The Sea is a Salty One

  A pile of cat butt coasters I made for a friend as a gift. Cat butt kind of describes the day. I went to church. I did my own thing. More people wanted to talk but I wasn't in the chattiest of moods. A few weeks ago a couple from Brazil ( I think?! Don't they speak Portugues there? One of the Latin languages.. ) were very excited to see worship flags. The lady kept mentioning coming by the house to see. I tried to tell her unsuccessfully that there wasn't anything more than I had there. Suggested a meet at a coffee bar to talk to answer her questions, but I was too busy for a visit to my home studio. Her response, reaching out to one of my tenants, asking for my phone number. My number was not given out thankfully. When I saw the lady approaching today I sighed, smacked myself in the head and squared up my shoulders. She came up, starting her usual babbling about coming to my house to see me. I let her know that would not be happening because a) I am not well right now an...

  Oooph!I need to be facedown in a bag of coffee beans at Coopedota right now! Muy cansado, or tired beyond tired. I will skip all the boring moaning about mast cell that is driving this exhaustion and point out something super funny about living here in Costa Rica. Accents. Spanish accents! Just now I was outside speaking to Eduardo and Luis, the pool guys, as they did their Saturday morning thing at the pool. As I approached Eduardo stopped his constant rapid-fire commentary to Luis. I find Eduardo very hard to understand when he's speaking like that. Why? He's speaking very rapidly and slurring the words together. He's a Nico, from Nicaragua, speaking with his regional accent. He knows if he speaks to me it has to be slower and more distinct.   Spanish class in university did not cover accents and colloquialisms.. Here you might have Guanatecos with their slang, Ticos from farther south, Nicos from the north, Mexicanos, Argentenians, etc all with different accents. Som...

  Someone shared this crumbled up piece of paper on my social media this morning. She was mourning the fact that someone tossed it away because she would have treasured it from her mother. Girl, me too! Right now my mother resides in a locked memory care unit. The decision to place her there fell to me as her only child. It was devastating and sort of soul destroying to take this step because she always had a fear of ending up in a place like that! While we're never been estranged for more than a few months never have we been close. I would have never once received a card or letter with something that sentimental on it. She's made it clear through the years that I am an enormous disappointment to her because we could not have been different. She's told me repeatedly I never heeded her advice, or lived exactly as she did and she couldn't stand it. As if she's the living embodiment of Scarlett O'Hara from "Gone With The Wind". Very much a Southern Belle ...

   A cave wave carved near a beach named in Spanish "The name of Jesus". Took this photo and a pile of others on Sunday on a big boat on the Pacific. Saw humpback whales. Saw a ton of tiny islands and deserted beaches, swam in the Pacific and got waited on hand and foot by the staff. I could get used to that. One thing I didn't count on was how quickly those whales surfaced, and disappeared in the flip of a massive tail. Don't really want to talk about the trip because I took a tumble, broke toes, injured my hip and discovered I also have a cracked rib now. No more "Ahoy sailor" for awhile. Today two of my biggest baddest stressors resolved. First, the husband finally started taking his blood sugar problems seriously. He takes his readings, he uses his insulin and he no longer whines about it, trying to bargain it away. I guess I got kind of over the top insano mean to him while chasing him about with the blood sugar meter and trying to keep him on the stric...

  Our cat Stinky submitting to a big iguana he'd been fighting. This bout stopped all the silly attempts to land a five foot iguana. Ignore all that silly whining and whinging I've been doing. It all fades away into the silliness it actually is. Day before yesterday, last at night our cat Stinky started to follow around and cry so piteously. That "Mom, Mom, it hurts and I frightened" cry I last heard when Miss Porque was dying. No he wasn't dying but yesterday morn as soon as the good vet clinic by the house opened we brought Stinky in. As I suspected it was a urinary blockage.   This handsome fellow had minor surgery and is staying several days as a guest *coughcoughUnwillingPatient* at the animal hospital until his blood tests show that the infection is going.  I went to see him this afternoon and he was so so pitiful in the clinic's kennel cages in the back. But after I knelt down to talk to him and pet Stinky he finally started making eye contact with us b...

 Heck, I have tried thrice to insert a moody atmospheric photo of the gardens at that missed Arenal hotel that has now been razed. Just imagine it's here. Something in this thingabob isn't working right for me tonight. So on brand. Today was a wild one, tough, trust-busting, and brought some big surprises accidentally.  Husband and I had a disagreement. That's not too unusual. We do not agree on a vast many things and it's okay. Even silly things like who gets to clean out the crisper drawer in the fridge. We still manage to find our ways back to each other. Yeah, we're that couple that does not go to bed angry. We might be going to bed hurting or sad, but having talked out the heat of the matter that diffuses the anger aspect of interpersonal dramas. I discovered that a pretty big boundary had been breached in my privacy. I found out entirely by accident when he handed me his cellphone to fix and when a strange set of messages popped up as the first thing. It wasn...