Welcome to the Jungle!

Liberation study

Today is my cute mom's birthday and a rainy day. I get to walk around in the clouds and it's quite amazing. I got a migraine type thing in the morning. I tried to help with debarking the logs for the Liberation study but that's pretty much the loudest activity you could do when you have a migraine. To de-bark a tree, you have to hammer all over it to loosen the bark from the trunk. I had to go lie down.. but then it started pouring and my ducks are too little to be out in cold pouring rain. I went and got them and put them in their box but they were doing their "WHERE ARE YOU" cheeping which feels like knives in your ears when you have a migraine. I put my "noise-canceling" headphones (LIES) and hoped they'd fall asleep but they were wide awake. After the rain lightened up a bit I put them outside but they still wanted to know where I was and flipped out until I came outside and brought them to the pond, their favorite place. I closed all the windows in the bunkhouse hoping it would get dark and quiet but there's windows on the roof that do a FABULOUS job of letting light in. The rain on the roof sounded like a crowd of 545743056734067403 babies clapping. I didn't get much rest. Ahh well! I watched the ducks play for awhile and enjoyed it a lot. Noodle makes me laugh. The way he has to run to keep up with Beanie and JPD is hilarious. He's always tripping. He'll run a bunch and then plop down and breath really heavily. Sometimes I carry him so he doesn't get so tired but he's always like "HEY where are you guysss" to his sibs.
Anyway... I love my ducks. Today 3t put up some pictures of the Liberation study and I thought I would put some of the ones I'm in up here. I don't ever talk about the actual work I'm doing- so here's a couple pics. And a side note, I'm starting to learn the trees here and I'm really excited about it. Oh and I will explain the Liberation study quickly. Las Casas de la Selva is a forestry project. The main mission of the project is to study how to utilize the forest without destroying it. The Liberation study involves picking out good trees for harvesting later and "liberating" them, which means cutting down trees near to it that will inhibit their growth. This sounds lame but when we cut down the first tree my eyes welled up with tears. It was just difficult for me because my passion and care for the planet is really quite new and I wasn't to the place yet where I understood that ..... well that it's not all about CONSERVATION.

Doing some road work so the jeep and trailer could pass without falling down the mountain. This is the road we used to take the wood from the Liberation plot back to the homestead for de-barking.

Loading up the trailer!

Bulging muscles at work.

Almost ready to tie up the load.

pics by 3t Vakil!