Routine

Sarah: I guess you can say we’ve settled into a routine, since I’m having a hard time thinking of what we’ve done for the past number of days! A bit of exciting news, we got our rain gauge set up so it’s fun right now to check every morning and see how much rain we got from the day before. Other than that, we’ve done lots of data entering and continuing work on past research projects.

A professor from Southern Nazarene University (SNU), Dennis Siegfried, has been in Costa Rica for the past two weeks at a conference and came out to QERC on Sunday. He brought lots of goodies for us from the states—a laminator, new CR and USA flags, some books we had left, hand warmers, bread yeast, and other random things. Here is the neat connection with Dennis—besides now being a co-worker at SNU, he did the LASP program like David and I did, so he knows some of the same professors. And, to make things even more connected, he studied in the program the same year as Scott and Dawn Smithson, so he knows them fairly well. Scott was our boss while we worked in California the past two years, and he and Dawn became good friends of ours.

Monday we all got up early and hiked Los Robles trail, the only trail I hadn’t done before. It was a long hike, and even longer since David and Dennis enjoyed stopping for every bird and insect along the way. (Take note of the interesting fly we came across.) We had great weather—it only misted a little bit—and Los Robles takes you across one of the ridges so we had great views. The old oak trees on the trail are incredible. They are so big; it reminded me a little bit of being back in the redwoods in California.

Today we visited the family Dennis stayed with when he was a student here, and they were super nice. They were very welcoming to David and I, and we’re excited to get to know them better in the future. The father, Gerardo, told us about a tree that’s fruiting up in the orchards that attracts quetzals, so we drove up in the orchards to check it out. We ended up seeing 4 quetzals up there! What a gorgeous bird. It’s been fun to be able to show someone some of the work that we’ve been doing, and Dennis has been helping with more ideas for the future and taking care of some technical issues we’ve had with the computers. Tomorrow we head back into San Jose for the rest of the week to meet with some people at the University of Costa Rica (UCR), make a few more purchases for our home and the building, and also to do our monthly grocery shopping.