Dia de los Muertos

It took me forever to make that last post, so I have some catching up to do. I've been saving a few events and ideas for posts, but we'll just go chronologically and then onto the less linear information.
The beginning of November: this is one of my favorite times to be a Tucsonan. Halloween is traditionally a terrible night for me, every year, I seem unable to escape this fate. It's all made better, though, when Dia de los Muertos (a Mexican holiday) comes around. The reason this is so cool is that we have a giant parade. I'm not talkin' that little rodeo parade you have to drive 45 minutes to attend. I mean right in the center of town we have a parade that 20,000+ people attend and participate in.
We dress up, paint our faces, make masks, build floats, bring instruments to make music, drum, sing and snake around downtown and 4th avenue remembering those we've lost and loved. This year for the Day of the Dead parade, I went with my friends Chantal, Rita, Heather, and her little sister, and took pictures. I'm still trying to learn how to take motion shots in the dark (I actually figured out one way later on), so these pictures are pretty poor quality. Forgiveness requested.

Heather, Chantal and Rita (no, that isn't DQ we're at)

Myself (no one would dress up with me!)

Dead Fish!

Skelly time!

Robo Skelly

Bird and Chairs

Blue Guys


And the only one I had to mourn: Macho B, the jaguar killed by our state this last summer.

At the end of the parade, everyone files into a large area where small performances and fire shows take place.

An aggregation of enormous, spectacular balloons.

Angels singing (this was very pretty)

This is the backdrop for the stage we were near. My camera dies at this point, so the rest of the pictures (and the macho B ones) are credited to Heather.

Flam Chen (the pyrotechnic group in Tucson) organizes this whole parade, and traditionally make their appearance on stilts, with fire of course.

I love this pupa.

For the finale, a couple of things happen, and it's a little different each year. First, this year, the pupa above was attached to a number of courageous people and a crane, pulled up above the audience, and there became a spectacle of costumed dancers weaving around it with smokey flares in their hands. Finally they pop the pupa (made of the same huge balloons pictured earlier) one section at a time and tons of paper butterflies floated down upon us.

Pupa not visible here

After a giant hand-crafted paper/wire urn is brought to the front, where everyone puts in the names of those they've lost, it is then lifted high into the air by another crane and burnt to a crisp while the ashes shower the audience.

Ah, the glory.

JAMMIN! take two.

After such a disaster, could that girl ever scrounge up the courage to face jamming again??
"This is only a mom skill," she had mostly decided, when she thought she'd peruse the kiwis once more for a sale. Hey, if she backed out, they'd at least be shocking and lovely in a fruit salad. But alas, the sale had ended the day before - another sign from the heavens. As she browsed the produce, she realized that there was an acute disappointment in this resignation. Perhaps even annoyance. When 2 pints for $4 strawberries caught her eye, she lit up and bought them.
"One more try."
And boy was she glad she did. Astoundingly, the strawberries turned out wonderfully in jam. She chopped them all up and found a really cool recipe to follow, that doesn't use pectin.

She had heard that pectin was hard to work with, and if the job could be done without it, well it just seemed more natural. To substitute, she used lemon juice and a few higher pectin (unripe) strawberries, and mashed it all up.

The recipe called for cooking the above concoction for a bit.

Then it said straining out the pulp and cooking the juice and sugar to make syrup would be a good step. Interesting.

The syrup boiled up nice and big, making satisfactory pops.

"It looks good so far," she told herself, "but I must stir this time. It's crucial." So she put the pulp back in the mix and stirred and stirred and stirred. Consequently, she could not take any more pictures until the jarring was finished. But the success story is obvious:

and it was delicious.

JAMMIN! take one.

There's a story to be told, and it involves a girl who is addicted to mom-blogs.
One day, while casually catching up on her blog operas, this girl found a simple recipe for kiwi jam.
"How nice, I wish I lived in New Zealand near a giant over-bearing kiwi tree I could harvest for wonderful things like jam," she thought wistfully, with a smile. The only fruits that grew in the girl's hometown were lemons, limes, grapefruits and pomegranates, none of which seemed an easy fruit to jam with. So, she bided her time, storing the idea in the back of her mind for the day she had fruity trees of her own. At the grocery store not too long thereafter, she found a kiwi sale - perfect! She would try the kiwi jam recipe.
The fates would not have this skill come so easily, however. The recipe was not as simple as it seemed. She chopped the kiwis, thus finishing the most success she was to have.

She then put the kiwis with some OJ (for pectin) into the pot and got lots of juices out of them.

What came next was very tricksy - the addition of sugar. To stir? Not to stir? Sources were conflicting! The mixture boiled up and looked very good, so she decided to let it sit.

Let us note here that the girl later found that there was, in fact, nothing wrong with this recipe except that a novice could not use it. If stirring had happened at this point, the jam would have been perfect (and amazing!). Alas it was not in the cards, and sitting allowed the jam to burn. The burn was infectious, refusing to be quarantined in its small sector, browning up the whole pot. Soon the entire operation had a distinctly bad scent. Had it set? Well the freezer plate spot test told her it had, so into jars went the "jam". Unfortunately, what she had actually made was kiwi toffee - scarred, she pondered whether she would ever attempt homemade jam again. Perhaps this was an art for moms only.

Apple Zen

Ever since going apple-picking in Wilcox, Arizona, with my dad when I was younger, I've wanted to return and do it over and over again. The drive is only an hour and a half, and I love orchards - the smell, the spotty shade, the rows, the picker, the friendly dogs, the whole kahuna. So we went a couple weeks ago to Apple Annie's Orchard in Wilcox, and brought along our friend Hans.

It was great weather: big blue sky but not too hot.

We had a blast, picking Granny Smiths (for baking), Fijis, and Golden Delicious (they were supposed to be the best eating apples for the specific time). I took a lot of pictures, which are mostly over-lighted due to the painfully bright sun.

work, work, work for those apples!

The booty...

On the day we went, the farm was hoppin'! Here is the weigh station.

There were samples galore, which I had no problems with, there were apple burgers we didn't actually indulge in, there were people passing around homemade apple ice-cream even (sooooo good!). Hans bought some jars of home-made apple butter. I intended to make some myself, but the apples went bad before I had the time - I'd forgotten that they wax store bought apples for preservation, in part.

Goofy Hans and the American Gothic.

Alas, we made two wonderful batches of Apple Crisp, and I was pleased to gobble that up with some vanilla ice-cream :D

Bats, Rats, & Cat's Future

As I've said, or maybe haven't, I'm a senior at the University of Arizona, going for my Ecology and Evolutionary Biology degree (now all those blasted animal pictures make sense!) I plan on going to grad school, after taking a year to prepare for GREs and applications, etc. My goal is broad within this realm - ideally I'd study cetaceans on the east coast for a living. Unfortunately, that is a coveted life, so I'm flexible. I'd like to stick in marine mammals, or even more broadly, intelligent animals like octopuses or primates if the ocean just can't work out.

Back up plan: Become a sailor. In the CIA. Who can put out a fire and tune a piano? Sure.

So trying to focus my degree toward marine while living in the desert is a whole different story. I actually get laughed at when I tell people where I want to go. No matter, I'll get there, but I have to take everything I can that is remotely related. Thus I've got a finger dipped in all sorts of fields. In fact, I should start making posts called "What I'm Doing: Apples" and how it offers me flexibility, because I honestly do too much. But it's all worth it.

Currently my schedule includes:

Biology of the Oceans
Mammalogy
Evolution of Animal Form and Function
OChem D:

In the past I've taken a lot of other cool classes and I'm starting to feel a little like I know what I'm talking about in this field. That's always good, I think.

I've learned in mammalogy that part of learning about mammals (in the desert) is having to trap them and look closely and some people make "specimens" out of them - which I don't agree with. But we recently returned from a trip to the Chiracahuan mountains, where we spotted at least 20 species of mammals - many on the road!

Cute rehab bat who can't fly - Insectivorous.


Nectar-feeding (see the nose leaf?) bat of species I. cantremember


Kangaroo Rat! These guys can jump 9 feet!