I just had the best Saturday.  A long, lazy day filled with books, yarn, mangoes, and Blitzen Trapper. A necessity for sanity, really, and hard to come by of late.

Dr. Rice has returned to the states and we are now halfway through our intensive Climate Change and Agriculture class.  It is given at night, three hours for ten days.  There is a fifteen minute break in the middle, which usually turns into a youtube free-for-all on the big projection screen, reminding me over and over again that I am, indeed, very far from home.  We can move from discussions on the economic feasibility of greenhouse gas mitigation to this in just under 20 seconds. Or Shakira and futbol....  jeez, that drives the gauchos louco. When Telmo, our Brazilian advising professor, tries to wrap up for the break, it goes something like this, "So those are the main differences between biological and thermochemical processing routes for second generation biofuels.  And now, here is my fat doctorate student, Paulo, winning a cerveja chuggin contest last fall."

Ah, good times.