Days Like This and Acute Angles
So a bunch of hideous and dumb things have happened since I last posted. Yesterday we had tentative reservations to fly from Arenal home to Tamarindo, but after arriving at the airport, really a banana strip, things changed again. We ended up taking an Uber the four long hours back. I didn't realize when I reserved the tickets for the flight that a) it's not high season so it would be one flight to San Jose to hop a second flight to Tama, b) taking the ticket price from the usual eighty bucks a head up to around two hundred each and adding a couple more hours to the trip. The Uber did not run that!
Being that it's low season even the buses weren't a good option. I think we figured out while it would have been cheap, cheaper than the Uber at least, we would have had to change buses four separate times and it would have been about twelve hours. No thank you!
The Uber driver could not have been nicer and his newer model car immaculate! He even stopped for us in Liberia to get a Price Smart pizza before taking us to our home. No complaints from us! Bargain and the driving time was just about what the flying times and layover combined.
Once we were home Jim and I prepared to drive Bruce's newer, very much older, car to the post office and to the local Walmart subsidiary to get cat food. Typically Bruce's car was a new level of filthy, just like his old one, but it's a free ride? Cannot complain, right? Wrong, it broke down in the parking lot of the grocery store last night. We walked home and boy was I sore again this morning.
I'm going to have to start working out seriously, balance, no balance, whatever. I'm going to start trying to walk the backroad by the house on Monday. Maybe a few runs to and fro from the store. I remember when we first got here five years ago I thought nothing of strapping on the backpack and walking thirty minutes to the store, and back again loaded like a pack mule. I've gotten too soft now.
We're still waiting for our mechanic here to get out to the store and see what's wrong with the stupid car. We did tell Bruce this time we would be putting zero money into his car, no Riteve, no Marchamo, and no repairs. We might be footing a repair now so that we can get around until we buy a new car.
Bedroom of the bungalow we stayed in at Arenal.
The real trouble started when we got home. Jim called Davey to see if he would sign an agreement to purchase contract on our old CRV. Now remember in Arenal the shop owner had already offered us two thousand for it with a bad transmission, and we turned that sale down because Davey frantically screeched at Jim that he'd rebuilt the transmission solenoids and give us three thousand for the car. I'd listened to Davey on speaker babbling and an incoherent weird mess coming from his mouth insisting the transmission was not bad, it just needed cleaning of of those pesky solenoid just the night before. Jim was confused by his insistence we have the car towed here and he would do the work as soon as I brought back the parts from the U.S.A. I keep pointing out to Jim that Davey is a pastor, not a mechanic and he never has money enough in his pockets to ever pay for food when we go out. Sell to him and you'd likely get no money beyond the first payment.
Last night Davey started screeching at Jim that he had promised no such thing, he had no intention on working on the car, and he never offered to buy it. Codswallop, I heard what he said to Jim! He ended the conversation with Jim by saying "I don't wish to discuss the car any longer" and he hung up on Jim! Lying piece of stinking detritus!
But then it got worse, Jim's phone was flooded with messages from fellow church members offering used cars, or snippets of advice, or just running their mouths about the Jim/Davey situation. So, well, well, well,, Pastor Davey, who is no longer a practicing pastor or radio DJ (long dumb story) has now shot off his mouth about Jim, the car and the entire situation. So now we have the entire peanut gallery of Jim's sparkling new Evangelical church up in our business where they don't belong.
Last night when Jim came to bed he was so upset and bummed out by all of this he said he was not attending Men's Bible study in the morning, lest he run into Davey. You know it's serious when Jim skips the thing he's been doing for three years now, that church's mens group.
We talked so much last night, and again this morning about Davey and his farked up ways. We talked confirmation bias, Evangelical hubris, cranial rectum inversions (head up ass) and the Dunning Kruger Effect. Jim's looking at Davey, and by extension this entire church. Jim didn't go to the men's group and sure enough now the lead pastor wants to talk to him "this situation." Le sigh.
This is exactly the same kind of drama we would experience at our old Fundigelical Quiverfull church all those years ago. I don't know where this is going to lead.
In the meantime we've identified seven car dealerships in Liberia, one that had at least three late model Honda CR-Vs on the lot. So we're car shopping now. The shop in Arenal is buying the old car, and we'll be going from dealership to dealership as soon as we get Bruce's car up and running.
Davey better never speak to me in the near future because I'm going to give him a verbal frailing. No one treats my husband like that, and then uses it for gossip fodder for everyone at church. Nobody!
About three months ago Davey wanted me to do a promotion for his book he's written on some very boring Bible theme. He sent me like forty messages about in inside of an hour, and I finally told him that if he could not provide a review copy (like all the publishers did when I was at Patheos) and I could not confirm if the book was liable to be harmful to anyone struggling with spiritual abuse it was going to be a hard pass from me.
Some Christians just suck so damn hard. He's one of them.
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