here, so I was forced to make the crust from scratch. I like to cook and bake, but I have heard horror stories about pie crusts. Mine turned out okay, although I didn't roll it thin enough and the crust-to-filling ratio ended up to be a little more skewed towards the crust side of the equation. I had to eye most of the measurements as I was too lazy to bother with English/metric conversions, and some of the filling spilled inside the oven, where it baked on to the bottom. Nora insisted on cleaning up, which made me feel bad. It was literally encrusted onto that Chilean oven. She said she liked the pie, but I only saw her eat a sliver of it, and she's been pushing the leftovers on me at every meal (including breakfast), so maybe she was just saying she liked it.