30 Jul Scorpions in the Kitchen

The weeks have been flying by, and the Colorado Intern Summit is this week already! On Thursday I head out to Colorado, along with the 40 plus other interns at parks across the US, to share experiences and talk about National Park Service opportunities. It’s going to be a highlight, for sure. I continue to work on products from the Boquillas meeting five weeks ago, and it feels good to be able to make progress and keep this project on track. A lot of my work is in translating, which can get tedious as every set of revisions and edits has to be done twice and, besides that, translation is a rather difficult task. Right now I’m working on a letter to be sent to Mexico’s SEMARNAT (their Department of the Interior equivalent) in order for their office to request long-term visas from the US embassy for the CONANP park staff we work with here on the border. In other news, unbeknownst to me, there was a small scorpion making itself at home in my kitchen dishrag and, while making dinner yesterday, I found it just as I was trying to move the hot pot to the sink to drain. Cool little thing, but I sure wasn’t expecting it. Unfortunately, my pasta overcooked as I searched for a jar and captured the bugger, but all was for the better as the scorpion is back home under a cactus in my yard. About half as big as a minute. My second round of pasta (Thai – red curry noodles) turned out pretty well! Some meals are more creative than others.