Archive for December, 2010
Grad school application #1
I just submitted my first grad school application. Satisfying, but expensive. Now I’m going to play in the snow that shut down all the roads in and out of town yesterday!
Mount Elden
This tired earth
After only a week in the fields listening to the farmers, we realized that the crop substitution program, a key component of the American effort to eradicate coca, was a fantasy. Harvested by hand every four months or as often as six times a year if fertilized and sprayed, coca outperformed every other agricultural product […]
Mistletoe in a juniper tree
Continuing to wander through the park led me past this tree: How odd! It looks like it has two different colors of foliage. And the darker foliage seems to form very distinct clumps. That’s weird enough to warrant a second glance. A second glance reveals that those dark clumps aren’t part of this poor juniper […]
Identifying an Alligator Juniper to variety
I went for a walk around a park near my apartment today. After being indoors cooking and eating all day yesterday, a nice long walk on a cold winter day was absolutely perfect. I was planning to do some work on my grad school applications when I got back, but ended up identifying the plants […]
Merry Christmas!
This year I’m celebrating Christmas with my roommates, who have become part of my chosen family. I’ve mentioned before that I really love Christmas, but it’s probably hard to understand how much I love Christmas until you’ve lived with me in December and had to deal with the nonstop Christmas music and continuously flour covered […]
Cultural destruction
The Spaniards did all in their power to crush the religious spirit of the Inca. In a manual published early in the seventeenth century as a guide for missionaries, Pablo José de Arriaga offered simple advice for priests confronting idolatry. “Everything that is inflammable is burned at once,” the priest wrote, “and the rest broken […]