The Sea is a Salty One

  A nice clean backyard, a nice bunch of guys. The new gardening crew is back. They are scrubbing and painting all the concreto, pouring concreto to neaten up some things like the sidewalk common area behind the guesthouse. Guess what else they are doing? Putting in a second raised garden bed for me~ this one will hold corn and sunflowers. They're putting in a good garden area near the old concrete pad where the garage used to be before we had it relocated. A reading nook with flower beds. I am jazzed!

  Bernie in the parking lot of Liberia Walmart. I wasn't at the Liberia Walmart, but I was at a Walmart subsidiary here in Tama this morning to score some Great Value pizza and frozen waffles.  This morning I stayed home from church and Jim attended. He's there now. Why? Our car has an even numbered plate and Covid restrictions newly in place here only allow you to drive with an odd numbered plate. The only odd number plate we have here is on Jim's motorcycle and I ain't riding that thing, no way, no how. I don't even like him riding it!  I had to slide on down to the clinic, which is allowed no matter what your license plate is, and pick up my two weeks worth of drugs. On the way back I went past that Walmart subsidiary and stopped to get pizzas and things. Walking around the produce section I ran into Alice, an older lady I know that spends half the year here, half stateside. I know her from church only. Jim told me she was now at the outside church with the obnox...

 Yesterday when I was talking on the phone with my mother while sweeping in preparation for a quick wet Swiffer of the living room and some light dusting I found out we have a tiny snake living in the house. I pulled out the  broom and dustpan from next to my ancient peeling refrigerator and lo and behold there he was wriggling his tiny cute self behind the fridge. My mother was having something of a conniption fit about this, I just shrugged it off. I figured eventually he'd reemerge and it was likely our cat Stinky would get him. It happened. This very morn. I came into the kitchen for another coffee and Stinky was in the kitchen intent on something by the baseboards of the cabinet. It was the snake. I got out the dustpan, Stinky chased him right into the dustpan and I relocated the snekky snake right outside. Stinky went on guard duty outside, patrolling the area for tiny snakes.  He's either foolhardy or brave. The tiny snake kept striking trying to bite him. Stinky m...

 ....walking on imported air.. Not really. From one very old Blondie song. From an album I scored the roughly three months I worked at a radio station selling advertising during college. It was a place that routine bounced our paychecks to us. One of the cavalcade of crazy jobs I had in college. Then there was the time I applied and interviewed for a job manning the phones in the middle of the night for one of the local mortuaries. Didn't get the job, but had already decided a spooky mortuary filled with bodies in the middle of a grave yard in the middle of the night was just not going to work for me. Which has nothing to do with today. Side ramble. Today the gardeners showed up. on time, and finished the job, with some serious upgrades to everything external. They didn't pull the "Manana". I misjudged them. Not just cleaning up plant die off from dry season and unruly growth since wet season started. They sculpted the banana trees, used some old concrete pavers we ha...

  A small island off of Quepas Jim's been having a very frustrating few days. Dealing with what I keep calling 'The Gringo Shuffle' He's getting frustrated with certain aspects of the culture here. I get it, culture is so super hard to adjust to, and no matter how much you think you've cleared that hurtle it bites you in the butt. Like me losing it over the pool guys beheading a four foot long iguana in my side yard before taking it home to make soup. The English teaching job Jim is working hasn't paid him. It's been over a month. First the school owner showed him a form that the money would be wired into his account, that was two weeks ago. We're six or eight weeks in, I'm not sure how long, and he hasn't been paid. Asked today and told there was no money to pay him. Jim's unhappy with that, and the huge amount of prep time. There's a fair amount of disorganization too. The owner isn't Tico, but he's picked up some Tico habits in...

 Many years ago I sat on a jury in a trial. Actually, I've sat on more than one jury through the years before I learned to not be dressed in business attire for a trial if you do not want to chosen. I used to joke that the voter pool for our county must be tiny if we both kept popping up on jury pools. The reason I've been thinking about this particular trial is for what it has in common with the just rested Chauvin trial. The alleged crime right on video. In this one the defendant, a lady with troll doll uncombed hair and a somewhat less than court ready appearance that Chauvin, was said to have shown up at the local Safeway, picked up some expensive steaks and a pile of two liter sodas before beating down the manager who confronted her right in the parking lot. She told a convoluted tale of having gotten confused, thought her cousin paid for her steaks, gotten her period and I don't know what. None of which lined up with what we witnessed on the store security cameras. On...

  Ernesto displaying his captured iguana. Saturday morning I got something of a surprise. No, not the pool guys trying to raid my big mango tree. They always do that, and I never mind because I know they're only making 4 bucks an hour and this is a high cost of living area. What happened is the iguana pictured above fell pretty far out of the tree, so far he was stunned. Ernesto and Jose decided this was prime meat just going to waste. They grabbed up the stunned iguana. I heard the shouting. Jim and I rushed out of the house just in time to see Ernesto grin and display his find, a large iguana. He told us he was taking it home to make 'iguana soup'. So I know iguana soup is a thing here, particularly in the Nica populations, like Ernesto and his family. During the worst of the pandemic here we saw a dip in iguana populations here, hearing that many unemployed by the pandemic make soup from whatever iguana they could get their hands on. It's a cultural thing. Ernesto as...

  Scabby sleeping in Jim's swim trunks. He's started napping in our bedroom, in the perfect circle that is Jim's shorts. He used to nap on the bedroom rug. He'd come a long ways in the year or so he'd been coming around. He's a stray that spends large chunks of his days here. He's even turned playful and gentle.He's learned he can nag the crap out of me to feed him, open the door, shut the door and a whole laundry list of things. Who's trained who? Yesterday and today have been a hornet's nest or beehive of activity. By other people. The gate is being worked on. The gardener has been here and we're discussing the next phase in our landscaping. I want to put a hedge of ginger between the house and the guest house and relandscape the sliver of land outside of the gates. We planted cacti near Thanksgiving. Now I want to add some other plants like crinkly ferns and palms.  The guys came today to do the every six months of termite spray, and they ...

  I started mentally dancing to this song, for all its not very PC lyrics, like I'm Peter in "Office Space" Why? I FINISHED OUR TAXES ON TIME! Since we're moved to Costa Rica every single year our complex tax situation has been exacerbated by being an expat, difficulty getting documents, figuring out what I need to claim since we have investments in other countries, you name it. Every since year I've had to take advantage of the different time schedule for expats and file by June 15th instead.  I'm going to make the regular tax deadline. I was ready this year. I understood the foreign investments rules. Thanks Trump for passing tax codes that give anyone with foreign investments below a certain threshold, and not an insignificant one, a pass on taxes, and then reduced taxes on everything above. I had my documents lined up and for the first time in a very long time I am done. The huge yearly boondoggle is slain and filed.  Getting money back, a pretty large c...

  Scabby riding Jim's motorcycle to dreamland. This last week has been a bit nuts. We're dieting. We've been dieting the past two weeks. I ran into some problems with this. I'd finally gotten Jim to try the clean eating diet I follow strictly for two weeks before I transition into something a little less stringent. It's sugar free, very low carb and not much in the way to meat either. Lots of leafy green veggies. It's a great kickstart but I wouldn't want to live on it. Ran into a problem this week. One night, I can't remember if it was Tuesday or Wednesday night, I developed a headache that would not lift. My stomach was rumbling and I just didn't feel right. Hauled out by blood sugar meter that I rarely use because my A1Cs have been good for a couple of years, prick myself and run the tests. Off the charts, stupid crazy high like I haven't had since I first had issues during my mrsa year. No wonder I had a headache! I could not figure it out. U...

  Portero's lovely Asada building painted with the name pricked out in pieces of mirror. The Asadas are all happy places today. The reservoirs aren't quite as empty. Last night the rains came. They came back to Guanacaste. It rained for about an hour. I sat outside with a book, in my rocking chair and listened to it rain. This is literally the first March/April dry to rainy season switch over where I've been healthy. No asthma, no wheezing, no miserably shuffling around. Why, how? I think it's the Lyrica I was put on six weeks ago. Something about it is affecting my lungs the same way that medical marijuana does. I'm so incredibly happy over this. I've started to walk much better, and am able to leave my cane at home when I go out, more and more. I can handle the short jaunt from the parking lot to the cart without falling down. I still do not do well with unpaved uneven surfaces, but this is a big improvement from where I was 8 weeks ago. Higher pain levels and...

  Whooops~ Wrong holiday! Today was personally something of a shit show. I've not posted much this week because it would have been endless griping about the busiest tourist week of the year being in pain in the ass, or moaning about my stupid body. It's been quite the week. I'm not sad fishing, I'm just explaining how I got so turned around on Easter. Chop, chop, bitch, as a friend of mine says. The Lyrica makes me want to sleep all hours of the day. I set my alarm to go off at six thirty because the process of waking up and drinking enough coffee along with warming up my voice takes a good two hours without the process of getting dressed when you have no balance. Jim reset the alarm to 8 am without realizing why I had it set so early. I woke up just in time to guzzle coffee and get dressed in a panicked state. No time to warm up the vocal cords.  I leave Jim picking up mangoes and moaning about his thrown out back. I get a block down the main road and there's an ac...