Cedro's perfect dream

laziness holiday

The 4:30 Wake up call has morphed from blaring tone, to quiet sighs and hunger calls.  There is no rush, no pressure.  If we leave or stay inside all day, it is all okay.  Looking up from dinner, we se the manifestation of our state of mind, suspended from a broken limb just outside the window.  We stare and share in a moment that will become once again rare when work resumes anew.  For now, we sleep and eat and enjoy life in the canopy.  

The newest in New part 2

  The family is whole.  After rough times with Sandra's mother and extended family, we have been starved for extra-nuclear proliferation.  Now that my mother and sister are here, we are learning what it is to call on grandma and the auntie Greist for support and love.  This is what the holidays should be about. 

I extend the happiest of holiday seasons to all readers and hope that you find joy and peace within your families and friends as we have. 

Here are the Greist family singers together again after too much time. 

 

Here's yet another example of how translation screws with phoitography.  Saying "queso" just doesn't cut it!

Goodbye topsoil

  The rainy season here in Monteverde lasts forever.  We frequently find ourselves cut off from the world (and birthing clinics) due to fallen trees, downed power lines and heavy mudslides.  One of the most frequent and ongoing environmental dialogues I maintain with my students centers around practical everyday tangible ways that humans impact their surroundings.  In Monteverde, deforestation and the ensuing erosion of the mountain are two of the most obvious.  This year in addition to the experiments we do in class to understand the role of roots in topsoil preservation, I decided to document week by week the changes in landscape in the deforested hot spots around town. 

The owners of the future mall property have started looking at me funny when I show up to photograph their mud patch, so I made the executive decision to focus in on a future restaurant site.  The restaurant is one of the most popular in Monteverde and sits right on the main road.  It is one of very few options on the Eastern undeveloped side of town, and for this reason is nearly always full, even in low season.  The owners however decided that the restaurant should have a better view or something, so the bought a tract of forested land and stripped it, in hopes of making a new road that would lead up to the new restaurant site.  Here's how the land looked after it was cleared:

 

The slope in the foreground is to be the driveway leading up to the hilltop restaurant. 

Here is the same site after one week of rainy season weather. 

 

 

...And after three weeks of rain:

 

As of this posting, seven weeks have passed, but I cannot offer new photos because the heavy earth movers were brought back up the mountain to flatten everything out again last week.  Still, the process has begun anew and the rivers are again a deep brown, filled with nutrient rich topsoil, freed by yet another roadside attraction. 

Here are a couple of miscellaneous photos from other sites around town.