Rolling On One

Not counting the day we got there, because all we did was walk around the hotel grounds (seeing several life birds, that is, birds we’ve never seen before in our lives, in the process) and go to that orientation meeting. Well, the airport was more interesting than most airports. There was someone there making cigars, which was different.

The view from our hotel window was pretty nifty, though, with a rainbow that just stayed there for half the afternoon:

Oh, also at that orientation meeting everyone in the group introduced themselves. There were people from all over the US, two couples from various parts of Canada, and eight Chinese people (two from Beijing) who were three brothers and two sisters and some spouses doing a family reunion.

The first real day of the tour we got on the bus to go to Poas Volcano national park. There’s an overlook over a big crater and a life zone called “cloud forest”, not rain forest, up near the top. The booklet describing the tour said that there was only a 30% chance of seeing anything from the overlook. We were among the 70% who didn’t see the crater, although we were up there at the edge:

However, the cloud forest was there just fine. The idea is, at that altitude on that mountain range you’re in the clouds.

It doesn’t rain all that much, but it’s sort of drizzle, well, that 70% of the time. There are lots of plants (and of course insects, and birds too) that only live in the cloud forest. An indicator plant of cloud forest (that is, this plant only lives in that life zone, so if you see it, you know you’re in cloud forest) is this “poor man’s umbrella” leaf:

The cloud forest has lots of bromeliads, relatives of pineapples, growing in it — I think this is one –

and lots of other colorful flowers, extra welcome when you’ve been looking at the grey New England winter for the last month –

– and of course just lots of vegetation in general.

To get to the top of Poas we had been driving through lots of coffee plantations; that’s a crop that likes the middle elevations of the hills.

There were many signs offering coffee tours. We just got to walk in a tiny coffee grove in the backyard of the restaurant where we stopped for lunch, but we were right there with the coffee bushes,

and had a big view over Costa Rica’s central valley from the restaurant.

(Hey! Why did I turn that sideways? oh well…)

The bus took us back to San Jose, where we went to the gold museum. Besides being a museum of numismatics, with exhibits of coins and currency that had pictures of tropical animals and plants, it had lots of pre-columbian gold artifacts and a very interesting exhibit of how the pre-columbian Central American cultures had done lost-wax casting.

Rather than take the bus back to our hotel, Millie and Joel and Arlene and I opted to stay downtown and find a cab back. Two other women from the tour also decided to stay downtown. Between that and seeing which people on the tour group had chosen to walk on a little trail off the main road from the Poas parking lot to the overlook, and who was really looking closely at the plants up there (and one of the Chinese women was sketching them in a paper journal!), we were starting to get an idea of who might be the more interesting people in the group.

We walked along a pedestrian-only shopping street downtown, and then back a block or two on a parallel street before we decided to get a cab back. The thing I liked best on the mall was a group of sculptures honoring the street dogs of the city:

Oh! I was thinking about all the Spanish we were seeing on store signs. There were lots of shoe stores, zapoterias. I just now realized the similarity between the French ord for wooden shoes, sabots (of course sabotage means throwing wooden shoes in the machinery to stop the mill), and the Spanish for shoes, however much of zapoteria it is.

This is from several weekends ago — probably the weekend of Feb. 3. I’m not sure why Matt was so tired; probably from making two round trips out to Pitchfork Springs (a mile and a half each way? Through a foot of snow?) with Dozer. Both of them zonked out on the living room floor:

Arlene asked me something like “are you going to put markers on the fingerboard?” I hadn’t really thought about it, but I guessed I should; normal guitars have marks every so often so you can find where to play different chords and notes past the first few frets. I had some decorative inlay left from years ago that I figured would be suitable. It came out better than I expected:

I didn’t do the tiny details! I cut a strip of inlay into semi-tiny rectangles and put them in little spaces I cut out. Granted I had to cut two semi-tiny rectangles of inlay strip for each marker, to make diamonds instead of all herringbone, and cut the little spaces to just about the right size. But not the tiny details. All the same, I think it exceeds expectations for a cigar box guitar fingerboard. Here’s the inlay strip on top of the fingerboard so you can see what I mean:

We woke up to exceptionally beautiful snow in Casco yesterday. Here’s the best winter picture of our house I’ve ever taken –

We have a very long driveway, because there is a row of house lots between the road and our lot proper, with a right-of-way a little wider than our driveway between two of those; so I often think I’m out in more winter weather getting the newspaper than a lot of my co-workers are in a whole week. Here’s how it looked on my way back from the mailbox:

Last Thursday I went to a talk and demonstration about a musical instrument called the duduk, at the Armenian Library and Museum of America in Watertown. Well, why? you may ask. Mostly because I like music and strange musical instruments, and partly because I’ve been interested in Armenian culture since I lived in Watertown when I was in graduate school.

The link I have above is the museum’s page about the event. If you look along the thumbnails of the YouTube inset, find the one with a picture of a guy in an embroidered white shirt standing in front of a microphone — or go to YouTube and search for “Armenian Duduk Performance“. (or just click on that link!) There’s a 5 minute clip of a trio playing duduks there. If you just listen, and you’ve never heard the instrument before, you could be forgiven for thinking you’re listening to a viola and cello duet, but it’s a double-reed instrument, more like an oboe or bassoon than anything else.

There’s another Armenian double-reed instrument called the zurna. It’s like a snake-charmer oboe and variations of it are found all through western and central Asia. The duduk, however, is strictly Armenian.

I bought both a duduk and a zurna (in fact, two zurnas, one of which I gave to my klezmer teacher) when I was in Yerevan in 1999. I haven’t learned to play either of them. The zurna is incredibly loud, even by my standards as a trumpet player. Maybe not as loud as I can play the trumpet when I try, but I can play trumpet softly when I want to. Zurna, only loud. Only so loud that I wouldn’t want to practice it indoors, nor in fact anywhere within 100 feet of anyone else until I developed some facility with it — so that’s not ever going to happen. ALMA’s exhibit about musical instruments said that the zurna is used for outdoor events, and that sounds good to me.

The talk covered recent trends in duduk playing, mostly what happened during the Soviet era. The soviets were big on encouraging national identity in the different areas of the USSR, and organized folk orchestras which played traditional music of their nationality; but just by virtue of being officially organized they became more codified and polished than the real traditional musicians had been, and duduk music began to be taught more from printed curricula than just handed on from generation to generation. Fewer schools teach duduk now than did twenty years ago, and there is some chance of the traditions being lost. If you listen to the YouTube clip, you’ll agree with me that the duduk tradition is worth preserving!

Our first evening in Costa Rica there was an orientation meeting of the tour group before supper. The tour director (aka ‘our guide’) had written a few notes on a flip chart, of which two were the most important phrases in Spanish to know for traveling in CR: ‘gallo pinto’ and ‘pura vida’.

Gallo pinto should mean ’speckled rooster’, but it really is a dish of black beans and rice, probably with a little sweet red pepper and some cilantro or other chopped herbs added. We were served it probably every day with breakfast and at more than 2/3 of our other meals — not that it was all we had to eat by any means, but it was a regular. I figure it’s a little like Welsh Rabbit — if you can’t afford meat, you call the non-meat dish meat.

‘Pura Vida’ is the thing to answer when someone asks how you are or how’s it going. It sort of means ‘cool’ or, since the ‘vida’ is ‘life’, maybe you want to think of it as ‘life is good.’ You see it everywhere on T-shirts and souvenirs. One salesclerk told me (but it was in the airport when we were leaving, too late to do any good) that it was appropriate to say in place of “you’re welcome”. Our guide said it was distinctive in Costa Rican Spanish, and if you heard it somewhere else in Latin America you could be pretty sure that the person who said it was from CR.

Our guide would say, first thing every morning on the bus, “Buenos dias, amigos! Como estan?” and if we answered, “Muy bien!” he would say, “No! No! Pura Vida! Como estan? — OK, that’s better!” It took three or four days for everyone to catch on.

In our third hotel I had a wireless signal in the lobby, and it looked as though I didn’t have to pay for access as I had to at the first hotel (the second was out in the boonies and there was no chance at all). I asked the desk clerk if the lobby was a wireless hotspot, and he said, “Yes, we have wireless, but only right here in the lobby.” At that point I had learned enough to say, “Pura vida!” and that seemed to be appropriate.

If you haven’t noticed the latest couple of items on my twitter feed, I’m back from ten days of a trip to Costa Rica. I have a lot of pictures to process and post and a lot I’d like to write if I ever get around to it. To summarize, I

• went to the edge of a volcano crater that was too foggy to see
• tasted a raw coffee bean
• walked among butterflieshistop>
• saw people packing bananas that had just come in from the field
• rode on a bus for 2 kilometers on a road flooded six inches deep
• saw sloths, monkeys, crocodiles, caimans, lizards, and two dozen kinds of birds I had never heard of a month ago
• walked along the beach on the Caribbean and the Pacific shores
• changed boats in the middle of a river (I’m convinced the first boat broke down because the driver slammed it into reverse when he saw a jaguar swimming across the river)
• saw acres and acres of pineapple fields — I’m not worried about the supermarket running out of pineapples for us to buy
• (illegally) crossed the border into Nicaragua
• walked on suspension bridges 50 meters above the rain forest
• got a cha-cha lesson (all right, a group lesson) from the winner of a TV dance contest show

I did get the squirrel cage swift finished over the weekend. I realized that I hadn’t bought enough maple to make a frame for it, so I put together a frame out of some mahogany (probably it’s lauan, Philippine mahogany) that Matt had originally bought for deck flooring and brought up to Casco for bridges on the trails. There are dozens of board feet of it, so I took three lengths. Maybe I’ll make a nicer frame, but this one is perfectly servicable for now. Notice the handles on the axles; that’s something you can do once you’re a little comfortable with a lathe. I used the plunge router, too, without making a big deal of it. I probably commented when I got it about how much nicer it is to use than my old router. When I saw it at Marden’s I thought, “I’d like a plunge router, but is that feature enough to justify buying it?” It’s not just the plunge (which means you can set the base in position on the workpiece, in the right place, before turning it on, and then push the cutter into the work, rather than have the cutter projecting and spinning before it contacts the wood, which makes it impossible to do precise work in the middle of a board), but two other things that are even nicer features: First, a soft start. My old router goes from 0 to full speed as soon as you push the switch. The startup torque almost yanks the tool out of your hands, which is scary as well as detrimental to doing precise work. This one starts slowly and builds up to full speed over a few seconds, so it’s much easier to control. Secondly, this has a vacuum port for sawdust extraction. A router makes a tremendous amount of sawdust, all right, not as much as a lathe, but probably more sawdust per second of operation than a lathe. Having a place to put a shop-vac hose while running the router makes it a lot neater to use and clean up from. So, overall, although the old router “works just fine”, the new one was one of my best tool purchases.

Here’s the swift:

– ready to use, and below, loaded up with a big skein of Reynolds’ Eco Wool (bought at Fabric Place when they went out of business last year)

Late last Thursday afternoon (Dec. 24) we went up to the Ocean State Job Lot store near the Oxford/Norway line because Arlene wanted a handful of cheap putty knives for printmaking (getting ink out of cans). Of course we spent way more than six times 80 cents, but she did get those putty knives. Among (lots of) other things, we got a jigsaw puzzle just because we liked the image — the front page of the Boston Globe from the last presidential election. It’s very rare for us to buy a jigsaw puzzle other than a Springbok puzzle at a yard sale, but Job Lot prices are so low, and the pieces looked at least not all the same shape, that we got this one.

On the way home we got stuck behind some very slow traffic — extremely unusual for the area. After a couple of miles it got even slower, but there seemed to be some explanation ahead on the left — maybe a lot of parked cars, or flashing lights. Looking out the passenger window, Arlene said, “It almost looks like a parade float up ahead.” I thought I heard something, and opened my window. I had been hearing amplified Christmas music. As we got up to the parked cars, we saw a sign in front of a restaurant, “Santa arrives in Oxford, 6 PM Dec. 24.” That was it! We had been behind Santa Claus.

We did the puzzle that evening. It turned out to be easier than it had looked, because it was easy to sort pieces by picture, different sizes of type, and so on.

I thought that maybe Arlene could be more open to non-Springbok puzzles than usual, so the next day I brought out a puzzle I had got at the Casco town flea market two summers ago, one labeled “Fish sticks pieces!” It had a somewhat abstract picture of trout and leaves in very bright colors, but the interesting thing was the way it was cut — long skinny rectangular pieces with straight sides, except for the interlocking tabs, and lots of sections going diagonally. It was very hard to figure out which pieces were edges, because many non-edge pieces as well as many edges had short straight sides. We decided not to worry about edges at the start, but just to put together whatever we could. Halfway through, it looked to me like a pile of broken glass, with lots of sharp points. Look how much we did before we got even one edge complete:

It was a rather challenging puzzle, just because we’re not at all accustomed to pieces with shapes like that. After a while we did tune in to the shapes and colors, and it turned out not to be excessively difficult after all. We ended up deciding we liked it a lot.

In Casco, it’s three miles around the block; or, at any rate, three miles around the smallest loop of roads that goes around our house. On Christmas Eve we went for a walk, and took the left fork on George Hannon Road so as to take a slightly longer route, maybe fifty yards or so longer than we had to, just for the extra exercise. It was a beautiful sunny day with temperature close to freezing. I took the new camera for practice. Here are two of the sights:

Our favorite weathervane. It’s on the house at the corner of Mayberry Hill Road, at the top of the hill.

With the camera lens set to maximum zoom, I got a particularly clear view of Mount Washington from the spot on Mayberry Hill Road overlooking Pleasant Lake and out towards New Hampshire. I always like to walk clockwise around the loop so we’re walking towards this view.