Those canny Inca...

This is totally cool! Ginger took pictures of this piece of cloth that holds the worlds record for number of threads per inch. And it was made between 1200 and 1532 CE. Nobody today can even do this. It boggles the mind.

Llama mania

This is Ginger at, I think, the town of...blimey! I can't think of it... anyway, these llamas just might be alpacas. But they sure are cute, anyway!

Ginger and Luis at Macchu Picchu

So, my sister and her husband went to Peru without me. Waaaaahhhh waaahhh waaahhh!!!! Ok, so they totally needed to go so G could meet Luis's parents. So while there, they went to some Inca ruins, most famous of which is Macchu Picchu. Macchu Picchu was just elected one of the Seven Wonders of the World. I don't know much about it, and, at the risk of getting it all wrong, I'll just say that I THINK that this site was the most sacred city of the Inca and I did read that when the spanish were looting and pillaging, the locals hid the roads to the city and feigned ignorance of its existance so it survived the purge. Anyway, it's a spectacular place (judging by the pictures, anyway). And I want to go there TOOOOOOO!!!!

Integrated neighborhood fungi

I'm still working on my thesis. It's so hard to do. Maybe I'll finish it one of these days and then I can move on with my life and get out of the methadone clinic. Meanwhile, the mushrooms call...

Worm's-eye view

A worm's-eye view of a beautiful mushroom forest.
My life is so exciting.

A Fungus Among Us

After 40 days and nights of rain, the fungi are popping up everywhere. I'm waiting for one to grow inside the camper so I can photo-document it for posterity (it happened last year). These are from around the yard.

Spots of beauty in my yard

I took these when the rain finally stopped today, just so I could have some pictorial evidence that my yard is not all that bad. I haven't made the flower beds as spectacular as they should be, but there are some pretty nice little places around the compound here. I would like to invest a lot of time in the flowers, but I fear that I'll be moving and it breaks my heart to create a paradise flower garden that I'll have to leave. I'd like to stay, of course, but there's no chance of a job around here that I could do and feel good about myself and the chance for a social life that meets my needs is practically nil in this place. In order to stay here in my jungle, I'll have to have an income source that I can generate from home so that I can travel when I need to to stay sane. That is my ideal and I'm still working on it (admittedly, not all that gung-ho-ed-ly).
Meanwhile, my thesis creeps along, growing ever bigger and more complicated.

Fecundity

Two bugs mating on the statue of Sunny.

Apparently, I really am a postmodernist...

Your Score: The Post-Modernist

You scored 80 Materialism and 60 Phenomenology!

Truth? Under what cultural premises? Identity? What is the relationship between signifier and signified? If large swaths of your conversations tend to take the form of rhetorical questions, you may be a Post-Modernist.

Post-Modernism arose in the 20th Century as both a reaction to and as the newest development of modernism. Post-modernists take unbounded joy in taking a sledgehammer to calcified power structures in philosophy and ethics, denying not just formal religions but anything they see as possessing a structure that constricts the freedom of truth and meaning to explode into every variation of itself. To a Post-Modernist, the underlying metaphysics of the universe are never there to build one meaning, but all possible meanings.

Now if only you could make youself understandable!

Thinkers that you may agree with: Jacques Derrida, Jean Baudrillard, Jacques Lacan, Richard Rorty
Thinkers that may challenge you: Richard Dawkins, Noam Chomsky, John Searle

Link: The Metaphysician Test written by Jaylhomme on OkCupid Free Online Dating, home of the The Dating Persona Test

All My Shoes

This is a picture of all my shoes. Yes, these are all of the shoes that I own. I've been thinking about this for a while now. I own 11 pairs of shoes. That seems excessive. Sometimes I think about all the people in the world who don't have any shoes, or who only have one pair that don't even fit very well. Sometimes the sheer hedonistic lushness of my lifestyle makes me cringe in embarassment. I know I don't have a lot by US standards. I guess I live in poverty in a lot of ways. But compared to the people around the world who live in tiny one-room apartments in overcrowded buildings, or in garbage dumps, I'm living the life of Riley (whoever that is). So, my conundrum: Do I get rid of any of my shoes? And, if so, which ones are to go?
It would have to be some of the platform heels, because I almost never wear them. But which ones? The oldest or the newest? I struggle with the answer to these and other important questions on a pseudo-daily basis. I'm open to suggestions.