The Sea is a Salty One

We survived the flight, the memorial, and the trip home. No, I did not mud wrestle Mrs. Satan. I did drink a lot of tequila. But we still had behaving badly relatives and for once it was not either Mrs. Satan or I even if she did wear a rather questionable dress to the graveside service. Very flashy to the point of almost inappropriate. Not that many others dressed like society usually demands you do for a funeral. But none of them wore attention-getting get ups either. I wore my expensive black lace dress and was clearly very overdressed by today's funeral standards. My mother did not show up for the service, which was awesome because I know I would have been treated to a many months long rant on the evils of violating Miss Manner's and the Junior League's ideas on funereal splendor. I consider the issue really a non-issue. Wear what you want even if family members will snicker over it for ages, like the entire family still does over the low cut nearly red dress my m...

So I'm supposed to be packing for the funeral trip right now, cleaning the cat box, making sure there is fresh bed linens on the spare bedroom's bed for the house sitter. What have I been doing? Watching the monkeys instead. This morning instead of the usual lone ancient howler monkey that lives on our hillside he showed up with his entire troop, babies, mamas and himself. I was fascinated. They were up in the trees just beyond my patio. I sat outside much of the day, watching the babies climb up and down and the adults flop down on the branches to snooze. Endlessly entertaining instead of shoving clothing into a suitcase for a trip I have no desire to take. Tried to take photos but it's dark in the trees. I put a few grainy edited ones on Facebook of the howlers. We've already run into some crazy schedule hassles. The airline changed our flight to an earlier one so now into the three hour layover to get through customs in Dallas we have a four and a 1/2 hour layo...

Yeah, it's the middle of the night. Yeah, I'm up. Why? I cannot sleep because I'm doing some pre-memorial service worrying. A week from today we will be state side while a house sitter lives in our Tamarindo home to feed the kitty, water my sad attempt at a vegetable garden and keep random locals from breaking in and stealing our crappy tiny television. There will finally be a memorial service from my Maw in Law, who passed in mid October while we were also state side. We wanted the funeral and memorial service to take place while we were there in October. Even our kids flew out to Texas in anticipation of a funeral. My husband's brother and his second wife, Mrs. Satan. insisted we not hold the funeral then, but do it the week between Christmas and New Years. Great, just what I always wanted to do, give up two holidays and pay outrageously inflated airline fare on the busiest week of high tourist season here in Costa Rica. We dickered back and forth a few times on...

I've not posted in awhile I realize. It's been days of guests, dealing with getting our investments moved here, days on the beach, well most days on the beach. Sometimes I have to stop and do things like laundry, buy groceries, slide on down to the chicken shack and the fruit stand. That's between having mojitos and chifrijos on the beach. Playa Conchal, Playa Avellanas, Playa Danta, Playa Langosta, Playa Brasolita, Playa Grande and many more visited. I'm as brown as a leather satchel without wrinkles now. I've swam daily in the Pacific Ocean. One day I stood on a high cliff over the ocean and viewed an endless vista of beaches tucked into mountain coves. During the run up week to Christmas I had one of those most unique Costa Rican experiences. I went to the local bullfights at the festivals every village throws in mid December. They build the bullring from scratch every year with trucked in lumber, haul in carnival rides, cotton candy makers and other yummy ...

I haven't posted in a while because of a few things. One of the coming changes with Google Ads means I had to make a big change to how I am posting at No Longer Quivering. I had to think about how I was going to accomplish this change and it took me a good month to decide how to handle the changes coming. I finally did come up with a new working model but I've not managed to update daily like I have been for years. Truthfully I am going to have to decide if working as the admin over at NLQ is even worthwhile any longer for a number of reasons, like the new changes which are much more time consuming, dealing with a plethora of Russian trolls coming into the comments daily while attempting to use NLQ's comment space to build their reputation so that they will be able to post whatever propaganda they want later. All the email addresses are coming off a Yandex server, all don't post any original comments, they copy and paste someone else's comments in that same thread...

We finally picked up our car on Monday. I'd left it at my mother's house for pickup to ship here to Costa Rica in late June. Discovered when I got to Mom's that my title didn't state that the car was free and clear so they refused to ship it until I got another title from the state of Virginia with a stamp and signature certifying that there were zero liens against the car to be sent to my mother. She was supposed to let me know when she had the new title and I would call the shipping company for a new pickup date. The title took almost a full month to get to her. She and the shipping agent whose English is not the greatest did not understand each other so there was some delay and we missed the July date due to the misunderstanding. It finally left the port of New Orleans in late August - arriving at the port of Limon in early October. Then we had that hurricane and had to go to the States for Jim's mother taking a turn for the worse, delaying pickup even more. ...

I wasn't going to share this story any longer. But the Louis C.K. news and news of so many others being exposed as sexual predators has triggered me so badly that I'm vomiting up my tale of sexual weirdness with a well known comedian yet again. My family knows it. They witnessed a fair part of this too. My eldest child who is now in her forties was involved in this episode too. Neither of us took it laying down. A tale from the late   90s/early 00s. This was right around the time when I first started questioning what I'd learn at my old church, around the time of the yoga incident and the cracks were first starting to appear in my evangelicalism. How badly was I impacted? I'd gone back to work against all advice of our pastor and everyone I knew at church, not as a social worker, but I was working in the national licensing office in the D.C. area, working helping others obtain nationally recognized licensure. One of the things that happened to me there was that th...

On Saturday morning our possessions from the States finally arrived! Delivered by a nice Costa Rican man who spoke no English. Jim speaks Spanish pretty well, but I've still not far past my ugly American one semester in college Spanish. I can get around, I can shop, I can find the restroom, but not much beyond that. But between the three of us we managed to communicate plenty well enough while unloading the truck and putting the boxes in one of the spare bedrooms. In a few minutes flat we had the 31 boxes of household things we'd shipped down. the largest amount being kitchenware and art supplies. I worked like a grunt all day Saturday unpacking boxes and washing the contents. I'd forgotten from our other overseas moves that the USA. some shipping by boat companies and other countries frequently insist that your boxes all be fumigated before they are loaded. Ours obviously were, and I reacted, it was wheezy day. Pleased we didn't have more broken items. The ones tha...

Last week we got a kitten, a poor miserable tiny kitten who the vet named Negrito - meaning 'Little Black One'. His markings look like someone stood over him and poured black paint over his white fur. We got him at the veterinarian clinic that also does animal rescue across the street an down a little bit from our home here near Tamarindo. Here he is the first day: Silly little thing! We'd met the vet and her assistant during Tropical Storm Nate hitting this area. As the rains got stronger and weaker and stronger again they showed up on our doorstep wanting permission to leave food out for strays on our spacious tiled porch. Of course we said yes, and got to talking about animal rescue, how I ended up involved in it by default when people started dumping stray animals behind my home in the States. We told her we'd already decided we had to have a cat when we get back from our trip. Get back we did, and yes, I visited my new friend the vet, who had a crate of f...

We're getting our car and our boxes this week and I'm doing a happy dance! I've been living with a handful of belongings since 4 months ago. Imagining having only four or five outfits and one pair of shoes. I've been living out of a suitcase that long, and while it feels very refreshing not to be held back by possessions I cannot wait to get my stuff. I'll be able to paint again..mmmuhhahaha! The hold up has been because of a couple of factors: Overseas shipping isn't cheap so I didn't book one of the services that brings your stuff to you in a week. I went with a cheaper alternative. I knew I would be okay living for at least a few months without our things. Jim used to be in the military and we did a few big international moves. Which remind me, when the moving company picked up my boxes they exclaimed over how perfectly packed everything was. I laughed and told them this was not my first overseas move rodeo. I shipped the boxes at the very last secon...

Upon reaching my children's condo I slept in hard the next morning, sleeping so hard that I missed a couple of phone calls from Jim. When I called him back around 11am he told me that while sleeping at the Fort Lauderdale airport around 2 am he received a call telling him that his mother had just died. Thanks to Mrs. Satan and TSA he didn't get there in time. If they had just said sure come on over two weeks before, or agreed to help him get from the airport somehow to the nursing home (way too far for a cab, over and hour) he could have seen his mother before she passed. Ran through my errands, getting stuff for Costa Rica and taking care of banking and investment tasks before myself, our son and daughter got on a plane for San Antonio. We booked a hotel for the week after taking care to make sure all three of us had funeral appropriate clothing. Telling the kids was hard, I think our son took it the worse, he was struggling not to cry. When we arrived in San Antonio Jim m...

Sunday Oct. 8th ..and of course nothing goes smoothly. We took the 1 am flight from San Jose, Costa Rica yesterday no problem and slept the entire flight. Get to Fort Lauderdale with a 90 minute turn around time to catch our other flights, Customs and baggage has been told that the flight is filled with folks that got stranded in Costa Rica due to Hurricane Nate and they wave us on through so that there's plenty of time to make the connecting flights. We get to TSA security and it all goes haywire. I discover with some horror that my ticket does not have that usual security designation we always have -  TSA Precheck designation and started going right into a panic attack, no one from that particular Costa Rican flight has it and we get held up at security, I am starting to cry and panic now because it's been four days of crazy travel and almost no sleep. I get one person from the front of the line and  beg the supervisor to have mercy and let us through. He look...

Saturday, Oct 7th There's really no sleeping on the vinyl chairs of the airport, no matter how plush the blankets and pillows. We spent the night at the Liberia airport even though there were no flights going out to the US until afternoon the next day. Strangely enough, even with zero flights or activity in the darkened and mostly abandoned airport the P.A. System kept blaring out announcements, like warning you not to bring 10K in cash in or out of the country and that it's forbidden to bring seashells out of the country (oops! I've done that!). The announcements blared out every 15 minutes all night long! You'd finally drift off to sleep only be to jolted wide awake by an altogether too cheerful voice loudly warning you about various regulations.                                       Jim s...

Friday, October 6 th – Still in Tamarindo When we got up in the morning we had electricity and water, but no cable or internet or access to cell phone towers. We still could not call anything at the airlines. We had breakfast and settled in for another day without much to do. But the heavy rains ended a full day earlier than anticipated, the sun started peeking out from behind dark clouds. It seemed like everyone in town had taken to the muddy streets. Mid morning I decided to walk over into Villareal proper, to the closest grocery store, one run by a Chinese family that stocked a crazy variety of things. I needed to get Jim a pair of flipflops because his sneakers were still soaked through from the day before. Plus the storm had turned my already dying umbrella into a twisted unusable wreck. They had shoes for Jim but the only umbrellas bore images of Spiderman, so I passed on the umbrella and bought a raincoat instead. Plus I ended up with something even more valua...

I left off yesterday with us at a tiny casual restaurant on Thursday, October 5 th . Continuing on. This was the point where I finally found enough cell phone towers to call out. Coverage was down in Tamarindo along with everything else. I called our airline to tell them we were never going to be able to get to San Jose for the flight. I wanted to reschedule for Saturday or Sunday because the battery operated radio in the cafe had announced that Costa Rican president Solis had declared a state of emergency, ordering everyone to stay home and off the roads until further notice because of all the downed trees, flooding and washed out roads. I'd been watching right up until we lost power the weather sites and updates on this airlines own website, seeing nothing about my flight, but noting that they'd already announced that anyone flying their airline out of New Orleans or Mexico later in the week would be able to reschedule their tickets for free because of the app...

A lot has happened this month that does not involve internet trolls. Hurricane Nate hit Costa Rica just as we were trying to get home for medical appointments, banking and investment business and family visits. It did not go well, and then we got word as we were sleeping at the San Jose airport that my Maw in Law was at the end of her days. Things went nuttier from then, including a hurried trip to Texas and a family death. These are my notes hand written on those days sleeping at various airports. Going to take days to unpack. Thursday, October 5 th , 2017 – Tamarindo Costa Rica Today seems to fully encapsulate the frustrations and challenges of living as an expat in Costa Rica. It's been raining for days off and on as a tropical depression formed off the eastern edge of the country in the Caribbean. We have been told that in addition to the usual rains of the rainy season we are getting high winds and heavy rain bands that started Tuesday night, just as we climbed in...