Covid 19, Canadians and Money

The clock tower Burnabela Ramos in the park of the same name downtown Santa Cruz. I always park near it when buying fabrics and sewing supplies or shoes in Santa Cruz. Photo taken in mid February. There was no shopping there today, just driving through.

Things are getting a hair weird here. Yesterday's COVID 19 rates climbed by over 35% in a single day from the day before, which was a good hundred more than the day before. It's skyrocketing here.

Which means that strange lottery called national health recommendations changed again. Announced last night that beaches are reopening until 2 pm, and tourist flights are resuming on August 1st from Canada, UK and EU. No flights in from the U.S. In the middle of the rising rates of a pandemic.

SUCH a dumb decision! Most of the country is under an orange alert, we're under yellow. Meaning there's strict curfews in both, and no sit down restaurants open in the orange zone.  We found that one out the hard way, just like the fabric store closure in Santa Cruz, by showing up and finding everything shuttered. They've changed, back and forth, loosening, tightening, loosening and tightening restrictions left and right with no care over the climbing cases.

Almost four weeks ago they started mandatory masking and cases were around 300 a day, after having fallen to 1or 2 a day in late April/early May. Now we had close to 800 yesterday. Clearly whatever measures being done are not helping. There needs to be a firm plan of action to shut down and ride this out.

I was on pins and needles all day because today was the day we were supposed to pick up the car owned by our Canadian friend. That clattering bunch of junky metal 30 year old car he keeps trying to sell us that could not pass Retive inspection. All the way down past Santa Cruz (high infection zone) to Nicoya (even higher infection zone) gloves, and alcohol hand sanitizer, and masks, oh my!

You're heard the old saying 'No good deed goes unpunished'? It fits the situation with the car. Our friend, I'm going to call him Bert, asks if he can leave his car with us when he flies back to Canada in March in the face of COVID 19. He wants us to drive it a couple of times a week to keep it running. I tell Jim and Bert I am not comfortable with that idea because the car is coming up quickly on the yearly safety sticker inspection and it's clear the car will not pass. Bert tells us to not worry, just keep driving it.

We decide to stay on the right side of the law and get the sticker, take it for inspection and it flunks on 37 different items. We call Bert, who chews us out for trying to get the inspection sticker, insisting we drive with the expired sticker, or just buy it from him. We have no genuine use with a second car, were just storing this to do him a favor. But Jim decides to buy it because Bert is offering it at about half of actual value. We'll have to put about 300 bucks into for repairs to pass inspection, clean, scrub and debug, hang onto it just long enough to resell when Americans return to live.

We'll make a pretty penny. This is just one of the buying and selling things we've done for pin money for years. Opportunity knocks and you take it. You use the money you have to make more money via investing in small things, like me buying twenty domain names a year, developing a few with free blogs, and then selling the names. Or when I used to comb the second hand shops for antiques and resell them on Ebay. Easy money.

Bert gets wind of the fact that is what we are doing and says, hey wait a minute, and has now decided the two hundred in repairs we've put into it is his now and he will not pay because he never authorized the repairs, backing completely out of the sale. We find out there's something wrong with the title that is going to cost another 500 to fix, cutting the profit margin again.

Now Bert has decided the repairs are our 'rental' on the car, a car we did not want or need, that we both hated driving because it was a dirty rolling scrap heap crawling with bugs we were driving to keep the engine from seizing up.

Longer story short. We stopped the repairs, drove down to Nicoya to pick it up, and now it's going to be one very ugly purple lawn ornament until Bert returns. Likely the bug population will be even higher. We will not be driving it. And Bert is talking about not returning. So so tempted to park it outside of the gate with the keys in the ignition, and whoopsie it's gone. But I won't.

If this guy returns we'll have to put up with him at church. Everyone already dislikes and avoids him.

Turns out there's a lot I don't know about this guy and his highjinks here,.

I swear I am done with good Christian church people. This is not the first time I've had one screw me over like this. We'd already signed a promissory letter to buy the car from him when he returns in a few months, or via the embassy if he did not, and he reascends it all and screws us out of two hundred dollars and countless hours trying to fix the mess of the inspection sticker and screwed up title.