ummm...

So I was going to post pretty photos of another trip but I have my priorities.

Have you seen this yet?

Oh yes my friends, you too can own this stylish handbag. It's even on sale. Go figure.

(for the record, I adore grun and I'm thrilled that such a fun little shop exists in St. George, but armadillos?)

Costa Rica finally

We had a great time in Costa Rica this spring. A geology professor at school does a continuing education class nearly every other year and we got to go along this time. He has the director of a private field station organize nearly everything so we got to do some really fun things in locations that weren't crowded by Americans.

We started out travelling around the country and our first stop was at a local market to practice our nonexistent Spanish. The produce was worth it though.



We were lucky enough to be around for an oxcart festival/competition.







Of course we were the only gringos around and so we got lots of funny looks. These folks take some serious pride in their carts though so they were all very nice about letting us photograph them and their art.

We spent the second half of our trip at a field station located on the Pacific side and had to take a rather interesting boat trip to get there. I don't have any photos but we got to see flying fish on the trip and when we took the boats out again to a national park.

Well, it was all very lovely and scenic until we had to land. Apparently they had not seen such large waves in quite some time. One of the folks helping the group ended up underneath the boat at one point. The worst thing that happened is that several folks got VERY wet and had their pride bruised but it was one of the more "interesting" parts of the trip. Yes interesting would be a euphamism here.





The field station and surrounding areas were great for nature photography.

The sloths are fuzzy because I had to take the photo through a spotting scope using my point and shoot:








Check out the bit of red in the coati's mouth. It's eating a crab.



We did try to be a bit educational and trapped bats. Often you can just set up a stationary net and the bats will just fly into it because they can't see it. However, the bats we were interested in live in caves that open onto the ocean so we had to stand there and actually toss the net over the poor things since there was no place to set a net. Marius was particularly entertaining to watch.



We spent one day out at a national park. I went on the long hike where we were supposed to see lots of wildlife, while Marius went on the shorter hike that was supposed to end in a swim. It turns out Marius got the better deal but there was a price. The group had two massive trees fall over and land right behind them on the trail.



No one was hurt and it was great hearing how much closer the trees fell to the group as the trip progressed.

There was also some shopping of course and they did a really nice job of making sure we got to see things being made before we bought them.



Including the organic coffee we got:



I never planned on going to Costa Rica because it all seemed very touristy to me based on the trips that others have taken. I have to say that Kelly (the geo prof) and the local guides did a great job of minimizing the touristy crap and we had a great time.

I'm still here!

I just went a bit domestic over the past few days and decided that 103 degree days were the perfect time to get back into baking and such.

I've owned Dough for over a year and have not really had the time to do anything with the methods Bertinet describes. He advocates a really wet dough and then "kneading" it without dusting your work surface with flour. I don't have any photos to show you the mess because my hands were completely covered in dough. Essentially he has you stretch, slap and fold the dough to incorporate air until it (eventually) firms up.

Now I think I added just a tad too much water to the mix which may explain some of my problems. You are supposed to pick up the dough by spreading your fingers and sliding them under the dough. You then flip it all so that your fingers are on top (fast enough that the force stretches out the dough). The biggest issue I have with this is that the dough goes flying off at this point. I don't mean the entire batch, but I am still finding little specks of the stuff all over the side of my kitchen exposed during the process. Bertinet includes a DVD with the book and shows how he does it all. I didn't see dough flying off there. He also managed to very quickly get things into a cohesive and relatively non-sticky dough. I found that I could only do that if I let the dough rest periodically al la no knead bread.

After about an hour of on again-off again dough slapping, I finally had something that was approaching usable. In the book, Bertinet only gives baking instructions for the dough I made if you bread the batch into smaller bits to make rolls, breadsticks, baguettes, or other fun shapes with the exception of a gruyere and cumin loaf that sounds yummy but not what I wanted. I wanted a regular old loaf so I had to wing it a bit and ended up overcooking the loaf a bit and didn't get enough cornmeal on the stone so it stuck causing a great deal of swearing in the kitchen. In the end the bread came out fairly nicely though. I didn't get much of a crust but the crumb was wonderful.

The other thing I've been doing in my kitchen is making yogurt. I ordered this fun toy which I've been lusting for every since we taught our intro. biology labs about fermentation by having them make yogurt. Very few of the students were brave enough to eat their yogurt. I don't think many of them eat yogurt and, if they do, I seriously doubt they have ever had plain yogurt. We do provide them with all sorts of good things to add to their yogurt to make it palatable to them but the initial smell of yogurt seems to put them off. If you add enough syrup and crap to yogurt, it doesn't really smell like yogurt I suppose. It all smelled great to me and it showed me that you can make a fairly firm yogurt at home. In the past, I have read reviews of homemade yogurt and "yogurt makers" that suggested that it was fairly soupy. It turns out that you only have to boil your milk or add dry milk to the mix and it is perfect.

You don't need a special toy to make yogurt though. There are fairly good instructions on how to do it in your oven or in a cooler but it will require a bit of babysitting. That being said, I should have babysat my own yogurt a bit better. The instructions suggested incubating for seven hours but that was too long for my batch and a few came out with whey pooling on top. I'll show you the process the next time I make a batch so you can see how easy it is.

Wow, where have the past four months gone?

I've been really bad about posting so I'm going to try and do better and catch folks up on some of the fun things we've been doing.

The spring semester was really hard for me. I taught a brand-new course and had a group of very difficult students but I survived and I have learned a few things that will (hopefully) minimize such problems in the future. However the process of getting to this point involved quite a bit of hair pulling and beating my head against the wall.

There were some really great points in the past four months though. We went to Costa Rica for ten days in March and have some really great photos that I will share in my next post (which will be in the next day or so instead of in another four months!). I also went to Cambridge, Vienna and Prague with a group of humanities professors from my school (I was one of two token scientists) which was an amazing experience and I'll try to post photos from that trip before the end of the week. In between and ever since, we've been hiking and canyoneering like crazy people. Unfortunately my last camera died in a canyon right around the time of my last post. This may be part of the reason I haven't posted as much. I got a replacement in time for the trip to Europe but haven't taken it in a canyon yet. I have already begun to rectify this with a short trip to the north rim of the Grand Canyon but it will probably be next month before I get any additional photos to share.

Why next month? Because last week we did Fat Man's Misery (the wrong way) on Wednesday and then Orderville on Friday. These are both beautiful canyons. Orderville is a very easy canyon that then feeds into the Narrows of Zion. However, Fat Man's Misery, while normally not easy but doable, turned into quite a challenge for us because we parked the cars in the wrong place and ended up hiking the normal ~4miles to and through the canyon and then (what I estimate) nine miles upstream in a river and another mile overland to get to the car instead of the 2.5 miles we were supposed to do after the canyon. Not only did we have to hike that extra distance but we had to hustle out of the canyon because we started to hear thunder and you DO NOT want to be in a canyon if there is a storm because of the risk of flash floods. In fact, we probably should not have been in there at all that day but the weather predictions were a bit off and the sky looked clear when we started out. Fortunately we only experienced cold rain but it still made for a miserable day of slogging through the river and at the end of it all I developed runner's knee.

Yes, I developed a condition called runner's knee from canyoneering. I am nothing if not creative in how I get my injuries.

So this means that I am out of commission for a few weeks while this thing heals. This is a bummer since the summer is the time when we get to go canyoneering without freezing our butts off. It's also the only time we really have to travel. In reality, I've been pretty lucky. We had some really awful conditions for going into a slot canyon and the worst thing that happened is that my knee is a bit inflamed. Am I allowed to feel old in my 30's?