Camera Lens

Now I see why camera lenses are so expensive:

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Stop Motion Video = Lots of Patience

I found this video on Gizmodo:

Pretty incredible!

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Summertime

The weather here is starting to get really nice most days:

The only problem with that is that we'll be going to Colorado in a few days, and I know it's going to be cold as balls there!

Oh well.

As an aside, I hope that this video works in the U.S. It's the video for "Summertime," the song by D.J. Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince. I remember I bought their cassette Homebase at a Wal-Mart in Missouri in 1991 or so. I had gone to Missouri with my best friend Jared to visit his grandparents. I was 11 years old, and it was the first time I'd been to Missouri (and Wal-Mart, for that matter). So this song brings back memories of that trip:

-First time in Missouri
-First "rap" cassette
-First time at Wal-Mart
-First meal at the Olive Garden (in Columbia, MO)
-First time I bought hockey cards
-First time I got verbally assaulted by a small-town teenage hick (although it certainly wouldn't be the last!)

Only some of these memories can be classified as "good." I'll let you sort out which ones. Until then, enjoy some barbecue, and drive around in your car at 2 miles per hour (so everyone can see you).

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A Few Pictures With Comments

I had meant to comment on these four things:

First of all: STRIP CLUBS. As we all know "from the movies," strippers run on money, specifically paper money. So how does it work in a culture like Costa Rica or the Eurozone where they use coins more than bills? For example, the lowest-denomination bill here in Costa Rica is the 1,000 colones note, which is worth about 2 dollars. Not too expensive, I suppose, but consider the Eurozone, where the lowest bill is 5 Euros. So, in those types of cultures does a stripper strap a coin purse to her thigh, or does going to the strip club simply mean an expensive night out?

Next: BIGFOOT. Just kidding, that's not Bigfoot, although the picture quality might indicate that. It's actually an anteater that I saw from my car (he was really close at first, but by the time I got my camera out he had already plodded off). So, apparently there are anteaters in Costa Rica:

This is the "Oso Hormiguero," or "Ant-er Bear."

(I found this picture here... and why is he in a tree instead of on an anthill? Does this mean this sucker can fly??)

Just so you know, if you want to name an animal in Costa Rica, just take the word "oso" (bear) or "zorro" (fox) and then add a second word that vaguely describes what that animal is into. For example:

-Oso Hormiguero: "Ant-er Bear" = Anteater
-Oso Perezoso: "Lazy Bear" = Sloth
-Zorro Pelón: "Bald Fox" = Opossum
-Zorro Apestoso: "Stinky Fox" = Skunk
-Zorro Pequeño: "Small Fox" = Cat
-Zorra Desnuda: "Naked Fox" = Stripper

Actually, I was just kidding about those last two, but the others are true.

Finally...

CAKE. I made this the other day, and it's really, really tasty and really, really easy. If you've got some chocolate powder and red wine sitting around, then this recipe has your name on it. Just give it a try.
(Note: I used a silicon pan, so that may have affected the bake time. The recipe says 40 minutes but I needed to bake it for just over 60 till it was finally done)

Thanks for reading!

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99 Problems

If you're havin' weather problems, I feel bad for you, son.

I got 99 problems but the beach ain't one.

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365 Slideshow

Here's a slideshow of the completed Picture of the Day Project:

I think it's kind of cool. You can scroll forwards and backwards, pause it, and follow links to the individual pictures. I'm also going to leave this slideshow on the sidebar to the left so you can check it out later, if you wish. Thanks, and have a good day!

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Pictures of the Day - December 1-5, 2010

We're back with the first 5 Pictures of the Day from my new 365 Project! Hope you like them:

December 1st: Not the best picture ever taken of me, but I had to document the transition from Novembeard to Decembeard somehow. I had hoped for a nice picture of Berlin to start off the new 365 series (as I did for this last year), but it was foggy and really boring (see Leftover #1).

December 2nd: Some guys were fishing at the beach when I was hanging out there in the morning, so I decided to get a picture of their catch. By that time, the fish weren't biting, though, so only one out of 6 was in the water. Still, their fishing equipment was impressively spartan.

December 3rd: It was a big day for work on the Formerly Crappy Casita, but I still found a bit of time to make a pizza in the evening. It was delicious!

December 4th: Man, it was a ridiculously nice sunset. As seen from the back porch.

December 5th: Some cilantro sprouts. Angela planted the seeds in a planter in our bathroom a little while ago, and they're starting to look promising. She also planted some in our backyard but when the cats saw the nice dirt... well, you get the idea.

That's it for today! Remember to check out the Leftovers (either click here or at the end of the post, if you prefer a black background).

Thanks for reading, and have a great day!

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Oh, And By The Way...

Novembeard is over!

LONG LIVE DECEMBEARD!

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365/365!

365!

November 30th: My final Picture of the Day for this 365 project! Now, just try to tell me that the guy above doesn't look like the guy below:

Haha! Good times... Thanks again to everyone for checking out these Pictures of the Day this last year. I'm fully planning on beginning a whole new 365 project starting... right now. However, these last 10 days I've been really diligent about getting the pictures uploaded, but with the new project I'll probably go back to my old, lazy ways and upload 7 or 10 days at a time. In any case, I sure hope you keep following the project-- feel free to comment, too!

Thanks again for reading, and have a great day!

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Picture of the Day Countup: 364!

364!

November 29th: This is a picture of a tree in the office. Our students attached leaves with notes saying the things they were thankful for. It's a few days after Thanksgiving, but we still celebrated today. Nobody really noticed that the day was off since Thanksgiving isn't celebrated in Costa Rica anyhow (well, it was celebrated by us, but you get the point...).

So! Only one more Picture of the Day left in this 365 project! What will it be? Who knows! Even I don't know! So tune in tomorrow and find out!

Thanks for reading, and have a great day!

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Picture of the Day Countup: 363!

363!

November 28th: Today we went to Zarcero with Lucy and Wilson's family. I took this picture to actually get the hills that were beyond these bushes, but I liked the look of this couple more, so I cropped the picture and made it Picture of the Day. Still, if you click on the picture you can scroll through other nice pictures I took today.

Thanks again to Lucy and Wilson for a lovely day, and thanks to you for reading. Have a great day!

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Picture of the Day Countup: 361 and 362!

Last night I was busy baking lemon bars (really), so I didn't have a chance to post the Picture of the Day:

361!

November 26th: Although some people around here don't know what butter is, some do. I've been baking a lot these days. Tonight it was lemon bars.

362!

November 27th: A student was wearing this Lenin shirt today. Coincidentally, it looks like a pretty close approximation of me now that I'm nearing the end of Novembeard!

Anyhow, that's it for today! Only three more Pictures of the Day to go! Be sure to tune in, and thanks for reading!

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The Countup Continues Unabated! 359 and 360!

Sorry about that technical problem last night. In any case, here we go with two more pictures of the day... and after these, only 5 more to go!

359!

November 24: The towel at the hotel for my Wednesday evening class. It was almost so nice that I didn't want to wash my face.

360!

November 25: Since it was Thanksgiving, I made a pumpkin pie and ate some turkey deli meat for dinner. It was the least --and almost the most-- I could do. :(
Notice the semi-dirty plate. No, we don't live in squalor. Instead, this was my second piece, because besides being thankful, Thanksgiving's also about eating heroic amounts of pie.

Thanks for checking in! See you tomorrow!

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Does Not Compute

When I try to log on to my computer, it informs me:

"The User Profile Service failed the login. User profile cannot be loaded."

What an asshole!

To be continued...

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Picture of the Day Countup: 358!

358!

November 23rd: Some little dolphin figurines that Angela put in a plant in our kitchen. The plant happened to look like seaweed, and the whole effect is pretty funny. Although it makes me wonder where Angela had little dolphin figurines hidden away this whole time. What other secrets does this woman have?

Thanks for reading! Have a good night, and be sure to keep tuning in for the countup!

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Picture of the Day Countup: 357!

357!

November 22, 2010: A frog that I found on the side of the wall in the garage this evening. I had to get a few pictures before I took it outside.

Thanks for reading, and be sure to tune in the for the rest of the 365 Countup!

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Picture of the Day and Final 10 Countup!

First of all, thanks to everyone who's followed this 365 day, Picture of the Day project since I started December 1st of last year. It's been a lot of fun for me, and it's been rewarding to hear that some of you liked the pictures. Hopefully they've given you a window into this sometimes strange country. At the very least, I hope it was a nice way of killing a minute or so every day. Although if you actually did look at each picture for a minute, you'd have already invested 6 hours of your time since day 1. Think of all the better ways you could have spent that time!

I've only got 10 pictures left to go for this project, but I'm planning on continuing to take a picture a day for as long as I can. I thought it'd be more monumental to have a countdown for the last 10 pictures, but if I had a countdown, it'd seem like each picture was less and less significant. So, I decided to have a "Countup" instead! So, without further ado, I present you with...

Number 356!

November 21st: A few friends from work (Lidio, Kenia, and Adriana) stopped by this afternoon, and Berlin put on a beautiful sunset show for them. This is from our porch, looking at the Gulf of Nicoya. Pretty beautiful, I must admit.

Be sure to check in daily between tomorrow and November 30th to see the countup for numbers 357 through 365! Thanks again for reading and for your interest, and have a great day!

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Pictures of the Day, November 19 and 20, 2010

So, I've got Pictures of the Day from the last two days ready, and I'll post today's Picture of the Day in a few minutes, hopefully. Thanks for reading!

November 19th: A café in Palmares. Angela and I actually went out and did mildly social things this day, like drinking coffee in a café, purchasing things from a store, and eating a pizza!

November 20th: A Christmas tree at a gas station in Palmares. Here, they don't have Thanksgiving as a buffer (nor do they celebrate Halloween, for that matter), so people tend to get into the "spirit of the season" pretty early. It'd be fine for that if it weren't for the Christmas music, which is like my kryptonite. A month ago when I was in a department store in San Jose, they were already playing Christmas music over the loudspeakers.

So, that's it for the moment, but stay tuned for a countdown of the final 10 pictures in my first 365 project!

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Big Picture of the Day Catch-Up

We've got lots of pictures to look at, so let's get to it!

October 29th: A new lamp that Angela and I got on our trip to the embassy (not that the embassy sells lamps, but I suppose that if they did it WOULD have made our trip to San Jose less complicated).

October 30th: A picture of Angela as a little girl. The picture is at her parents' house.

October 31st: Ramon's niece Evelyn. I actually don't know her too well at all, but Ramon asked me to take a picture of her. I had thought of taking a picture of my own niece Yoselin or nephew Maikol for the picture of the day, but I never got a chance to get a picture of them together (Angela took one or two, but I didn't), and I didn't want to play favorites!

The picture is from First Communion celebrations in Berlin.

November 1st: It's been pretty boring here in Berlin of late. Lots of rain, not much to do.

Also, Chubby's a bit psycho. He used to knock over the clothes basket in the garage and sleep on our clothes, so we put a lid on it. So he started sleeping on the lid.

November 2nd: The headboard at the hotel where I teach my Wednesday class (this week I also went Tuesday).

November 3rd: Some (hopefully delicous!) sauerkraut I bought at a supermarket called Automercado in Tamarindo. It's a nice place to go to buy weird food staples like dark bread, sauerkraut, rotisserie chickens, bagels, and strange sauces. Basically, it's good when rice and beans just won't cut it anymore.

November 4th: Ironically (but luckily), just a few hours after our car passed its annual inspection, a taxi backed into it, breaking the mirror and denting the door. We were parked outside a liquor store where I had gone in to buy ice cream (really!) which, of course, melted (it takes a LONG time to fill out crash paperwork for the National Insurance Company).

November 5th: Word to the wise: don't buy a Microsoft wireless keyboard. This one was nice for a bit, but after less than a year the "E" and "L" stopped working (and after watching "Wheel of Fortune" at my grandparents' house, I know that those are two of the most vital letters to the English language!). Plus, after a month or two of not being used, it's starting to get a touch of mold. But that's Costa Rica's fault, not Microsoft's.

November 6th: I took about 30 of these pictures in Angela's parents' kitchen last night, but someone kept moving (until the last picture, when I gave up and told them to look at the camera and not move). So, candid shots are nice, but in this case, the posed one was the nicest one. From left, Cecila, Honorio, and Angela.

November 7th: We finally got a clock for our living room! And it's red.

November 8th: Lots and lots of little bottles on the bathtub ledge, and it's making me uneasy.

November 9th: Some shoes that I got the last time I went to Colorado. They reflect my deep and abiding love for Samba dancing and my commitment to indoor soccer. And they keep my feet from getting wet when I'm walking outside and it's raining, so they're ideal shoes in that sense.

November 10th: Honestly, I'm not a big fan of this picture but it's about the only one I have from this day. So I sepia-ed the hell out of it. It's just a field next to the "Costa Rica-Taiwan Friendship Bridge," where I usually stop to have a leak and stretch during my drive to my Wednesday class in Guanacaste.

November 11th: This is actually a lingiustic commentary. In Costa Rican Spanish, "night club" means "strip club" (as does "nigth club," as it's often misspelled). That's the type of information that can come in handy when you least expect it.

Anyhow, these are two signs from a strip club somewhere on the road between my house and my Wednesday evening class. It seems like a pretty classy place ("Ricuras" means "tasties," sort of).

November 12th: A raspberry from Chubby. Angela got a bit nuts and decided to dress up Boner with a necklace and even a bit of lipstick.

November 13th: A fiber-optic decoration that my in-laws have on their table. I think it's pretty cool, and in a picture it sort of looks like a firework seen from a distance.

November 14th: Arenal Volcano, on a rare clear day. We took a trip to Arenal Paraiso Hotel to celebrate Angela's birthday.

November 15th: Angela. Happy Birthday!

November 16th: Some Garfield slippers that Angela got for her birthday from Adriana.

November 17th: A cooler that my grandma gave me. A classic.

November 18th: From the beach at Pinilla.

So, that's it for now! There are only a few days left in this 365 project, so I'll have to start an official countdown in a day or two.

Thanks for reading, and have a great day!

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Much Nicer Than A Post About Snakes:

Wilco - Outtasite
Cargado por WBRNewMedia. - Ver más clips de música, videos en HD!

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Oh. Holy. Crap.

I still really like my Wednesday class at the resort, but a disadvantage to working in the jungle became apparent tonight: snakes. The freaking jungle is just lousy with snakes, at least in my imagination. But tonight this paranoia became more real. As I was getting out my key card to open my hotel room door, I looked down and there was a big snake. And I'm not exaggerating, it was really three feet. 

When I saw it I said some choice --and surprisingly multilingual-- profanity and got the hell out of there. I found a student of mine, who called someone, who called someone else. I guess it was something they called a "tuboa" (I'm not completely positive, since I was quite far away from them when they told me) and they said it was similar to a boa, but quite poisonous.

In the end, I guess I'm happy about how I behaved, since as you may know, I have a near-crippling phobia of snakes. I think it came from mowing the lawn when I was a kid, when they'd always dart out at the last minute. I spent a good decade of my life having snake nightmares wherein I'm cutting the grass and almost run over a snake, and when I step back to avoid it, I almost step on another. Pretty soon the whole lawn is covered in snakes. 

Fortunately I've not had those dreams for a while but even now, when I see a picture of a snake in a magazine --I'd like to interject a hearty "Go to hell!" to the photographic editorial staff of National Geographic here-- I get a sort of weird cotton-in-the ear sensation, like when you get too close to a campfire and inhale smoke. But this time, I just backed away. I didn't roll into a ball and cry, and I didn't shit myself. But just barely.

So who knows, maybe I'm slowly overcoming the phobia. But I'm still keeping my machete close at hand, just in case.

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This Video Lit My Fire

Many thanks to Brad for showing me this awesome video:

Dancing Pigeons - Ritalin from Blink on Vimeo.

Incidentally, this video shows basically what Angela and I did this weekend.

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Wow... Seriously, Wow!

As you may remember, I recently had to go to San Jose to renew my passport at the American Embassy. I was a bit skeptical because the United States certainly has its share of bureaucracy, and I assumed that if it were surrounded by Costa Rican bureaucracy, it might take me a few years to get a new passport.

However, after 9 days I got an email from the embassy informing me that my passport had arrived and that it was ready to be picked up. Excuse me? 9 (nine) days? Far away, in a foreign land? When it takes upwards of 6-8 weeks to do the same process in the US? Indeed, it was true. I got my new passport this morning:

As you can see, it's the newer "biometric" style of passport, which means that it has the RFID chip embedded in the cover. A more tangible result of the redesign, though, is that I was issued what my friend Annie called the "America: Fuck Yeah!" Passport. This picture above shows the page right above my picture, and it's not terribly subtle. In fact, each of the 52 pages has a different quotation from a "model" American, as well as a picture of some genuine Americana (for example, Mount Rushmore, Cowboys riding around on buffaloes, NASCAR, and lots and lots of freaking eagles).

Don't get me wrong; I consider myself proud of my country, but I do wonder if the sharply increased passport fee might have something to do with this redesign. Plus, this sort of ostentatiousness won't exactly smooth things over or impress the officials at foreign immigration booths. I don't apologize for my dislike of eagles, however. There's just something about them that strikes me as comical, and I crack up every time I see one. Maybe I just side with Ben Franklin in wishing our national bird were a turkey: at least that way we'd be able to be both thankful and patriotic every Thanksgiving.

In any case, all bitching, moaning, and joking aside, I was truly surprised at how fast, efficient, and even polite the staff at the San Jose embassy was (to me, at least, but I can't imagine non-U.S. citizens get such a warm welcome). It literally took about 4 minutes from the time we entered the embassy to the time I had my new passport in my hands. In fact, Angela had to wait longer in line for the women's bathroom. And to celebrate my heritage even more, on our way out of San Jose we stopped at the other American Embassy: Denny's! (Let it never be said that I don't know how to treat my lady right.)

I guess there's only one thing to say about all that: U.S.A.! U.S.A.! U.S.A.!

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Blogtoberfest Is Dead, Long Live Novembeard!

Well, Blogtoberfest has been a good time this year, and I've gotten nearly a post a day done. That's good enough for this guy. Now, it's time for something less labor intensive: growing a scraggly and mediocre beard:

My trashy beard, circa 2004

Ironically, I had thought of combining "November" and "Beard" a day before my friend Brad told me about Movember, which is all about growing November moustaches for charity. Sounds pretty good, although I don't really like moustaches very much, at least not when they're on my upper lip. Like most people, I prefer to simply admire them from afar; look, but definitely don't touch. But I may go in for  Movember and start growing my own personal "moustrashe" eventually. 

I don't have many talents, but I'd say growing a trashy beard that most people dislike --except Angela, inexplicably-- seems to be one of them. So we'll see where November takes us. It's a journey, after all... a gross facial hair journey!

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Acceptable In The 80s

Doesn't it seem like things were less complicated in the 80s?



Or is it just my imagination?

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Pictures of the Day: October 24-28, 2010

Here are my (strangely purple) Pictures of the Day from the last couple of days:

October 24th: An orchid that we gave to Angela's mom for her upcoming birthday.

October 25th: Some gnome magnets that my sister gave me. They're really cool, although they occasionally get mold (this is Costa Rica, after all).

October 26th: A sunset over the school where I work.

October 27th: A guy walking some oxen down the street in Guanacaste.

October 28th: I liked Angela's shirt.

So, that's it for now. Thanks for reading! Have a great weekend!

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