La Boca Center for Sustainability

Sunday morning we took a trip down to the La Boca Center for Sustainability to check out their farm and, if we liked what we saw, sign up for their CSA. La Boca is an old railroad town on the Pine River just north of the Colorado/New Mexico border, about 35 miles for our house. More than just a farm, La Boca practices and teaches principles to farm/ranch sustainably.

Gabe the Assistant Director of the center was our tour guide for the morning, showing us the property where the grow the crops, raise the animals, and even his low impact housing. Towards the end of the tour I found out that Gabe went through the Ecological Horticulture program at UCSC and knew/worked with Amy at Freewheelin’ Farms. That was the farm we got our CSA from when I was living at Zami House. Small world. We signed up for their CSA, hopefully the food is as good! (And if anyone knows where I can get duck, emu, ostrich or any other “strange” eggs in the Four Corners area, please leave a comment!) Kinsee’s pictures are below.

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New Header

If you’re reading this in a RSS reader, visit the site to see the awesome new header image my brother made for me. It’s replacing a pretty bad header that has been up there almost a year.

Thanks Chris!

Blogging and San Diego

I haven’t been blogging much here, but I’ve been doing a ton of blogging over at BeerNBikes.com Durango, CO (and the surrounding Four Corners area) is an awesome place for both craft beer fans and cyclists.

I still read up on things happening in San Diego every once in a while, especially all the wonderful beer being made.

I saw this post on Draft Mag’s blog about the SDCityBeat Festival Of Beer coming up in May, and their summary of San Diego pretty much sums things up for me:

Occasionally, we consider moving to San Diego. It’s warm. All the time. It’s beautiful. All the time. The people are attractive. All the time. Honestly, what’s not to like? Then you visit, however, and realize it’s essentially a city devoid of culture, unless you consider being a stop on the way to Tijuana an important cultural experience. We don’t.

They do have good things to say about the CityBeat Festival of Beers though.

iPod Touch and Switcheasy Thumbtacks Mic

I bought an iPod Touch about a week ago after my five year old iPod finally died.

I love the Touch, the apps you can download are great and make it really expandable. I stream music from the internet and my home computer, play games, read email and browse the web on it, it’s great.

Another thing I was excited about was the ability to record notes, use Shazam, the app that tells you what song is playing by recording a little bit of it, and trying out Skype. To do this you need a microphone as there isn’t out built into the Touch. I saw the Switcheasy Thumbtacks Mic and it looked good. It’s small, unobtrusive, cheap and has good reviews. I ordered one right away and was anxious to get it. According to their website arrival time is 2-5 days depending upon the distance from their warehouse.

Well, here I am 9 days later, anxious to play with my new toy, and I still haven’t gotten it. I emailed them when I didn’t recieve a tracking number and was given a tracking number and told it would ship soon. When I check the tracking number on the USPS website it shows that it hasn’t even shipped yet.

Hopefully the mic itself is better than Switcheasy’s customer service.

Being a Tourist in My New Hometown

I’ve been in Bayfield for about a month and a half now, but haven’t really done too much exploring until now. This past week my brother and sister came out to visit and we did a bit of the touristy stuff.

Sunday afternoon we headed up US550 to Ouray.

Tilt-shift Photo of Silverton, CO (Photo by Chris Hammett)

We went to Wiesbaden Hot Spring Spa where they have a “vapor cave” a dark cave with water piped in from the hot springs at around 108F. It was hot. We couldn’t stay in there for more than 10 minutes or so. Luckily they had an outdoor hot springs pool as well.

(On a random-small-world-note, before we left in the morning I was looking at Twitter and saw someone post saying her and her family were visiting Durango and headed to Ouray for the day. I sent a message about maybe meeting up, an impromptu tweetup of sorts) and then forgot about it. That night when we got home I got a message back saying she didn’t see it in time, but was at the hot springs at the same time we were!)

After three hours at the hot springs we were hungry! We had lunch at O’Brien’s Irish Pub and then stopped by the Ourayle House Brewery for some beer. (I’ll be posting about that at BeerNBikes.com soon).

The next day I had to work but that night we went down to Ignacio to go bowling at the Rolling Thunder Lanes. My sister and I both bowled in a league as kids, so that was fun.

The next day we went out to Pagosa Springs. Even though it’s only 30 miles away I hadn’t been there yet. We stopped by Pagosa Brewing Co first and had dinner and beer (which I wrote about at BeerNBikes.com) and then went out to the Pagosa Hot Springs. They were less hot than the vapor cave, but hotter than the other pool at Wiesbaden which was pretty nice. They had about 20 pools or so, we went in maybe 10 of them. It was a much different experience. We all sort of felt like we were at a miniature golf course because of the way it looked.

(Another random-small-world-note, someone from Twitter was at the brewery at the same time as us also, we found out about it the next day!)

It was fun having my brother and sister come out to visit and explore the area with us. Anyone else that wants to come out, there’s plenty more to explore.

Winding Mountain Pass (Photo by Chris Hammett)