Snowball of Awesome

The view from o Corcovado. I’ll write more about my trip to it later.
1: My home
2. The horsetrack. It’s hard to believe how much real estate this thing takes up.
3. Two favelas.
4. Another favela (housing project style)
5. The sea.

The snowball effect metaphor doesn’t quite work down here in Brazil (very few Brazilians know how snow works), but it’s such a good one that I’m going to use it anyway. I am rolling down a mountain of glory in a snowball of awesome! I imagine the overflowing energy running through me will come out in this writing. I’ve got about a million things to relate, but I don’t think I’m going to get them on here tonight, or ever, because it seems that the amount of these things just keeps growing every day. A lot of my time is being absorbed by my other blog where I’m actually doing the research that I came down here to do. It’s exciting stuff (if you’re a nerd like me). I’m working on an entry to hopefully publish sometime next week in which I’ll explain a bit more about the place I’m working. For now, just know this: I love it and I truly revere my boss.

So, I’m feeling jittery and I wonder if it sounds like I’m manic, but I’m not. Well, maybe I am. I wouldn’t know. All I know is that I’ve got a million things to do all the time and they’re all great. The newest of these “million things” is yoga class. I joined a gym in my neighborhood last night partially because I wanted to and partially because we didn’t have running water in our apartment. Our water pump had been acting up all week, depriving us of hot water. Yesterday, however, it went out completely and we had nothing, not a drip.

Patricia, my dear mother down here, had to verbally box the apartment management to get them to do anything, but they’ve been dragging their feet. They even went so far as to tell her that we did have water because their plumber had said so. Well, we didn’t have water and the outage coincided perfectly with the beginning of the month which is the perfect time to join the gym, so I showered at the gym this morning after a good jog along the beach. This gym isn’t cheap, so I’m determined to shower there as many times as possible even though Patricia has told me that we got our water back already. Also, I’m going to take as many classes there as possible. So, that means lots of yoga…I guess.

Oh, my friend Paul explained to me that viajar na maionese (traveling through mayonnaise) is a Brazilian saying that roughly translates to having one’s head in the clouds. So the Ruffles promotion that I mentioned yesterday is based on that saying. Next time someone’s trying to talk to you and you’re kind of out of it and not paying attention, apologize to them saying “sorry, I was just traveling in the mayonnaise.”