Ouch

When Rachel was visiting, we followed Michael on hike to see the rare, Resplendant Quetzal birds in a place where Michael had seen them feeding all week. We did see them, too- a male and a female, and they are truly gorgeous. At one point during the hike, Rachel exclaimed, "Oh, look at this!" Without even turning around, Michael shot back, "DON"T TOUCH IT!" How he knew what Rachel was about to touch, I'll never know. Unfortunately, it was too late and Rachel had dozens of fine, cactus-like spines in her fingers. The first picture shows Michael using his pocket knife to remove them.

The second picture shows me at a well-known strangler fig that grows in the woods behind the "Other" Rachel's cabin.

Finally, you will see 11th grader, Joe, heading out with a GPS to track the trails on the school campus. The hat has a flat antenna that helps acquire stronger signals from the sattelites the GPS uses to map locations. After a second trip around the trails- remember the campus has 106 acres- the kids were able to make a good map of the trails.

Drawing the map was not easy. We could not print it out from any computer or printer, so they had to project the GPS images from my computer onto a large piece of paper they had secured to the wall in Dolly's storage room (using velcro because nothing else would hold the paper to the wall) and then trace the image. If all that weren't awkward enough, they had to wade through mounds of "stuff" on the floor of the storage room since it still does not have any shelves (but we are going to buy some soon).