My family is pressuring me to write a blog. Not because they want to read it (though I´m sure that desire is in there somewhere), but because people keep commenting to them how I haven´t written for awhile. I must admit, they´ve been after me to write a blog for about two months now and I´ve been procrastinating quite nicely.
However, the time has come. Nothing particularly special has happened in the past few days to warrant this occasion, but I have a head cold and apparently this has put me in the proper frame of mind to actually sit down and write.
To sum up December and January: fiestas. There are a variety of reasons for this. The first probably being that, seeing as it´s Christmastime as well as the New Year, people come back home to celebrate. The town probably if not doubled its size, at least halved it once over. College kids return, everyone who left for college and never came back return (there´s a good amount of brain drain that goes on here) and people come back from the States to visit. As a result, the majority of weddings and 15-year-old birthday parties that take place during the year take place during about a 3-4 week span.
In addition, to start off the fiesta season, the 12th of December is the Día de Guadalupe. Guadalupe is a very important lady here in Mexico and particularly here in Olinalá. The majority of the town walks up the hill to the sanctuary on the night of the 11th, when there is a fireworks display, and then on the 12th when there is a mass every hour. In the twelve days leading up to Día de Guadalupe, there are several masses a day, the first at 4:30am. In the days following this, until about a week after New Year´s, there is a wedding or 15-year-old birthday party nearly every day.
I met a lot of people, played American football in the plaza, went camping, went to dances (wedding and 15-year birthday parties always have a dance at the end, often with a live band, and you can go to the dance whether or not you were invited to the occasion or not) and tried out a lot of new, very delicious, foods.
In January, I went to a hot springs that´s about three hours from here and was quite relaxing. I tried to load pictures of this outing, but the internet, at times, is extremely slow and I was not able to do so. I shall try again soon.
This past weekend I traveled to Huatusco, in the state of Veracruz, to see an organic garden operation that also sells seeds. It was a great experience. It was encouraging to finally 1) find seeds and 2) find organic seeds and 3) find seeds that weren´t from an enormous multi-national corporation. Most of the seeds that we bought are old varieties that go way back and are from Mexico.
On the way back from Huatusco, I stopped in Puebla and visited some friends from Olinalá that are attending college there. They assisted me in buying more seeds in Puebla and they also showed me around the city. It´s a very pretty city whose architecture is much more colonial than the other cities that I´ve visited here. The number of churches in Puebla is quite astonishing and there is also quite a bit of very cool artwork. It was also fun to do things like stop at stoplights and see roadsigns.
This weekend I´m going to Mexico City to meet the newest addition to MCC Mexico. Meredith is a 3-year termer who will be in Cuernavaca for language school for the month of February and then will come to Olinalá to join us here for the rest of her term. We are all very excited.
So. That brings us pretty much up to date on my life in the past couple months 
If people have questions, I very much welcome them. And I´ll have another go at attempting to put up more pictures.
