The Sea is a Salty One

  Things are finally starting to feel more 'normal' as we return to our regularly scheduled programming and boring every day lives here. I am trying to download and edit a few of the many photos I took at Lago Arenal, the volcano and other places on the trip including a pile of rainbow photos. It was rainy and cold around La Fortuna during our visit last week, but it just made the adults only pool next to the cocktail bar at the volcano springs place the best place to be! Soaked so long and hard in 100 degree water I started to feel faint. Upside: We've managed to move everything back where it goes and clean. Fresh sheets on the beds, both bedrooms that were used are freshly clean. Guesthouse pretty clean, I can put off the sweep/mop/dust a few days. Good thing too because I discovered today that our other guests used all the towels and extra sheets. Guesthouse sheets on the line right now drying. Towels first thing tomorrow! On top of it all now.  I just started something ...

  We were here again, on that windy road with warnings not to feed the coatimundis, or as the Ticos call them Pizotes. Yes, I did feed a pile of them. Breaking the law, breaking the law! Sorry the sign is so fuzzy.  These guys. So I know I said I was staying home from Arenal and my husband was taking his two friends, but what ended up happening is that Jim talked me into accompanying him because he didn't really want to be around them either. One of them is just ridiculous! His brother was fine save for handing out those religious tracts. I went because the husband requested it and boy it was a huge mistake, pizote feeding or not. Why? Well, Timmy, the guy that's visiting. Not Mike his brother, but Timmy. Timmy started getting on my nerves and didn't let up even after he left. He pretty much ruined my Tuesday and parts of yesterday too. I've come to the conclusion after this trip that Timmy must be autistic, or OCD, or some other diagnosed 'ism.' None of this is...

View from a restaurant of a dried up river bed.  Lately life has been that twisted tortured two-step clown rodeo with disabled hijinks at the airport and church followed by beaucoup of sciatica. I've been mostly housebound and on pain meds. Jim went through quite the travail to get home from that funeral in Ohio. His second flight, from Dallas to Liberia was cancelled due to weather. Two nights sleeping at the airport because the airline played that silly game of keep delaying don't cancel until every hotel room from Dallas to Denver was booked. Then he flew from Dallas to Houston, spent another night away, this time in a hotel room before arriving home on the busiest travel day I've ever seen.  Many of those stupid flight trackers were wrong and I ended up trudging back and forth to the airport a few times on faulty information and Jim calling to say that they were boarding the plane multiple times. Right now we have the second of two sets of visitors here. First set was o...

Quite frankly I'd rather be riding one of these horses on the beach. New Year's Day started with death. I got up and saw the news coverage of the terrorist attack in New Orleans, where I still have plenty of friends and family living. I kept reading through the coverage obsessively, trying to make sense of the pathway up Canal St to a tight turn onto Bourbon St. It's too tight of a turn for the driver to get much speed going, and just like that my mind has been down a conspiracy rabbit hole. Jim had to drag me away to a New Year's Day party at the house of a friend. I did not enjoy myself because my mind kept working it's way back down to New Orleans worrying while the sorriest excuse for a pile of strange foolishly preening self-focused Gringos kept yammering on about inanities around me.  Life has been a pile of more strange involving deaths since the first of the year. Jim's aunt Ramona died, his last living relative from his parents generation. Tomorrow I ta...