New Year's Eve 2012

Fiscal cliffs, reality TV, and uncontrolled gun violence. Probably time for this year to end so we can start a new one. Maybe one with better decisions. Happy New Year to everyone. [NOTE: Video is R.E.M. on MTV Unplugged playing an accoustic version of "End of the World As We Know It". Seems fitting]. 

Oh, we finished putting together the jigsaw puzzle yesterday. Breaking it apart and putting it back in the box was strangely reminiscent of the EHZC sand painting (see Sand Painting). Both good lessons in impermanence. As is the end of another year.

 

Jigsaw Puzzle

The weather outside is frightful, but inside it's so delightful. As the song goes (sort of). I have been spending my time baking bread from the new book I got for Christmas (thx, Luke) and working on the jigsaw puzzle spread out all over the dining room table. Extremely detailed and colorful scene of Time Square. 750 pieces. To be finished by New Year's or else. [NOTE: Peter Reinhart's Bread Baker's Apprentice: Mastering the Art of Extraordinary Bread is truly a marvelous cookbook. If you really want to get the most flavor out of a grain of wheat, "pre-ferment" and "slow rise" is the way to go].

Oops.

So, Amy was making fudge for Christmas but she was also wrapping presents and doing a hundred other things. And she left the marshmallow fluff concoction simmering on the stove and it started to boil over. So she moved it to the center griddle where it spilled over and made a huge sticky mess. And then she moved it back to the burner to continue cooking but the bottom of the sauce pan was covered with marchmallow fluff and it caught on fire (red circle). [NOTE: This happened, apparently, at 2:02 PM].

She finished wrapping her presents and completed her hundred other tasks. And the fudge (topped with red and green M & Ms) was delicious. We had a wonderful Christmas.

Angel

Angels we have heard on high
Sweetly singing o'er the plains
And the mountains in reply
Echoing their joyous strain

Gloria, in excelsis Deo!

-James Chadwick (1862), Bishop of Hexham and Newcastle

Happy Christmas Eve, everybody. [NOTE: Angel ornament, handmade in Nepal, is hanging from the dining room window].

Dragon Prow

The courtyard at Wat Si Saket in Vientiane (see Wat Si Saket, Wat Si Saket (Revisited), and Collateral Damage) contains an old wooden boat with a lovely, and somewhat casually painted, dragon prow. Love the bulging eyes, donkey teeth, and splash of yellow. [NOTE: Four days to Christmas]. 

Social Forestry Development Project

A few details on some recent posts about West Kalimantan (see Hedda and Ernst and Provisions). The Social Forestry Development Project, or SFDP, (map shown above) was the GTZ project that Ernst Kuester was team leader of and with which I worked for several years. Community management of an old logging concession containing over 102,000 hectares. Fifty-eight Dayak villages and four different languages (not dialects). Dark green areas on the map are intact Dipterocarp hill forest. That needed to be inventoried and described. Which is where I came in.

Satellite image of the SFDP site is shown above. Red squares are the 70 inventory plot clusters that we located throughout the area in a stratified, random fashion (see Global Positioning System). Recorded 455 tree species and compiled a massive database (1419 entries) of plant uses. Incredible amount of work. Great fun. [NOTE: I was walking through the forests of interior Borneo with Dayaks counting and measuring trees almost 20 years ago. This project was visionary (thx, Ernst)].

Phone

No internet. No voice mail. No long distance access codes. No digital anything. Nor any way to dial. Lovely room phone in the hotel in Huaraz, Peru. Elysa's nail polish and hand to the left. Image scanned from an old slide (1985), although it is unclear why I took the picture. Maybe the lamp? [NOTE: Huascarán, the highest peak in Peru and in all of the Earth's tropics, is clearly visible from Huaraz].    

Provisions

Dividing up provisions among the field crews before heading out to the forest to start the inventory work (see Field Crews and Western Borneo). Mostly bags of rice, salt, and cooking oil, but it looks like we also took a lot of cans of Coke. [NOTE: I think the name of this Dayak village is Darok in the Bonti sub-province. I think].  

Iceberg Calving

This incredible video is from James Balog's new documentary, Chasing Ice. It shows almost two cubic miles of ice crashing off the Ilulissat glacier in Greenland - the largest iceberg calving ever filmed. Like watching Manhattan break apart in front of your eyes. Please watch this. This is real. This is scary. And it's happening whether we "believe" in global climate change or not. Have a nice weekend.

Three Figures and Four Benches

Spent the entire morning entering growth data into long spreadsheets. Probably have a somewhat glazed-over, monochromatic look on my face. Like that on the three sitters in George Segal's "Three Figures and Four Benches" from the Lila Acheson wing at the Met. Sharing the bench, but not the reality. [NOTE: The growth data are from six commercial species of rattan collected over a four year period from community forests in Laos and Cambodia. Paper forthcoming].