McGuyvering It Again and New Friends

 

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 little teat of a stopper on the bottom of the brew basket, which did solve the entire problem. As I am grunting and grappling with this far too complex stopper, spring and gasket and popping it off Jim came in and said the funniest yet truest thing. "McGuyvering it again are you?"

Let me tell you. Do not even consider moving to a foreign country from the USA unless you are not offended by trying to McGuyver it. It's a necessary skill that many lack that causes them to go skittering back to the US. Pro tip. I had to do some McGuyvering in Germany and Turkey and now here too. I enjoy a challenge and always feel like a champ when I figure out how to fix something or circumvent a bad design, or just figure out a way around a problem.

Yesterday I'd planned on spending most of the day cleaning our guesthouse and our kitchen, but it didn't happen. I got the windows done at the house and guesthouse and my phone rang. Just like that I was on the phone for the majority of the afternoon with someone powerful and influential in getting these trouble teen treatment homes run by various IFB churches shut down. We had a very long convo, key information exchange. He's here in Costa Rica too, on the Caribbean side. I think he's the real deal, not just all smoke and mirrors like many claiming to help survivors.

Crazy interesting story too. He's been down here long enough to have seen the CIA gun runners that are alleged to have operated out of Costa Rica bringing weapons to the Sandinista in Nicaragua. That's some crazy McGuyvering it! New contacts are always good.

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