The Sea is a Salty One

Yesterday my husband did some crazy stuff. Some of it makes me laugh. This is so what being married 33 years is like. He had constipation. Bad constipation. Crying, hollering, rocking on the toilet constipation. When he finally went he started yelling he could not believe how big his bowel movement was. I said 'Uh-huh' and went back to what I was doing. Then he trotted out with his phone, trying to show me a photo of his bowel movement he took to prove how big it was. Just what I did not want to see in the morning while drinking my coffee. Being married this long has kind of broken both of our filters. Inappropriate things happen, or are said. Like how I flip the bird at the television every time he watches Fox News to see what inanity they are spouting on any given day. Sometimes it's nice though. Yesterday we went to a community wide  Thanksgiving meal. I walked up, someone was smoking and my wheezing started. Walked into the cram packed meeting room and my whee...

My ex had some of the lousiest luck with cars. He had a Corvair, which was horrible at any speed but spent more time stopped. He then bought a brand new Vega, drove it a year and the motor mounts failed causing the engine to fall out. But he never learned the lesson that you don't buy crappy cars with horrible reviews. The last I heard he was driving an ancient American-built van. I seem to recall him with a rodeo of rolling scrap iron. I only had one bout of bad idiotic car buying. Back in college I scored a job delivering air freight for one of the bigger air freight carriers, making a munificent twelve bucks an hour, when minimum wage was three bucks and ended up strolling into the European car dealer to buy an Italian made convertible. Stupidest. Decision. Ever. Well, maybe second stupidest. First stupidest was getting married young to a much older guy. That stupid car was in the shop more during the one year I owned it than I was able to drive it. In the shop, in the shop....

Yesterday we finally ordered Jim's desk and I picked up mine. I went with a very small Guanacaste wood table and paired it with a nice comfortable low chair I picked up a few months ago. I am so short. I don't need much. Yesterday was a big wasted day because I did something so damn stupid early on. Like I am prone to do. You'd think I would learn. I took a quarter of a blood pressure pill because I had a borderline high reading when I got up and I'd taken no pressure pills all week. Readings straight down in my shoes. The car was in the shop most of the week. We have dead sensors, and electronic parts dying that had to be replaced. More on order. I'd forgotten how badly I dislike not having a car. Today was sort of stressful early on. More crazy Duggar speculation and rumors, more people pming me like mad, while I was trying to put up a post and fix Jim's computer.  He spilled apple juice into the keyboard of his laptop. Not much, but enough so that ...

Yesterday Jim and I had an interesting conversation in the car. We were on our way to Liberia to look in the furniture stores for a desk for him. The guy that always custom builds our furniture quoted a price Jim thought was high.  So he wanted to look first. I'm still partially felled by asthma and completely felled by parts stupidity and reporting on the mess of the Duggars. Hearing from oodles of people claiming to know. I've just reported on it all since there are a lot of rumors I cannot prove one way or another. The only sure thing is that a branch of the federal law enforcement is after Josh Duggar. That we know for bedrock sure. It's stressing me out. What did we talk about? One of the places I wanted to hit was the big fabric store. My friend Mary swears they sell batiks, and I need blender fabrics for quilting. I started talking about my years working part time at the art studio and quilting store. It had been great under the original owner, but after she sold...

Boy was I cranky last night at about 2 am when I last wrote. That's what happens w, then I deal with the asthma. I get crazier than usual. Having three different people try to market their MLMs to me at church and getting lots of bad medical advice, including a friend that make the mistake of trying to get my to tray homeopathy. Today I slept in until something like ten am, getting up to the tabloid press finally starting to mention the Josh Duggar rumors and claim they are just that - rumors. Perhaps, but likely something is happening there, but perhaps something rather different than is thought. Stay tuned. I didn't update NLQ today. I ran an errand and when I walked into the book store my friend took one look at me and said, "Wow, you look like you feel very bad today!" Yep. So what did we do after that. Desk shopping. Since Costa Rican Customers decided to give us one drawer of our desk and confiscate the other 7 drawers and the desk we both needed a desk....

You'd think I would have learned by now. A very bad night with low blood pressure and crazy asthma equals a very crappy day where my patience is oh so limited and stay away from people like the entitled rich gringos here that babble about balancing their feng shu, aligning their essential oils and climbing Machine Pikachu. But like a ballerina on crack at the circus I stumble my ass right into the middle of it yet again. Even as I know better. Yeah, I went to church. I felt fine when I got up, better than fine like nothing had happened the day before. Maybe I wasn't so fine, but I was merely distracted by all the odd news coming out of the Duggar family.  I went. Mistake. I need to take a complete sabbatical from church I think. Last week it was Mr. Z chasing me down to lecture me about the fact that I do not take communion. I explained that the sulfates in the wine and grape juice are insta-asthma for me so I just quietly sit out. He explained why he thought that was incre...

Been a week. Right now we're pondering another big change. There's a situation happening I cannot really talk about that if it goes down will change our entire lives. No, it's  not a bad change, it's just one of those things one must do when others drop the ball. All week has been embroiled with discussion of the possibilities and looking into the logistics and costs. It's not something I want to do, but I think it might benefit some of my loved ones. That's when we're not in the pool or at the beach. Jim and I had one of our rare big fights over something that happened at the beach on Thursday. We did our usual beach walk, and seeing that high season has started with oodles of tourists we did not have the beach to ourselves. There were two young women that suddenly removed their bikini tops, and sunbathed topless. All I could think about was Lori Alexander, she who threatens thonged girls, foaming at the mouth. It's illegal here in Costa Rica, consi...

If we're not in official dry season yet we're at least flirting with the edges of it. This morning I got all my dry season chores done, scrubbed pool deck and covered lanai, dusted off the cobwebs on the lanai teak ceiling, cleaned out the bird feeders and bird bath and hauled out my outdoor drying rack. And I was paid back magnificently right afterward. I got to see an orange-green small parrot taking a bath. While fighting off angrily all comers. Birds circling. So beautiful. The rest of the day was a goat rodeo, a two-step to an out of tune honky tonk band with a disrhythmic drummer. While I was sweating my ass off watering plants and watching the birds someone called and said they were coming over to swim, RIGHT THEN! Please, please, please do not invite yourself over to other people's houses to swim. Or if you do give them more than five minutes notice. I had to dash inside to don a bra and other clothing. I don't care if Jim sees my sagging boobage and assor...

We've been busy. Eating out with friends, the usual running of the errands and Jim drug me to bingo. BINGO! THE! HORROR!!!!!!!!!! He loves bingo. I'd rather have a long slow root canal with no laughing gas than play bingo. Particularly at this local joint. Gringo prices, slow slow servers, so-so food. Jim's bingo obsessional friends are a pretty dull bunch. But I did manage to have a good time this time. It was the usual suspects, the girl named after yogurt, the girl that climbed "Machine Pikachu", the guy that is so clearly insane he's climbed Everest a bunch of times, the man that works out six hours a day and assorted others. Dumb millionaires. Nice people, just not my type at all. Usually I end up playing Candy Crush and cruising the internet on my phone while playing bingo when I go. No one there worth talking to usually, and the few that are are so  focused on bingo that heaven forfend you make an innocent inquiry into how their dog, surfboard, or...

Yesterday morning when I got up I was pretty bummed out. I'd spent most of the night thinking about that poor little puppy. In tears during breakfast talking to Jim about the situation. Once Jim went away to Bible study I looked up the animal rescue people here I'd had contact with and called them about the puppy. They agreed to take it if we couldn't keep it. But when Jim came home he told me that he'd persuaded our friend to call up his housekeeper and find out about the puppy. According to her the puppy is eating and drinking and behaving normally. I wasn't aware that it was nearly two months old because of the small size. The animal rescue people are going to see if they can intervene and help out with some of the issues this poor dog will face as it grows. Starting with treating for mange first. To me that is one of the very difficult bits here. The way animals are sometimes treated here. You're talking about a population of people who are too poor ...

Today was filled as usual with ups and downs. A down that turned into an up. Sometime a few months ago we had people in the house caulking and repainting the ceilings. One of the painters went into my closet while painting the ceiling, opened the closet, opened the small drawer at the bottom, got into the box I had hidden my jewelry in, and took a number of items. One of those items was my wedding ring, the engagement ring and ring guard, custom designed I'd had for the past almost 34 years. Most of the other stolen items save for the other ring, tanzanite, diamonds and platinum, were small potatoes. A pried out of the setting blue lapis, a small emerald pendant with a poorly colored emerald, a very small diamond and tanzanite pendent, a garnet pendent. He left a dematoid garnet necklace likely worth more than the house, a complete set of 10mm Mikimoto pearls I've had forever, a set of alexandrite and diamond earrings, a set of pink sapphire and diamond earrings, a set of...

I've been cleaning yesterday and cooking today. Why? Well, we were scheduled to have lunch guests today, and it got pushed back to dinner guests. But not as fervently and crazily as usual. Normally I would be reacting all over the place, but for once I was able to not react like a rat in a maze chasing cheese. I'm sort of kind of proud of myself for once. During my formative years, in my childhood I picked up some rather weird anxieties and reactions. Example, someone coming over and I would go into a frenzy of cleaning and cooking. On Friday when I started to go into that very weird space I thought to my self for the first time ever, "Hey wait one cotton picking minute! My house is clean enough, just need to dust and turn on the Roomba. These people know me, they know I'm a scatterbrained artist. They like me, and they aren't coming with white gloves to make sure I have polished the underside of the pipes or anything nitpicky like that!" I cannot tell ...

Having some sleep issues. Passing out unintentionally too early because I've stepped up the workouts. Waking up at 10 pm all drooly and confused tangled in my too long hair. I'm just  a laugh riot! Tempted to give myself an extreme hair cut soon or else I'll have to come up with some sort of elaborate Game of Thrones braided style. It's just too heavy, too hot and too much in my way. Up in the standard huge messy bun all the time now. I look like some deranged granny. Yesterday was more than a little scary, and not just because my wrinkled sagging old self was on the beach in a swimsuit scaring folks either. Jim and I went for a walk on Tamarindo Beach yesterday. We've been limiting our walks to Grande, and some of the smaller more remote beaches. Jim needed a massage and I was finally able to put down the muscle relaxers from my own back hijinks and start walking again. It was low tide and quite interesting. Like I said I've seen a very early uptick in to...

While doing my random round of reading Quiverfull blogs this morning I found this on Doug Wilson's blog: Oh Doug! That is not at all why people decamp to places like Belize and Costa Rica. It's not some sort of silly one-up-man-ship. It's not to show off. It's to have a better quality of life. It's the same reasons why people from poorer countries head to the United States. Likely why your ancestors took a boat from whatever white European country they arrived from. People want to live where they can be happy, without fear and with enough financial resources to live well. This is why older folks love Florida so much. Of course Doug makes it all about something stupid, trendy and counterculture. People want to be happy. It's as simple as that. I think Doug is just jelly-ousel, ooops, jealous. He's pushing a book about EvanJelly-fish, whatever they are. Today would not have impressed anyone, or made anyone jealous here. It was pretty miserable. I ran ...

I have a dear friend I love. He's one of the most upbeat and positive people I've ever met, sort of my opposite in that regard. But I worry about him sometimes, not just because he is relentlessly positive, like a real life Ned Flanders, but because he seems to accept everything at face value without question.. Example? He's one of many folks here who've written books about his experience moving here, and it's rather naive. He is naive, but he's a youth pastor and many times they live on a different mental plane as far as I can tell. One passage he wrote that water was so cheap here, that he paid his HOA only fifty bucks a month for the water bill. I had to put the book down and say "Huh?" when I read that part because we're on local asada water, and our bill runs something like eight bucks a month. My friend just accepts the Gringo Shuffle as the real price and real way things are done. I'm curious to see if he's going to change his mi...

The neighbor's cat is in heat. How do we know? Because she's friends with Stinky. We see them together along the wall first thing the morning. Now she's showing up at night, rolling on the ground and making those crazy seductive meows and assorted noises towards Stinky, who is just sitting and watching. She's so barking up the wrong tree. Stinky was neutered at 4 months. All that rolling and calling wasted. Just like the last couple of days here for me. Back still waxes and wanes. Wasted days and wasted nights. Or not wasted. Today I laid out in the sunshine and read. There are advantages to downtime. I'm finding a few of them. Jim brought dinner from a roadside stand. It was delicious and I didn't have to cook. Which is good because these last few days I've been thinking. Thinking about hideously hateful cultural enforcer Lori Alexander of The Transformed Wife. Lori and I are of a similar age. We're of a similar socio-economic class. We both have co...

Last night I was talking to my friend Cindy about those jobs that were a pure joy in the past. The places I loved working at, that I couldn't wait to get up in the morn and go to work. Without a doubt the ones I adored had in common one big thing. A non-insane boss that knew well enough to allow me to do my own thing creatively, and not micro manage everything and everyone.  Plus some creative element.' I was thinking about that a lot because of how I struggle living in Costa Rica with having to sometimes be the heavy. I don't much care for either supervising people any more than I like being supervised heavily. Unfortunately you have to do that here. Like the tale of the three plumbers it took until they changed the wax gasket under the toilet right. I don't much like standing over the plumber and insisting they do it my way. Plus I'm not wild about the Tico Shuffle, that thing that many locals will do, try to squeeze the maximum dollar amount out of you becaus...

Today is shaping up to be a banner day of very bad decisions and laughter. Threw my back out all over again as I was starting to heal up by doing the dumbest of the dumb - putting on a back fastening bralet that requires gymnastics to get on. Man, am I stupid sometimes or what? Laughing my ass off. I have tasted the pain rainbow and it's not as fun as the Skittles one. But I felt better after seeing the travel photos of one of the Clonies. She's in South America and posted she about to climb, and I shit you not, "Machine Piakcu" Not sure if it's just autocorrect fail, or she's as stupid as me this morning. I think she means "Machu Picchu" Glad I'm not climbing it today.

Today I creeped around with my bad back.Not as bad as the time I threw my back out sneezing or taking off my swimsuit, but close. Spent large chunks of the day laying around glaze-y eyed on muscle relaxers. The engineer came and looked at the drainage issues and made recommendations. I didn't hear any of them because I was inside dinged out on drugs and pain. Told Jim I didn't care what it took to fix this, human sacrifice or strange and wondrous journeys to retrieve elves or magical rings. Just make it happen. He will. Or not. When I was lucid, not hopped up on pain pills and not watching my guilty trashy reality show pleasure (hello "Love After Lockup"!) I was toying with a Nigerian Romance Scammer. Years and years ago, when the internet was shiny and new, and dinosaurs still roamed the earth, and my boobs didn't suffer from gravity yet I had a hobby. A mean but fun hobby. Nigerian scam baiting. Here's my absolute favorite baiting story from 419eater...

Good thing the water is out. I did the living room, Jim did the kitchen. I ran out of furiously pissed off madness once the water was out. More work on the drainage, talking to someone that does water engineering tomorrow to make sure our plans for the drainage are the right ones. It's a good illustration of how things change once you chuck fundytown up onto the scrap heap of your personal history. Back in May 2000 our hot water heater came apart in the night and flooded the downstairs of our house to the depth of about two inches. Jim got up and went to work the next morning, coming upstairs to tell me there was 'a little spilled water' before departing. I got up that morning, splashing through the water, and had a meltdown. But being that I was still in trying to be a good submissive Quiverfull momma and wife I swallowed my ire at Jim. It took a full week to get all the water out of the house. Houses in the U.S. are such different construction than here. Here it...