On the Move

The last two weeks have been full of fun surprises.

The first being that www.orbitz.com and Spirit Airlines SUCK! Trent and I have been planning a trip to Peru this summer. When we went to purchase the tickets to go we had a horrible time. You'd think airline companies and travel agencies would want your money...nope. This one just pretended to. The short of it is that false advertising and bad communication are bad for business. Just an FYI, if you are looking for cheap airfare don't trust either of those companies. As for our trip, it's still a go as long as we can find flights.

The next fun surprise was much more exciting. Our river friend, Jim (featured in the lovely picture below),

offered us his house to live in downtown. A house...downtown... it doesn't get much better than that, right? Wrong, not only is it downtown but it's super close to some of my favorite people in the world.
Nikki, Monica, Raina
Stephanee
and Won (I don't have a picture of him, so here's one in recognition of him).

The last surprise was that my whole family is meeting here in good old SLC for Christmas! I hear one of my cousins already has his ticket. I can't wait!

(The last time we all got together was in 2005)

What a great two weeks (minus the airfare debaucle). Wiih spring around the corner, I'm excited for what else is going to pop up this year.

What is a Baobab?

Well there's this amazingly quirky, yes quirky, tree in Madajascar that stores all it's water in it's trunk. It looks like something out of a Dr. Suess book. Someday I wish to be sitting under one. Until that day, I'll pretend.

Here's the Wiki-definition of the tree: (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baobab)

Baobab is the common name of a genus (Adansonia) containing eight species of trees, native to Madagascar (the centre of diversity, with six species), mainland Africa and Australia (one species in each). The mainland African species also occurs on Madagascar, but it is not a native of that country. Other common names include boab, boaboa, bottle tree and monkey bread tree. The species reach heights of between 5–25 m, 10-80ft (exceptionally 30 m, 100ft) tall, and up to 7 m, 23ft (exceptionally 11 m, 36ft) in trunk diameter. They are noted for storing water inside the swollen trunk, with the capacity to store up to 120,000 litres, 32,000 US gallons, of water to endure the harsh drought conditions particular to each region.^[1] All occur in seasonally arid areas, and are deciduous, shedding their leaves during the dry season. Some are reputed to be many thousands of years old, though as the wood does not produce annual growth rings, this is impossible to verify; few botanists give any credence to these claims of extreme age, with current evidence suggesting they rarely exceed 400 years old.^[2]

The Malagasy species are important components of the Madagascar dry deciduous forests. Within that biome, A. madagascariensis and A. rubrostipa occur specifically in the Anjajavy Forest, sometimes growing out of the tsingy limestone itself.

To blog or not to blog...

we'll see.