Changua

Tonight, Carlos made a delicious soup for dinner called changua. This is a typical soup from the central Andes region of Colombia (e.g. Bogota) and we usually have it as a Sunday meal. Changua is a creamy soup made with milk, water, and chicken bullion. Once boiling, a raw egg is added for each person and sauteed scallions are incorporated. The eggs are cooked as the soup boils and once done, changua is served with chopped cilantro and sliced bread (e.g. a baguette) on top. This is a really good, nurturing soup and is perfect for a relaxing night's meal!

Harvest

Carlos harvested some of the fruits produced by our little balcony garden and, despite the hot, hot weather, the tomatoes and peppers are still very productive! The tomatoes are from the variety "Sweet 100" and are very good -- they taste a lot like grape tomatoes. As for the peppers, they are too hot for me, but Carlos really likes them!

My mini MOO cards are here!

Woo-hoo! I just received my order of mini MOO cards in the mail and they look great! I am so excited that I decided to order them. I wasn't sure if it would be worth it, but for less than $20 I have 100 beautifully-printed cards with my artwork on one side and information on the other. These will be perfect to give to professors (and potential post-doc advisors) this summer in Germany.

I took pictures of the boxes that Carlos and I received along with 50 cards lined up. They are so well done I can't really believe it and the whole ordering process was really smooth and easy. When I run out of business cards, I will definitely order from MOO again!

Balcony garden

I realized that I haven't posted any recent pictures of Carlos' and my garden that sits out on the railing of our apartment balcony. We planted herbs a little over 3 months ago and they are huge now! The basil has really grown huge and I use it often in caprese sandwiches and on little pizzas.

I don't use the rosemary as much, but it is doing well too. The arugula was huge, but got a little out of control so we harvested it to start fresh next growing season. Same with the chives, they were growing really well, but we weren't able to keep up with them and had to harvest them all.

We also planted two varieties each of tomatoes and peppers a couple months ago and they are really big! The pepper plants are producing a LOT of big fruits, but the tomatoes aren't liking the super-hot Florida summer very much. Unfortunately, I think we have gotten as many fruits as we could out of our little tomatoes. If we had planted them in the winter, they would have done better I think. Overall, our little garden is great -- it's pretty fun to grow your own food!

Swimming

I have kicked off the summer with a new workout regime -- I am swimming every day! I paid my UM wellness center fee for the summer on Monday and I have been swimming in the natatorium there ever since. I swim for 30-35 minutes and then spend 5 minutes in the jacuzzi afterwards. It is really fun and I realize that I have missed swimming a lot. I especially like it since the water is cool and you don't sweat while working out!

One problem is that there are LOTS of people that are swimming here over the summer too. I am pretty surprised by this since I thought campus would be dead while regular classes are not in session. Usually I go to the gym in the morning, but I have been trying various times later in the day to see if the lanes are less crowded. Woo-hoo for swimming!

Best Grad Student Paper -- plaque

Heehee, I took a picture of the plaque I received last Friday for the best Graduate Student Paper in the Department of Biology at UM. Carlos and I were co-authors on the paper "Vertebrate Fruit Removal and Ant Seed Dispersal in the Neotropical Ginger
Renealmia alpinia (Zingiberaceae)." This was my first big paper and I am really proud of it. Hopefully I will have a few more published by the end of the next academic year!

PS. I blurred out my name in case there are any creep-o stalkers out there.

MOO mini cards

This afternoon, I ordered a batch of 100 mini cards from the printing company called MOO (I love that name!). Originally based in England, but now with a US office, MOO is a really cool-sounding company that prints beautiful business cards, mini cards, post cards, and stickers. I ordered mini cards which are basically half the size of standard business cards. On one side, there is a photo and on the other side is your text information. You can upload up to 100 different photos (jpgs) for the cards, but I uploaded 50 pictures so that I get two of each. Instead of photos, however, I put scans of my artwork on the cards.

I am really excited to receive these next week (hopefully). I have been wanting to order business cards for a long time, but everything I've seen was pretty boring and expensive. I hope these are nice so that I will be able to bring them with me to the tropical biology conference in Germany in a couple of months. Oh boy -- networking...blaaaarf! I will be sure to take pictures and post my MOO cards once they arrive!

Spring semester finished!

The Spring 2009 semester is over! I have finished teaching, entered my grades, and am in the midst of writing my dissertation (one chapter down!). The semester has gone by fast! Here are some of the highlights:

• I won 1st place at the College of Arts and Sciences Research and Creativity Forum (Biological Sciences division) for my poster “Relative terrestrial mammal abundances and contrasting seed defense strategies impact neotropical seed fates.”

• I submitted my first dissertation chapter (manuscript) to the Journal of Tropical Ecology.

• I won the best graduate student paper (along with Carlos, my co-author!) for “Vertebrate fruit removal and ant seed dispersal in the Neotropical ginger Renealmia alpinia (Zingiberaceae).”

• I received an NSF-funded grant from the IRES program (a research experience for grad students program) to conduct more mammal seed dispersal/predation research in Costa Rica -- this time in a dry forest.

• I also received a Curtis Plant Sciences Scholarship for the summer!

Right now I am getting excited about going to the 2009 Association for Tropical Biology and Conservation (ATBC) conference in Marburg, Germany. I have registered, reserved a hotel, and received my plane ticket. Carlos is also going to present his research and we will have about a week after the conference to travel around Germany (I’ve never been there before and will mostly be visiting the south and central parts of the country). It’s been so long since I’ve visited Europe and now I am trying to pick up a little bit of German. Ich spreche keine Deutsch! Anyway, this has been a productive and exciting semester and I hope there are more good things to come during the next academic year!

Asian snacks -- Green tea cookies

I ate some of these cookies today (a pre-dinner snack to tide me over while the curry and rice were cooking). These are great -- very tasty and buttery with a subtle grassy green tea flavor. They also go really well with tea!

Happy early Mother's Day to my mama!

I painted a picture for my mom for Mother's Day this year. I have been working on a series of sketches depicting my pets Tiffany, Tyler, and Sierra in vintage food-themed posters. It sounds a little weird but they've turned out really cute!

Anyway, I have finished the painting of Tyler selling Apple Head Brand Carrots. Tiffy and Tye were Siamese kitties of a certain type called "Apple Heads." This means that they did not have the long, pointy face typical of most Siamese -- instead they had beautiful, cute rounded heads! Also, Tyler had a strange quirk -- he loved to purr on and play with carrots. They were like catnip to him! So it seemed only appropriate that he should have carrots with him in the painting.

So, I took pictures of my work at various stages of completeness: from sketch to finished painting.

I miss my animals every day, but all I can do is remember them and make art that celebrates them and reminds and informs others as to how great they all were.

More zoo pictures -- Asian exhibits

During our last trip to the zoo, I took a lot of pictures and they all couldn't fit into one post. Without further ado, here are the animals of the Asian exhibits!

Carlos and I were lucky in that the day we visited the zoo was part of a belated earth day celebration so a lot of the animals received fun enrichment items made of recycled materials and/or food. We saw the tigers play with recycled cardboard tubes filled with foodstuffs, giant Amazon river otters trying to extract fish from bamboo tubes, and sun bears (Helarctos malayanus) eating popsicles (fruit frozen into ice)!

Onto the Wings of Asia exhibit -- the huge aviary that is one of my favorite parts of the Miami Metro Zoo.

The birds were extremely active during this visit and I tried to take pictures and identify most of the birds that I saw.

White-crested Laughingthrush (Garrulax leucolophus):

These Plumed Whistling Ducks (Dendrocygna eytoni) were having a good time drifting through the fish-rich waters:

Fishies!

This Masked Lapwing (Vanellus miles) was so cute and really wanted to eat some food out of one of the bird food-filled bowls on the floor, but a duck was sitting in the bowl and didn't want to share:

Nicobar Pigeons (Caloenas nicobarica) were walking everywhere within the aviary -- their plumage is so beautiful!

This sweet Pink-necked Green Pigeon (Treron vernans) was resting and cooing on a rope lining one of the trails in the aviary.

I have a few more pictures of birds in the aviary, but I haven't identified them yet, so they will have to wait. After visiting all the exhibits we wanted to see in the zoo, Carlos and I stopped at an ice cream stand before leaving and got...Dippin Dots!! I love this -- it is the ice cream of the future after all!

Asian snacks -- Petit Strawberry Candy

As a sweet snack today, I ate some of these -- Petit Strawberry Candies! There are five different strawberry-themed flavors of hard candies in the bag and for the most part, they were sweet and tasty!


Dark red = tasted like a wild strawberry, juicy, and sweet (my favorite of these)

Opaque pink = creamy, sweet, and milky with only a hint of strawberry flavor there

Shiny light pink with speckles = blah, tart fake sour strawberry taste (eeew)

Powder pink = softer wild strawberry flavor than dark red, really good!

Translucent pink = juicy, sour (not artificial-tasting) strawberry

Overall, I really liked these candies. The dark red and powder pink candies tasted very close to real strawberries -- one of my favorite fruits!

Amazon exhibits at the zoo

Last weekend, Carlos and I just couldn't stay away from the zoo so we went again to see the Amazon and Asia exhibits (it is so great to have a membership!). I love the Amazon exhibits -- they are so well done and the animals have a pretty good amount of space to roam around. Some of the highlights:

We caught a rare glimpse of the Giant Hummingbird: Patagona gigas. This fella is found only in the Andes of South America, can weigh from 18-20 grams, and measures approximately 22 cm in length! Sorry for the blurry photo, but he/she was zipping all over the cloud forest bird enclosure!

These glass frogs (Centrolenidae) were super-cute, small, and sleepy. I used to find these guys all the time in the PVC tubes holding up the corners of my mammal cages in La Selva. I would shake the water out of the tubes and *PLOP* out would splat a little glass frog! Many glass frogs have transparent skin (especially on their ventral sides) and through it you can see their green bones!

Bushmasters (Lachesis muta) usually scare me a little -- they are highly venomous and infamous for their bad tempers -- but this one was so cute and apparently very thirsty. He was drinking water from a little puddle the whole time we watched him!

This Sunbittern (Eurypyga helias) was very inquisitive and cute. When these guys spread their wings during threat and courtship displays, they show off two very lovely, bold eyespots.

I felt bad for this Blue-billed Curassow (Crax alberti) since all the idiot zoo patrons who saw him near the cage wall felt they had to poke at him and chirp stupidly in his direction. I really wanted him to bite one of these morons, but the Curassow just ignored them. This is an extremely rare and beautiful large ground-dwelling bird found only in Colombia. We have a different species at La Selva (Crax rubra).

This agouti (Dasyprocta aguti) was sleeping under a bromeliad next to the Curassow. Most people had no idea what kind of animal this cute agouti was (although there are signs everywhere!) and most called him a rat.

I love the Amazon exhibit and will visit it again whenever I am back at the zoo. On our way out of the Amazon, heading towards the tropical Asia exhibits, we saw a few White Pelicans (Pelecanus onocrotalus) sunning themselves on a lake -- so picturesque! Next time I will talk about the Wings of Asia aviary -- I got more pictures this time!