September - March (My attempt at grad school)

Grad school...

Inspiration.
Lots of writing.
Discouragement.
Lots of reading.
Inspiration.
Lots of grading.
Discouragement.
Short deadlines.
Discouragement.
No time for...
Inspiration.
More of everything.
Discouragement.
I've been in school for too long.

In short, I'm taking a leave of absence until next spring.
I guess I should have seen this coming

A bit more from Puerto Rico

You can figure out how the rest of the trip went from the pictures.

I'll try to rotate the sideways ones later...
(hey I actually did it)

So Here's What Happened

Here's the post I had intended to make the day following the last Puerto Rico Post.

---

I slept on the couch last night. Typically there are two or three ants that wander up there and I can simply remove them. But last night my bed was covered in ants. They were on the comforter, on the sheets, under the pillow, on the baseboard. =/
Yesterday we went to a botanical garden. It was nice, though a bit wrecked up from the hurricane.

See those trees? That's Bamboo. I've never seen it that big.

 Afterward we went back to Old San Juan. We hung out in one of the plazas for a while.

I was sitting on that bench until the people behind me started throwing down bird seed.

Doggy

I went into a shop and this guy was under the counter.

We wandered around a bit looking for food and found a park that was named after the number of pigeons it has.

Pigeon holes.

There were several of these cast shoes in this park.

We eventually found a place to eat by the park. And it wasn't a fast food chain! It had traditional Puerto Rican food (And there were a few vegetarian options). I had stuffed green plantains in some kind of tomato ginger sauce (I think that's what the sauce was). It was really good. After, we went to the mall and wandered for a bit. They still had a Borders. We got a few cheap books. I was kind of sad to see the place go.

Spent a while in there.

Hanging glass bulbs in the mall.

Animal Count: 5 lizards, 13 dogs, 5 horses, 1 (field of) cows And cats go missing again

Wait for it....

...almost.

Arecibo

I'd never thought I'd ever spend this much time in a burger king.

Yesterday we went to the Arecibo Observatory. It's way in the middle of mountainous nowhere (which is typical for telescopes). The drive there made me a little nauseas; there roads just went up and down constantly with sharp turns. On the way back my dad actually took a video of the road. Anyway, it's the biggest single dish radio telescope in the world, or in Spanish (radiotelescopio).

The middle of nowhere (Arecibo)

It's quite large. twss.

I thought it was pretty cool, though there's not much to see there. They have an area with a bunch of science activity booths. Typical museumy stuff, most of which didn't work. Then there's this 20 minute video about a typical day for the observatory or something like that. The production value was pretty low. I appreciated it for the fact that the scientific things said in the video were real, because they were clearly not actors. I would've liked more explanation of how the thing worked. It did give a sense of scale though. They showed some engineers working on the thing and inside the secondary reflector, and you see how tiny they are. After the film everyone goes outside to the the observation deck and you look at it for a while.

Physics tea party.

They had a Nobel Prize

We got back to my grandpa's place just before it started raining. The church band was warming up. I guess the concert was last night. This time they had music followed by talking, repeat. Rather than trying to sleep I watched 20th Century Boys and several episodes of Full Metal Alchemist Brotherhood. I still have no idea what happened in 20th Century Boys. I'm gonna need to watch the second one. Regarding FMA, is it just me or do things happen faster in Brotherhood? Everything is very familiar, so I'm not sure if the episodes weren't just reedited or if they're actually different episodes.

The support cables for the secondary reflector

Finally got both of them in a picture. They're quite skittish. 

Woah, Banana Flower.

One of those loud roosters, and my Grandpa's dog, Brownie

Animal Count: 15 lizards, 10 chickens, 5 dogs, 8 horses, 4 (fields of) cows
No new cats yesterday?

El Morro

Slept in today. Making up for yesterday. The church band was just finishing up by the time we got back yesterday. We went sight seeing with Nirav and his family. It was a lot of fun. Didn't have time to write a real post this morning, so here are some pictures:

Old Spanish Fort, El Morro

El Morro's light house from outside the walls.

Inside the fort

More from inside the fort

Birds outside the fort. Nirav called Merkrow's looking for their hats.

Cat on one of the walls

Cat at base of the fort.

I thought these were pretty

This iguana was sitting on the fort wall by the old latrines.

Triangular staircase. I thought it was cool.

Animal Count: 2 lizards, 3 cats, 9 dogs, 1 chicken, 10 cows (in a field), ~8 hatless merkrows.

What kind of Church is this?

Just one of the banana trees in
my grandpa's yard.

Instead of waking me up this morning the rooster decided it would rather keep me up last night. But I don't blame it. I blame the church next door for keeping me up. Why is a church having a concert until 11 o'clock on a Wednesday night? The coquí frogs didn't help either. The night before they were charming; Last night they were more annoying than crickets. I still blame it mostly on the concert. At one point it seemed like there was a strobe light pointed at my window. Anyway, today I woke up at eight and was incredibly groggy.

Yesterday was nice. We visited some of my dad's cousins, as well as his aunt. My great aunt was nice, though the need for everyone to feed me is kind of tiring.

"I don't eat meat"
"Oh my god!...Still fish though?"
"No fish"
"Oh my god!"
"I can't drink milk either. It's been upsetting my stomach lately"
"Oh my god! What do you eat!?"
"Vegetables, Fruits, grains"
"Oh. I guess that's good. Lots of vitamins...Um, have some mashed potatoes and gravy"
"I... don't eat mashed potatoes"
"Oh my god!"

I had fried plantains (mofongo) and rice. And after was given two bananas. Everyone has banana trees in their yard. My great aunt also had an incredibly friendly dog named Pipa. I made a sketch of her face and I promised I'd make a full body sketch my aunt could give to her daughter, but Pipa moved around quite a bit and I don't have much practice drawing dogs. So we ended up taking some pictures, and I'll do the sketch later.

The first sketch of Pipa

Oh! On the way to my aunt's place we actually ended up on some of the roads we were trying to take to my grandpa's. We were looking at the strange grass and then passed a familiar looking house with a ridiculously steep driveway, and then realized all the grass and trees off the side of the road had been under water yesterday (Where I failed to get a picture). It drained really quickly! We made it passed the point where the road was flooded and I got some pictures of the river. My grandpa said the other day, "We'll have water as long as it doesn't rain too much". It's because when the river overflows it brings silt into the reservoir and they shut off the water.

It's clearly taken some dirt off the mountain.

Today I see Nirav. He's got a 6 hour layover here on his way to Antigua.

Because the internet needs more cats (and dogs):

My Dad's Cousin's Pets

One of my Grandpa's cats hiding in the leaves. 

This is Pipa, the friendliest pit-bull in the world.

Animal Count: 9 lizards, 20+ chickens, 2 ducks, 4 cats, 16 dogs, 2 sheep, 7 horses, 8 (fields of) cows, 4 (individual) cows