Day 44

This is what happens when it gets cold in the jungle:

Clay returned today during siesta. Apparently he breezed in, sat down, and started playing the fiddle. He spent a few days in Iguazu, and now he’s back. Last night at dinner we felt like there was someone missing. And though we didn’t know it yet, apparently it was Clay. I guess Matias was holding his place while he was gone.

The turmeric is blooming in the garden!

We had an exuberant day of working hard, trying to get to a stopping point on Kim and Marcelo’s house before we leave this weekend. I spent the morning laying baked bricks with cement as part of their stem wall, and the afternoon making mortar and laying the unbaked bricks with mortar on top of it, stopping up the airflow under the house.

This afternoon I fell and hurt my tailbone on a rock. I was moving out of the way, and backed over a giant boulder which toppled me, but the boulder was so big that I landed on it too, with all of my weight on the very bottom of my sacrum. Ouch! I don’t think it’s broken (thanks be!) but Kim gave me some arnica oil to rub on it, and I am going to bed early in the hopes that I can get lots of sleep to heal.

Vegetable sponge:

After our evening’s work we went down to the river and had a jungle photo shoot with Jess, something she requested at our Saturday night check-in meeting. Sash and I painted ourselves... She was water, and I was fire, though we didn’t talk about it before we were done. Cool how things like that work out! Jess has promised to share the pics, so I'll post them when I get them from her.

Paulina (from Chakra Suiza, another local sustainable farm) came this morning with some of her friends and family, and they stayed through our delicious lunch.

We had siesta at the river, sun shining brightly with no clouds in the sky. This little bugger (which they call a horsefly) wouldn't leave us alone, so I warned him and then I smacked him when he landed on me again. They are nasty! Those long hummingbird noses provide quite a sting while they try to suck your blood... he had it coming.
We got too hot and found our way to the yoga shala to cool off before our afternoon work session. We read aloud (every Wednesday night we have a discussion on our week’s sustainability readings) and told stories before the afternoon work horn blew.
This beautiful butterfly looks like a monarch, except it's fluorescent green and black... crazy!