Puerto Rico Part I: Rare Finds in a Rain Forest

Lani and I were recently visiting some of her family in Puerto Rico and managed to spend a few days in a mountainous tropical rain forest called El Yunque. (It’s a national forest.) We hiked around verdant landscapes populated with giant ferns, tree frogs, and climbing vines and scrambled our way across mountain streams feeding into waterfalls.

El Yunque is also where we met Frank, shown at right (last name omitted to protect his privacy). A longtime electrical engineer, Frank had a personal crisis that initially dragged him down but ultimately led him to a life as a park ranger, something he’s done now for 15 years. “I work as close to heaven as you can get,” he says.

Frank will be 72 this year, though in person he looks a decade or two younger. (The light breezes of the mountains and Frank’s obvious gusto for his constant level of physical activity probably has something to with it.) He does a whole set of ranger-y tasks: trail maintenance, guiding visitors, search and rescue, etc. He roams around with a wide-brimmed hat, a hand-carved walking stick he made himself, and a necklace with a large ivory-looking tooth on it. A few times a day, he leads short hikes for visitors starting about two thirds of the way up the main mountain. Lani and I were lucky enough to get him all to ourselves on a slow afternoon. We wandered with him under the variegated canopy.

Less Taxing To Do Lists: A Self-Justification

I have a quirky way of making to do lists. As you’d expect, I include all the complicated things I need to get done by breaking them down into simpler steps. But I also make sure to include super-basic items that take almost no effort, as well as a few that I’ve already completed and can check off without actually doing anything. For some reason, the list looks less daunting this way.

Here’s an example. I’ve been slogging through my taxes over the past couple of weeks, and I made a point of writing in really easy items along with all the important complicated stuff. Things like gathering up the W-2 forms that came in the mail from our employers and creating the pile of tax-related receipts I will eventually need to deal with. I even gave myself kudos for filling out the cover page of a tax organizer from the accountant we work with. Of course there are other to do items that make my brain sputter and fizzle. (Itemizing? Ack!)

Lani finds the odd mélange in my to do lists amusing, but now I’ve found some scientific backup. It even has a fancy, scientific-sounding name. It’s called the endowed progress effect.