Summer Update II

... The very next day after arriving from la Sierra I woke up very early to get Q from the airport. He was visiting to help with wedding plans and to be here for my birthday. Wedding planning went great.. and so did the birthday. Q has been super supportive with the wedding stuff… I keep changing my mind about things… and every once in a while I become a knot of emotions, and he helps me untangle them… He is SUCH an amazing fiancé…

We organized the wedding ceremony and got a photographer. We looked at invitations, but the ones I like are incredibly costly, so Im still looking for a better option.

My birthday (and my dad’s) was a lot of fun. My siblings got me little gifts, which according to tradition they gave to me as soon as the sun came up (yup.. woke me up early in the morning… I was half asleep) Dad got some great gifts too. I gave him a portable radio for when he and the kiddos go to the football games. Q supplemented the radio with some UTEP gear.. it was a fun gift, I thought. I didn’t do any cleaning the whole day (hehe). And then we had dinner together at night – cabrito, brought on a plane by a pastor friend of my dad’s .. all the way from Monterrey. Dad was raised in Monterrey, and he had been craving cabrito for a while… so we had it brought from the national center of cabrito breeding and roasting. Cabrito is a very difficult roast… the kid (as in goats, don’t start with the baby eating, Q) has to be a very specific weight AND age, and it has to be roasted with a specific wood, at a specific temperature… very delicately… any of this goes wrong, and the meat will either fall apart or become plastic-like or hard. Its very difficult to make, I hear.

Anyway… it was a good dinner… and we had fun getting a meal from so far away… and Dad and I felt special.

Q took me the very next day to a restaurant I had been wanting to go to for a while. We had traditional Mexican food… they had a good chef in the back and a very nice waiter who tried to act like he hadn’t seen my flip flops and let us in :P Q had a huge stake and I had salmon and corn soup. The soup had huitlacoche, a very rare fungus that grows on corn under conditions so specific that they are impossible to recreate –it only grows ‘wildly,’ so it’s considered a delicacy. I loved the soup it was a part of, but when I had a bit of huitlacoche on bread, I have to admit I didn’t like it. I suppose I have a ghetto sense of taste. But I enjoyed the whole thing… lunch was absolutely great, service was splendid, and the place is as gorgeous as I imagined it’d be. Q and I had some alone time, and we talked and talked and had a great time together… it was a good birthday indeed :D

It was great having Q at home this summer. He accompanied me in my daily routine and helped me out with everything… we took walks, and went to the movies, and even went shopping once.

After he left, it was all about Anapra. We got ready for school, did some major cleaning in the house, and pretty much just tried to tie any loose ends before September caught on to us :P

And all in all, it was a good start of the school year.