Absentee blogger

I know, I know. I swore I wouldn’t abandon my blog again.

I haven’t, I promise. Actually I have quite a good reason for my lack of blogging. Aside from near constant rain which inevitably leads to grumpy, wet, muddy horses. I am moving!

Yes, I did just move to a farm. No that farm isn’t going anywhere. Cardinal Ridge Farm (www.cardinalridgenc.com) is the family farm and is home to- yep, you guessed it-  a lot of my family. Carlos and I are leaving and everyone else is staying. To be specific, Carlos and I, our two cats Moonchie and Panterita and our horse Willow are moving to Phoenix, Arizona.

Carlos is a physician. Having graduated in his native Venezuela, we have been in a long and arduous struggle with a lovely organization called the ECFMG. It is an organization which was somehow granted the authority to certify foreign doctors by comparing their medical education to the U.S. system. Basically it is about bureaucracy and paperwork. Lots and lots of paperwork. It’s been a three year process, during which Carlos took a series of eight hour board exams and generally studied his butt off. Long story short, after the fight of our lives, Carlos was finally certified. He applied for several residency programs all over the country and was granted several interviews. I’ll be honest with everyone. My husband is a damn good doctor, but half of all U.S. applicants don’t get positions let alone foreign graduates. Things looked pretty grim. Lo and behold though, Carlos was offered a “pre-match” which basically means that a program wanted him so badly they offered him a contract outside of the match. The Match is a computer system which uses an algorithm to “match” applicants to programs based on a ranking system. All results are released in March. He didn’t have to go through that, and never will again!

So that’s it. The next three to four years of our lives will be spent thirty five hours from home. We spent the past week in the Valley of the Sun looking for houses. Forgive me if my posts are sparse, there is a lot to do to move our little household across the country!

Tonight I shall make cheese…

…and I plan to document the process.

There are some super exciting things happening these days involving goats, chickens and alpacas. As such, I am committed to learning as much as possible about how to go about using the products from each animal. I’m pretty much good with the chickens- crack the egg, stir, season, yum, but all I can make from goats milk so far is butter. Alpacas? No. I don’t know how to spin their wool into a useable string. That is next on the list. Tonight I will be making cheese- fresh mozzarella from goats milk which I intend to purchase somewhere. Not sure where yet. I have already acquired the rennet and will shortly purchase the citric acid (or lemons) that I need as well as some cheesecloth and a dairy thermometer. You’d think I’d already have one seeing as we have a bakery. Oh well.

In my previous posts, I’ve mentioned that I frequently make my own butter. Several of you have asked for a video showing said process, which I will be shooting tonight, along with a video of my cheese making antics.

Stay tuned!

Meh

Its been a very distracting week. It couldn’t have happened at a worse time. This is the last week of the semester for me, and amid final presentations, and incredible amount of last minute assignments, the bakery decides to throw us all off balance. In one single day, the power shuts off and our facebook page disappears. That wouldn’t be so bad except that we’re a 24 hour bakery… we couldn’t bake! Secondly, our facebook page had nearly 14,000 fans. That’s more than the Charlotte Observer. We don’t advertise, but instead we rely on our facebook page to communicate with our fans. It was devastating!

Well, I’d better get to doing homework. Please forgive my absence! I’ll be back next week with wonderful tales of planned mountain trips, a visit from my Dad and the continued planning of my long awaited trip to Venezuela! Thank you, 300 people who somehow read my blog almost every day! I love ya!

**Update** Our facebook page is back up again, with most of the fans restored. Yay!

Not too much to say

Today has been a rather ordinary one, save the 87 degree weather which was, dare I say it, awesome. I overslept and missed class this morning. Which is ok I guess. I didn’t really feel like going and I didn’t feel it was particularly necessary. On the subject of school. I am doing a *gasp* undergrad double major in Business (minor Entrepreneurship) and Spanish (minor French…?) at Queen’s University of Charlotte. Ironically, I’ve always wanted to go there, but wasn’t accepted before. Oh well, no matter, now I’m rocking it and kicking butt in school. I’ve received the President’s merit scholarship this semester, which was really exciting. I’m doing several research projects at the moment. I’ve already completed one about syncretic religions in Latin America, which is a topic I really love. I also did one on the development of socialism in Venezuela, which was almost as fun. Now I’m doing on the rules of accentuation (HELP Amity, Spanish teacher extraordinaire of http://amity.beane.org) and I have to choose a topic for my final presentation in one of my classes. It must have something to do with Lain America. Those are the only requirements. I have absolutely no idea what topic to pick, which is why my professor Dr. Galleno has requested that I not come to class on Wednesday, but rather spend the entire day in the library deciding on a topic so I can submit the outline by Friday. I absolutely love my classes, but am really happy that it’s nearly the end of the semester!

In other news, I missed flamenco class today, but it was for a good cause. I’ve launched a new website. www.cltflamenco.com and it looks wonderful, if I do say so myself.

That’s all for today folks. See ya later!