a week of stress/laziness

it's 3:47 in albuquerque and i'm sitting in my parents' dining room in what i consider pajamas, though my mother has assured me that i'm dressed enough for nm - that her students wear such things to class. i don't think i'll leave the house in this attire though. i've been playing with and attempting to figure out my new technology all morning, with a few interruptions for ping pong with my dad, scrabble with my mom. my life seems to be arriving in boxes on the front porch these days, one after another. yesterday i got these boots,which seem to be perfect for a trip involving lots of walking and potentially cold weather. then came my new cell phone (hooray for perfect two-year trade-in timing!), which has an international sim card. it's still like a million dollars a minute, so i don't plan on doing too much calling, but it makes me feel safer to know it's an option wherever we go. and finally my suitcase arrived this afternoon. end-of-summer blow-out sales allowed me to get a slightly bigger bag for quite cheap, giving me just a bit more room for possible shopping and making it so that i won't be shoving and squishing each time i have to pack.
my most exciting purchase of the week, however, was one i researched online but purchased locally, at good ol' camera and darkroom on central. i had been thinking about getting a dslr in order to renew my interest in true phography, but they're both too expensive and too huge to bring on a long trip. soo, after a bit of looking i landed on the nikon p5100, which is the closest thing available in a point and shoot. it offers full manual mode and has the possibility of attaching an extra lens and flash. i've only had it for two days, but am already quite enamored with it. the pics below are just examples of what it can do without any tinkering at all


so i'm excited to see what i can do with it in europe! as far as other planning goes, i wrote to a girl in venice to see about surfing her couch, as hostels there are ridiculously expensive. otherwise, i'm just printing things out and writing things down and getting all my last-minute freak-outs out of the way. on saturday i fly to the bay area, where alex and i will spend three days hanging out with his family before flying out of san francisco. ah! one week left in the u.s.!

more plans!

so we've found three farms, which seem to be the ones. now that that whole tricky business is off my chest, i've sort of become obsessed with finding people on couchsurfing. it seems that i'm a bit addicted to the planning process. maybe that's a good thing though, right? anyway, i also created a timeline of our trip: http://www.timetoast.com/timelines/2850, which i will update periodically as well. it may seem like overkill, but hey, i'm enjoying myself.

so the three farms:
1) with a british husband and wife in tuscany, where we will be helping them restore an old villa. more manual labor than farmwork on this one, it seems, as the only animals they have are cats. though i do think they have six of them.
2) ten days with a gay couple - one american, one italian - helping them herd, milk, and tend their 60 goats. they also make goat cheese every two days and have other adorable seeming animals to care for. this one is still a bit shaky, but seems to be a go.
3) another british couple, this time on the island of sardinia. there we will be helping with the start of the olive harvest, as well as looking after a few donkeys and various other farm animals.

i think they all sound amazing, and i'm so happy to have found some people willing to have us!

we also made contact with our first couchsurfing host, a lovely-seeming woman in graz, austria. we will be spending two nights with her after our four initial days in vienna and before heading to zagreb, croatia. she seems like a great match, as she is both a student of social work and an avid rugby player. who could ask for anything more?