Standing on Shakin' Ground!

 Does anyone remember this song by the Temptations?

Heee! Reminds me of a band gig way back in the late 1970s where our band played on a boxing ring, and the canvas floor kept shifting. We did this song!

So why is the ground so shaky? We had a 6.2 earthquake this morning and as of right now there have been 35 aftershocks, some around 4.0. I keep feeling them. I'm pretty immune to the earthquakes here in Costa Rica now. It just made the day strange.

Happened while we were at the clinic, and on the drive home, and at the house. Jim has to go to see a surgeon about the mrsa problems he's having. It's just a question now of straight to surgery, or a CT scan and doctor's visit. All hinges on how he's doing Monday. 

I swear I cannot WAIT for 2024 to end! The entire year has just been a complete and utter spitshow!

On the good side I ordered a custom piece of artwork this week from a dear artist friend for Jim. I still feel bad we had to let go of so many things when we moved here. Jim had hung onto some momentos of his time as a Saint's fan who wore a paper bag over his head. 

This photo occasionally pops up on the NFL website and they've shown it during a few New Orleans Saints games.

The tricky bit in ordering the artwork was paying the artist. Remember last year when I fell down the steps getting off that Frontier airlines flight from hell and I lost my cellphone? Pretty sure it fell out on the tarmac. The problem being I have two factor authentication on everything linked to that phone number and I'm pay as you go. No sim card meant I had to change numbers when I got a new phone. I was able to recovery every single thing except my X profile and my Paypal account. I tried again to get into Paypal and was denied, so I decided to set up a new Paypal account. They would only allow me to set up a Costa Rican account and then refused to let me link one of my five bank cards/credit cards. I got weird error messages for two days before I realized it would likely be due to the difficulties moving money because of trying to prevent drug money being laundered. Costa Rican banking is a cluster-you-know-what because of those rules.

Using the other way the friend takes money was no more successful. You cannot use that system from here. I ended up messaging one of my children, moving the money into their account and asked them to pay my friend. Except......

I didn't hear from my daughter.....

Finally I did it and she questioned me pretty hard. Laughing. She was afraid I was about to be scammed! I had to explain I'd known the artist for 3 years and they are legit! Finally got a payment and oh my! I have seen the sketches and just laughed so hard over the finished result! He's going to absolutely love it.

We voted this week, which was a trial. Apparently our local registrar back at our old address purged us from the voting rolls. After some less than friendly back and forth we got the ballots, voted, and shipped them off to San Jose to be added to the US Embassy's diplomatic pouch to ride back to the good old USA.