The Sea is a Salty One

I've been ruminating this week. First at the beach and later while felled by some annoying stomach bug yesterday. I've been ruminating over the nature of families, faith, grace, mercy and kindness. On Monday during my beachwalk I was touched by the unmerited kindness of strangers. There I was, dipping my wrinkled old toes into the surf while shell hunting, and not having much success.As I drew near two young Hispanic males they each bend, picked up a cowrie shells (I call them purse shells) and when we were abreast each handed me the shell, with some sweet banter calling me "abuela". Abuela is Spanish for grandmother, fitting because of my gray hair, but here in Costa Rica there is a sweetness about the people, a kindness we seriously lack in the States. A type of kind respect. I was very touched and thanked them before moving on. I have those two shells sitting on my nightstand even if they aren't very good cowrie shells, the surfaces of the shells scratche...

This morning was I had an ephiphany.  Not a good one. It came out of last  night's karma rant. I was talking with a friend of mine about the times my ex purposely tried to screw me over, and I realized it was many, many times, not just the two examples I listed. Thinking about it put a huge amount of things I've struggled with through the years in their proper perspective. The very last time he attempted to mess with me happened back in January, and took place through my kids. Forty years after the divorce he is still trying to get some sort of revenge. Sick. But it was good to realize this. The puzzle pieces finally clicked together in my mind, and things make more sense. While I managed to mitigate and lessen his influence after leaving Louisiana, it does not mean he ever stopped. It just went underground and happened through other people, usually family members. This last time it caused a rift with a family member. I realized he has at times weaponized this member of ...

just ignore. This is one of those Patheos things that I need to put a photo up of myself.

I'm fuming tonight. I've spent a part of today dealing with the management company that I helped pick and hire back when I was on the HOA board . All those fruitless, angry, threatening to mud wrassle meetings that ate my brain. So what's the deal? We sold our house almost a month ago, on July 31st, and a month before I let the HOA management company know that as of August 1st I was no longer responsible for any HOA monthly fee. I let them know well in advance not to debit my bank account any longer. What did they do? If you said take the moolah out of my checking account on the first of August you would be right. They took it. I called them again, and they told me this time that they had not received any of the paperwork or payments from the settlement company, meaning I was still responsible for the payments.  Told me I could have a refund when they got the settlement payment, which had the August HOA payment rolled in with the deposit the new owner had to put up. ...

Actually I think all of my recent changes are positive. Been a hard week of changes. Change is never easy even if it is a necessary thing. We've gone back to walking on the beach four times a week in the monring. This is something we used to do when we first moved here that I really enjoyed. We used to walk everywhere. Then the car arrived and we rode. It's not been so good for our health, so we're back walking the beach for an hour every morning. Last Monday morn I walked and it was hard, so damn hard. I was exhausted the rest of the day after coming back to swim in the pool too. We're rotating between different beaches, which is both good and bad. On Friday I didn't get much walking in because I ended up in a battle with the sea at Playa Langosta. I decided to cross the estuary to walk towards Playa Pinellas not where I usually do, in the shallows of the river, but by the sand bars on either side of the line between the river and ocean. It was only a ten foot ...

I just finished crocheting up a project I started late last October - my spite afghan. What do I mean my spite afghan? I started it out of spite, to be a pain in the ass. It's exactly the kind of ridiculous passive aggression that is one of a woman's few weapons in the forced submission in fundigelical town. I'm almost ashamed I regressed to it in a moment of irritation. Back in mid October when we were traveling and missed my maw in law's death we were driving around aimlessly doing various things to distract ourselves, like visiting a Japanese tea garden in San Antonio, going to the LBJ museum, going shopping. I don't remember what point of silly assholery my beloved was engaging in but he really got on my nerves, so I announced that I immediately needed to go to Michael's craft store on our way back to the hotel because I had this, uh, thing, crochet, yeah, that's right, I had to start on. Remember being so annoyed with the men in the family that I ...

The security wall to the north and west of our property has finally been properly raised to nearly twenty feet so Jim can skinny dip at night with impunity. Our property is bounded on 3 and 3/4 sides by denada. The neighbors on both sides are on the other side of vacant lots and there's nothing behind us,  just one back corner with a small two story apartment building unfortunately overlooking the shallow end of the pool. Not any longer! The new garage is in, built adjacent to the house instead of up by the front gate a far piece from the house. I really did not want to have to buy a golf cart to get from the garage to the house. In the rainy season that could be a problem, so we've been parking next to the house under the mango trees where the monkeys rain down excrement and half eaten mangos. No more. Jim and I cannot agree on what to do with the bare slab inside the security fence where the old garage used to sit. I wanted to add a few potted plants and chairs, have an a...

Title does not involve me, thankfully, all my friends are still my friends, even if I'm ignoring some of the typical archetypes at church. I'm talking about a friend of mine. I'm worried for her. We've talked a couple of times recently and she's had the hard awakening that not all the people that say they are your friends are actually your friends. How? She went to take care of  someone she thought was a friend during their recent surgery and it went haywire very quickly. I don't know for sure what the problem of her friend is, but I suspect it's parts mental, parts physical and could be medication madness of mixing of pills and potions. I only know that she hurt my friend with her behavior. I hate that, because my friend is very sweet and helpuful to everyone, loving, kind, caring. But for now my friend is grieving and doing that thing we do so well as women, particularly women who have come out of spiritual abuse - Monday Morning Quarterbacking what ...

Seems like I'm getting lots of unsolicted comments and advice, real life and online. I freaking hate it. Particularly people that have no clue how my asthma works with very high IgE levels. Particularly by people who have never had to deal with chronic illness. List of stupid shit I've been told I must do to heal my asthma in the past week ( an illness with no cure ) Use essential oils (usually right before telling me that they sell doTerra or Young Living) Yoga (numbnuts, I already do water yoga and I have for years No balance, I fall down on land when doing for reals yoga.) Taekwondo ( hard to do when you have nerve damage that makes your balance crappy ) More yoga ( See above! ) More essential oils (Did I mention I am horribly allergic to them? No, that's not 'detoxing', it's a true allergy to something about them. Lemme show you photos of the time I broke out in hives the time I got a massage with scentless Young Living oils) Take the suppliment ...

I'm in the middle of reading Omarosa's book 'Unhinged' and it's seriously warped. I figured it might be. Here's the comedy of it. Throughout the book she brays about her status as a licensed trained minister and lifelong Christian while backstabbing while ignoring Trumps foilables. In other words a typical Fundigelical crap-tosser. It reads like a dragonfly orgies. What do I mean? Her entire relationship with Trump is one of symbiotic use. Dragonflies when they screw both attach the tip of their tails to the abdomen of other fly. Mutual screwing. Omarosa and Trump have been mutually figuratively screwing each other while ignoring the other person's sheer awfulness. She realizes this and refers to it. But one of the most disturbing parts of the book so far has been Omarosa's reaction to a woman that she claims was a crisis actor in the wake of Trump's 'Grab them by the pussy' remarks. She talked about the lady trailing her around at acampa...

Monday morning we had to drive down to Nicoya to get our yearly car safety inspection. They call it the Retive here. And boy do they do the inspections differently here. Back in Virginia just about every mechanic shop would do the yearly state safely inspection, and many were not very thorough in that inspection. You'd wait in the shop, not able to see what they were actually doing or testing, only to be passed or failed. Usually on some silly ridiculous thing that the shop immediately wanted to fix for a high price. Here in Costa Rica they take those middle men mechanics completely out of the mix. The inspection stations are government owned and run. Professional. We stayed in our car the entire time and I have to say that they ran tests on things that are clearly not part of the Virginia state inspection. Took awhile, but we were soon on our way with our new Retive sticker for another year at a much lower inspection fee. Today is Mother's Day here in Costa Rica, so it...

Relearned yet again that I only have so much tolerance and energy for other people, parties and crowds. The day started well. Our main man we turn to for building projects showed up early and gave us an estimate for installing a garage, a bricked patio and a hot tub. We've decided to brick or tile in the area between the kitchen windows and the pool, have a 6 person hot tub custom built right below the windows and put a couple of teak loungers on the rest of the patio instead of the rectangle of grass there now. Landscaper stops by and we point out trees that need to come down, which need serious trimming and bushes we need. Another estimate. We spend more time in the pool and on the covered patio than in the house. Makes sense to tart it up a bit more. Outside is where it's at. Jim's weird sleeping patterns caused him to nap much of the afternoon while I was in the pool and later reading in the hammock out front. But in the late afternoon I had one of those horrible ep...

Jim has hurt his back, so there's not much happening at our finca. It's been rest, run a few errands and more rest. Today during one of the periods he was napping I finally broke down and watched PBS Frontline documentary on last year's Charlottesville 'Unite the Right' rally. Last year when the rally took place I cried for days afterward , even telling our landlord in my horrible pidgeon Spanish why I was so upset over this. Charlottesville was a mere 40 minutes from my house and I was all too familar with much of the town. We were only 60 miles outside of Washington, D.C. but I quickly learned that for shopping purposes I was much better off heading south to Charlottesville. We also ended up going to Charlottesville very regularly from the time my youngest was four years old and developed immunio problems. At first we were at the UVA hospital every few days for months on end for platelet counts and treatments, gradually tapering off to once a month, then three...

Up in the middle of the night. Between Jim elbowing me hard in the boob in his sleep and my sudden realization that I'd washed a load of towels right before bedtime but not put them in the dryer I'm up. I hate it when I wake suddenly, sit bolt right up and remember something I left undone. So I'm up finishing up laundry at 1 am local time.  Plus my burn is hurting spectacularly so I'm waiting for the pain pills to kick in so I can get part two of my sleep. Yay! Insomnia! Yay! Pain! This afternoon Jim had his meeting with Pastor 'Whoa Dude' as I think of him. Turns out my sixth sense about Maggie was right. There have been many attempts to help her from the church and some of those rich sad sacks she was complaining about. She apparently has some, uh, habits and hobbies she spends her wages on a little too freely, and it's the same old song every month. I feel bad for her, but I knew there had to be more to her story than people ignoring her. I was sorry ...

I realized yesterday after hitting the publish button that I sound rather mean girl in regards to Maggie's problems. No, not at all. But I am cautious about helping people in the church because of past experiences, particularly when they turn gossipy about others. For as long as we've been here and attending this church *around a year now* Maggie has interrupted every prayer meeting, womens group, retreat, volunteer picnic, you name it, with cries about being an impoverished single mother. Copious crying and complaining. I get that, having been one myself. The difference is that I didn't think others owed me anything because of my status, and I didn't tell everyone I met about my struggles most loudly. While I do think the church should help her, I cannot assume that they have or haven't. Maybe like the Smiths so many have tried to help, but been rebuffed when they offer real solutions I have to wonder if this is that again. Better for Jim to talk to the pastor,...

Yesterday Jim went for his twice weekly physical theraphy session with Maggie, and it went weird. I stayed home because I had the proverbial thousand things to do, from cleaning the fridge to my obessional towel and sheet rotation and washing. Monday's are a busy day for me, the day I do the majority of the cleaning so I can loaf around with my sewing machine and other art mediums for the week. Heaven forfend my towels don't get changed out on Monday! LOL Jim is so casual about it all and I am not. Jim would gladly use the same old crusty towel for six months. I learned this anew when I flew to Costa Rica and spent those three months in the plastic paneled room in the garage. I asked the landlady for hand towels and washclothes only to find out she didn't know what they were. It never dawned on Jim that there weren't the right kinds of towels and no top sheets in our room. Rather than make a scene I bought two handtowels and whipped out my crochet yarn and quickly...

This morning I underwent one of the most intense asthma attacks I've had in one very long time. Ironically I'd been doing so much better than I'd downsized to a new purse, a small one I'd made out of Moda fabric selvages and sewing odds and ends. I had the basics of meds with me, but not my Wynd filter, my filtering mask, my pulse oxy meter, my portable neb, most of my meds and my epipen. I'd done so well with moderate to mostly minor attacks that I'd lightened up my daily load. Big mistake! It started with a woman I did not recognize came into the church and sat next to me, She reeks, literally reeked, like she'd bathed in cheap cologne. Within seconds my airways narrowed, I had to get up and move away from her and start rescue breathing. Medicated with the small amount of basics I had with me, sat back and continued on with the rescue breathing while futilely praying to the universe that the meds would kick in. Then the panic attack started, that silly...

Right now I'm reading through a book on marriage by one of the ladies Lori Alexander loves to cite, The Peaceful Wife. Yes, she's also written a book, like Lori did, on marriage. So far the book is filled with less disgraceful language, but the exact same toxic ideas Lori loves to promote. Example: The book introduction. It is filled with three stories from marriages. The author does not state which of the stories is from her personal marriage, but it's not too hard to see the ridiculous marriage damaging lies in those first three strawnmen. Husband and wife #1 involves the husband grilling amidst beaucoup flies and asking the teenage son to fetch a flyswatter. Not an unreasonable request to be made of anyone, right? But momma tells the boy that daddy is being ridiculously pussy about the flies and to ignore him, Kid does. Daddy sulks. Husband and wife #2 have guests, relatives of the husband, and the wife is up trying to get ready for work and fix breakfast for the r...

A kind of rough couple of days. Yesterday we went to close on our house in Virgina. As of yesterday morn we are no longer property owners in the United States. I have had problems emotionally letting go of our house. We raised our kids there. I planted and grew a small orchard and large garden. We cooked, cleaned, laughed, and loved there. My kids growth is still charted in pencil on the drywall of the garage. I loved my home deeply and didn't want to get rid of it. We tried rental. It was a disaster. If I could have done what I wanted I would have kept the house and gone back and forth between here and there. But, I knew that wasn't practical. My house here is quite nice, .. It's much larger, I have a bigger pool and a covered patio with as much square footage as the  Virginia home. It just does not feel like home yet. The sick sad large amount of money is already in our bank accounts, preparing to be moved here to be put in a Banco Nacional CD. But it still hu...