Covetable: Van Cleef and Arpels Midnight Planetarium Watch

I'm not sure if this is supposed to be a men's watch or a woman's watch - it's quite large at 44 mm across - but I would wear it either way! The Midnight Planetarium watch is part of Van Cleef and Arpels Poetic Complications line. Not only does this watch tell the time (via the shooting star moving around a 24 hour clock), but it gives you the exact position in real time of the six planets visible from Earth in relation to the sun. It also tells you the date and lets you pick a lucky day of the year, which will be highlighted when the stone representing the Earth moves within the star icon on the face.

I love this! It's so whimsical and gorgeous. However, unlikely ever to be within my price range, given that the base model is $245,000. One can dream, however!

Watch the promotional video from the Van Cleef and Arpels website above. It reminds me of Cirque du Soleil!

All images from the Van Cleef and Arpels Midnight Planetarium website.

Amazing neighbours in Lakefield!

We've only been in our new house for a couple of weeks, but quite a few of the neighbours have stopped to talk while they've been out walking. It helps that we're in a small town on a quiet street that is just off of a gorgeous walking path along the river. As much as it's sweet to meet the neighbours, I've always had a dream of someone stopping by with fresh baked goods as a welcome to the newcomers. Lo and behold - it happened!! Our next door neighbour dropped by for a visit with fresh baked cookies and her first batch of jam for the season! I'm so excited!

I've already eaten half of the cookies . . . I might hide the rest so Tim doesn't know about them. I'm sure he'll still think it's generous if she only brought by the jam. 

The Great Garden Experiment: Week 2

Week 2 was almost as eventful as Week 1 in the garden - check out my Week 1 post here. Unfortunately, most of the events resulted from various neighbourhood predators, mostly rabbits. Possibly one extremely fat raccoon.

Adorable sneaky little muncher.

Our poor parsley!

The cilantro looks the same as the parsley, only they didn't gnaw through the string there. And something unburied the seed potatoes from a few mounds, although it didn't appear to eat anything. Just dug them up.

As a result of the voracious wildlife, Tim spent some of yesterday afternoon building the Rollwagen Garden Compound. To build this, he bought 1"x24"x50' chicken wire from Home Hardware for $19.20. He also picked up a package of (25) 2"x2"x36" garden stakes and (4) 2"x6" pine boards from Kingdon Tim-Br Mart for $40.08. He's loving finally using the fancy Dewalt mitre saw we bought him for his birthday last year. 

The Rollwagen Garden Compound.

On a happier note, we've had both kale and Swiss chard seeds sprout this week!
 

Baby kale!

Summary to June 8th, 2014

Total cost of garden thus far: $339.29

Total harvest: Couple of tbsps of basil for pasta

The Great Garden Experiment: Week 1

Depending on how well you know me, you may know I have a bit of a black thumb. To the level that I struggle to keep spider plants alive indoors. I've been downgraded to airplants - take a look at my post on making a terrarium for those here. They only require sunlight and water, vs sunlight, water, and soil. So far, they seem to be doing rather well.

 . . . I probably jinxed myself by saying that.

I'm hoping I have more luck with the outdoor gardens at our new house than I've had with houseplants. Especially because the new house has a big lawn with LOTS of gardens. I haven't even started to think about the flower gardens, which probably need watering/weeding/planting. Especially the virtually empty circular garden in the front yard that has one bush and a bunch of tall grass growing in it. I tried convincing Tim the grass was supposed to be ornamental, but he isn't buying it.

I was all gung-ho about getting our vegetable garden ready, though! It is also pretty large at 28' x 11'. When we moved in, the soil was a pale grey colour and it was full of what I believe were little tree saplings. My sainted mother-in-law (who is an amazing gardener) took a crack at it on the Wednesday of the week we moved in and spent hours weeding and then breaking up the soil. We probably could have planted from here, but it was still looking a little lacklustre, so Tim went that Saturday and bought 2 cubic yards (a full trailerload) of compost and borrowed a friend's gas rototiller to mix it all in with the soil. It looked pretty gorgeous after that, all dark and fertile. The compost was from A & T Scott Concrete just outside of Lakefield and it set us back $72.32. A bargain, considering my sister told me that compost up near Owen Sound would have cost her over $150 per cubic yard!

Garden post-compost and rototilling. The pre-existing plants are rhubarb and raspberries.

I had downloaded a gardening app on the iPad (Garden Plan Pro, which cost $9.03 on the App Store) and planned out what and where I would plant things earlier that week. I love the planning portion of things, so I really enjoyed this. Tim, of course, reviewed it later and vetoed a bunch of things. I had space for 112 pea plants, which he apparently thinks is a little excessive. I still don't agree - I LOVE peas! It's okay, though, there's always next year.

Preliminary garden plan!

On more mother-in-law gardening advice, I had gone to Farmboy in Peterborough that Friday to pick up all the plants and seeds we would need. I may have gone a little bit overboard. I wound up paying $117.93 for 38 seedlings (6 basil, 4 cilantro, 2 parsley, rosemary, thyme, oregano, sage, lemongrass, garlic, spaghetti squash, and 19 tomatoes), 16 packages of seeds, and one bag of seed potatoes. Yes . . . 19 tomato plants. Somebody shoot me. Or, at least, they should have a warning light at the till when someone comes through with that many tomato plants. They should have to ask you how many people you're feeding, and if it's anywhere under 'Army', they should limit your tomato plants. There are so many kinds!! Oh well. I hope everyone we know loves tomatoes.

On another note - Farmboy in Peterborough at the end of May is a NUTHOUSE. The parking lot is a disaster, there are too many people to count, and the aisles between the seedlings are so narrow. They easily have the best selection of plants I've seen, but it was a bit of a traumatizing experience. Right down to the woman at checkout who creepily loud-whispered as I was paying, "Don't buy seeds here! Put those back! You should be ordering them online from Stokes!"

I also bought a few gardening necessities from Home Depot while I was in town - a spade, a trowel, gardening gloves, a hose nozzle. That cost $74.53. Tim bought bamboo garden stakes at Home Hardware for another $6.20.

Mom and Dad came up to visit that weekend, and brought me a few gardening related housewarming presents from Shannon - a currant tomato plant that she grew from seeds she took out of tomatoes from the actual pasta salad at our wedding, and some more seeds. I was SO excited about the current tomato plant!! Most of the seeds she sent I just didn't have space for, but I did make room for a few acorn squashes, which both Tim and I love.

Before Mom and Dad left, I had Dad cut down some of the garden stakes for me to 1' lengths so that I could lay out the garden with twine for planting. I spent all of Sunday afternoon barefoot and pregnant, planting the garden!! I wish Tim had taken pictures of this, because I was wearing a fedora, bikini top, and shorts, and I was covered in dirt. I looked completely ridiculous, but it was so much fun!

All of the plots laid out with twine and stakes.

A few hours later = a planted garden!

Now we wait and water. And water. And water some more. It needs to rain!

Summary to June 1st, 2014:
Total cost of garden thus far: $280.01

Total harvest: Nothing yet!

Read the recap of the Great Garden Experiment: Week 2 here!

DIY: I made a lightbox!

I am so proud of myself! I finally made my lightbox! I've been wanting one of these for a couple of years now for taking still-life photos for the blog. I thought about DIYing one for a while, then thought about buying one. I even pinned one to my Christmas list from Amazon, but my sister wound up getting one for herself and said it was a piece of crap, so I canned that idea. I finally decided that if I want to keep up with the blog this time around, I need to actually follow through with things I want for the blog.

So last night I took a trip into Peterborough and rounded up the things I would need, based on this tutorial from Never Homemaker.

From Home Depot:
Extra large moving box - $4.47
Packing tape (needed this anyways for our upcoming move) - $2.24
3 - 8.5" clamp lights - $16.97 each - $50.91
3 pk of Daylight bulbs - $9.98

From Michaels:
White craft paper - $7.49
Tissue paper - $3.99

Total - $79.08 plus 13% tax = $89.36

I couldn't believe how expensive the clamp lights were when the tutorial said that they could make the whole lightbox for less than $35. But I guess we can always use the clamp lights for other things too, especially if Tim needs them in the shop or for reno projects.

I came pretty close when following the tutorial I linked above. Assemble the Home Depot box, tape one end securely shut. Cut the flaps off of the other end. Use a ruler to mark out a square on three adjacent sides that is 2" from each edge. Cut out your squares with an X-acto knife. I cut a long slice in the top of the lightbox against the back so that I can put wrapping paper or fabric through the top without having to tape it to the box. I also cut holes on the top in the middle of each side and hung wire so that I can hang small things that I want to photograph upright. We'll see whether these are worthwhile additions or not. I added a permanent white backdrop by trimming the white craft paper from Michaels to the width of the box and then taping it across the whole bottom and back. Then tape the tissue paper squares (which are conveniently 20x20" against the 22x22" Home Depot box) on the three cutout squares.

Lightbox! I'm pretty proud of it. Tim was playing with it and took a couple of shots which are infinitely better than lighting pretty much anywhere else in the house, so at this point I would call it a success!

DIY: Making a Home for the Airplants - Part 1

My mother-in-law is one of the most thoughtful people I know. I've had airplants pinned to my Pinterest wishlist forever. She asked around at a plant show and found a vendor selling them, then bought me an assortment of eight of them as an Easter present! They're SO adorable! Plus they're supposed to be resilient, which is perfect for me and my black thumb. Tim loves them as well, but mostly because he's a science geek and the idea that they get their nutrients to grow from the air and rain rather than soil makes them cooler to him than regular plants.

Up until now we've had half of them jammed into a teardrop terrarium that Tim bought last summer (it's still available at Chapters-Indigo here for $39.50) and the other half in a glass bowl our friend Tia made for us as part of our wedding gift. I want to make planters of some kind for most of them, but a couple of them are going to find a permanent home in the teardrop terrarium. I just had to make it a little more hospitable!

A little airplant terrarium inspiration! Scroll over the image for links!

I thought I already had white sand in my craft supplies but couldn't find it anywhere. However, I did have a collection of pretty rocks and gems (or minerals? I should ask my father-in-law, who is a bit of an amateur geologist). I used to buy a bag of the little rocks every time we took a family trip to the Barrie 400 market when I was a kid. I had originally wanted to put the white sand in the bottom of the terrarium, then a layer of soil, then put an airplant or two and some moss on top of the soil. But after reading a couple of air plant care articles (this one and this one were particularly thorough), I learned that having anything that holds moisture - like moss - around the base of your airplant is very, very bad. They need to dry completely between waterings or they might rot. I shouldn't be sad - not having to go out and collect moss made this project so much easier.

I wound up picking up white sand ($4.99) and black river rocks ($3.49) at Michael's for a total of $9.58. Then basically I just filled the bottom of the teardrop planter with the white sand, then put a layer of black river rocks on top. I picked out a couple of rocks from my rock collection and put those in. On top of that went a couple of the airplants and a little jade turtle that my sister brought back from Africa for me. Ta-da! Airplant terrarium! Much prettier than just having a jumble of airplants all in a tangle.

Now I just have to figure out what to do with the rest of them. I have a couple of ideas in mind!

Trifle Day 2014

Happy birthday to me! I kind of can't believe I turned 29 on Saturday. My last year before my thirties. My first year having a child, owning a house. 29 is marked as a pivotal point in stereotypes - eternally 29! - but I think it will be pivotal to me for how much change it brings into my life. I may remember 29 as the year of being broke and sleep-deprived!

I always find birthdays, along with New Year and the start of September, make me reflect on the year past and consider the goals I need to be working towards. Some goals I want to keep in mind for 29 are to stay strong on the budgeting front and really focus on sticking to cash purchases. No more credit! I want to be focused on my fitness both before and after baby - ideally I'd like to be back to my pre-pregnancy weight by Christmas. That means not letting my pregnancy weight gain get out of control, and being diligent about actually exercising. I'll admit I've never been good at that. I want to keep up with this blog (I say that every time I set goals, but I struggle to follow through with any regularity). Most importantly, I want to be better about connecting with family and friends. Making dinner parties, brunches, and get-togethers happen more often. Being better about picking up the phone or shooting off a quick e-mail or note. I know that a lot of people find it difficult to balance having a child with their pre-child relationships, and I don't want that to happen to me. My friends are an extended family that has been with me through so much. I don't want to lose any of these people through neglect.

But enough about goals and reflection - my birthday is always celebrated with an annual Trifle Day! Tim and I stopped in town Friday night to pick up trifle supplies. I make enough trifle to really comfortably feed twenty people, or that can be stretched to feed thirty. I make it in a large glass punch bowl/cake plate that I bought at Knock on Wood back in university for this exact purpose. We had twenty-one this year and there was only the tiniest bit left over - I have it in the fridge for a snack. It does feed a lot of people, but I'll warn you that it isn't cheap. I usually spend between $50 to $70 each year, plus it takes an hour or two to prep and assemble if you're doing it on your own. Without any further ado:

Laura's Birthday Trifle

Ingredients:
2 - angel food cakes
2 - 170 g clamshells of blueberries
2 - 170 g clamshells of raspberries
2 - 1 lb clamshells of strawberries
6 kiwis
2 - 1 L containers of Cool Whip, thawed
1 - 500 mL container of sour cream
1 cup of milk
2 - 4 servings pkgs of vanilla pudding mix

1. Prep your cake: Cut the angel food cakes into approximately 1" cubes.
2. Prep your fruit: Wash the berries. Cut the strawberries into chunks the same size as your blueberries and raspberries. Peel the kiwis and cut into chunks the same size as your berries.
3. Prep your cream: Mix together sour cream and milk. Thoroughly mix in both packages of vanilla pudding mix. Fold in both containers of Cool Whip.
4. Cover the bottom of your trifle dish with cream, then a layer of cake, then a layer of fruit. Repeat until you've used up all of your ingredients. I can usually get three layers in my large dish.

From this:

To this:

To this!

Have a happy trifle day!

Designing the Nursery: Can you fall in love with a rug?

I have been a little bit worried about how the nursery is going to look with white walls and possibly white furniture, so I wanted to inject colour through some of the textiles in the room. I was cruising around Houzz looking at rugs and found this incredible nursery by Dvira Interior Design Toronto that I just fell in love with:

Contemporary Kids by Toronto Interior Designers & Decorators Dvira - Interior Design Toronto

The rug - which is exactly what I wanted - is an Ikea Strib rug and sadly discontinued. But the photo gave me an idea of what to look for. After searching 'Colourful Nursery Rug' on Pinterest, I found this photo of a felt ball rug:

Photo courtesy of Dots by Dorte Damgaard

This rug is Hay's Pinnochio rug - hand felted and strung in Nepal. Similar to the bespoke Swedish GRAN wallpaper I wanted, this Danish designed rug (sticking with the Scandinavian design concept) does NOT come cheap. Canadian website The Modern Shop lists them at $549.00 for a 90 cm circle, which is definitely smaller than what we'd want on the cold basement floor of the nursery. The 2 metre circle, which is closer to the size we'd want, is listed for $2,829.00! Not happening!

I considered for a second attempting to DIY this rug - lots of people felt things. But my Google search turned up lots of stories about carpal tunnel syndrome and the frustration of making hundreds of felt balls. It seemed like most people never finished their attempted rugs, and I am neither as patient nor as crafty as a lot of people who blog about these things.

Again, I went to Etsy instead to see if I could find something a little more realistic for our price range. Etsy has quite a few of these rugs listed for much more reasonable prices. I even found one I really liked in a decent sized rectangle - 120 cm by 150 cm for about $425.00 CDN shipped. Check out NativeCraftNepal for some reasonable Etsy felt ball rug options.

I thought I had Tim convinced that this was a great option, but he was talking to his mom about it and she told him that we had to go to Winners and at least check out the rugs there before we settled on anything. I think Tim was easily swayed by this suggestion because he didn't love how colourful the rug was. He was worried about it being too loud for the nursery. My arguments about babies loving colour apparently weren't persuasive enough.

Whether babies love colour or not, Tim and Wendy turned out to be right about Winners - we found an AMAZING rug. We both loved it right off the bat, even if I did have a twinge of regret about the more colourful felt ball rug. This rug is felted wool as well, but is wool twists rather than felt balls. It's a very similar texture and feel, though. Tim loves that the colours are more neutral. He loved it so much that he actually stood guard over it with his hand on it while I went to find someone to help us get it down. When I teased him about it, he argued that it was necessary - one woman had come over to eye it while I was gone and he had to defend it! The texture of this rug is amazing underfoot. It feels like you're getting a foot massage every time you walk on it, which is why both Tim and I have been taking random walks around the living room ever since I rolled it out last weekend.

Not only was this rug significantly cheaper than the felt ball rug (unsurprising, since that was coming from Nepal and this was driving home with us from the south end of Peterborough), but it's larger as well. We're hoping the 5x7' size will be perfect in the nursery, which is roughly 9x12'. We're planning on cutting at least a foot or two off the long end of the room by adding built-in wardrobes at some point. The room we're using for the nursery doesn't have a closet, so we'll need that storage space. 

I think this rug is going to look amazing with the decals - we received the colour samples from Julie at iSigns Decal Studio and have been going back and forth with which greens look best with the variegated blue tones in the rug. What do you think? From left to right, the colour chips are Celadon, Olive, Light Green, Green, and Dark Green.

Spring Weather Hiking: Avoid the Darshy Areas!

This winter has been the coldest and longest I can remember - which makes sense, considering that it's been the coldest winter in twenty years for a lot of North America. Living in Lakefield made all the difference for me - if I don't have to drive in it, I love winter! I loved walking to work while the snow was coming down and seeing everything all white and sparkly. But even so, it has been nice to finally have the spring thaw. It's been entertaining to watch the river get higher and higher even as we've had a bit of flooding panic at our house. We had water coming through the ceiling in one of the heavy rains and the basement flooded 6" deep because the sump pump was (stupidly) not plugged in.

After all of that, it was really nice to have a long Easter weekend at home. We took a drive every day to check the flood waters and Tim got lots of yard work done. We had a couple of family dinners and I ate at least a pound of Cadbury mini eggs. On Sunday we decided that the weather was nice enough to head up to High Falls and attempt a hike. We haven't really done anything like this since Christmas on the Bruce Peninsula, when I wasn't really showing. I haven't put on a ton of weight yet with my pregnancy, but we're five and a half months now and the eight pounds I have put on feels like a ton sometimes! (Mostly when I'm bloated - how can air feel so HEAVY?)

Tim was more than a little jealous that there were a couple of families camping there. He had really wanted to go camping this weekend when we found out we weren't going to London to see my family. But it was encouraging to see three other vehicles in the parking lot - we had been worried the trail would be a mess with flooding. We passed a couple of guys coming back along the trail and Tim asked them if it was possible to reach the falls. Their response was, "Yes, you can make it almost all the way, there are just a few darshy areas."

We thanked them and moved on, but then had a hilariously puzzled conversation about the exact definition of "darshy". Damp and marshy? Dodgy and marshy? Perhaps even dangerous and marshy? It remained entertaining over a couple of saturated and muddy patches, until we reached the first stream you have to cross. This was where we had some of our High Falls engagement photos done, and it usually looks something like this:

 

I mean, as creeks go, it's not insignificant - but now you couldn't even see this tangle of logs that usually makes up the path across. The "creek" went right from the embankment on the east to probably fifty feet across and was at least four or five feet deep, maybe more. (Even Tim didn't test it.) There were definitely some logs and mushy ground across it, but nothing that we could see that connected or looked particularly stable. Not to be discouraged, we turned upstream and thought that we could probably find a crossing further up where it wouldn't be so wide. Fifteen minutes . . . No good crossing sites. Thirty minutes . . . One good crossing log, but it was fairly narrow and at least three feet above the water line (although now that I type that, why does it seem more stable if the log is closer to the water?). I would have skeptically attempted it, but Tim decided he didn't want to risk the hike and drive back home with what would have been an extremely pissy me if I had fallen in the water. We all know I would have blamed him for it somehow. I did cross a couple of smaller logs without mishap.

There was still quite a bit of snow back in the trees, but hopefully this melts slowly enough that it won't contribute to the current flooding.

Forty minutes or so of hiking upstream though and Tim alerted me to the rumbling water he was hearing. We thought for a few minutes that maybe we had managed to cut inland and significantly shorten the usually hour and a half-ish hike to the falls! No such luck, but we did find an absolutely gorgeous set of smaller falls.

Low Falls?

Sunbathing with the baby!

So much love.

Tim spent some time playing with the settings on his camera to blur the water, but I think we should have brought the tripod.

There was also a little camping site on the other side of the creek at the falls. The creek has a sandy bottom, so both Tim and I were thinking of how nice that camp site would be in the summer.

Sierra made hiking so much harder! Level trail wasn't bad, but the off-trail hiking and all the ups and downs were exhausting. So after we found the waterfall, we went a bit upstream and found a big patch of sun and sat for a while. It was unbelievably gorgeous weather. 

We made boats and sent them in a boat race down to the waterfall. Can you pick up the design flaw on Tim's flashy and furry boat? It shouldn't come as a surprise that my tried-and-true bark and twig schooner won!

Why is it that the hike out is always so much shorter than the hike in? We probably took an hour to get out to the little waterfall, but it only took us a half hour to get back. True to my statement before of how me falling in the water would have been Tim's fault, I was crossing a log on the way back and Tim stepped on it and it broke. And it was totally his fault! He said that he wasn't anywhere near where it broke, but I'm sure that if he hadn't stepped on it I would have been fine. Luckily it was just over a little ditch and not over a bunch of water. Tim being Tim, that was not the only time he almost killed me on the way back. He likes to find dead trees that have fallen into other trees and untangle them so that he can push them down. He found a big one on our hike back - maybe 8-10" wide at the base of the trunk and thirty feet tall or so. I got out of the way of where he indicated he would drop it, but then he gave a big push and I looked up and it was coming straight for me! Tim said I looked the Road Runner spinning my wheels when I ran away. I ran behind a big tree and looked back and Tim just had this shocked and terrified look on his face with both of his arms wrapped around the trunk. Like that would have stopped it from falling! Luckily it caught on another tree. But I still hid behind a big tree until Tim had pushed it all the way over. 

Oh, I forgot - on our way in Tim spotted a trio of otters playing in the main part of the river! I haven't seen otters since I was in my early teens, and it was so much fun to watch them watching us and swimming with each other. I always forget how BIG they are! 

Two of them were pretty shy and slipped away soon after we started watching them, but the third pulled himself up on a log and watched us back. He almost seemed to be posing for the camera!

Finally, here's a map to show where we should have gone versus where we did go - so much for us thinking that maybe we had found a shortcut to High Falls!

I love the area - it's not quite like the hiking back on the Bruce Pen, but it's a nice spot close to home. We need to get out camping some time before I have the baby!

Designing the Nursery: Picking a "Theme"

One of the questions that I was often asked about our wedding was, “What is your theme?” Unfortunately most people seemed stumped when I tried to explain that we didn’t really have a theme, or a particular colour scheme. I feel like people are having a similar reaction to the direction we’re going with the nursery.

I knew very early on in the pregnancy that I wanted the nursery to be wilderness themed. If we had been having a boy, it probably would have been more literal. Not camo – but actual camping gear. But since we’re having a girl, I love that I get to take that same wilderness theme and make it a bit more my style. I want it to be a good representation of both Tim and I – a space we both feel comfortable and happy in. The direction I’m going in is what I’m titling “Scandinavian Wilderness”. The original inspiration was the GRAN wallpaper from Fine Little Day:
 

Unfortunately Tim vetoed that as soon as he found out that it would cost us around $450 (eeek!) just to do a feature wall. My mother-in-law suggested we could get a very similar look by stenciling, but I know that we’ll probably have to be repainting down the road when Sierra (yes, we’ve named her already) is old enough to have tastes of her own. Painting over stenciling does not strike me as being particularly fun. I think you’d have to sand down all of the edges of the trees. I’ve used decals in a rental before, though, and absolutely loved how they applied and how they looked.

I wanted to source decals as locally as possible, so I looked up wall decal companies on Etsy located in Ontario. After sending out a few e-mails, I received a quick response back from Julie at iSignsDecalStudio in Kitchener. I sent her the photo of the GRAN wallpaper and asked if she’d be able to do something similar. She sent back this graphic of decals she had made in the past, which both Tim and I loved. The colours are so nursery-friendly! She’s sending us samples of the different colours of greens she has available so that we can customize the trees to how we want the room to look. I can’t wait to start picking out other items to go along with these!

Favourite Photos: Tim's trip to Ecuador and the Galapagos

Oh, travel eye candy - I'm not sure whether I like daydreaming about it, or whether it just makes me envious. Even more so when it's my husband who is travelling, without me.

Every spring Tim applies to go on a service trip with his school (he's a high school teacher at a private school) to some far flung destination. Last year it was Costa Rica, where they poured concrete in the slums and helped build a hut at a tribal village in the jungle. This year it was Ecuador and the Galapagos, where they herded and sheared sheep and alpacas in the mountains and then helped renovate an old library in the islands. This year seemed to involve quite a bit of downtime in one of the most beautiful and ecologically important places on Earth. Tim came home seriously suggesting we name our baby Darwin. I responded that I seriously thought he might still have sunstroke.

He also has a seriously peeling back, although he swears he (mostly) wore sunscreen.

These are a small selection of my favourites of the photos he took while he was away.

Chimborazo Volcano in the Andes in Ecuador at night. It is currently inactive, but another volcano (semi) close by called Tungurahua was erupting only a couple of weeks before Tim went on this trip. Six of the world's top ten most active volcanos are in "Volcano Alley" in Ecuador.

Although some of the kids struggled with the altitude, they did quite a bit of hiking in their downtime in the mountains. They were staying at La Casa Del Condor, which is almost 13,000 ft above sea level. 

Clothes drying in the community of Pulingui San Pablo.

Storm moving in or not, I love the shots Tim got of the highlands in Ecuador. The fields are all on the lower levels of the mountains. The higher elevations are left as grassland for the wild vicuna herds, a relative of the alpaca. Apparently the wild vicuna were extinct in Ecuador due to overhunting before efforts were made to reintroduce the animal with stock brought in from Peru and Chile. 

Alpaca and sheep are raised in the highlands for their wool, which is used in traditional weaving. Tim brought home some amazing textiles that are made from alpaca wool. He's helping to shear a sheep here. He said it was more than a little disgusting - the animals had LOTS of ticks and you had to cut through the ticks as you were cutting the wool. 

Chimborazo in the daytime. Until the Himalayas were discovered, Chimborazo was considered the highest mountain in the world. The summit is the closest point on Earth to the Sun, though, due to the equatorial bulge.

The second part of their trip was to the Galapagos Islands. While the mountains were cool, the islands hit 35 degrees Celsius most days by noon. Tim will have a great tan when (if) he finally stops peeling. Apparently they would work half days in Galapagos then spend the rest of their day at the beach. Hard life. 

Crabs wandering on the rocks at the beach!

Galapagos has some of the best sunsets in the world, so the group often went hiking at sunset to take pictures and just enjoy. One evening Tim managed to get between this fellow and his cow and calf. 

There were lots of lizards both on Galapagos and in Ecuador, and Tim took LOTS of photos of all of them. This one is my favourite. Because the Galapagos didn't have an apex predator until humans arrived, the animals haven't evolved to be frightened. Tim said you could get shockingly close to most of the animals.

That included the pelicans, which Tim seems to be fascinated by. There are multiple sets of photos where each picture is taken about six inches closer than the one before it. 

Finally, my last (but not least) favourite. Typical Tim, in a giant tortoise shell.

Someday, maybe I'll get a chance to travel to places like this too. In the meantime, I'll certainly enjoy Tim's pictures and stories!