American Idle

When you live with cats, your going to, occasionally, notice a slight acrid urine smell around the house. It's just part of the program.

For the most part, these smells are isolated to the litter box, which is how it should be. Every once in a while, I'll notice a smell outside the box, which means that one of my cats, usually Fil, has decided the litter box was not clean enough for her liking and she decided to improvise her own box. I have two boxes for them and I've become fastidious about keeping it clean, but she still pisses on various throw rugs, newspapers or piles of clothes, now and again.

I'm sort of used to the odor by now, having lived around it for six years, and usually I can find the litter box du jour and toss in the washing machine or dump out in the trash. But every once in a while, I catch the whiff of cat piss, but can't for the life of me locate the smell. There's a hint of an acrid smell in the air, I search for it, can't find it, and then it goes away. It hits me again, then I lose it.

This happened today. It took me all morning to realize that FIl had peed on my pajamas and I was carrying the smell with me all over the damn house. Fucking cats. Can't live with 'em. Can't drown 'em.

One of the great discoveries on this past trip to Brazil was Açai (pronounced AH-SAW-EEE). I'd been hearing about it for a long time now. It has arrived with a vengeance in the US (via email spam mostly) as a supplement touting all sorts of positive health affects: energy, weight-loss, blah, blah, blah. Who knows if the claims are true. What is true is that açai is delicious. Served cold and mixed with guarana syrup, it tastes something like a mixed berry sorbet. Add in banana and granola and have a superbly tasty treat. I'm going to have to find a place in Oakland, or more likely Berkeley, that sells good açai. If I can't I'm going to start importing the pulp and open up a shop in the Bay Area to sell it to the masses.

Visited the Zoo Safari in Sa˜o Paulo yesterday. Spider monkeys, Bororo, the baby hippo above, a giraffe, camels, big cats, peacocks, albino emus. All very cool. Pictures, accounts and descriptions to come. Many pics being uploaded to Flickr now.

We're getting ready to leave for a day at the beach in Guaruja down on the São Paulo coast, but we can't leave because of regulations to reduce traffic in this crazy car-filled megalopolis. Depending on the last number of you license plate (1-2 for Monday, 3-4 for Tuesday, etc.), you are not able to drive in the city limits from 7am to 10am and 5pm to 8pm. This effectively reduces traffic by 20% at rush hour. Not that it seems to have done much good (I would have hated to see what it was like before the regulation was in place.

Quel's plate ends in 9, we are stuck on Fridays. So we are diligently awaiting the appointed hour when we can get on the road and head south the beach. Then we have to decide to come back early before the 5pm or curfew or stay late and return after it ends. Sort of annoying, but necessary.

Hard to get tired of taking pics of the sweeping beach and stunning mountains of Ipanema. It's truly one of the world's finest beaches. Undoubetly, it is one of the best places in the world for people watching, especially on Sunday when the street adjacent to the beach shuts down to traffic and turns into a day long parade of dog walkers, joggers, strollers, cyclists, rollerbladders and gawkers.Truly, truly, truly fantastic. (add musical accompaniment here)

More images on Flickr, as always. I just wish we had more sunny days and less rain, though it did make for some dramatic pictures.

Ok, so not technically a stray, since she had a collar, but she really didn't belong to anyone. Some guy tried to sell her to us for 50 euros, which is silly. She might have been around 4 months old. Badly in need of someone to look after her, feed her, bath her, cut her nails and love her. She was a total sweetheart.

She followed us around and that was before Quel bought a bag of food and started to feed her. Then we had a gang of dogs following us around Pied Piper style around and back into our hotel in Morro de São Paulo. We would have loved to take her with us, but we just wouldn't have been able to take her on the flight back to São Paulo. Here's hoping she has a wonderful life on the beach in Bahia.

More here, here, here, here, and here.

Yesterday, we went to see this tiny, curvy cobblestoned street in Vila Madalena called Rua do Batman where the walls of all the houses are covered in graffiti. The art is changed periodically as the artists wish. Not all of it is great. Some is very odd in fact, but most of it is incredibly colorful and beautiful.

I am trying to upload the photos from here in Brazil. It is slow going, but eventually, they will all be here on Flickr.

Saw the latest Star Trek opus last night in a mostly emtpy theater in Sao Paulo. With a few minor places where the movie looked too much like Starship Troopers, it was quite good. It's probably not going to win any Academy Awards, except maybe some technical ones, but it's worth a watch, especially for casual fans of Star Trek-interesting to see the main characters as young men and women.

The casting of movie was excellent, most notably Zachary Quinto as the young Spock. The guy is just so perfect. Looks right. Sounds right. Is right. Simon Pegg as the young Scotty was also an inspired choice.

I was sort of disappointed that none of the aliens spoke in any language other than English. I was expecting to have some trouble with that part of the movie as the subtitles would have been in Portuguese. I even prepared Raquel that she would have to translate for me, but it turned out to be unecessary. The last time I saw a movie in Brazil, The Lord of the Rings, I completely missed on everything the Elves said because there was no translation in English. No problems on that end here.

When I disembarked from the flight yesterday, we were given to orders over the PA to report to health authorities if we had a fever over 100 degrees. Then as we hit the jetway, we were handed a slick pamphlet about the H1N1 virus with instructions about what to if you've come or are headed to an infected area (is California included? Don't think so). At immigration there were people walking around with surgical masks. I laughed the whole thing off. I'm strong, right? I don't get sick. Hardly ever.

This morning I woke up feeling not so great. A little headache and a minor chest cough. I don't think it's anything. I don't feel warm and Raquel took my temp and I don't have a fever. I chalk it up to a combination of jet lag and wearing myself out on wednesday's long ride.

I drank some OJ, some coconut water, ate some toast and took a couple Ibuprofens and feel better, just a little fatigued.

The sun is shining here. Time to make some hay.

Tchau.

Ok, well not really, but I have been studying with both Rosetta Stone and Pimsleur (while on my bike). My vocab and grammar are improving in leaps and bounds. It helps that so many of the words are close to or the same as in English and Spanish. I don't speak Spanish either, but I probably know close to 2000 words, which is all I should need. And it helps that I studied Latin and Greek, albeit a long time ago, so I have decent understanding of conjugation, declension and a strong foundation in grammar.

However, the pronunciation still ties my tongues in knots. I'm truly hopeless. It doesn't help that there are sounds in Brazilian Portuguese that just don't exist in English. I'll keep trying and we'll see where I get after 24 days of trying to speak and pretending to understand what people say back to me.