Beautiful Days With a Teensy Little Fly in the Ointment

We have had some fabulous times in the last week. The hot tub is finally in, and running. We bought the cushions Jim wanted and they look lovely against the gold painted stucco of our house. I'm still ordering the gardener around to move plants to better locations.

On Sunday we spent the day on a forty plus foot long catamaran. Once or twice a year our church gets a half price rate for the cruise and we go out for the day. Forty bucks a head instead of eighty. Wonderful time on the water, I wish I had photos but my sports camera is not cooperating, it's not allowing me to access the photos on the memory card. Which is really a bitch because the cruise was one of the best days yet in Tamarindo in some big ways. We went way out, dropping anchor near one of the tiny deserted islands that dot the Pacific.

Dropped anchor in about two hundred foot deep water, and jumped in to swim. The water was turquoise and crystal clear. While we were out we saw a pod of dolphins and several large sea turtles. They served a lovely lunch on the boat. I was sorry to come back to land. Reminded anew of my father and the 40 foot long sailboat he owned when I was a child. Good memories of weekends on the Gulf of Mexico.

It was the getting there that was tricky. After a few days of deescalating asthma I had an asthma attack on the way to the boat. We gave a ride to another couple, the wife of whom I've been avoiding since my stroke. Jane is the one that kept approaching me with her essential oils pitch, claiming to 'cure' strokes with her type of MLM essential oils. I was quite rough with her, and she left me alone, for a while at least.

Lately she's been something of a pest, at church, at functions.  There's just one problem. She's always wearing enough of her particular brand of essential oils to provoke asthma in me. Usually I get away with a little wheezing and I am polite to her. Not so when she ended up in my car, swearing she was wearing no perfume, just her harmless oils. I think it's Young Living she sells, which happens to be the brand I am the most allergic to.

Now Jane is angling to come swimming in our pool and sit in our hot tub. I'm not quite sure how I'm going to handle that. But I will have to say something to her and I suspect based on what happened when I first met her that it will be unpleasant.

Impossible to avoid. On Monday night we went out to a friend's birthday party, and there Jane was, pushing forward, trying to hang about, provoking more wheezing. I don't dislike her, just this oils thing. That and the fact that she handed me a piece of birthday cake and I asked if it had peanuts, she laughed and said no, why would I ask such a thing? I didn't eat it, poked it with my fork and it turned out the entire bottom layer was some sort of chocolate and peanut concoction. I shudder to think how close I came to an epipen episode at the hands of an idiot who has proven more than once that her woo takes priority over my breathing.

We had to leave the party early because I could not take the wheezing and had left my medicine at home, stupidly forgetting to transfer them back into my bag after putting them in my backpack for the boat trip. Never again will I make that mistake.

I am better, which is good because yesterday we ended up meeting an old friend of Jim's in Punta Arenas. His friend Art took a cruise ship that stopped for the day in Costa Rica. Art, his wife Ling Fong, and their friends Xima and Serge decided to hang out. I was unhappy when they proposed we all take a tour with the pushy 'Tourismo' guys hanging around the port, and I was nervous about leaving our car parked portside too. Tourist areas are areas where you are most likely to be ripped off. There's very little more than petty theft in Costa Rica, but tourists and tourist areas are rife with it. I have had small things lifted from our car in San Jose, an umbrella and a sweater or two.

The tour was a hoot in some ways. We stopped along side the road at one place so we could see the white faced monkeys. I was puzzled when the tour guide asked me for the bananas I had with me, and I was disturbed when he started luring the monkeys onto everyone's heads and shoulders with the fruit. Feeding wildlife here is very much against the law, but unscrupulous tour guides apparently do it.

Jim with a monkey on his back.

There's good reason not to feed the monkeys. It makes them dependent on people, sometimes aggressive with humans, and means that many times a well meaning tourist or guide gives the animals foods that aren't good for them.

Later on a tour of the estuary of Tarcoles I got to see the river tour guides do the exact same thing with the crocodiles. Disturbing because that is exactly what the river guides did in Tamarindo and it ended badly. They had to stop baiting the crocodiles when a surfer lost a leg and there were other incidents with the crocodiles. Never a good idea to feed wild creatures who are not migratory birds.

The day with Jim's friend and pals was still wonderful for all the tour guide breaking of the feeding laws. I got to see many different types of birds including a large flock of Scarlett Macaws. We had a great time, had a wonderful meal and even managed to squeeze in some shopping. I bought my remaining Christmas gifts.

Angelina Jolie. Apparently the river guides have nicknamed the crocodiles all sorts of crazy names, from Osama Bin Ladin to Monica Lewinski. And the newest one is Donald Trump.

Today it was back to laundry and housework and rest. Still pondering how to handle oily Jane without being too mean.