The Sea is a Salty One

  Crab mysteriously showed up in the swimming pool a mile and a half from the ocean. This last week makes about as much sense. I feel like I should be mounting a "We Survived Church Thanksgiving Dinner!" bumper sticker on the rear of the old blue Kicks. Hostility, indigestion and turkey go so incredibly well together, don't you think? Thanksgiving Day was a hard one. We got up and Jim had to go to the clinic. Running a fever, a couple of different spots oozing pus and blood all over the sheets. It's a vicious cycle. Jim gets bug bites here, scratches and presto-chango you got staph infections. It was indeed. Culturing, cleaning out and gross medical things done and sent home to prepare for a turkey day feast at the church. I was already tense because it was exactly two weeks since Jim's biopsy and we're heard nothing, plus making 4 dozen deviled eggs for a potluck at the last second was a new level of misery involving a misfiring pastry bag and eggs that simpl...

  And I wish I was that woman buying beer. If only my medications for mastocytocis didn't inhibit me from drinking. Told Jim yesterday and today I wished I could wash my mouth and my brain out with tequila. Alas no. What happened? It's complicated. Jim and his new church, the place that loves to advertise itself as ' That little Christian revival in the jungle! ' Ugh, I feel dirty just typing that out! He's on the board as an elder and is all in, going so hard like I did during my years at Possum Creek where he was the unsure one not getting with the program. This time it's me. I just know too much about how these places operate now. I've been with him there, but it's clearly not my scene at all. They are all trying so furiously to summon up a IHOP KC, or TACF type revival with folks rolling on the ground, screaming for FIRE! and laughing type emotional revival. I did that stuff back in the 1990s and half of the 2000s and have zero desire to revisit it. ...

  A crumbling crude concreto mermaid by the JSM gas station near Filadelphia, Costa Rica. When you're so desperate for boobage you construct your own. Today was the stuff of legends! I went into town with my laptop computer in tow. It's about three years old, and had been through the wringer. The stuff of legends! I am tough on laptops! This poor thing was dropped and cracked during a border run through Nicaragua while photoshopping a new date on my PCS Covid test. At the orders of the people at the border! It's been dragged through TSA security checkpoints left, right and upside down. Almost accidentally drop kicked around. Battery dead, covered in dust but up until a week ago it worked well.  Then the color display started to split into three different colors, a common thing that happens when the display driver is out of date. I tried updating the drivers and it still didn't work. I knew from my time working with computers that I would need to go into safe mode, and f...

Since we got back from San Jose I've just been in the doldrums. I don't even know why. I feel depressed, sadly deflated, and lacking all energy. Pains in my limbs and other vague symptoms. One of my friends yesterday suggested it was the stress I was under waiting for Jim's pathology report mixed with Aunt Heap/Mom dramas. I came back from San Jose only to a pile of frantic text messages about Mom not picking up the phone and had to point out that's just how she is, holed up in her house like a cute little senior citizen basement troll. They're freaking out over her normal behavior. Leave her alone. But I don't quite think that is it. Today I finally popped a low grade fever on top of days worth of exhaustion mixed with something else new, you got it, lung congestion. I think I'm stuck in end of rainy season lung crud, like the end of each and every rainy season. So I'm doing very little today. Jim tried on Tuesday to get me all jollied up by taking me s...

  Night time view from the balcony of our hotel room in the Balmoral. It overlooked the Calle Central that's now a pedestrian mall. Had museums, parks, and such unheard of western luxuries as Starbucks! Heck yeah I drank gallons of Cafe Latte! We were both nervous driving down through the wilds of Guanacaste to the big bad too crowded and too many confusing streets of San Jose. However we did see the usual assortment of weird things on the road. Here's just one. We kept trying to guess what was in the big bags. Got close enough to determine it's some sort of heavy duty plastic sheeting. Took Rutas Una all the way from Limonal into the heart of the old city, where we promptly got lost because our new phones decided they kept wanting to input our old Stateside address to where we were starting. After some fits and starts, and stopping at a local McDonald's for directions we finally arrived at the hotel.  Turns out the Hotel Balmoral was quite lovely and very nice. They up...

  Rainy season and everything is green! Going into a  hard week. My computer died. Struggled to fix what it was doing but it's a more serious snafu with the software than I am prepared to fix at this time. Off to the shop! On my ancient ten year old workhorse of a laptop. But that's not what's making this hard. Oh no. Jim's upcoming surgery to try and determine if he'd got cancer or something less nefarious going on below the belt. Jim's behaving like I don't know what, not remembering the tests he has to have run in the run up to the surgery, and a few other things.  One of the ones we sort of went round and round on was the need for two to three nights in a hotel. Finally twisted his arm into texting his doctor's support staff to ask. We're a five hour right from the hospital. Kept telling Jim I thought we needed to spend the night after the surgery in a hotel too. Surgery so early in the morning there's no way on earth we can drive down. We...