The Sea is a Salty One

  A nice clean backyard, a nice bunch of guys. The new gardening crew is back. They are scrubbing and painting all the concreto, pouring concreto to neaten up some things like the sidewalk common area behind the guesthouse. Guess what else they are doing? Putting in a second raised garden bed for me~ this one will hold corn and sunflowers. They're putting in a good garden area near the old concrete pad where the garage used to be before we had it relocated. A reading nook with flower beds. I am jazzed!

  Bernie in the parking lot of Liberia Walmart. I wasn't at the Liberia Walmart, but I was at a Walmart subsidiary here in Tama this morning to score some Great Value pizza and frozen waffles.  This morning I stayed home from church and Jim attended. He's there now. Why? Our car has an even numbered plate and Covid restrictions newly in place here only allow you to drive with an odd numbered plate. The only odd number plate we have here is on Jim's motorcycle and I ain't riding that thing, no way, no how. I don't even like him riding it!  I had to slide on down to the clinic, which is allowed no matter what your license plate is, and pick up my two weeks worth of drugs. On the way back I went past that Walmart subsidiary and stopped to get pizzas and things. Walking around the produce section I ran into Alice, an older lady I know that spends half the year here, half stateside. I know her from church only. Jim told me she was now at the outside church with the obnox...

 Yesterday when I was talking on the phone with my mother while sweeping in preparation for a quick wet Swiffer of the living room and some light dusting I found out we have a tiny snake living in the house. I pulled out the  broom and dustpan from next to my ancient peeling refrigerator and lo and behold there he was wriggling his tiny cute self behind the fridge. My mother was having something of a conniption fit about this, I just shrugged it off. I figured eventually he'd reemerge and it was likely our cat Stinky would get him. It happened. This very morn. I came into the kitchen for another coffee and Stinky was in the kitchen intent on something by the baseboards of the cabinet. It was the snake. I got out the dustpan, Stinky chased him right into the dustpan and I relocated the snekky snake right outside. Stinky went on guard duty outside, patrolling the area for tiny snakes.  He's either foolhardy or brave. The tiny snake kept striking trying to bite him. Stinky m...

 ....walking on imported air.. Not really. From one very old Blondie song. From an album I scored the roughly three months I worked at a radio station selling advertising during college. It was a place that routine bounced our paychecks to us. One of the cavalcade of crazy jobs I had in college. Then there was the time I applied and interviewed for a job manning the phones in the middle of the night for one of the local mortuaries. Didn't get the job, but had already decided a spooky mortuary filled with bodies in the middle of a grave yard in the middle of the night was just not going to work for me. Which has nothing to do with today. Side ramble. Today the gardeners showed up. on time, and finished the job, with some serious upgrades to everything external. They didn't pull the "Manana". I misjudged them. Not just cleaning up plant die off from dry season and unruly growth since wet season started. They sculpted the banana trees, used some old concrete pavers we ha...

  A small island off of Quepas Jim's been having a very frustrating few days. Dealing with what I keep calling 'The Gringo Shuffle' He's getting frustrated with certain aspects of the culture here. I get it, culture is so super hard to adjust to, and no matter how much you think you've cleared that hurtle it bites you in the butt. Like me losing it over the pool guys beheading a four foot long iguana in my side yard before taking it home to make soup. The English teaching job Jim is working hasn't paid him. It's been over a month. First the school owner showed him a form that the money would be wired into his account, that was two weeks ago. We're six or eight weeks in, I'm not sure how long, and he hasn't been paid. Asked today and told there was no money to pay him. Jim's unhappy with that, and the huge amount of prep time. There's a fair amount of disorganization too. The owner isn't Tico, but he's picked up some Tico habits in...

 Many years ago I sat on a jury in a trial. Actually, I've sat on more than one jury through the years before I learned to not be dressed in business attire for a trial if you do not want to chosen. I used to joke that the voter pool for our county must be tiny if we both kept popping up on jury pools. The reason I've been thinking about this particular trial is for what it has in common with the just rested Chauvin trial. The alleged crime right on video. In this one the defendant, a lady with troll doll uncombed hair and a somewhat less than court ready appearance that Chauvin, was said to have shown up at the local Safeway, picked up some expensive steaks and a pile of two liter sodas before beating down the manager who confronted her right in the parking lot. She told a convoluted tale of having gotten confused, thought her cousin paid for her steaks, gotten her period and I don't know what. None of which lined up with what we witnessed on the store security cameras. On...

  Ernesto displaying his captured iguana. Saturday morning I got something of a surprise. No, not the pool guys trying to raid my big mango tree. They always do that, and I never mind because I know they're only making 4 bucks an hour and this is a high cost of living area. What happened is the iguana pictured above fell pretty far out of the tree, so far he was stunned. Ernesto and Jose decided this was prime meat just going to waste. They grabbed up the stunned iguana. I heard the shouting. Jim and I rushed out of the house just in time to see Ernesto grin and display his find, a large iguana. He told us he was taking it home to make 'iguana soup'. So I know iguana soup is a thing here, particularly in the Nica populations, like Ernesto and his family. During the worst of the pandemic here we saw a dip in iguana populations here, hearing that many unemployed by the pandemic make soup from whatever iguana they could get their hands on. It's a cultural thing. Ernesto as...

  Scabby sleeping in Jim's swim trunks. He's started napping in our bedroom, in the perfect circle that is Jim's shorts. He used to nap on the bedroom rug. He'd come a long ways in the year or so he'd been coming around. He's a stray that spends large chunks of his days here. He's even turned playful and gentle.He's learned he can nag the crap out of me to feed him, open the door, shut the door and a whole laundry list of things. Who's trained who? Yesterday and today have been a hornet's nest or beehive of activity. By other people. The gate is being worked on. The gardener has been here and we're discussing the next phase in our landscaping. I want to put a hedge of ginger between the house and the guest house and relandscape the sliver of land outside of the gates. We planted cacti near Thanksgiving. Now I want to add some other plants like crinkly ferns and palms.  The guys came today to do the every six months of termite spray, and they ...

  I started mentally dancing to this song, for all its not very PC lyrics, like I'm Peter in "Office Space" Why? I FINISHED OUR TAXES ON TIME! Since we're moved to Costa Rica every single year our complex tax situation has been exacerbated by being an expat, difficulty getting documents, figuring out what I need to claim since we have investments in other countries, you name it. Every since year I've had to take advantage of the different time schedule for expats and file by June 15th instead.  I'm going to make the regular tax deadline. I was ready this year. I understood the foreign investments rules. Thanks Trump for passing tax codes that give anyone with foreign investments below a certain threshold, and not an insignificant one, a pass on taxes, and then reduced taxes on everything above. I had my documents lined up and for the first time in a very long time I am done. The huge yearly boondoggle is slain and filed.  Getting money back, a pretty large c...

  Scabby riding Jim's motorcycle to dreamland. This last week has been a bit nuts. We're dieting. We've been dieting the past two weeks. I ran into some problems with this. I'd finally gotten Jim to try the clean eating diet I follow strictly for two weeks before I transition into something a little less stringent. It's sugar free, very low carb and not much in the way to meat either. Lots of leafy green veggies. It's a great kickstart but I wouldn't want to live on it. Ran into a problem this week. One night, I can't remember if it was Tuesday or Wednesday night, I developed a headache that would not lift. My stomach was rumbling and I just didn't feel right. Hauled out by blood sugar meter that I rarely use because my A1Cs have been good for a couple of years, prick myself and run the tests. Off the charts, stupid crazy high like I haven't had since I first had issues during my mrsa year. No wonder I had a headache! I could not figure it out. U...

  Portero's lovely Asada building painted with the name pricked out in pieces of mirror. The Asadas are all happy places today. The reservoirs aren't quite as empty. Last night the rains came. They came back to Guanacaste. It rained for about an hour. I sat outside with a book, in my rocking chair and listened to it rain. This is literally the first March/April dry to rainy season switch over where I've been healthy. No asthma, no wheezing, no miserably shuffling around. Why, how? I think it's the Lyrica I was put on six weeks ago. Something about it is affecting my lungs the same way that medical marijuana does. I'm so incredibly happy over this. I've started to walk much better, and am able to leave my cane at home when I go out, more and more. I can handle the short jaunt from the parking lot to the cart without falling down. I still do not do well with unpaved uneven surfaces, but this is a big improvement from where I was 8 weeks ago. Higher pain levels and...

  Whooops~ Wrong holiday! Today was personally something of a shit show. I've not posted much this week because it would have been endless griping about the busiest tourist week of the year being in pain in the ass, or moaning about my stupid body. It's been quite the week. I'm not sad fishing, I'm just explaining how I got so turned around on Easter. Chop, chop, bitch, as a friend of mine says. The Lyrica makes me want to sleep all hours of the day. I set my alarm to go off at six thirty because the process of waking up and drinking enough coffee along with warming up my voice takes a good two hours without the process of getting dressed when you have no balance. Jim reset the alarm to 8 am without realizing why I had it set so early. I woke up just in time to guzzle coffee and get dressed in a panicked state. No time to warm up the vocal cords.  I leave Jim picking up mangoes and moaning about his thrown out back. I get a block down the main road and there's an ac...

  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...

 The last few days Kirby Smith Hall at LSU has been a topic of discussion at our house as we ran to Price Smart and other mundane errands. Yep, Kirby Smith Hall. I never lived there but my husband did the fall of 1969 before he pledged with a fraternity and moved into the frat house. Kirby Smith was always an eye sore, even if it was only four years old when Jim moved it. It represented everything wrong with modern Soviet style architecture on a campus of ivy covered classic brick buildings and graceful Live Oaks. Jim has told me many a stupid tale of things breaking in the building all the way back into the Mesozoic era he lived there. Reading through the history of the place it looks like it turned into something of a very expensive white elephant.They use it as a dorm, then it would be condemned, suddenly they were in a housing crunch so badly they'd retrofit the place for something like 17 million and use it a few more years. It has spent as many years empty and ready for the w...

  The local food bank. We were out yesterday dropping off four bushels of ripe mangoes along with bitter oranges and star fruit. Our orchard runneth over! This is also where our stimulus checks went, where we give regularly too. They feed a lot of folks in the area. Thinking about charging non family members using our guesthouse a token fifty bucks for the week and donating that too to the food bank. So what does the food bank have to do with idiots flapping their gums and getting it all wrong about life in Costa Rica? Plenty. We stopped at a favorite restaurant at a local corner that is all food trucks. The place took a hit during the Covid lockdown, but the years we've been here there have always been taco stands, smoothie places and vegany type food trailers there, except for during the six week Covid lockdown.  Our favorite place had gone from their old dirty location in the middle of town into the food truck corner. It was around 3 pm, too late for lunch, too early for di...

 This was written by a friend of mine. I share this just for educational purposes, not to claim copyright. "I got my Costa Rican license today. This. Was. Funny! Step 1- First, you get online on Thursday mornings at exactly 8:00AM, to get your appointment. Step 2- You repeat step 1 for many weeks in a row until you get an appointment. Step 3- You send off your foreign license to be translated. They write you back with pick up instructions that are straight out of a spy movie—- drive to this gas station an hour and a half from home. Find the auto parts counter in the gas station. Walk to the back of the store. Give the woman $20 in American dollars. She will give you an envelope. So awesome! Step 4- Go to the clinic. Pick up a health voucher. This costs 5000 Colones or about $9. Step 5- Drive to the DOMT. When you arrive, park in the parking lot. A guard will meet you. Park where he tells you. Step 6- The guard will then instruct you to walk back out of the parking lot and around t...

  A nearby peaceful cove past Las Ventanas My pain has stepped up a few more notches and they're stepping up the Lyrica, first another 75 to see if more helps. Not in time for Saturday night. I slept poorly, got up late, not wanting to go to church. I did go. I said I would, and I sang. It didn't go well. Three of the four songs were new to me and very new to the congregation. This is literally the first time I've taken the stage in a full year because of Covid with no rehearsal other than a quick run through of the three songs I didn't know. I held back and only sung on the choruses. I said nothing, but the best practices on worship team is that you introduce one, sometimes two new songs in a month. Introduce them as new songs, make sure the team has rehearsed them for a full month. None of this thrown together nonsense. This was a perfect illustration with everything going wrong with the church after the pastor bailed.  When I'd gotten up on Sunday morning I'd...

Pain related insomnia sucks. I've tossed and turned the last few hours. I know part of it is the on going mess at church. I think this is the end. It was supposed to be the end a few weeks ago, but I had a good friend talk me into staying. Seducing me with talk about remaking the church the way we all want it. Things have changed, but I am getting the distinct vibe that it's time to burn the ships and leave.  Last Sunday was tough because I'd told the worship team leader I'd start singing again as the Mississippi Millionaire who can only sing on key when standing next to someone singing on key was leaving. Showed up, but could not rehearse because I could not see the tiny print on the printouts. It stymied me. It didn't help that when we got to the one hymn, one I've heard this other lady bobble too many times when the leader said she'd really wanted to sing it with Miss Mississippi one last time. I stared at her like she has lice in her hair, slightly hor...

  I feel like these guys from "Office Space" do right now. The last 24 hours has been sort of frustrating, but I have no evil printer to go out and kick. Tried some comedy writing last night and one project helped. A poll on YouTube listing all the possible "evidence" that Todd Paulson holds against Tati and James Westbrook. The giggle helped. Today shows signs of being no better. I need to get out and get in the pool, but the water pressure is nil right now, just like it frequently is towards the end of dry season. The Asada cuts water availability some days between 9 am and 4 pm to conserve what's left. I need to shower immediately after swimming lest my asthmatic dermatitis rears its ugly itchy head. This is a non negotiable for me. Jim's on the phone with ICE already today, not understanding this will just close out our repair ticket and open another one, delaying the repair even more. I've already hissed at him about this. Yesterday started well, wi...

  Late afternoon at Las Catalinas on Playa Danta last month. Life since we're returned has been the utterly mundane, just like I like it. Even the back and forth with ICE over the problems with our internet. It looks likely I cannot get decent upload speeds that seriously limits making YouTube videos. Today was hit Mega Super for the 4 for 3 specials and go talk to ICE about the upload speed being almost zero. Chase around the dentist because Jim is infected after having two teeth removed. I've been reading CNN anchor Don Lemon's new book released yesterday. I entirely read it yesterday as Jim is sick with an infection from having those teeth pulled, and I'm fighting another stupid sinus infections. Lots of laying around happened. The book is called "This is the Fire" and it's about racism in the United States. Interesting book, at least to me. I'm six years older than Don Lemon and grew up near where he did. Except I lived in Buffwood. I'm not su...