The Sea is a Salty One

Well the Hell Bert fall out happened quickly yesterday. As I was sleepily shuffling towards my French press and fresh coffee Hell Bert sent Jim a message that he had to have 80 dollars immediately. No explanations, just the same demands for moolah as last year. It finally dawned on Jim that nothing  has changed, Hell Bert is exactly the same scamming scummy guy he always was. But now Jim sees it. This morning brought another set of pleas from Hell Bert, right down to claiming the extra 3 mil Jim paid him was a 'tip', or a reembursement for the meals I refused to provide. I have always said the best predictor of future behavior is past behavior. We all do it, we slip into what we know, even if it does not work because it's more comfortable to keep doing the same thing than to try something different. Yesterday started with me driving Jim around to the electric company and to get keys made. Our electric bill was high, but Jim refuses to accept it was high last month bec...

You would think that after nearly 33 years of marriage that it would have finally dawned on Jim that the middle of the night and the very early morning is so not the time to have a discussion with me about anything serious. Last night I passed out about 9:30, just exhausted from dealing with this awful cold for the last week. Around midnight Jim decides to try and talk to me about what I do not know. All because I sighed and turned over in the bed in a moment of slight almost almost awakeness. Jim: "Hey, whata you think about blahblah blah? I think we should do blah, blah, blah.." Me: "Huh? Potato. Leamington. Faffleafngoi @#(*%6" Jim : "No really, what do you think:" Me: ***SNORE****** Followed by shuffling along around 7 am, making a direct bee line for my French coffee press, not much more awake than I was last night. I do not have conversations before coffee. I just feel super cranky, like being a serial killer is a completely doable idea. J...

We did end up getting a new sofa, a blue one. Just a couple of problems. Jim is still in a huge orthopedic thingie on the left side of his body. I am still being felled by the cold from hell so it made for a miserable shopping day and drive from Tamarindo. By the end I just did not even care any longer because I felt too sick to care. We ended up getting a blue sofa with no arms, that can be folded down easily into a bed and the coordinating chair in various shades of blue. We just did not realize that the sofa was so.. soo... small until we got it home. It looks puny and tiny in the living room, like kids furniture. Maybe I need a second one, two facing each other, I don't know, I just know it's not quite right. Don't get me wrong! I love it. It just might be better suited for the guesthouse, which needs a new sofa too. It may be back to the furniture stores soon.

One of the few things I insisted upon after Jim's hospitalization is that we fly back to Tamarindo instead of taking that five hour bus ride back. I kept remember how much I puked on the ride back from my stroke, not looking forward to Jim and his bulky orthopedic appliances being on th at bus. I sensed he might have as horrible a time as I did. I insisted on the flight, went online to find and book two seats on one of the commuter tree hopper flights for Easter Sunday. Throughout Jim's time in the hospital he kept crowing that he thought he'd lost a lot of weight. His weight has been mostly up since we moved to CR and their delicious versions of junk food. I've lost some more, Jim's gained. I couldn't figure out why he would think that when he was ordering up a hot cocoa from dietary a few times a day. He laid in the bed and he ate. The big shocker for Jim  happened when we rolled up for our flight. Here in Costa Rica when you take those small tree hopper...

I have returned from days in San Jose at Jim's bedside with a cold from hell. I cannot think straight, I just cannot function at all. Except in one capacity. I have been scrubbing like a fiend! My rubber flip flops, my purse, my toiletry bottles, anything that accompanied us to San Jose for Jim's surgery at the Metropolitano. Jim fell off a short step ladder on Thursday at noon, maybe two feet, onto the soft grass outside of the guest house when he was painting. He broke the part of his shoulder that is like a cup, holding the head of the arm in. Broke in two places. Lifeflighted to the city, three days in the hospital, and he's fine. I am amazed at how quickly he is recovering. Somehow I picked up a cold there, and cannot even sit up for more than an hour without having to go crash. Making up for the  missing sleep in the hospital I guess. One of the things I picked up in the States in December was a big bottle of Hibiclens. It's the scrub you must use when you h...

Back before I met my husband I worked at a chair restaurant. One big in the South and South West and prided itself on home cooked style foods. Ever now and then upper management would come up with some bullshit programs to try to increase employee moral and better service goals. Even all the way back them I was sort of snarky and sarcastic. I remember they did a program with a name like 'Warm and Fuzzy' and if you were found to be doing something friendly and personable for the customers you'd get a piece of pompom called an actual 'Warm and Fuzzy' stuck to your name tag. I remember rolling my eyes then and chortling out that if the company was really interested in improving moral they would have taken the amount they blew on this program and given all of us bonuses instead of a childish 'atta boy' in the form of those silly fluffy pompoms. I had no use for bullshit then and I do not have any tolerance for it now. Lately it seems like the bullshit leve...

Sometimes I am reminded just how really small our world is, at the same time that it's big. Whenever I travel I am reminded. We are all the same, with the same needs both physical and emotion. We all  have to eat, we all need to be loved. We all have dreams. I think in this divisive time of Trump and others is is important to realize this. It's just too easy to think we're this or that, and none of us has connections to the world at large. Two things stand out this week to remind me of our deep interconnectness. Sunday night was the season 8 premiere of "Game of Thrones" I have to say I have really enjoyed interacting with GoT fans from around the world. I've been in deep discussions this week with friends from the Muslim world that love GoT. Sweet ladies with head coverings. Men who normally limit their interaction with unknown women. They are hardly the only people group I've had contact this week, but we were all saying just the other day that if w...

Seriously sunburned right now. Me who never burns. Why? Earlier last week I went to an animal rescue with my daughter and they invited me to volunteer since I'm local and I have animal rescue experience, big bird handling. I have, I have worked a few hours there over two days. The first day was wonderful preparing foods for the animals and feeding them. I got to bottle feed a baby sloth. The second day? Hmm, not so much. I got sunburned very quickly out in the smoky haze and overcast afternoon I spend traipsing about in the bush trying to wrangle various animals in the path of a fire. We went to the edge of the fire in the marimba woods to meet with firefighters and other animal rescue folks to scoop up a frightened (and very fast) youngish scorched coatimundi and a few other animals. It was a comedy of errors that took way way too long. We could have made a comedy skit out of all the crazy stuff that happened. I ended up with sunburned lips, backs of my knees, backs of my ...

I have reappeared. My adult children were here for six days and I have been busy. Today things have returned almost to normal. I've gotten all the extra bedding and towels washed and put away, the house straightened up and the kitchen cleaned. Tomorrow I tackle the guesthouse. Still sweeping out sand. We have half of the sand in Tamarindo in the house. My kids do not like me talking about them here. The visit was lovely. My daughter saw our dentist and we came up with a treatment plan. Enjoyed seeing both of them immensely. But there is something good to be said about returning to routine too. Cannot swim nude or sit in the hot tub sans clothing with visitors. Sadly I am rather sunburned, something that has very rarely happened to me. I think it was the antibiotic I was one.

I clocked an American tourist with my car tonight, and I cannot blame it on the pain pills I take for my newly infected foot. Yeah, MRSA again. I am SUCH an old lady. Actually the tourist clocked my car. Tonight after a particularly long and goofy worship team rehearsal I had errands to run in Tamagringo. It's high season, and the town is very tourist filled, so much so it is putting a strain on the local electrical company and the water system. But I still had to get colones and dollars at the bank and make a run to the fruit stand. Once I got into Tama one of those golf carts pulled out from a side street in front of me. I could see that the golf cart was a biggie and very bigly overloaded. The bench seat up front held 3 or 4 folks, the back seat the same, and the bench over the back bumper held 4 more. One dude was standing, feet on the back bumper, hanging off the golf cart ceiling, jumping about and acting a fool. As soon as I saw this my naturally inherited from my moth...

My kids arrive in a few days so I'm in frantic finish redecorating and placing the last of our possessions where they go. While I'm doing that Jim is running about trying to get his motorcycle running now that it's finally been delivered. I've semi joking said "Just call me Widow T" to a few friends because I really worry about him driving it in the crazy clusterfuck of stupidity that is driving in Costa Rica. Saturday we did that necessary evil that is the border run. Costa Rica only allows you to stay 90 days on a tourist visa and we're still gathering all the oddments of paperwork we need to apply to be residents. I don't mind doing a border run since we're less than two hours from the border. What I do mind is the huge plethora of bloggers with inaccurate info that they have posted online about the border run up to Penas Blancas. I'm looking at you My Tanned Feet! Because my mind is more the strange playground than a steel trap I coul...

Get up this morning after very little sleep to that most annoying no sleep problem. Crazy blood pressure numbers. Crying, laying down and copious pills brought it down, but pretty much shot the day. I felt too much like shit to do a thing, I didn't even show up for my fund raiser shift. I sent my regrets. Pretty sure I will not be missed because the night before they had so many volunteers they were tripping over each other. The only thing real I did all day besides crash after getting the blood pressure numbers to come down after about 30 minutes was take Stinky to the vet. At least I tried. Our regular vet, a lovely lady from Spain directly across the street from our old rental house, said she was going out of business. She's closing up her office, selling everything and no longer offering what Stinky needed, his shots and yearly exam. It's bad enough when we take Stinky there, and he knows and loves that vet. It's still a ballet of flailing cat limbs trying to av...

The last week has been emptying those boxes, sorting putting away, and dealing with the unfun part of moving. I knew that the customs, aduana, was thieving here in Costa Rica. My first shipment of household goods of 40 boxes left us missing a set of large metal mixing bowls, a dozen linen kitchen towels back in November 2017. This time it was everything of value. It's been hard to take. We've been busy documenting the empty boxes and thievery. You can only cry over something just so long because it gets overwhelming and stupid. I have reached the crying no more stage. Jim finally finished painting the outside of the house. I took an afternoon to paint two murals on the walls past the windows outside of our guest bedrooms. I haven't painted in ages and it's been literal years since I did a mural on concrete. But I'm pleased by how both turned out. Today was baking for a fundraiser. One of the local private schools is trying to raise funding for a bridge...

Today started awful. I was almost throwing up my coffee it was so bad. The shipping company delivered the last of our household goods. The company delivered the wrong damn boxes. Remember back in November when we went, sorted out our boxes to figure out which ones to keep Recap: Nearly a year ago I went back to the states, sorted out all of things in storage, splitting into piles for going to the dump, dropping stuff off at Goodwill, that friends and relatives would soon pick, and lastly boxes to ship to us in Costa Rica. I paid the realtor selling the house pretty handsomely to get a crew to load those boxes into a container. The realtor waited for no one, have everything, trash, kids things, an abundance of things Goodwill was to get, and the things we wanted. Once the shipping container reached Costa Rica and the contents list did not match we had issues, but were told 'we get everything by paying a big fine. A 3 month strike in customs on unimportant person possessions and ...

We're still engaged in the paintathon here, which is why I haven't been posted. I've been painting the master bedroom. While I was able to knock out the other bedrooms in one afternoon each the master was a bit more problematic. More like two seven hour stretches and now I'm cleaning up the painting mess in there. Our bedroom  is huge, with one full wall being taken up with a twenty foot picture window. There's a dressing room, a portion with a tv and rocking chairs. It took time. I haven't been sleeping well because I've been sleeping in one of the smaller bedrooms because of the smell, which is thankfully fading due to the fact that I've cracked open those enormous windows. I cried at church Sunday and have been mostly out of sorts because of the paint fume inhaling and my asthma. Today my blood pressure is way way up from the lack of sleeping. Guess what I am saying is that it hasn't taken  much to ruin my cha-cha, and it's definitely be...

Today Jim and I were invited out to one of Jim's friends houses to look at their homemade furniture, custom made by some Tico artist. We're in the middle of the great remodel and Jim has been raving about the furnishings at his friend's house. I was very much less than enthusiastic about going. This is the same 'friend' we first met back in August that acted like a total and complete jerk the first time I met him and gave me the lecture on our weight. Ain't nobody got time for that. Plus Jim tells me every time he stops by this dude's house the guy is in the stupid clutches of Fox News. I definitely  have no time for that! But we went this morning, around ten am, with me grumbling slightly, and the day being what has to be the hottest one all year. Since Jim did not remember the street number we had to park at the Playa Grande beach parking lot and hoof it across the burning sand the twenty minutes to the back of Mr. Trump supporters house. I was wilt...

Today started out as usual with a pre breakfast swim with coffee, followed by the usual laundry and housework. Jim continued on with his task painting and I scrubbed, rearranged and put out new bedding in the two guestrooms. We were stymied doing anything more than that because of the fact that we lost power around 9 am. There are only so many tasks you can accomplish with no power and low water pressure. No additional laundry done,  no floors mopped, de nada. I went shopping for curtains for the bedroom that still has pink curtains, and for additional sheets for the guestrooms. The sheets left by the original owners were pretty much old and worn out. I have pretty quilts I've made in all of the rooms, but felt like I needed to redo the rooms for the upcoming rental. I'm also working on finishing up the guest house in lux furnishings since we're going to be living in it for Santa Semana and I have relatives arriving soon. Last year, nice as a regular hotel room, this ye...

Well, I'm back, but I don't have time to explain all what happened right now. On my way out of the door to get groceries and attend *please someone stop me!* a Pi Day celebration involving pizza, mathematics and physics. I am all peopled out and the day is not over. One hint as to how the hotel tour went.  She has a live in maid and gardener, yet is begging for dough. So many thoughts now, but it basically boils down to he bought her the hotel to keep her happy and she's completely gutted the thing. There's no way in hell she'll ever make a go of it.

Today started with a bang. Jim and I trading painting services with each other. I cannot reach the very tippy top of the bedrooms to paint, not if I stand on the step ladder, de nada. I am short and this house has high cathedral ceilings in most of the rooms. I told Jim I'd paint the columns outside, the carved bases and all if he would trim out the ceilings in the bedroom. So that's what I did. I just didn't count on Jim freaking out by my not taping or other preparations he does. I did get the painting done, but there were a few words between us, at least until he calmed down after I showed him that the few little paint speckles come right up off the tile with some water and a quick scrub. Different skill sets entirely between the two of us. Part of me thinks that Jim enjoys worrying and fretting sometimes. He kept freaking out thinking I was about to slop paint everywhere. It was during our painting that we both got phone calls. For what? For money. Both of us were a...

A little less angry today over the begging for money. We're not loaning or giving them a cent. I'm sorry they are dealing with their mess, but it is their mess. This is what happens when fools rush in without research or just observational time in an area. They did something I have seen repeated in Costa Rica many times. Got in over their heads. Costa Rica is less expensive than the U.S. and yes, you can live on less here. But.. fantasies that you can come here and live like a zillionaire on less than a millionaire's money aren't realistic. There are those here, some of them realtors, that push the Costa Rican Dream instead of the American Dream. Come here, get a fancy condo or house and live large. You deserve it. If you believe that lie you'll get taken. Just look through the turnkey business sections of the local real estate market and I can tell you a tale of someone who came here, decided they needed more money and either bought or opened a business. If y...