Cannonball Run

It got down to five degrees Celsius yesterday, which I think is about forty-some degrees Fahrenheit (you can do the calculation) and a nasty cold has descended upon me. But, there’s heat in my humble apartment and I’ve got new tunes on my iTunes. My hand-me-down iPod died the day before I returned to BA, which is the third hard drive to fail on me in the last six months, not including the one that disappeared with fifty gigs of photos that weren’t backed up because I was on the road up in La Rioja with Ramiro, La Rafa, Dave and Mei.

Finally I slept last night more than I have in the past month… almost twelve hours in a row. But when the door bell rang for the tenth time at 8:00am I had to get up to tell whoever it was that was ringing my doorbell at 8:00am to go the hell away and then the buzzer at my actual apartment door rang. Looking through the security peephole I only see one person in a dark heavy jacket standing in front of my door, so I open it.

“Fumigation,” says the young boy standing outside my door as the door to the apartment next to me slowly opens. “No, we ordered the fumigation,” says my neighbor. “Sorry,” he sheepishly tells me as I continue on about how I had already told him over the intercom that he had the wrong apartment number. He had already apologized over the speakerphone but comes up and then he rings my doorbell anyways. I went back to bed and slept till two in the afternoon.

Sam Slaughter is on his way over, to talk about the car that he needs to sell and about staying here in this apartment with me until he is scheduled to leave Argentina on June 6th. We are also going to talk about Paraguay, Ciudad del Este and the military base up in the north, somewhere out there in the Gran Chaco desert near the border with Bolivia. Edd is even considering comin. I’ve got to get the pitch out cause this could be good one; three foreigners traveling to a land where no Gringos go, except for Ethan. He went there, but not all the way up into this part of Paraguay, the barren Chaco. Paraguay is about as far from a tourist destination as the North Pole is for an Antarctic penguin. It’s Indians, Peace Corp, Mormons, ex-Nazis, CIA, special ops and then the US Soldiers that are doing ‘joint military exercises’ with the Paraguayan military and who are also helping build the runway up in there in the North, next to Bolivia, where they just nationalized the gas fields which are just across the border from this part of Paraguay.