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.