Grapefruit, My Bathing Suit

 Bet you don't know what song this blog title is from.

A rather grainy photo I took last year of a Yellow Naped Amazon parrot in our grapefruit trees. The trees are starting to produce and I awoke this morning to the parrots making their first raid on the trees, and hummingbirds circling the blooming fruit trees here. A peaceful start to a morn.

Today was pretty average for the kinds of things we do here daily. We couldn't go anywhere because under the new tighter pandemic restrictions we could not drive our cars today. I hate seeing more lockdown, but understand the why. Too bad we're not tourists, tourists are still allowed carte blanche to go anywhere and drive any place. Spread that Covid, honey.

We swam, I used my hot glue gun to fix various things, and I gardened. So exciting, not. I did get to see and here a black billed Toucan in the back yard snacking on our Starfruit tree. Took down the Christmas tree.

It didn't start off so well though. Jim, in his perpetual dieting scheme. He's started working out madly in the past two weeks. About six months ago he laid out a small fortune to get a second hand Lifecycle from a gym that was closing due to the pandemic. He rode it once or twice, until recently.

Now he has grapefruit nuts. His, hmm, how do I put this nicely? His scrotum has swollen up like an angry red grapefruit. He's had to stop biking and tomorrow we're on our way to pick up padded bike shorts and a big gel pad for the bike seat. You just don't know how glad I am that my gonads are internal. It looks pretty gnarly and I cannot talk him into going into the clinic.

Why is it that men (not all, but it seems like a significant number!) will not go to the doctor unless they are dying. Why do they act like every cold is killing them? Still trying to get him to have his sack checked out now.

This morning I received an answer to my simple question yesterday of asking how Vyckie Garrison picked Albania for her move. I got a long long answer filled with stupid claims. I did a really shitty thing and debunked all of her claims about Albania with links to the U.S. State Department travelers website. The more I read through the government coverage of Albania the more frightened I've become for her. I had to take a deep breath and step back. I ended up blocking her.

Our relationship got very weird and complex once Vyckie started asking me for money routinely, asking for a percentage of my laughably small pay from Patheos, and started trying to get me to run her multiple GoFundMe requests for money. People started to tell me tales of giving her money to set up a charity, or for other things related to No Longer Quivering and Vyckie pocketing the money. It was starting to impact NLQ so I told her no more fundraisers, and started to quietly scrub her from the website, not wanting to be associated with enabling her bad financial decisions, or that whole mess of money given to set up NLQ. The more she tried to work me for money, the more I started to think she had some effing nerve.

I am reminded of Miss Without a Moral Compass, Katie Joy, who would sell her mother to the circus if it would make her money.

I'm good at recognizing and fobbing off those purveyors of the Gringo Shuffle, exploiters of all nationalities, but apparently I suck severely at figuring it out in my friends. I should have known the second I found out Vyckie never really ever held a real job, and when Katie said that she never minded the dramas because they drove eyeballs to the page resulting in bigger and bigger paychecks. I miss the giant red flags in those I'm friendly with.

I am going to suggest if you are a creative working and your sole motivation is financial you're writing - painting - making videos - crafting - you name it - for all the wrong reasons. People working in creative fields should be doing it because they must. When I write, or paint, or make things it's not with an eye towards a profit. It's because I'm going to bust, or die if I don't get those oil paints out and paint, or unload my thoughts into a written form. Money never enters the equation at all.

After 24 hours thinking about nothing but Vyckie moving to Albania I have come to the conclusion she's running, she's running from something big, bad and serious. It will not do her any good in the end. We all have to face awful things and hard times sometimes.

Her facing hard times will be complicated by the fact that in Albania she'll lose her SSI disability at the 30 day mark. The fact that most prescription medicines aren't available in the country and the ones that are happen to frequently be knockoff medicines that are not very good fakes of the real thing. A nation with almost no doctors and nurses due to the ongoing brain drain away from Albania to the greener pastures of Europe. She talked about how great it will be living in a place with socialized medicine, never dreaming that it does not cover foreigners, that you must pay cash upfront, just like here. She says it's Covid free. That's because the country is not tracking Covid cases, just like many other extremely poor nations like Nicaragua bury their numbers and deny.

The State Dept. has it marked as "Do Not Travel" because of the violence of the largely Muslim population there against non Muslims, because of the drug trafficking, and because of the overwhelming number of untreated untested Covid cases.

I see someone so in love with the cachet and fantasy of being an expat in a exotic foreign country that they're functioning entirely in a lovely fantasyland of confirmation bias. Unable, unwilling to accept the idea that a place is not paradise.