The Sea is a Salty One

Apparently I've picked up something else, something that keeps me sweating like a fool, feeling exhausted and feverish. Another doctor's visit, another round of drugs. One of the quite awful parts of moving overseas is being exposed to completely different cold virus and other medical maladies. Costa Rica has a few bug borne illness and other medical issues we generally don't get exposure to in the USA. But, I think that being raised in South Louisiana, in the heat and the bugs before air conditioning, has had a positive effect on me. Jim catches every single bug bite that turns into a hideous infection. I don't. I can only conclude it has to do with my childhood in a tropical clime. On the positive side I have managed to get a box of suppliments made from a Costa Rican herb that is currently being studied as an asthma aid. It works, it works well on me, even better than the CBD oil and medical marajuana ever did, which worked much better than any of the other tradi...

We're still schlepping around like death on a vacation. Jim still aches. My removed toenail bad had turned itno a dull roar now. We're both shambling around with colds that will not lift. It's all good. We have good deli food so I'm not exactly cooking. Lots and lots of naps happening. Quelle excitement. Since we're both still function on low speed we've both spent more time flopped down in the hammocks observing the local wildlife. We've seen the sloth that lives next door very very slowly climb to the bottom of its tree to pee twice lately. In the last four days a large flock of green parrots has made themselves at home in our honey mango trees. The noise of the birds is so pretty but deatening. We're talking several hundred parrots all squawking at the same time. After asking a Tico friend why the black furred howler monkeys have white balls I got quite the story out of him. Here it goes Onee upon a time howler monkeys were all white and very di...

Jim and I are ailing right now Not just my cut off toenail either. Jim's been having more and more pain all over his body, which worries me because in the past when he's aching in every joint it's been a parathyroid tumor. We've been through that three times now. He's down to a tiny nubbins of a parathyroid gland now. So off we went to the doctor everyone here gringo recommends - Dr. Raphael (not his real name but close enough) to get a calcium level on Jim's blood. That will tell if there is parathyroid problems. If so we'll be planning another trip to Tampa, Florida to the Norman Parathyroid Clinic. Dr. Norman is the only one that didn't make a butchery of the surgery and managed to remove the tumorous bits until the local surgery in our podunk hick town. The main complaint Jim had was that his tendon down the back of hia ankle is very sore and his back is bad again. Dr Raphy sent him off today to the private Catholic hospital in Liberia, about a...

Yesterday was a banner day for me. First I had to go to the doctor here and have a big toenail removed for infection. It went okay except I had a weird reaction to the local anesthetic used, and ended up having to sleep it off most of the afternoon and evening. I learned anew that I could never be an opiod addict. Kept making me get up and dry heave over the toilet over and over and over last night. No sleep yay! Minor surgery yay! Drug reactions yay! I would rather have the pain than the side effects of the narcotics they sent me home with. So it's grin and bear it time. In the middle of this I found myself having to block a pile of people I'd been friends with over twenty years. Old friends on Facebook. Why? Because of their support for what our government is doing to separate immigrant kids from their parents. One of them I was the most shocked at because she's been a foster mothere for as long as I'd known her. She was the one I would expect to have some compass...

I have a confession to make. In February of this year I started attending a local non denominational church with Jim. While I no longer drink the koolaide and have no belief is much of what's in most American churches I discovered that Jim is right about attending church for awhile after you move. You meet people. It's been great for that, and getting hooked up again with interesting volunteer opportunities. For years I was involved with with the food bank, soup kitchen and nutrition projects in our old town. I hooked up with those organizations back during my time at my first Quiverfull church, yet I kept up with volunteering through the time there, ending up at the mainstream church and later with no church. I've always found that helping others feels good and it feels like you're making some small difference in a world gone toxic. It's been mostly good, but that might be because I'm very minimally involved here. I like the pastor, I like his wife. I avoid...

Sometimes I get oh so tired of putting up posts for No Longer Quivering. I'm in one of those times now. Right now it seems the worst of the worst Quiverfull Evangelical bloggers are posting scads of posts justifying abusing women or, worst of all there are women (I'm looking at you, Lori Alexander!) ordering you to put up with any sort of domestic violence in the name of Jesus, saying you cannot ever divorce. I was thinking about this a great deal this afternoon in the pool, particularly after the last few weeks of watching the dragonfly that thinks our pool is his own personal babe magnet cum love shack. Oh yes, lately I've been treated to the violent spectacle that is dragonfly sex. A little reading told me that dragonfly males will find a body of water, or a special tree or other natural feature and 'claim' it with their constant presence. Our guy has certainly done that. He is constantly either sitting on the edge of the pool or buzzing around right above it...

This week was a good illustration in the differences between American tourists and American expats in Costa Rica. This happened at the fancy American-oriented grocery story near our. Tourist: "They ONLY have GARLIC bagels!?!" * slams down sleeve of bagels back into the store freezer* Me: *picking up same sleeve of bagels and starts  singing* "BAGELS! BAGELS! BAGELS!! I GOT BAGELS" Tourist: *rolls eyes before muttering to me* 'But they are GARLIC!! Where are the cinnamon raisin ones?" He says this in a voice that seems to indicate that garlic bagels are as evil as Hitler, Nsync and those idiots that thought up 'fun size' candy bars. Me: " I got some BAGELS!!!" *now starting to do a bagel dance with my happy bagel song. First time I'd seen a sleeve of bagels in a grocery store here and boy was I ever happy. I happen to like garlic bagels best. The only other place I've seen bagels in Costa Rica is a coffee shop that...

This time it wasn't me. Back when I had MRSA from the end of 2015 and much of 2016 I was the one trudging back and forth to the doctor and hospital getting my infected spots squeezed to get out the pus. Sometimes it was so painful I cried. But my infection was primarily in my hands and face, both areas with lots of sensitive nerve endings. Jim has been bitten by some big bug on the back of his thigh. A couple of days passed and it got red, swollen and painful. He lapsed into the weird man thing - the one where men start to claim they are having the WORST PAIN EVER and are DYING, while the women of the family look on unsympathetically and think "I squeezed three babies out during natural child birth" or "Fingernail surgically removed without pain meds and I didn't whine like that" Not trying to be unsympathetic. I knew it hurt him and could see the growing circle of swollen redness. Figured he needed to see a doctor before he developed whole leg cellulis ...

Yesterday the new guy started, the replacement for Helbert, painting the roof. It didn't go great. Jim went to church and left me here to oversee this guy. I'm working on taxes because for expats they aren't due until June 15th. So, it's always in my nature to delay as much as possible because I just do, don't know why I hate doing taxes but I'm more detail oriented than Jim. So here I am, surrounded by piles of paper, receipts, etc, tapping away on the keyboard, knocking out all the data entry. I noticed even before Jim left that Juan the painter was buzzing around, dragging his feet and acting like the last thing he wanted to do is to paint the roof. Yeah, I get it. I didn't want to do taxes either, plus no one is paying me to do it. But it has to be done, just like the roof needs to be painted. He even asked Jim to buy him breakfast. This must be a cultural thing because Helbert demanded lunch on those days he worked for us. But none of the other ...

If there was a big take away from my life this week it would have been 'always listen to your inner voice'. Real Estate Highjinks We put our house on the market two or three weeks ago at the price the realtor suggested, a good 70 thousand more than he stated it was worth a year ago. I completely ignored my inner sense that we should list it for a little lower and we ended up with 25 potential buyers with all of them saying to a tea that the house was 'too old fashioned' What the literal hell? It's a Cape Cod cottage style home that has been updated and completely remodeled last summer. It's never going to look right with all stainless steel appliances and modern style fixtures. We lowered the price to about ten thousand bucks more than we wanted or anticipated, and it sold in three days with multiple offers coming in. A bidding war happened and we ended up very close to that first price, within a few thousand. So my sense is that it was the right thing to ...