Steve Foley from Buenos Aires

While I have never said I don´t like winter, in fact DO like in the right place and time..., I am more than happy to have arrived here two weeks-plus ago to the most lovely weather. They had had a heatwave before we got here, everybody complaining about high temperatures and humidity, and just when we got off the plane it settled down to "buenos aires", sunny, breezy, not too hot, birds tweeting away! Nonetheless, we both came down with colds immediately, but within a few days they had gone away.

Several times already I have ordered up "bife de lomo" delivered to the house from the barbecue joint around the corner, big luscious steak that is without doubt the best I have ever eaten, up in price now, 6 dollars for an ample amount for two people. We make a big salad to go with it, and.... ahhhh. Just this afternoon I finished a meal like that, sitting out on the sunny patio by the little green yard, looked up at the deep blue sky and said "Wow, this is the life. Thank You, Thank You"!

I am pursuing one of my habits of the past few years, this year taking it perhaps to its logical limit - seeing how I can fit a piece of my furniture, unassembled, in our travel bags to bring down here and put together.
Remember the easychair/ottoman I did recently? Well, it is big... but I managed to dry-assemble one, take it apart, cut it up into pieces such that I could jam them into our bags... and voila! I now have almost completed putting it back togetheragain, except for the leather upholstery, which I will get done down here, for much less cost. Fun! I have taken pictures of the whole process, and will enjoy someday putting together a little slideshow of how I took my easychair to Argentina!

Almost every day I get up, get on my bike and ride about 10 blocks through semi-crazy traffic, and then arrive at Parque Palermo, a huge park with many separate parts. I confine my activities to riding around one of the lakes and then doing some exericses, all the while communing, in a way, with the hundreds of others doing the same thing, many of whom I recognize from the first year I came here, eight years ago. Sometimes I go home by way of the Hypodromo, also part of the park, maybe the size of twenty football fields with a horseracing oval and big ornate old-european-looking grandstands, and quite often there will be lots of jockeys out there exercising their beautiful racehorses.

We had thought to do nothing this "season", maybe take a long trip to northern Brazil. But something we have had on the back burner is rearing its ugly head and demanding, maybe, that we do it this year - a major remodel of Monica's lovely but too small house. Since the footprint is pretty much fixed, it means going up, and almost certainly means enough physical changes that the current personality of the place, sort of Mexican hacienda, will be wiped-out and we will have to create something new... perhaps in the same style, but it depends on what we can find in the way of doors, windows, etc. There are several reasons, besides the fact that we know we want to do it sometime and are relatively free this year, why we think we should do it now, but on the other hand it will change what would have been a relaxed sojourn into a crazy push not unlike some of our other times down here when we were remodeling while watching a ticking clock. Several factors are at play and will help us determine, in the next few weeks, if we will take it on or not.

But we are well aware that many would love to be in our shoes, facing our daunting array of difficult choices!

Love,
Steve/Moni