St. Patrick's Day dinner

Last night Carlos and I celebrated our Colombian-Irish heritage and made a nice traditional meal for St. Patrick's Day. We cooked corned beef (or corned beast as we like to call it), mashed Yukon Gold potatoes, and cabbage. This is the traditional meal my family has always eaten on St. Patrick's Day -- Erin go Bragh!

Carlos made a Colombian dessert called natilla -- it was really good! It is kind of like a thick flan and it is caramel-y and cinnamon-y. We had tried to make this back in Washington from a package we found at a Mexican food store in Pike's Place Market, but that was a slight disaster -- this natilla gets the Colombian stamp of approval for authenticity!

Blah...writing

Well, I am still writing, writing, writing and I am getting a bit stressed because my defense is soon! I am finishing up my last data chapter (to be sent to my advisor by Sunday) then I have to write the intro and conclusions chapters, acknowledgements, and literature cited sections. After writing an abstract and filling in the table of contents at the very end, the main writing component will be done and I will send my complete dissertation to my committee by next Friday! Eep! Once that is all done, I need to start practicing my talk -- it will be 50 minutes, but I am not super nervous about this since I have given various permutations of this talk numerous times (at La Selva, to my lab group, to my committee). After 7 April, I will feel a lot better!

Super Mario Bros. 3 cross-stitch

It's been a little quiet on the blogging front here recently due to tons of dissertation deadlines that I have. I am finishing up the bulk of my writing with my full dissertation needing to be done in about 2 weeks -- stressful! Anyway, I found some pictures of a work-in-progress cross-stitching project that I have been working on when I need to take a little break from work. I am stitching a screenshot from one of my favorite Nintendo games -- Super Mario Bros. 3 on the NES. I've loved this game ever since I saw it in The Wizard and I played it with my friends when I was little. The pixels of the video game translate very well into cross-stitch and it is turning out nice. When done, it will be a map of world 5 -- sky world.
These are the first work-in-progress pictures that I took a long time ago. I am much further than this now, but I thought I would post these to show how I started. I will show more pictures as I work along on this, but right now the project is in a drawer so that I don't get distracted and only work on my dissertation!

Chocolate con queso

This morning (and actually again right now before I get back into my writing) I enjoyed a tasty treat from Colombia: chocolate con queso. Chocolate con queso is basically a high quality hot chocolate (made from bricks of chocolate with sugar and spices inside melted in hot milk) with little pieces of cheese inside (I used havarti). It might sound gross, but don't knock it 'till you try it. The hot chocolate melts all the little cheese bits and you can eat them with a spoon while you drink the chocolate. It is a nice balance between salty and sweet!

U-Pick strawberries

Yesterday, on the way home from some errands, Carlos and I stopped by a little parcel of land where you can pick your own fruits and vegetables. We wanted to see how their tomatoes looked (they looked sad) but we ended up picking a lot of delicious strawberries. It was really fun to pick all of the ripe fruits -- they had a lot of strawberry plants. We sampled some strawberries at home last night and they were sweet and juicy -- Carlos even used them to make a milkshake that we had with dinner!

Tomato shortage

Wow, I just read some news reporting that over 80% of Florida's January tomato crop failed due to freezing temperatures and frost. Now this effect is trickling down to the supermarkets here where tomatoes are hard to find and any that are for sale are expensive and gross-looking. Tomatoes are being imported from Mexico and other countries in Central America and they are in bad shape (not to mention the carbon footprint on all of that shipping!). Carlos and I went to Publix the other day to buy some roma tomatoes and there was only a tiny basket containing ~7 bumpy greenish yucky-looking tomatoes left! Luckily, our tomato plants are still producing a decent crop so we are going to try and subsist on our own tomatoes until the situation gets better here.

Post-graduation trip planning

Because Carlos and I will both graduate in May, we are thinking about taking a short trip after we are all finished to celebrate our hard work and reaching a giant milestone in our careers. We are thinking of either taking a cruise around the eastern Caribbean (neither of us has been on a cruise before) or driving up to Walt Disney World and visiting the parks for a few days. We want to do something that is very Floridian because we will be leaving the state at the end of June -- we should take advantage of being here before we leave! I think right now we are leaning towards Disney more because it will likely be easier, but the cruise would also be fun.

I also am working on planning my summer trip to France where I am presenting my dissertation research at a Frugivory and Seed Dispersal Conference/Symposium in Montpellier. Although it will be expensive, I have to make it to this conference because it is only held once every five years and will be a good opportunity to try and land a job. My parents are going to join me in France post-conference and we will spend about a week touring the south of France up to Paris!

More manatees!

I have been visiting the manatees near our neighborhood fairly regularly this past week -- they are ALWAYS there! Yesterday there were ~25 manatees in the canal -- that's the most manatees I have ever seen in one place. Today, Carlos brought his camera so we could get a few pictures while these awesome guys are enjoying the lovely weather: cool days with plenty of warm sunshine (and I am assuming, lots of sea grass to munch on).
One of the manatees was covered with barnacles and algae. He is my favorite and I have named him Barnacle Bill. I hope he isn’t ostracized because of his ectoparasite problem! Barnacle Bill really liked to put his nose up against the culvert where (possibly warmer) water was coming out -- he is the best.

Manatees, frozen yogurt, Whole Foods = Field trip

This afternoon, Carlos and I took a nice long walk around town -- field trip! Our main goal was to visit the recently-opened frozen yogurt place called Yogen Früz and on our way there, we stopped by the usual canal to look for manatees. We saw 12 -- including a couple little babies! They are so cute and it is really fun to just sit and watch them float along and poke their noses out of the water from time to time.

After manatee-watching, we were hungry for yogurt and made our way to Yogen Früz. I first went to a Yogen Früz in Cartagena, Colombia and it was so delicious -- one of the best frozen yogurts ever! They take a vanilla yogurt cube and you choose a frozen fruit to add, then things are smooshed together in a cool machine and you get one tasty homogeneous mixture! I had lychee and Carlos had kiwi -- kiwi is my favorite! We will definitely make another trip here in the near future.

From Yogen Früz, we walked to Whole foods and picked up a couple things before continuing on our way and stopping by the canal again to ogle more manatees. The weather here is really beautiful (70 F and sunny with a light breeze). We will have to take another long walk soon and maybe I can get some manatee pictures!

Asian snacks -- Sweet corn sticks

I can't believe how busy I have been recently with writing, job hunting, etc. so this poor blog has been on the backburner for a little while. I don't have anything exciting to write about because I am trying to finish my dissertation and prepare for graduation!
In the meantime, until I do something exciting, here is another Asian snacks post about sweet corn biscuit sticks! I had these at home in Washington and bought them from the best store: Uwajimaya. These were really good and I would definitely eat them again. They tasted like sweet buttery corn with salt and soy sauce -- weird but interesting!