The Sea is a Salty One

  Took a ton of sunset photos last night from San Raphael Hospital yesterday but haven't started to edit them yet. All in these colors of my Brasalito photos. Crazy week. Family visiting from the States. Jim had a gall bladder attack and we're trying to work out where exactly the best place for the surgery is. San Raphael is closer, but I'm still trying to collect for my ER bill and the four days I was inpatient with the 104 fever back in March. Insurance keeps rejecting the bills each and every time.  Hospital Metropolitano takes our insurance 100%, but is a five hour ride. I had to explain to Jim I am so not taking the damn bus. In the middle of this drama trots one of our visitors to tell us how he views our marriage. I cried I was so crushed by his ideas. No one looking at your marriage from the outside can possibly determine everything going on inside. It's just not possible. Plus he's angry and bitter about being alone at thirty something, which colors his vie...

  It's backyard banana season again! These are my neighbors bananas. We relocated our banana trees out front with our cacti, not quite big enough to bloom and produce bananas but close. They weren't doing much back in the shade. I had some interesting experiences this week. My fancy newish coffee pot has started doing something terrible, well, terrible for the white marble countertops. It sometimes spews coffee and grinds everywhere instead of down into the pot. I ended up going online to see if I could solve this problem. Manufacturers website blamed the problem on a dirty coffee maker, too fine a grind of coffee, or, get this, brewing a full pot. Brewing a full pot?!? I always brew a full pot. I do that, let it cool and pour it into my cold coffee pitcher for iced lattes in the morning.  Consulted Consumer Reports which said some coffee makers were more prone to that than others and offered some tips to avoid it. I ended up with various tools to effing remove that useless li...

  Beach walking on a cloudy day. Last week I made a discovery of something I'd never laid eyes on before. Or maybe I'd seen them and it didn't mentally register. This time I stopped and picked it up. That's a sea bean in my chubby little hand. What's a sea bean? A seed from a tropical plant that gets carried on the ocean currents before landing into the flotsam of beaches at high tide. I picked it up without knowing what it is. Now I've fallen down a sea bean shaped hole and have been back and forth several times to Grande looking for them. Few and far between. Once it's finished with the freezing that kills any potential bugs the old dremel is drilling a hole and we're stringing it up for a necklace. My new crazy searching fetish means I've been beach walking twice as far even as I'm having some post Covid fatigue. At the same time my legs look like I caught them up in barbed wire or something because I'm ringed with scabs. I'm having cr...

  The sign mere feet from the expensive exclusive beach club in Langosta. I laugh every time I see people swimming in the lagoon and ignoring the sign. Proceed at your own risk, which seems to be a theme here. Monday I finally got released from daily heart/lung examinations because of the Covid. I'd made enough process to end them. What hasn't ended is we both are dealing with hard fatigue and muscle pains. Not exactly 'Long Covid' just one or two pesky virus hold overs. We were still quarantined through Thursday and we made the huge mistake of rushing out to do a Price Smart run and pick up the license plates on the new car. It took all this time, nearly three months, for the government here to issue. Tico time on extra slow speed involving a hack of the government database and them trying to upgrade mixed with the shuttering for some months of the inspection process called Ritive. The plates had come in a few days after we got our diagnosis and could go nowhere near t...