greta! greta! greta!

I forgot to tell you we have dog named Greta that lives with us. She looks like a cross between a guinea pig and a grimlin. She's just a little nugget but she's fierce. Everytime someone goes in or out the door she attacks. Greta goes bananas and bites at your feet and barks like crazy. A couple of examples...last week Meganne and I decided to go be friendly and pet Greta. Bad idea; she bit my hand and went crazy and then attached herself to my sweatshirt. Game over. Meganne and I were done trying to make a new friend. And then, this morning I was trying to leave early and had not had the chance to tell Adriana (house madre) that I would be leaving early for a meeting. I tried to be so sweet to the Grimlin and keep her quiet and then she went balisitic. My madre came scuffing around the corner in her pj's and refused to let me out the door until I had a cup of coffee and a media-luna. I felt so bad. Blame it all on the dog.

Another story from dinner the other night. Here is a prime example of what happens when Meganne and I get our words mixed up at dinner. Everynight we have some sort of fruit for dessert and this night it happened to be oranges, which by the way they do not call them oranges, they call them "mandarinas". Apparently there is a significant difference. Our house brother, Scott, was pealing away the skin from his mandarina in one long strand. I tried to draw attention to what he was doing but mixed up the words for "hair" and "skin". Skin is "piel" and hair is "pelo". So I ended up asking him what he was doing with the hair of his orange. Oopsies. And after that, naturally, Meganne and I try to make a nice casual recovery by pretending to be oranges with hair. We lost it. There was no coming back. We laughed for the rest of dinner. And our other house brother is from here and we don't think he is as easily entertained as us. He just looked at us like we were Martians invading the dinner table. I don't know if this makes any sense at all, but I PROMISE you it was outrageous.

Allow me to also tell you what we have eaten for an appetizer the last couple nights. Twice now we have had some sort of "lets-go-crazy-with-the-mayo" treat where Adriana puts left overs from the night before in the blender and sends the food for a ride while adding a huge amount of mayo. It's then put on our plates to eat. Enough said. And then 2 nights ago we had some kinda beet salad. Did you know if you cook something in beets everything turns bubble-gum pink? If you didn't, now you do. In this pink lovliness was beets, hearts of palm, egg and tomato. And all of these ingredients guesses because we couldn't actually see what it was. Did I mention it was all pink? Just checking.