Car free for 2012

According to Reuters in 2010 44% of Americans planned to make a New Years resolution. Here I am in 2011 drinking Ranger IPA from New Belgium trying to figure out how I am going to reign in the New Year. Well, that isn't 100% true as I already know I am going to dress up as "The Situation" on Jersey Shores at Devon's New Years party.

"So we got a situation", I have been kicking around the idea of going car-less in 2012. To clear any crazy ideas that may have just sprung to life in your mind the intent is not for all travel to no longer be powered by the internally combustable motor. Rather there will be restrictions I would place on my transportation. So far the best idea I have had is that I will not drive if it is solely for my transportation, "personal transportation". I think this subverts many of the socially awkward situations I could think of. So if my wife wants to see a movie in February for valentines day I am free and able to driver her there and not feel the need to try and make it seem romantic for us to ride our bikes there.

One of my biggest concerns is poor weather. Specifically precipitation that is in the solid form, also known as snow. The cold is not of any concern. What really bothers me is CO-5's last leg up to CO-392. There is zero shoulder and it is up hill, prolonging the amount of time I get to compete with traffic.

To solve this problem I first turned to Fort Collins public transportation system. One important fact for this discussion is that it takes me about 20 minutes to drive from my house to the office. Unless I am missing something obvious it would take me about 2 hours to get to the office taking public transportation. At this point I am thinking that in order to meet my objective of avoiding personal transportation I am going to have to either find some sort of commuting group or plan to work from home if the weather is poor. Both are not ideal. Time to hit the chalk board...

FYI: I got the idea of "personal transportation" from Carfree.us.

Expanding Mac iPhoto shared library

Today Jenn wanted to add photos to our library from the CSU vs. CU game yesterday (9news report of the game), but couldn't because there was no free space out of the originally allotted 20GB. She told me about this and I looked at how to do this. The good part is that it is actually very easy. Because we have separate accounts I set up our iPhoto library as suggested by Apple here (sparse image placed in shared users folder). Here are the steps taken to expand my volume from 20GB to 40GB:

1. Unmount your sparse image
2. Open Terminal
3. Type
1. hdiutil resize -size 40g iPhotoLibrary.sparseimage
4. Mount your sparse image and load photos

After you do step 4 and look at the available size (command-i) you may ask your self why it is not reporting the size you requested. The reason is because 40g is actually (2^20) * 40 = 41,943,040 in base 2.

Hope you enjoyed.

Costa Rica 2011 Part 7

We all slept in a little bit. This was really nice given we had to get up early most of the days to do various activities. After having a minimal breakfast with everyone we went for a hike. The objective was to find the water falls that are on OSA mountain property. I left about 40 minutes into the hike in pursuit of a machete.

During the hike poor Jenn was climbing over a log to traverse a steep ravine when it gave loose. She was not able to recover from this and fell.

Hopefully you can see how this could go wrong.

I was not able to get the machete while others were hiking. What happened was everyone except for Tyler, he was feeling ill again, ended up coming out by Tyler and Jess' villa. I wandered around trying to find them for quite a while until finally finding them at our villa.

Back at our villa Devon and I watched the beginning part of Terminator Salvation while the girls showered. While watching one of the workers brought my machete by. Awesome!

Coolest thing in the world!

We packed up and head out after this. I mean what else was there to do! On the way we stopped in San Isidro again for lunch. We went a little out of the way because pizza was the requested meal and that was the only place that our GPS knew about pizza. Turned out that after San Isidro there were a bunch of pizza joints, go figure. After getting lunch we made our way for San Jose. Because Jess and Tyler are rock stars they took portrait pictures of us on the way. We really did not do the best job of managing our time so we ended up driving the rest of the way in heavy rain and in the dark, not fun.

That covers the adventure that was Costa Rica. Hope that you have enjoyed this series of blog posts.

Costa Rica 2011 Part 6

We all woke up around 7 so that we could go on the canopy tour. It was a really good time. Jenn did really awesome for not being comfortable with heights. I mean just check out this picture (Thanks Tyler and Jess).

Isn't Jenn one bad A!

One of the "rides" was a monkey walk. I was a little worried that she was going to get frustrated. Fortunately she did not and was able to complete the obstacle. Here is a picture showing what that looked like.

After the canopy tour we went back to the villa for lunch. We ended up doing left overs. I made myself a burrito and Jenn made her self a taco salad thing.


After lunch the girls took a nap while Devon and I smoked a Cuban cigar on the deck and talked about life. We talked about everything from concerns about our siblings, thoughts about our wives, relation with the in-laws, ten year reunion for high school to having kids. An hour later the both of us had a killer buzz from the Cubans. Wish that I could have brought a lot of those back! Good way to relax and take the day in with a great friend like Devon Bruntz!

Doesn't the guy just look like a future politician!

After getting ready we went into town for dinner and to get Tyler some drugs that seemed to do the trick. Dinner was really good. Jenn had a slug crawl over her foot while being served bread as an appetizer. That was pretty comical.

Costa Rica 2011 Part 5

We went to Manual Antonio to see all of the wild life. This included: iguanas, howler monkey, spiders, walking stick, frogs, snails, crabs, sloths and raccoon.

Baby iguana (that is our guess at least)

Iguana

"The Lazy Path"

Howler monkey

Sloth

Jenn and I on the Lazy Path

We had lunch at Sanchos in Manual Antonio. If you ever end up going there I would suggest you stop there for lunch as well. It is awesome. Plus the owner speaks english fluently as that was his first language. This can be a nice break from having to understand spanish. We finished the day off with Tyler's pool side 30th birthday party.

Us guys enjoying a nice cuban cigar

Costa Rica 2011 Part 4

On the forth day there we went to Dominical and San Isidro. On the way back to Dominical from San Isidro we stopped by a couple of shops. We did not end up getting anything but did get an impression of what the local markets had to offer when they were not commercialized like the Maxi Bodegas (scroll down a little for the Costa Rica section) of the world. When we tried to get to Playa Ventanas beach the road was completely washed out.

Road just vanishes

Me standing in the bottom "Where did the road go?"

Jenn got a coconut drink that was the coconut and nothing else. The locals called this "poppas fritas".

The girls thought these were yummy

We all had lunch at a pizza place on the way back to Dominical. What was cool about that was the bee hive in the restraunt that had the smallest bees known to man. At least I think that they are the smallest bees known to man.

Costa Rica 2011 Part 3

After fishing and everything else in the trip folks were a little tired. As a result we all slept in and did not get up until about nine, felt really good. For breakfast we had eggs, turkey, mango, toast and cheese. After breakfast Jenn, Cara, Devon and I hung out by the pool while Jess and Tyler got there villa put together. Really that meant we drank by the pool side while taking in the sun rays.

Shot of Jenn and I while we were at the pool

Shot of Devon and Cara while we were at the pool

When we were at the pool we watched some guy using his machetty to cut down leaves and branches which was pretty awesome. This also served as the inspiration that gave me purpose and meaning for the rest of the trip, to find and own a machete of my own. We also saw some pretty cool insects including a huge "nest" of termites. I threw a stone at that to see what the inside looked like. Not really that interesting but different enough to be neat.

Costa Rica 2011 Part 2

After the first full day we really started to find our stride. We started the day out early again because we were going to go deep sea fishing. Again Tyler set this all up for us. It was such a pleasure to have the Shanons take care of us for the week! Devon caught the biggest fish of the day, well sort of. While pulling in his fish it came off of the hook. Luckily I was pulling in "another" fish. Turned out the both of us are realling in the same one . As the boat guy was pulling it out the hook feel out and my line got wrapped around it's tail. Guess it was not the fishes day.

 Two is always better than one

Jenn was able to reel in a pretty good sized Tuna as well.

In total we caught six tuna and one mackerel. We did not get to keep the mackerel as it came off of the hook as Cara was reeling it in. When fishing we almost made it to Caño Island. On the way back to shore we went through a pretty strong storm. After getting back from fishing we had just enough time to get home, shower, cook dinner and then enjoy the rest of the evening. The fresh tuna was really good. After fishing; tuna, rice and beans would become a staple of our diet. I looked forward to dinner every day.

Costa Rica 2011 Part 1

After our saga of getting from Colorado to San Jose we started the day out somewhat slowly. Jess and Tyler started it off by coming over with some really good pineapple. After having breakfast we explored the village area and met some of the staff and residents. After exploring a little bit we set off for Tyler and Jess villa shopping and lunch. During lunch Devon had a massive fish. It was the whole thing deep fat fried. It was about 16" long. This was probably the highlight of the day.

What a fish!

The cool part was that the server who was also the cook held up the fish before hand asking if it was the right size. We all assumed that she was asking if that was enough for all of us. After lunch we went to the local store to pick up stuff for Jess and Tyler's villa. While the Shannon's and the girls were shopping Devon and I got a beer at the bar that was attached. It was pretty cool that the little shop had a bar attached. It was at this point that I noticed there are dogs everywhere in Costa Rica. There was not a place we went without dogs running around. The odd part is that none of them had collars. Once we got back from shopping and lunch we had dinner. During dinner we had a pretty strong rain storm. I actually welcomed this as it was neat having a warm rain instead of the cold ones that we get here in Colorado. After dinner we went to the pool to enjoy some suds and the weather. Jenn did her typical saving every living thing, this time a bug floating in the pool, and it bit her while doing so. After being bitten she started to talk about how mean the little bug was. As she was cursing the bug out she realized that it was sprinkling. Once she noticed that it was sprinkling she said "oh, look it is sprinkling, how pretty" in a super chipper voice. Those that know Jenn understand what I am trying to describe. It was the highlight of my day. The beer for the day was Imperial. Later in the week I would realize that was going to be the beer for every day. They also had Pilsen and Bolvaria. They were not as common though.

Costa Rica 2011 Part 0

Jenn, Devon, Cara, Tyler, Jess and I just got back from an eight day vacation to Costa Rica. We stayed at the same village that Tyler and Jess just purchased their villa at. This post and the next few are going to describe each of the days that we had there. Enjoy and please feel free to post comments :-)