Back in Action--Hackers in China be Damned!

So many of you may have thought that the blog was no more!  This is because someone from China somehow hacked into my gmail account to try to sell stuff, and gmail detected this and disabled my account.   A week ago when we came into town to check email, I was told there was suspicious activity on my account and I could not access it.  Now, when you only check email once a week and it's a big activity a message like this is pretty annoying, BUT it turns out to have been for the best.  Of course, the only way to fix it was by having a message sent to my phone, and of course I don't have a phone here, so it seemed quite problematic.  My dear Dad helped me out in this pickle, and now all is well and I have a more complex password.  Kind of freaky though!  It seems like a lot of things are going wrong now that I have no way of dealing with them.  Unfortunately checking email has become the most stressful part of the week.  So please, send me happy emails that are not about bills that were supposed to have been cancelled but somehow were not, or insurance claims that have been rejected, or leaves of absences being rejected.  Please!  :)

In happier news, life here continues to putter along peacefully.  We have gotten a fair amount of snow in the last few weeks, which has been lovely.  The weather seemed to have been turning warm, with the other day creeping into the upper 50s, but now we're back to frosty.  Fortunately that beautifully warm day was one in which Luke and I left the ranch and went hiking out near this town called Guadal.  It was gorgeous, and other than me falling into a poison thorn bush, it was a great success.

We are trying to begin to hammer out some plans for when we leave here.  Around the 23rd of September we will be heading on a ten day trip with Jonathan Leidich, who is Mary Ann's exhusband.  Anyone interested in what is going on in this area should check him out.  He is a very active member of the community here, and has been involved in numerous documentaries about the area.  He is the one with the guiding business.  We are going out to  his ranch with him for a while to help him build some fences and do other assorted ranchy tasks.  This trip out to his ranch will be quite involved.  We must first drive a few hours through brush and mud, then take a small balsa wood raft over to the other side of a river, then take some sort of zip line (I kid you not), then hike 13 miles, part of which involves wading through a glacial river.  All the while we will be carrying all of our necessary supplies.   The 13 mile hike is supposed to take around 7 hours.  I am really hoping the weather will be a teensy bit warmer by the time the glacial river crossing happens.  Now this place is isolation at its most isolated.  Jonathan, a native of Colorado who has lived here for the past 15 years after hitchhiking down here at the age of 19, plans to move full time to this ranch in the next few years.

We finally joined WWOOF Argentina, and we are going to try to set up some farm work for about a month from now.   We have been diligently (okay, somewhat diligently) studying Spanish everyday to prepare for our departure from the ranch.  I am actually reading a book called Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin I believe his name is.  It's an English book, but Mary Ann has it in Spanish, so I am slowly ploughing through it and doing double duty--learning about the area and increasing my Spanish vocabulary.  I am learning a lot of words like woolly mammoth and brontosaurus, which might not necessarily help me in my conversational Spanish, but are interesting nonetheless.  And who knows when I might encounter a Spanish speaking paleontologist.

Hopefully hackers will keep out of my life and the posts will be more frequent.

Sending happy thoughts northward.  This is a picture of our backyard.