Sprinkled with Ash

Ok, so the past two days have been two more routine research days... Since I, thankfully, have organized most of the letters, I am still moving one person at a time. The first thing I do when I get a person's folder is organize it chronologically. This allows me to see their conversation as fully as possible. I have done about 8 people so far, and I don't even want to count the total... I think it is way over 50. Oh, and these 8 were the shortest folders... The most interesting folder so far has been her cousin's, Adi's. I am about to finish the folder, but so far, he has talked about the people he is killing in Israel (since he left Uruguay to join the Israeli army), the women he has proposed to, his love stories, the people he has discovered, and his escape from the massacre of Rabat. All these letters are from 1948 and 1949, and they are allowing me to learn about what was going on in my grandmother's life, because she is telling him everything.
This kind of work has eaten up the last three days. On Wednesday, after I posted, I began this process, and worked until Maia got back from the soccer game. When she returned, I took a little break to hear all about the experience of watching Uruguay's first home game since their fourth place finish at the World Cup. AND ... THEY BEAT THE NETHERLANDS!!!!! Well, they tied (1-1) and won with penalty kicks! Such a perfect game to watch, and they presented Forlan with the Golden Ball. After that I continued to work until about 3:00 am. After a late start on Thursday, we continued to do the same thing, and since I was behind, Maia decided to skip her planned trip to a great bookstore with a view of the beach.... Good thing she did, because later that night we found out there was an armed robery right next to it.... Oh big cities. OOHHHHH! Fun fact, we woke up to see that Montevideo was covered under a thin sheet of ash from the volcano. This sheet was enough to cancel all the flights to and out of Montevideo. The cloud is apparently awful for planes!
This morning we woke up at 8:00 to head to Atlantida, because my aunt needed someone to be at her house while she was at work, since her carpenter needed to come finish some closets in her new house. Here, Maia and I got a lot of letters done in the peace and quiet!!! The sun was out all day and it wasn't really cold until the sun set. After finishing letters, we began taking some things out of boxes and cleaning the millions of dishes that were still not unpacked... That took a good 5 or 6 hours. It was exhausting. Tomorrow we are heading back to Montevideo early so I can spend all weekend working on the letters.