Posted by Lisa on December 19th, 2005 — Posted in Activities
This weekend was beautiful. Since I’ve started hiking again, I decided to take Steve and Leyna with me. We had already O.K.’d it with the vet. We hiked only for about an hour, and found that an hour was Leyna’s stopping point. At the bottom of the mountain, she found a little shade and laid down for a rest (as did Steve 🙂 ) Overall Leyna did very well, for part of the time she didn’t have a leash and she followed basically right next to me. We encountered runners, bikers and dirt bikers. She barked a little but that was it. I’m happy that I now have a hiking buddy. If only we could get her over her car sickness…
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Posted by Steve on December 18th, 2005 — Posted in Your Guest Host Steve
In another effort to rub it in our family and friends’ faces that we are enjoying wonderful weather while the rest of you are enjoying the magical cold and winter weather that is December, I’d thought I’d share a few more delights from the yard.
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Before it had ever bloomed, I thought this plant was rather boring and we contemplated getting rid of it. Good thing we didn’t. It produces these lovely hanging purple flowers. |
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Close up of the flower, looking up. |
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While this plant has yet to produce any lovely flowers, it has another wonderful property. When the leaves of this geranium are squeezed between your fingers, they release a wonderful lemon-scent. Very accurately named: the lemon-scented geranium |
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This is actually the third appearance for this plant. It was one of my original ‘what is it?’ posts while Lisa was away in September. Careful readers may also recognize it from one of Lisa’s day trip posts with her friends (it was on the beach). As we have approached summer, the plant turned red in many places and produced these lovely little white flowers (which weren’t opened this morning, unfortunately). |
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Here is a close up of this desert plant. As we learned on our trip to Isla Damas, this plant is a very important source of water in the desert of Chile. Both wild animals and the herds of goats rely on this plant. The amount of water locked away in this plant is really amazing. Click here for a 18MB movie showing how much water you can get from this plant. |
Well, I hope you enjoyed this latest installment of our garden. Enjoy your snow and cold weather…
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Posted by Lisa on December 16th, 2005 — Posted in Travel
Steve has been working very long hours lately, so today, he decided to take most of the day off. To celebrate we decided to take a little trip to Vicuña, which is about 60 km away from La Serena. Vicuña was once home to Nobel Prize poetess Gabriela Mistral and is located in the Elqui Valley. It boasts a wonderful bug museum “Museo Entomologico e Historia Natural” which is home to a very impressive, albeit scary private collection of insects from around the world. It only costs 600 pesos to enter, and will now haunt my nightmares for a very long time. I have decided after visiting said museum, that I will never visit Thailand (very nasty bugs found here!!!). Vicuña also has a beautiful Plaza de Armas with artesian shops surrounding it. We went to lunch at Restaurant Halley, which according to my travel book, it’s house specialty is Cabrito- grilled kid goat. No, we did not have that. I had a yummy churrasco completo sandwich- which is basically a steak sandwich with tomato, avocado, onion and mayo, and Steve has Pastel de Choclo. When we got home, Steve went to a meeting, and then we took the puppy to the beach to run around. Poor thing, gets car sick, and drools incessantly. Steve suggested we start driving her around more on short little trips, so she can get used to the car. On the beach, we did find tons of jelly fish. I posted a picture of a big one we saw. Makes me not want to swim!! Leyna did seem to love the beach though. I took her for a little run and she did great. Tomorrow we plan on taking her hiking. We had a beautiful sunset tonight with a great green flash. The perfect way to end a great day. Tonight we went to a party and hung out with friends. It’s now a little after 12, and Steve is at work. It’s just me and the dog.
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Posted by Lisa on December 15th, 2005 — Posted in Misc
Now that Steve and I joined the co-op organic hippie farm, we get fresh fruit and veggies once a week. I go to Innatura to pick them up on Tuesdays. Innatura is a health food store here in La Serena that sells yummy vegetarian lunches and a variety of health foods. This is also where you can get tofu and great yogurt made fresh at the store. I’m really enjoying belonging to the farm, I like working on it, and we get stuff that I never have really had before, or never think to buy. This week we got dinosaur kale, red bibb lettuce, beets, some type of green beans, yellow squash, cilantro and swiss chard. Since we don’t eat beets, and have a garden full of cilantro out back, we gave them to Leonore. Last week, I had taken my goods out of the fridge for a party and forgot all about them and left them in a drawer. Of course, they all went bad and stunk. This week, I was determined not to let that happen. So today, I went kale crazy and used up all the kale. I made a polenta and kale dish and I made a soup similar to the soup from Olive Garden. They were both wonderful, though Steve didn’t try the polenta dish. Since I had made the yummy soup, I decided to completely copy the meal we would normally get at Olive Garden, and made a homemade alfredo sauce to dip some garlic bread in. Delish!!! I still do try to get the farmers market at least once a week to add to our organic produce.
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Posted by Lisa on December 13th, 2005 — Posted in Activities
Today, I had my west african dance class, taught by my friend Jaime. Today we danced, 2 dances my favorite “Cu-Cu” and we learned a new one “Sofa” which is a hunting dance (I may have spelled these wrong). I decided, it’s finally time to share some pics with you. So the below pics are of the dance studio, us dancing, Jaime, and the new 2 week old puppies. As some of you may remember, when we were first talking about getting a dog, we were going to get one of these. They are so cute, but I think we got the best dog of all, Leyna leyna bo beyna!!
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Posted by Lisa on December 11th, 2005 — Posted in Misc
Today, we found an old toy of Izzy Bizzy’s that she had hated, or maybe it was us, since it always made her vomit. We decided to see how Leyna did, no vomit, but…
Leyna’s Kryptonite
Click to see the movie (11 MB)
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Posted by Lisa on December 11th, 2005 — Posted in Activities
Today (Sunday) Steve and I made christmas cookies. Unfortunately, you can’t really buy good decorating stuff here, and we thought we had xmas cookie cutters, but can’t find them. Today is election day here in Chile, so everything is closed, so I guess you just have to make do. We made 2 types of cookies today, Lemon Spritz and Sugar Cookies. We had a great time making them and decorating them.
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Posted by Lisa on December 11th, 2005 — Posted in Activities
Steve didn’t have to work on Thursday as it was a national holiday here in Chile, the Immaculate Conception. A friend of mine Liz Anne, invited a group of us to her house/abalone farm. They live about 15 min south of us on a beautiful 26 acre ocean front property. Her husband Mike is a marine biologist, and they started the first abalone farm here in Chile 9 years ago. They have a second abalone farm in the south of Chile, in Chiloe. We had a wonderful time learning about abalone (which is a vegetarian sea snail). They started their stock of abalone from some brought over from California. They now raise millions of baby abalone until they’re about an inch and a half, and sell them to buyers in the Lake District (which is the South of Chile). There, a law was passed allowing the abalone farmers to grow their abalone directly in the ocean. On Mike’s farm, as you can see in the pictures, they have big houses where they grow their abalone, and pump water in from the ocean and filter out any bad stuff, and use that for the abalone. Here in La Serena they sell loco, which is similar to abalone, except that it’s carnivorous. There are many abalone farms in Chile now, but the abalone are all exported mainly to Asia. Afterwards the bunch of us went to Guanaqueros to El Pequeño for lunch. Steve was happy to finally go on an outing with us.
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Posted by Lisa on December 6th, 2005 — Posted in Misc
Poor little Leyna got her first bath this morning. She cried the whole time. Then afterward, before I could dry her, she got her puppy energy and was zooming around the house, and of course her favorite hiding place is under the xmas tree. We are teaching her not to hide under the tree, but it’s just so cute! Soon, she won’t even fit, she’s getting so big!
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Posted by Lisa on December 5th, 2005 — Posted in Uncategorized
LIKE A BIG LOSER, I GOT MY DATES MIXED UP, CARA AND JOEL’S ANNIVERSARY IS THE 4TH AND LAUREN AND CRISS’S IS THE 6TH, BOY WHAT A TERRIBLE FRIEND. CARA AND JOEL, I’M SORRY. I HOPE YOU HAD A WONDERFUL ANNIVERSARY! I LOVE YOU GUYS!!! HAPPY BELATED ANNIVERSARY!
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