When I woke up this morning, my sourdough starter Javier was looking pretty sad. He had less bubbles and had really separated a lot, but I wasn’t too concerned because my book said sometimes that happens when it’s cool and it had been pretty cool last night. But when I came home from work, after Javier had been out in the 80 room temperature for 9 more hours…he was looking even MORE sad. And I am afraid that he is dead.

I know. I was really sad, too. BUT I’m not going to declare him dead until I’m positive that he is. And I wanted to show you the progress so far.

Javier was born on day 1 and in retrospect I wish I had given him organic flour and spring water from the start. But he still started off well and had quickly developed by the time I went to feed him the next day!

You may remember this second day, I was concerned that Javier might be trying to grow mold. But I think it was a false alarm. He was right on track this day, bubbly and beautiful already!

Another beautiful day of growth! But he got really STINKY by this day! That’s normal, but it sure was surprising.

Day 4 things were still looking great. Javy was still really stinky and my family started to get a little wary of him because of the smell, but he was growing beautifully so I was still happy!

And then this happened. I’ll show you a side angle so you can really get a picture of the separation.

And as you can see from the top, while the liquid has a few gross bubbles sitting on it, it doesn’t much look like Javier himself was still bubbling. And no bubbles means no active yeast. 🙁 But I refuse to give up on him! The feeding schedule for today said that this was the day when I should remove like 25% of him to keep and then discard the rest. So in hopes of increasing my chances of success, I gave Javier a cleaner and smaller new home in a glass jar and gave him a nice feeding.

And I think I see some bubbles of life in him already. Let’s hope so.

In other news, JASON WAS SELECTED TO BE ON A LAW JOURNAL!!! Hooray!!!! I’m VERY proud of him!!! I’m sure it will be tough, but it’s a resume booster for sure and it will be another way to gain experience while in school. I had an intuition that he would be selected after the competition and I wouldn’t be, and that’s alright with me. We’re a team, and as far as I’m concerned this is a win for our team. 😀

Thanks for reading!

-Lauren