In Portugal

Just a quick hello to everyone from Portugal. Quick, mainly because the "computer" is actually the TV in our hotel room, and although that sounds fancy, it's a lot more frustrating than you might imagine.

In any case, Portugal is great, and the rest of our trip has been great so far, too. I've also been keeping up on the pictures of the day, so we'll have a big backlog when we get to Colorado.

Hi to mom, especially, since I can't seem to reply to emails on this system. Also, a trip to Costa Rica to visit us sounds great!

And finally, if you happen to be reading this, Tessa, you were right: Portuguese does sound like Russian.

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In The Old Country

Hi everyone!

Angela and I made it here OK, and I just thought I'd check in. Since we'll be moving around for a bit, I won't be putting up any Pictures of the Day for a while. I will still be taking them, but I'll just have to do a massive upload when I get back to Colorado. I probably could have brought my computer along or sorted out a way to put them up on the way, but that's not an ideal way to spend a vacation.

So, in the meantime, take care, and I'll hope to be sharing some interesting pictures with you all soon!

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Pictures of the Day, May 5 & 6, 2010

Here are the Pictures of the Day from May 5 and 6.
Now, I'm going to bed!

May 5th: This is a weird bush that's growing in back of the Formerly Crappy Casita. It's sort of a mix between a strawberry and raspberry plant, but not as good as either. Still relatively tasty, though, and pretty!

May 7th: Wilberth, one of my students who happens to speak German, too, gave me a stack of German magazines. It's been great to practice again, especially considering our upcoming trip. Thanks, Wilberth!

So, thanks for reading, and have a great day!

365: Picture a Day Project    365 Leftovers    All My Pictures    Sitzbook

Picture of the Day Catch-Up: April 26 - May 4, 2010

Wow, it's been so long since I've posted Pictures of the Day that I've almost forgotten how to do it! So, here are my favorite pictures I've taken in the last 9 days:

April 26th: Some of the spices in our kitchen. I keep them in old olive jars, and that way they look terribly photogenic.

April 27th: The toilet paper roll in our bathroom. Camouflaged with that metal thing. (And sure enough, the bidet made its way into the Leftovers).

April 28th: I was grading some papers this afternoon and listening to music on my headphones (there was a lot of lightning, so I had to turn off the electronic stuff). I like the leftover picture of my head, but that seemed a bit egotistical to put another self-portrait of me in such a short time, especially one where I'm in need of a shave. Plus, I like the blue in this picture. I have no idea why it came out blue, since both the curtain and light coming through it were both white at the time.

April 29th: The fire station in Palmares. The color is about as subtle as a kick to the nuts, but I suppose it's a good color for people who associate themselves with fire.

April 30th: There was a little festival coming up in Berlin, so they hung this sign in front of our house.

May 1st: My brother-in-law Arnoldo helping us cut down a stump. The saw I had just wasn't cutting it. All of my in-laws have been great by helping us out with things at our place, and it's nice to live close to people we know and like.

May 2nd: A paint-by-numbers that my brother Paul gave us, and which Angela did most of (I worked on about 3% of it). It turned out pretty cool. Thanks, Paul!

May 3rd: My globe. I tried to get a similar picture a while ago, but the light in that one wasn't good since it was evening. I think this is a bit better.

May 4th: Still progressing with the paint on the Formerly Crappy Casita... at about the same rate the country itself is progressing, actually. To see more pictures of the Formerly Crappy Casita, as well as other stuff from the last nine days, check out the Leftovers.

So, we're caught up. Thanks so much for reading, and have a great day!

365: Picture a Day Project    365 Leftovers    All My Pictures    Sitzbook

Pictures of the Day, April 23, 24, and 25, 2010

Here are the Pictures of the Day from this last weekend:

April 23rd: The curtain in my office. I thought it looked interesting with a bit of breeze coming in.

April 24th: Most of the pictures I took this day were from a big activity we did with our students to celebrate Earth Appreciation Month. This girl is the sister of one of the students. Both sisters are very cute.

April 25th: The faucets for our washer. We have a solar water heater on the roof, and it's awesome to have warm water.

That's it for now! Thanks for reading, and have a great day!

365: Picture a Day Project    365 Leftovers    All My Pictures    Sitzbook

Picture of the Day, April 22, 2010

I finished replacing the windows in the Formerly Crappy Casita, but that left me with a lot of glass and nothing to do with it. What better thing to do than to put it into a box and break it with a hammer?!

Sometimes, doing something this simple and destructive is great fun, especially if you do it over and over trying to get a good Picture of the Day. Now I know what those Chicken Soup For The Soul books were talking about.

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Picture of the Day, April 21, 2010

These beetles have been invading the country over the last few days... or at least our part of the country. Supposedly they're "avejones de mayo," so they're not due for a few more days. Still, last year they hardly came at all, so I guess April's OK.

The only thing is that they're not too smart, even for insects. In fact, these beetles are pretty appallingly stupid. This was one that was in my office.

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Picture of the Day, April 20, 2010

Here's April 20th's Picture of the Day:

Our lovely niece Mariela came over to help us by pulling some weeds in our grass (it was 4/20, after all). She's very nice, and aside from having the tedious task of pulling weeds, she even let me take her picture. So, thanks for both of those things, Mariela!

To everyone else, thanks for reading, and be sure to check out the SeeVida page that we've been working on (you can also see it on flickr). You'll remember that the group's goal is to have a person in every country taking a picture a day. So far, we've still got the U.S., Costa Rica, Bolivia, Germany, and it appears we've added Italy and possibly Russia. If you know of someone in another country with a flickr account who may be interested in participating in the project, please tell me.

Have a great day!

365: Picture a Day Project    365 Leftovers    All My Pictures    Sitzbook

Pictures of the Day, April 15-19, 2010

I was busy last few days while taking quite a few pictures, so let's get down to business!

April 15th: For most of this day I painted the Formerly Crappy Casita. Almost done with the primer. The problem is that as I keep moving along the house, I keep finding small things that need to be repaired or changed, so it's a slow, slow, slow process. But it'll look nice in the end.

As a side note, I'm very happy with this particular paintbrush. I found it somewhere in the Crappy Casita, and it looked about cashed. But I've used it to prime the whole Crappy Casita, and it's still going strong.

April 16th: This picture is Part of a mural at the school in San Jose where I helped administer some interviews today. This school was really interesting, and chock-full of murals. It was also sandwiched between the buildings of downtown San Jose and the Sabana park. Check out the other pictures from that day if you're interested.

I was debating between this picture and the previous squirrel picture for the Picture of the Day for April 15th. The squirrel won out in the end--the squirrel ALWAYS wins out in the end, dammit!--but I still wanted to include this one. It's of a stall door in the men's room with "Guetto Respect" written on it.

April 17th: My coworker/friend/Saturday Arch-Nemesis Monica's feet. She seems to wear interesting shoes to work, but she doesn't like the idea of taking pictures of them. I think she didn't believe me that I was doing a Picture of the Day project. Plus, I told her the straps for her shoes looked like whipped cream (that's a compliment where I come from!), so she was even more skeptical. Here she's walking away.

April 18th: This was a busy day, and I'm posting three pictures that I really liked and wished I could make Picture of the Day. This picture is of my father-in-law Honorio, who had his birthday on April 18. We went with Angela's siblings to wish him a happy birthday in the morning.

This was also taken on the 18th; it's some flowers at my in-laws' house. Really pretty, but I still feel weird making flowers my Picture of the Day. There are many people who do it better.

Finally, on the 18th we also visited our Belgian friends Sofie and Thyss, who we'd not seen in quite some time. It was great to see them again, especially since they had a new addition to their family, little baby Andres! I like this picture a lot, but since I'd not asked permission to use it as Picture of the Day, I thought it was best not to. But thanks again to them for a lovely day, and hopefully we'll meet up again soon!

April 19th: My evening class, with their ideas to help improve the world. It's very nice group, and one of my favorites, actually.
Plus, the guys with the trash can look so earnest and sincere, it'd be impossible not to like this group!

So, that's it for now. Be sure to check out the leftovers for some other great pictures. Have a good day, and thanks for reading!

365: Picture a Day Project    365 Leftovers    All My Pictures    Sitzbook

Picture of the Day, April 14, 2010

We had one of our lights in the living room crap out right before we went to Colorado in December, and we finally changed it yesterday. Here's it's replacement. Pretty nice, and a lot brighter than having no light.

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More "New" Old Pictures

The archiving continues...

Today I uploaded quite a few pictures from Costa Rica that I took in 2006. They begin when I first moved here. If you've been following the blog since then, then your name is Phylis Sitzman, and you've probably already seen most of the pictures in the set. If that's not the case, though, and you're interested in checking them out, you can see them by clicking here. There are also some pictures from a trip that I took to Colorado at the end of 2006 to visit my family. You can see them by clicking here.

And as usual, if you're in any of the pictures and don't wish for me to make them public, please tell me and I'll get them down ASAP. Until then, though, enjoy!

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Picture of the Day, April 13, 2010

Here's the Picture of the Day from yesterday:

This is some sort of miniature kettle or incense thing that Angela was burning in the kitchen yesterday. I'm not sure if there was oil, wax, or something different inside, but it was starting to smoke a bit. Whatever it was, after I took this picture I can't quite remember what happened, and I woke up three hours later on the living room carpet, with a large gash on my forehead and my pants pockets turned inside out.

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Picture of the Day Update, April 6-12, 2010

It's been a week since my last Picture of the Day update, so here we go with the most recent pictures:

April 6th: My shirts hanging in my closet. I liked the colors.

April 7th: A coffee plant on our front porch started flowering a bit earlier than we expected.

April 8th: Today I got some glass to make new windows for the Crappy Casita. A lot more complicated than I thought it'd be, and the small cuts from nails and glass hurt my pride more than my hands. But I'm learning, slowly but surely.

April 9th: A watermelon. April 9th was a slow day for photography.

April 10th: Some Go-Fish cards at work.

April 11th: Vicky and Arnoldo. Arnoldo is one of my brother-in-laws. The two of them were showing me a new property they bought in Berlin. They'll possibly be using it for their kids when they're older.

April 12th: This is a bug I saw on our steps late on the night of the 11th, so I hung around for 32 minutes to make it a Picture of the Day for the 12th. Aside from the strange but interesting bug, I also like this because of the narrow focus. Thanks for selling me a cool camera and lens, Brad!

So, that's it for now. Hope there was something you liked. Until next time, be sure to check out the leftovers by following the links directly below. Thanks for reading!

365: Picture a Day Project    365 Leftovers    All My Pictures    Sitzbook

Picture of the Day Big Catch-Up: March 26 - April 5

Hello! It's been a while since I've posted a Picture of the Day update to the blog. I've been uploading them to Flickr more often and efficiently, and there are also quite a few interesting Leftovers, so be sure to check there occasionally. In any case, here we go with the ones from the last week or so. I messed up while uploading them, so they're chronologically backwards, but oh well. Just pretend you're watching Memento. Enjoy!

April 5th: I just took this about 5 minutes ago in the kitchen, realizing it was 11:00 PM and I still had no Picture of the Day. Eventually, I'll run out of crap in my kitchen to take pictures of, but that day's not come yet. When it does, I'll find things in the bathroom. I hear the bidet looks sublime when bathed in the unique, frantic light of 11:45 PM.

April 4th: Today was my sister-in-law Toni's birthday. This is a bag that Angela gave her her present in.

April 3rd: My father-in-law Honorio watering the posts in the fence he and I put up in the morning. The fence-posts are caña india, a type of cane used often in fences. Honorio looks angry, but I think he just didn't know I was taking a picture. He's actually very jovial guy, in any case.

April 2nd: I didn't have much time for pictures because I was painting this day, but this one came out OK, I guess. I like how the flash created a sort of eerie blue glow on the plant.

April 1st: This is a wall in the Formerly Crappy Casita. At one point, it used to be a complete picture that someone drew of "Toro," the guy who laid the ceramic tiles in our house. But when we made some modifications to the Crappy Casita, some of the planks got moved around, and the drawing was scattered.
And I have no idea why the person wrote "cheese" next to Toro's head, but he also spelled "ceramic" --as in ceramic tile-- wrong, I believe.

March 31st: There's nothing quite as iconic as a girl and her frog. This is Hannah, Paola and Juan's daughter. We went to their house for a delicious dinner. She was subject of a Picture of the Day a few months ago, but at least this time she (barely) stopped moving for a moment to allow me to get a sharper picture. Very cute girl, though!

March 30th: I know that I had a similar picture to this one as a leftover on March 21st, but I really liked the way it looked, so I recreated it with a bit more sexiness this time. And MAN, that coffee looks freaking delicious right now!

March 29th: A delicious mango I had after lunch. I know I had a mango picture up the other day, but when they're this delicious and photogenic, I can't resist. Plus, there's something aesthetically appealing about making a piece of fruit unnaturally conform to geometric patterns.

March 28th: Part of a traditionally-painted Costa Rican yoke.

March 27th: A plantain on a chair. You got a problem with that?
I was taking pictures of the entryway at Angela's folks' house, but this turned out to look more interesting.

March 26th: I had to paint the top rail on our gate. It took a LOT longer than it should have. Lousy greasy, acrobatic painting.

So, that's it for now. Thanks so much for reading, and have a great day!

365: Picture a Day Project    365 Leftovers    All My Pictures    Sitzbook