Back at the end of June I had a post about our resident hummingbird here in Potrerillos Arriba. At the time I wasn’t positive about the identification of the bird but guessed it was a rufous-tailed. Rufous meaning “red.”
Last night on Chiriqui Chatter Don Ray had a short post about a gentleman, Ralph B. Dessau, who is an avid humminbird fan and has been photographing the creatures throughout Panama, the Caribbean and Texas. I immediately emailed Ralph about our bird and he almost instantly confirmed its identity and sent me two of his pics.
If you find these miniature creatures as fascinating as I do you’ll enjoy Ralph’s pictures found at:
July 24th and 24 consecutive days of rain. Tired of stories about rain? Me too.
So now for something completely different. Back in the summer of 1974 I was in Chicago and got my first captain’s job running a 42 foot Hatteras Tri-cabin motor yacht. I’d get off work in the afternoon and go to meet my girlfriend at the building where she worked in the Loop. I’d usually get there earlier than most people got out of work so I’d hang out at the small bar next door to her office building. I’d often be the only one there. The bar tender was an old guy who had once been one of the best sleight of hand men in the business. Every now and then he’d do a couple of tricks for me as a way of passing some time. I know a little bit about magic and trying to keep your eye on the off hand and not to be diverted but I was never successful. He would amaze me time after time. But he’d never do the same trick twice in one sitting.
On the other hand, Rene Lavand, an Argentinian who lost his right hand in a car accident when he was nine, isn’t afraid at all of repeating a trick over and over, and you NEVER catch him. I don’t remember the first time I saw him on television but it was years ago.
As if there isn’t enough for Gulf Coast residents to worry about with the massive oil and its aftermath now Tropical Storm Bonnie is about to enter sometime Saturday. Once it’s in the Gulf some area is going to get hit because these things don’t disappear. Though not predicted to turn into a hurricane you can never tell. As my dad used to say…”If you trust a weather man, you’ll trust a politician. And hurricane or not Tropical Storms push a surge ahead of them capable of pushing all that oil further inland compounding the horror already inflicted on the area.
There’s only one thing the residents can do besides pray and Marcia Ball sums it up…
My previous post about how much rain we’ve gotten and how many Olympic-sized swimming pools it would have filled has been picked up on Tweets by Panama TV, Panama VIP and Travel Panama according to a comment sent to me by Topsy.com.
When it’s said that an “inch” of rain has fallen it’s considered that an acre of land (.4 hectares) would be covered with one inch of water.
According to the U.S. Geological Survey that’s 27,154 GALLONS! (102,789 liters for you mathematically challenged people stuck in the metric system. Don’t get me started on THAT rant.)
Here it is the 22nd day of July and it’s raining right now. Twenty two consecutive days of it this month. In June we had 43 inches of rain OR, 3.58 FEET, OR 1,167,622 GALLONS. And that’s just over ONE acre of surface area. I can’t begin to calculate the entire area of Potrerillos Arriba.
So now, in July as of the 19th we’ve received 39.5 inches of rain…3.29 FEET…1,072,583 GALLONS.
There are about 600,000 gallons of water in an Olympic-sized swimming pool, so from the first of June the water that has fallen on each acre of land here on the mountain would have filled 3.73 Olympic pools!
No, I don’t think I’m getting a little stir-crazy shut in the house because of the rain, do you?
Comments Off on Another Perspective On The Rain In Potrerillos Arriba, Panama
The rain in Spain may fall mainly on the plain, but here in Potrerillos Arriba, Panama, it pours like you wouldn’t believe.
The term “Rainy Season” doesn’t even begin to describe what’s been happening here. There is officially a “rainy season” in Florida, but it’s a joke compared to what we’ve been going through here. In south Florida it heats up during the day and then there are isolated thunderstorms scattered around the area. Sometimes with a deluge and localized flooding, but these storms are usually of a limited duration. I can’t begin to count the number of times I’ve literally been standing in the sunshine on one side of the street and watched it rain on the other.
Here, though, it rains over a wide area. June and July are supposed to be the driest months of the rainy season but this year has seen the shattering of 16 year records as recorded by Ricardo Espinosa. http://joycepa.wordpress.com/precipitation-data/.
In June it rained 27 days out of 30 and dumped 43 inches of the wet on us. Here it is the 22nd day of July and we haven’t missed a day of rain yet and another record was set. Back in July 2008 38″ of rain fell. As of the 20th we’ve had 39.5″. On the 19th we had a storm like I’ve never seen before. We got 4.4″ in two and a half hours.
The mornings generally start off in glorious splendor.
By noon the rain clouds start to form
And by two o’clock it starts to rain
And then it’s like someone turned on a fire hydrant
So, if you need to do anything outside the house you better get started early and finish up by one or two o’clock. And you NEVER leave home without your umbrella no matter how sunny it is when you close the door.
While this blog is simply for whatever strikes my fancy at the moment, boats, music, my move to Panama, the other blog is specifically about houseboats, shanty boats and minimalist boating. I don’t let it branch off into other subjects. I started it a few months after this blog and at first I posted nearly every day. Then I tailed off abruptly because I pretty much ran out of things to post when I discovered I had become a “source.” That is, when I would Googled for new ideas I found my blog was dominating the results.
To date that blog has received 58,216 hits. This one has had 28,164.
WordPress keeps track of all that stuff in their “Dashboard” page for each blog and there is a “Stats” section that I find interesting. Yesterday 65 people came here to see what sort of drivel I might have added recently. I haven’t added a new post to my shanty boat blog for nearly two weeks but yesterday it got 511 hits! The busiest day ever. The busiest day this blog ever had was October 28, 2009 when 176 people checked in.
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My neighbor and fellow blogger, Joyce, in a recent post in Living in Potrerillos, decried the lack of decent bread here in Panama…http://joycepa.wordpress.com/2010/05/12/the-staff-of-life/. I couldn’t agree more. What I have tried was simply inedible. Even my four-legged garbage disposal, Charlotte, wouldn’t touch the stuff and I’m hoping the remains won’t damage the compost heap. The only thing I like about bread in Panama is the name of the largest bakery – BIMBO Bread. (A big conglomerate, I guess, because I’ve seen Bimbo bread in Spain and Mexico as well.)
One of the things I truly miss about France is the bread. If happiness is a warm puppy then a crispy, fresh from the oven French baguette is a mighty close second. It’s also a fact that no baguette ever makes it home from the boulangerie with the ends intact.
Recently I’ve made a couple of attempts at making bread myself. Previously I’ve only ventured into bread making a couple of times. One of my favorites, and enjoyed by everyone I know, has been cranberry bread. Actually this is more of a cake than a real bread and was something my mother made every Christmas time as I was growing up. The recipe is found on the back of every package of Ocean Spray whole cranberries. Around the holiday season bags are usually found in the produce section of the supermarket but the rest of the year you can often find them in the frozen food section. Cranberry bread is easy to make and absolutely delicious but you’d never use it to construct a tuna salad sandwich with the stuff.
This is not a photo of MY cranberry bread but shamelessly ripped off from:
If you want something yummy, here’s the recipe from Ocean Spray:
CLASSIC CRANBERRY NUT BREAD
INGREDIENTS:
2 cups flour
1 cup sugar
1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
3/4 cup orange juice
1 tablespoon grated orange peel
2 tablespoons shortening
1 egg, well beaten
1 1/2 cups Ocean Spray® Fresh or Frozen Cranberries, coarsely chopped
1/2 cup chopped nuts
DIRECTIONS:
Preheat oven to 350ºF. Grease a 9 x 5-inch loaf pan.
Mix together flour, sugar, baking powder, salt and baking soda in a medium mixing bowl. Stir in orange juice, orange peel, shortening and egg. Mix until well blended. Stir in cranberries and nuts. Spread evenly in loaf pan.
Bake for 55 minutes or until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean. Cool on a rack for 15 minutes. Remove from pan; cool completely. Wrap and store overnight. Makes 1 loaf (16 slices).
PER SERVING (1 slice): Cal. 211, Fat Cal. 54, Protein 3grams, Carb. 37grams, Fat 6grams, Chol. 18mg., Sodium 313mg.
Richard’s Rating: Ease of preparation A, Satisfaction A+
The only “real” kind of bread I ever made previously was a family recipe my maternal grandmother used to make for “Shredded Wheat” bread. A light, wonderfully nutty-tasting bread that doesn’t require kneading.
I’d love to make this again, but none of the four supermarkets in David stock shredded wheat cereal and I have no idea what could be used as a substitute.
Richard’s rating: Ease of preparation A, Satisfaction A+
The other day I decided I’d try my hand at producing some of the real stuff and went online and Googled “bread recipies.” The search engine came up with approximately 2,900,000 hits. Okay, narrow it down a bit and add the word “simple.” THAT came up with 3,250,000 hits! How is that possible?
Being basically a lazy, lay-about I next tried “no knead bread” and knocked it down to only 305,000 possibilities. Here’s a video I found:
Needless to say mine didn’t turn out like that in the video even though I followed the instructions to the letter. The New York Times recipe, (click to link to it) as well as others that are basically the same, all say “dough will be shaggy and sticky.” Mine was, for, oh, maybe three milliseconds and then it turned into something else. Not knowing what I could do to change the situation other than just starting all over again I decided to just let things develop and see what happened.
The next day this is what I got:
Looks pretty good, but it would have made a better discus than a loaf of bread. One problem, I think, was that the Dutch oven I used was probably too large so the dough spread out and gave me a loaf about 2-1/2″ high. On my next trip down the mountain to David I’ll buy one a little smaller. I need to build up my kitchen items over the next few months anyway for the time I’ll leave this house.
Richard’s rating: Ease of preparation B, Satisfaction D -.
Tuesday I had a go at what was supposed to be an easy recipe for generic white bread complete with kneading. I went through all the steps required and it turned out a lot better than my first attempt and I came up with this:
Again, it’s not something I’d use to make sandwiches with, but still warm with a little butter it was heads and shoulders above Bimbo bread but still lacked a little je ne sais quoi. It did make excellent toast the next morning.
Richard’s rating: Ease of preparation C+, Satisfaction C.
That dogs dream is not a myth. We know that they chase things in their dreams when they bark while asleep. Some, I’m sure, dream about things they wish they had. Some, though, have their dreams come true. Charlotte, the resident dog here on the hill, has discovered a treasure trove of bones somewhere across the street most dogs can only dream about.
One More Good Adventure 