The Sea is a Salty One

  The hummingbird that visits every morn. I finally got a photo of him two days ago. Today I was back at the doctor's office, down to the clinic, where I got to see Baby Doctor. He's so young and so cute, the kid brother of my once and future neurologist who treated me for my stroke, and who's about to see me for my balance confloptions. Baby Doctor is so so nice too.  I had to stop by because while my asthma finally backed off I've been having one heck of a sinus infection in the aftermath that is refusing to respond to garlic pills, my usual treatment. My right eye that swelled shut the other day, and did the same thing in the poodle aftermath looks like I went a couple of rounds in the boxing ring, swollen, red and painful. Nose infected. Damn, I'm fallen apart. Infected upper respiratory stuff in the wake of the bouts of asthma. This happens if the attack is severe enough, and gets provoked again, sinus infection, infection in the eyes and nose. Nose I have the ...

  A rainbow yesterday from the edge of our property. Reminds me of promises. A few dark days here. Not because of anything here. Everything here in paradise continues on in its proscribed ways. Jim teaches, he edits things, he frets over the painting job the last Ticos we hired did. The Tico that tried to move in with us right before Thanksgiving has reappeared in phone calls begging Jim to bail him out of jail. I do my usual things, including planting my new garden frame with every kind of flower instead of veggies. Okay, I planted more American corn. We stay home all the time because of the climbing way too high Covid rates in Costa Rica. It's not India, but if this keeps up it will be. No beds left for Covid patients in the hospitals. So why are the days dark? Two words one name. Josh Duggar. Yesterday especially. I got offline for the entire afternoon and evening instead of spending a bit of time in the morning and checking in during afternoon and evening a few times. The diape...

  New Year's Eve surfing at Playa Avellanas. A beautiful sunset. We have the prettiest sunsets in dry season. So we knew today was going to be insane. The traffic experienced a significant uptick starting late Friday. The government of Costa Rica pretty much shuts down the week of Easter (Semana Santa), and everyone decamps for the beach, turning our narrow one road in and out of Tama into gridlock. No parking, no nothing.  We had things we could not put off, I needed crayons, which were hard to find here, only at the bookstore. So Jim dropped me at the bookstore and went to the bank. I walked around town to get my necessities, I'm trying to put together a batiked altar cloth for church, and cannot get the encaustic wax I need for that, so I'm improvising, making my own with pigments, wax and melted crayons. We dealt with the crazy crowds, got what we needed and hightailed it down one of the dirt backroads. The rivers have dried up to the point where all the roads, even whe...

  And here we are again. Last night I got over a hundred emails in my spam filter. This is my old email box that is connected to No Longer Quivering, and nothing else. I have filters in it that send different types of emails into differing folders. The spam filter catches anything that seems squishy. I would rarely get much in it during my time at No Longer Quivering, the occasion "Dear Friend, I am the wife of General Ngbogo of the Nigerian Army and he has left me millions of dollars I will share with you, kind friend." I checked the filter every time I accessed the box, but besides the few Nigerian come ons there was rarely anything in it. That all changed once I started speaking out against Without a Crystal Ball's Katie Joy Paulson. Suddenly I started reaching a flood of spam emails. Being signed up for magazines, insurance quotes, shipping notices for free marijuana gummies and other goods and services. And oh boy, porn, porn, porn and more porn. I feel sorry for ...

 Si, so here we are again....   This afternoon Katie Joy announced that she'd been contacted by "The Dr. Phil Show" They want her to be a guest. Most of her detractors said it was not true. But I know it is. I know of at least five different attempts by people I know to get the show to take a look at her, her lies and her various insane claims and plots. I've seen copies of three of those email contact forms, screen caps of what was said.  Those are just the few I know of in my own friends group. Likely the total was much higher. No names, but they were contacted. She just stated that she's not going to do it. I am disappointed. I would have thought she's not turn down a chance to abase herself on a grand scale in her chase for clicks and coins. To call out her hating haters that hate, allegedly. Still not sure I believe she would turn this down. Then Saltzy dropped another legal brief and Emily D Baker read it. Turns out to be the most insane one yet. The s...

 It appears we are here again, and I wanted to rant about church and religion instead. There's a lot going down in the local religious community that is so wrong and toxic. Today will not be that day, sadly enough.   A few days ago someone I never heard of before popped up on my YouTube channel. They weren't the usual brain dead person who does not like me telling me I am "Teh Evilz". It was someone making the allegation that Emily D. Baker and Tati Westbrook knew each other, were in league to ruin Katie Joy's life and that they both knew Michael Saltz, Tati's attorney. Some sort of evil cabal and conspiracy according to this poster.  I did screen shots before erasing the comment, because I cannot stand conspiracy theories like some stupid QAnon codswallop. I have no time for bullspit in the middle of more bullspittle. Posting them on Twitter I suggested the long ranty nature of the comment reminded me of Katie Joy. I never said it was her, just that is soun...

 Bet you don't know what song this blog title is from. A rather grainy photo I took last year of a Yellow Naped Amazon parrot in our grapefruit trees. The trees are starting to produce and I awoke this morning to the parrots making their first raid on the trees, and hummingbirds circling the blooming fruit trees here. A peaceful start to a morn. Today was pretty average for the kinds of things we do here daily. We couldn't go anywhere because under the new tighter pandemic restrictions we could not drive our cars today. I hate seeing more lockdown, but understand the why. Too bad we're not tourists, tourists are still allowed carte blanche to go anywhere and drive any place. Spread that Covid, honey. We swam, I used my hot glue gun to fix various things, and I gardened. So exciting, not. I did get to see and here a black billed Toucan in the back yard snacking on our Starfruit tree. Took down the Christmas tree. It didn't start off so well though. Jim, in his perpetual ...

 And so here we are yet again. Another day, another pile of things spilling from Katie Joy of Without a Crystal Ball's lips that sound like lies.   Why this time? Some nonsense involving a moderator of hers who has been apparently masquerading to do videos against her that went by the nom de plume Tea Detox. Frankly, I think the ones that need detox are the viewers of the content of Katie and Tea Detox.  I've been out of the KJ loop because I know when my emotional health is important. Since leaving Patheos and No Longer Quivering I'm trying to find my sea legs, newly structure my day, and get back into the routine of swimming and riding my bike daily along with other writing projects. Change is hard. Sometimes it's just like that Jimmy Buffett song about Hurricane Katrina "Breath In, Breath Out, Move On" Not that this time is as hard as post-Katrina is, or was. Katrina was particularly bad. I have to see if I can scare up my New Orleans photos from the terr...

 Here we are again.   One of the Roloff's released a statement about sexual abuse that happened to them as a underaged person and Katie Joy has jumped on that like a starving piranha on a pile of rancid corndogs. Klassy! Yet again she makes someone else's trauma into her way to make money.  Let me say this again for the terminally clueless - someone elses sexual trauma, as a child or an adult, is not gossip fodder for someone else. I swear I get sick to my stomach every single time Katie reports on something like this, rapacious, rapturous expression on her odd little face. She seems almost sexually excited, like the words of the confession have invoked a spontaneous orgasm in her. It's quite uncomfortable to watch her exploit someone elses pain for clicks and coins. Trauma is not tea.

Big Iggy just walked up to me in our yard. He's four feet long and suddenly not afraid of us. I had a head nodding conversation with him. Bet you didn't know I speak iguana.  Back years ago when I was in one of my social work positions I worked with a 21 year old girl who styled herself as a rapper named "LoLo Ballz" Clearly this was not her real name. She was a very attractive girl with waist length wavy chestnut hair, a petite figure and a pretty face. If you'd have been casting a teen movie you might have cast her as the ditzy Valley Girl sort of friend. LoLo was harmless, but she used to just stress me the heck out every single time I had to interact with her. It wasn't just that she did things like interrupt a IEP (Individual Educational Plan) meeting to shout, "Quick! Quick! Can someone explain how you give a blowjob!" The blowjob thing is a long story involving an inappropriate relationship with a married man she worried would cheat on her wit...

 Yes indeedy doo! Here we are again! I think that from now on when I refer to Ms. Without a Moral Compass I'm going to have to separate it out from my life, and do it's very own "Sayin' Don't Make It So" post. Several full days of WAMC twittering on and on about bombs and yesterday evening the reply to the Tati Westbrook lawsuit hit our hot little hands. It's a doozy, but what it wasn't is a bomb, more like a pack of those cheap Black Cat firecrackers you forget in the back of the junk drawer. When you remember you have them and try to light the package it fizzles out. The reply tried to claim that there was no jurisdiction in Seattle over the gal whose name they could not even keep straight in the reply, referring to her as "Katie Joy", "Katherine Paulson" and "Kathryn Manske Paulson" at different times. KJ claims that there's no jurisdiction because she does not believe that Tati lived in Seattle during many of t...

 Last night after Without a Moral Compass moaned about taking a four day internet break she posted this: Vaguely hinting around about being suicidal. I hoped she was just being her manipulative self, but I've been seriously worried by the Tsunami that is Suenami going around. She's started to act more like her slim hold on sanity is slipping. People stepped up to call law enforcement to ask for a well check after the suicide threat and we get this: She makes a vague threat of suicide, then get upset when people take it seriously and want to make sure she hasn't carried through on the threat. Apparently this is all a game to her. But here's the deal. In this difficult time dealing with Covid, not seeing friends and family and all the other struggles for money, to keep a roof over ones head it's not something that could or should be treated as an idle threat. Just in the last few months I have had several friends here in my small Costa Rican community kill themselves....

 There's an old R & B song I love by the above title. I can only find a recent remake by Duke Robillard. The version I love was recorded back in the 1940s, and was on a blues compendium CD I used to have. One of the early lines in the song always makes me laugh "I'd believe you better baby if your wig wasn't on so tight" . It's a song that speaks of folks that make ridiculous lying claims and the singer knows better.   Back in the mid aughts when I worked at a large clinic across the parking lot from a hospital we got to see a lot of crazy examples of this. One regular patient showed up staggering and babbling, either having some sort of seizures or a stroke. We were so worried that one of the doctors ordered him loaded in the clinic wheelchair and he was pushed across the parking lot to the emergency room and admitted for suspected stroke. His problem? He was high on meth, and starting to have seizures. To this day he swears he didn't take drugs. Su...

 So I've slept well, I've had breakfast and  enough coffee to float a panga down the estuary. Which is why I'm using a photo of the actual estuary minus the pangas for today. That boat is too big to be a simple panga. It's a tourist boat taking people out to see the crocodiles. We're going to look at two particular human crocodiles this morning here. Katie Joy and her simp Unirock. I have been utterly fascinated these past two weeks since it was announced that Tati Westbrook would be suing Katie Joy of Without a Crystal Ball for defamation. I figured eventually someone would do this. You cannot dig that hard into someone else's background, trying to obtain birth certificates and the like, and tossing about old rumors involving the death of a loved one as fact without there being some legal pushback. For the record I know exactly zilch about Tati. I don't follow the beauty bloggers in any way, shape or form. Since my diagnosis of mcas 13 years ago makeup and ...

  Approaching the first checkpoint at the Nicaragua-Costa Rica border at Penas Blancas. Shot last March during my hurried border run trip to keep my drivers license valid. This currently is a thing of the past. At least for now during the pandemic. Last night I came to a decision about where my personal borders are. My boundaries. For the past ten days we've all been chuckling over the graphically bizarre hot mess that is Katie Joy versus Tati Westbrook. I willingly admit, I've joined in on the delicious schadenfreude nature of the lawsuit and the paperwork, and the speculations. But I am stopping right here, right now. Why? Easy. I think, after viewing her live streams of the past week, especially last night, we're all just poking the deranged badger with the sharp spoon. It's just making the badger even more crazed. In my humble opinion. Not saying this is all 100% factual, this is just my view from the mean girls squad. My opinion only. Just like what is below is jus...

  After the tension of yesterday and my tossing and turning all night mixed with Jim's nightmares what I did today was nap. I napped through the work crew replacing our glass doors. I napped through lunch and dinner. I napped hard. Now I'm sleepy again. Stinky napped on top of me much of the day. So relieved to get up this morning and see that counting the mailed in votes is starting to turn some of the red states blue, and that Joe Biden currently stands at 263 electoral votes with more than a few states still counting those mail ins.  Also relieved we've had no real violence yet. I've seen footage of a few rallies around counting centers, but no gunfire yet. I was so worried about the violence at this time. Worried that they would have voter intimidation at the polls. Our long national nightmare is easing for now. I got up a few minutes ago to take a shower and get ready for bed, chuckle, chuckle, I don't know how I slept all day and now am as sleepy as if I worke...

    Just sitting around in my teak Tico leather rocker enjoying some sweet, sweet, sweet delicious schadenfreude!  I bounced around today between bouts of joy while dealing with talking to friends with some pretty severe issues today. I talked to three of my best friends, trying not to giggle while listening to some dilemmas. Today was my last piece for No Longer Quivering. I was happy, peaceful and content over it, feeling like the circle has come around and I've done what I need for my health and writing my book. So happy I took the step, but that's not why I laughed all day after discovering something yesterday. Why am I laughing? Karma, baby, sweet karmic realignment to someone that surely deserves it mixed with some vindication.  One Katie Joy of Without a Crystal Ball, former friend through work at Patheos. She's being sued by Tati Westbrook, another YouTuber. I haven't followed the entire Tati and Katie story. I do know that Katie has been 'reporting' on ...

 Monday started off okay. Our monkeys showed up just outside our windows and walls, closest yet. I talked to the insurance company who told me they would pay 85 percent of Jim's hospital bill if we used the Liberia hospital. So we scampered off for Jim to do the pre op bloodwork, the EKG, the COVID test and the xray. Show up at the hospital, met at the door by the nurse with a handy dandy temperature gizmo. Pop a 101 temp. I had to trot back out to the car, and read a book while Jim did his pre op. Which I was nervous about, rightly it turns out. I handle all the insurance. By the time Jim came back out an hour later it was all bolloxed up, changed around. The insurance company refused to pay for the pre op, saying there was no indication that this surgery was necessary. Upshot now after two full days going back and forth with the hospitals, doctors and insurances. Jim is not having surgery tomorrow in Liberia, but in a week and a half in San Jose. That five hours away San Jose. Ou...

 I stumbled across this and copious pages of claims and replies earlier today. So now she thinks Jim Bob Duggar is obsessed with her? Knitta please! He may know who she is. Old Jim Bob does seem to keep track of the family detractors. I know that from meeting him during the book tour for the book that the four eldest daughters wrote. I introduced myself, told him who I was, and he said he knew already. C'est la vie! But there were no insults, or naughty words hurled. We were both unfailingly polite, as one should be with those one disagrees with. But to make the claim that she has somehow shamed Jim Bob into doing anything is pure delusional. This is a man that loves him a cease and desist order almost as much as she does. I am guessing any editing out of Jill and Derick's sons has more to do with the fact that there are no signed release forms on file any longer with TLC. Oh girl, knock it off! You're starting to look a teensy bit unbalanced here. Somebody is going to have...

The roots of an enormous tree near the turn for the nearest grocery store.  Yesterday was primarily given up to shopping for folks here still under quarantine for exposure to Covid. Thankfully I think the quarantine lifts late this week. Shopping here is quite a task. I was explaining it earlier to a Stateside friend. In the States it wasn't unusual to have to hit Aldis, Trader Joes and then Wegmans to fill your list at a good price. Here it can be more complex, here, like there, you can break down and buy everything, well, mostly everything, at one place. But like the States some items are only at certain stores and if you want the best price you have to divide up the list. Meats - This is one I will not cheap. There are much cheaper meat places, but only the heavenlies know for sure what's in their meats. I use only the USDA inspected places here, getting all my meat at either Auto Mercado (expensive place with foods from around the world), or over at the wholesale meat mark...