The Sea is a Salty One

  For once I am not chasing down Albuterol! It was Jim that had the medical confloptions, and boy did it illustrate the huge flaws in the US healthcare system and the one we're now used to in Costa Rica! We flew in nearly a week ago for a family Christmas. Traveling was mostly copacetic, with the exception of TSA in Charlotte. Got an extremely invasive pat down and TSA put the bin with our laptops in it back into circulation. Lost the laptops for 20 minutes. We had to run to catch our flight after the delay at the security checkpoint over the computers. But the real fun started when we got up the next morning. Jim's cat scratch was much more infected. He could not use his hand. The swelling was hideous. So off we go to urgent care. Three hours later he is seen and told he has to have rabies shots at the local hospital. Off to the hospital we go where we.... .....wait .....wait .....and wait some more! It takes six hours to be seen for the first time. This is a huge contrast wit...

Merry Christmas, or whatever holiday you are celebrating. Pick one. Tomorrow I fly to the States with the hubby. Today he pops up with more mrsa. The only good thing of today is that our doctor leaned on him to wear a mask and stop trying to pet stray kitties. He got scratched hard on Sunday for picking up one of the random strays that come eat at our feral colony feeding we do. It got him but good. He was oozing pus and his hand smelled weird. The good news is that rabies have been eradicated in Costa Rica, so he's not having to get the series of painful injections in his stomach. I ran around like a maniac today trying to find my blood pressure med. None of the supply houses here have it. It's disappeared nation wide. Going off patent into the whole generic thing and I'm caught in the several months this is happening in. Last month Price Smart set me up with the individual drugs that make it up, but it's kind of a pain to haul around multiple pills in place of the one...

  Has nothing to do with last night, but it was the only photo involving dancing I still have in my funny stuff. Somewhere floating around in my images is a photo of me dressed as a ballerina for my own dance recital. I wish I could find it because my hair is truly tragic, teased into an enormous beehive sporting enough Aqua Net to open up its own hole in the ozone layer. I've been cleaning like a fiend in preparation for my house sitter, but last night we took a break. I wasn't wild about the idea but I was glad I went. We went to the end of the academic year dance recital for one of Jim's students, a sweet high school girl name Mariguana. In many ways it was just like recitals in the US. proud parents rushing up to take close ups of their children dancing, moms and dads sporting tees with the name of the dance studio with "Dance Moms" or "Dance Dads" on them. The kids did a variety of styles that weren't routinely taught when I was a kid in the Jur...

  Sunset at Braselito where I never walk any longer after finding out that the fish market and some of the nearby shacks dump their waste straight in the ocean. I always wondered why their beach stunk! So I'm so over my last week of outrage at Vada Jade for art plagiarism, and tired of the games played on all sides. I am blocking both because when *coughcoughsharlacough and Nonsense show up there can be no rationality, just more petty feuds. Go pound sand you guys! Had a shock the other day that I'm still trying to navigate. Our new housesitter expects to stay in the house, not the guesthouse, so I'm about to have to be very ugly about this and say guesthouse or no housesitting and lock the place, set the alarms and put the catfood on a timed feeder.. I don't mind if she uses the hot tub, the sauna or the pool, just not the house! I'm still shaken up over what happened this summer. Still to this day I find things completely ruined by the last housesitter and those a...

  Original acrylic painting by myself done entirely with a palette knife of a photo I took of sunset looking towards Playa Langosta. Yesterday I did something rather out of character for me, but not entirely. For the last year or better I've sat on my personal opinion of someone in the Katie Joy WOACB Anti community, a gal that goes by the online moniker of Vada Jade. No longer, I did a video on YouTube outlining what plagiarism is in the art world. It's a good distraction from the fact that we just discovered via additional tests that Jim has a few cardiac issues that potentially impact his cancer treatment. Vada approached me a few years ago out of the blue on that same reach out and try to touch me bad touch edition platform - Facebook. All the oddballs use Facebook messenger to reach out to me. She acted in turns like she knew me, and did some random trauma dumping, all the while attempting to get some positive strokes. She seemed desperate to gain my approval for her abou...

  What a horrid last few days! Friday night we went to see a local little dinner theater production. Christmas in a place that never feels like Christmas. I went because I figured I needed to make an appearance around Jim's ridiculous church friends. I had my game face on, I knew the production would be goopy, gooy, sentimentalism, I was prepared for that. I knew the person making the meals and figured it would be just okay. I just didn't count on it being tamales steamed in palm leaves, arriving smoking with palm leaf fumes. Instant asthma. Very allergic to palm leaves. Here usually they are steamed in banana leaves, not palm leaves. I ate nothing more than two spoonfuls of the dessert, which was cloyingly sweet I could barely choke it down. No matter, Inhaler, drugs and the beat goes on.  This is what happens when you make an allergic to food claim too, many many times! Sometimes it involves someone dosing you with your allergen to see if you are actually allergic to that fo...

 I swear I need to do the above because I sleep off to the side almost to the edge on my side and my husband sleeps like he's battling a drunk octopus while trying to don a tight girdle! If I don't get to sleep first I might as well give up, or go sleep in the guest room because there's no sleep until he falls asleep. Since the cancer diagnosis there's not been as much sleep on either side, his or mine. We got some rather bad news this week. He has mrsa. The infected spots on the legs have gone haywire, and now he's the one getting scraped and squeezed at the clinic, not I. Freaked out when they confirmed it was mrsa and went straight into crazy mrsa protocol that my old infectious disease doctor drilled into me 8 years ago during my long bout fighting it. Clorox wipes wiping down every single thing from light switches to knobs to remote controls to you name it you might have touched. Our laundry is separated out, I'm blasting the hell out of his clothing, towel...

  Crab mysteriously showed up in the swimming pool a mile and a half from the ocean. This last week makes about as much sense. I feel like I should be mounting a "We Survived Church Thanksgiving Dinner!" bumper sticker on the rear of the old blue Kicks. Hostility, indigestion and turkey go so incredibly well together, don't you think? Thanksgiving Day was a hard one. We got up and Jim had to go to the clinic. Running a fever, a couple of different spots oozing pus and blood all over the sheets. It's a vicious cycle. Jim gets bug bites here, scratches and presto-chango you got staph infections. It was indeed. Culturing, cleaning out and gross medical things done and sent home to prepare for a turkey day feast at the church. I was already tense because it was exactly two weeks since Jim's biopsy and we're heard nothing, plus making 4 dozen deviled eggs for a potluck at the last second was a new level of misery involving a misfiring pastry bag and eggs that simpl...

  And I wish I was that woman buying beer. If only my medications for mastocytocis didn't inhibit me from drinking. Told Jim yesterday and today I wished I could wash my mouth and my brain out with tequila. Alas no. What happened? It's complicated. Jim and his new church, the place that loves to advertise itself as ' That little Christian revival in the jungle! ' Ugh, I feel dirty just typing that out! He's on the board as an elder and is all in, going so hard like I did during my years at Possum Creek where he was the unsure one not getting with the program. This time it's me. I just know too much about how these places operate now. I've been with him there, but it's clearly not my scene at all. They are all trying so furiously to summon up a IHOP KC, or TACF type revival with folks rolling on the ground, screaming for FIRE! and laughing type emotional revival. I did that stuff back in the 1990s and half of the 2000s and have zero desire to revisit it. ...

  A crumbling crude concreto mermaid by the JSM gas station near Filadelphia, Costa Rica. When you're so desperate for boobage you construct your own. Today was the stuff of legends! I went into town with my laptop computer in tow. It's about three years old, and had been through the wringer. The stuff of legends! I am tough on laptops! This poor thing was dropped and cracked during a border run through Nicaragua while photoshopping a new date on my PCS Covid test. At the orders of the people at the border! It's been dragged through TSA security checkpoints left, right and upside down. Almost accidentally drop kicked around. Battery dead, covered in dust but up until a week ago it worked well.  Then the color display started to split into three different colors, a common thing that happens when the display driver is out of date. I tried updating the drivers and it still didn't work. I knew from my time working with computers that I would need to go into safe mode, and f...

Since we got back from San Jose I've just been in the doldrums. I don't even know why. I feel depressed, sadly deflated, and lacking all energy. Pains in my limbs and other vague symptoms. One of my friends yesterday suggested it was the stress I was under waiting for Jim's pathology report mixed with Aunt Heap/Mom dramas. I came back from San Jose only to a pile of frantic text messages about Mom not picking up the phone and had to point out that's just how she is, holed up in her house like a cute little senior citizen basement troll. They're freaking out over her normal behavior. Leave her alone. But I don't quite think that is it. Today I finally popped a low grade fever on top of days worth of exhaustion mixed with something else new, you got it, lung congestion. I think I'm stuck in end of rainy season lung crud, like the end of each and every rainy season. So I'm doing very little today. Jim tried on Tuesday to get me all jollied up by taking me s...

  Night time view from the balcony of our hotel room in the Balmoral. It overlooked the Calle Central that's now a pedestrian mall. Had museums, parks, and such unheard of western luxuries as Starbucks! Heck yeah I drank gallons of Cafe Latte! We were both nervous driving down through the wilds of Guanacaste to the big bad too crowded and too many confusing streets of San Jose. However we did see the usual assortment of weird things on the road. Here's just one. We kept trying to guess what was in the big bags. Got close enough to determine it's some sort of heavy duty plastic sheeting. Took Rutas Una all the way from Limonal into the heart of the old city, where we promptly got lost because our new phones decided they kept wanting to input our old Stateside address to where we were starting. After some fits and starts, and stopping at a local McDonald's for directions we finally arrived at the hotel.  Turns out the Hotel Balmoral was quite lovely and very nice. They up...

  Rainy season and everything is green! Going into a  hard week. My computer died. Struggled to fix what it was doing but it's a more serious snafu with the software than I am prepared to fix at this time. Off to the shop! On my ancient ten year old workhorse of a laptop. But that's not what's making this hard. Oh no. Jim's upcoming surgery to try and determine if he'd got cancer or something less nefarious going on below the belt. Jim's behaving like I don't know what, not remembering the tests he has to have run in the run up to the surgery, and a few other things.  One of the ones we sort of went round and round on was the need for two to three nights in a hotel. Finally twisted his arm into texting his doctor's support staff to ask. We're a five hour right from the hospital. Kept telling Jim I thought we needed to spend the night after the surgery in a hotel too. Surgery so early in the morning there's no way on earth we can drive down. We...

  At the hardware store. Dig Jim's crazy pants! Yesterday was kind of fubared beyond all recognition. But I knew it was going to be. One of the pastors at the church Jim attends was supposed to be giving a sermon on Israel. I knew this was going to go sideways. It did. The pastor said you can only watch Fox News because everything else is antisemitism. Baloney! There was a post church unfriendly conversations with Jim and others. He's decided to stop tithing. He wrote a sternly worded email as well. No reply. Typical high demand non-denominational evangelical nonsense.  This is so serious with my husband that he stopped tithing immediately. He's now talking about going back to the dog hair church, which I predict will be another disaster! That's the same place that was teaching on "End Times!!" for the last 3 years that drove Jim nuts. I can hardly imagine the slant there, the usual evangelical promotion of Israel only to bring about the return of Jesus.  Ther...

  Boats at sea. Wish I was. So much going on right now. I haven't felt right in the head since Israel and Hamas started bombing each other. Heart breaks for those on both sides, the desperate families of the hostages and those dead in the first terror attacks and those in harm's way through no fault of their own on the other side. Too much blood has already been shed. Yesterday morning we got very bad news first thing in the morning from Jim's recent repeat of his tests from two months ago. He's scheduled for a biopsy in just under two weeks. I was and am in tears because I've read up on what they think this likely is and it's not good. I wasn't much good afterward, and when I saw what someone I don't much like had done my mouth outran my brain. I don't like the lying about too many things. I don't like she was trying to follow me again after I've blocked her many times. It was all fire and fury coming out of my mouth. I'm ashamed I behav...

  I’m going to puzzle over culture again, and include a cautionary tale of shopping in Costa Rica. Today amply illustrated the triggering of my hunter/gatherer instincts. Just like so many other times here in Costa Rica. I was hunting down pieces of a nativity set. Just a cheap plastic one, but one to replace the one I had for years, since 1988 actually. Back when we’re first moved from the United States to Costa Rica I’d shipped two full pallets of possessions. They arrived in one piece with a few notable exceptions like the small crockpot that arrived with a broken crock. I’d done the packing, the listing of every nth thing. The guys picking up our two pallets said to me that it was obvious I’d packed before for an overseas move. Yes, one to Germany years before. The second shipment of goods didn’t go so well. I packed nothing, but I’d gone through the storage room over our two car garage and labeled where everything went, some to Goodwill, some to my kids, some out ...

 This afternoon at this place Playa Grande! Yep, rainy season so we were walking knowing we might be rained out at any moment. Tide wasn't as low as it is here. Lately I've been catching the tides too high and I knew I was walking a merely two hours after high tide. I wanted to sea bean hunt today. Hitting the beach right after high tide is always a good bet for beans. There was just one problem. A week and a few days ago I'd walked the beach at Tamarindo during the height of high tide and somehow twisted my ankle. Right where I already have issues on the foot and ankle. It's spot where I have a bone spur and every now and then if I move just right a ligament catches on the bone spur and WOOWEEE SUCKA does it hurt! Today I refubbed up my foot.  One of the challenges of hunting for sea beans is that they don't congregate in the edges of the waves like shells do. They end up pushed up the beach with the trash and the seaweed, meaning you have to meander around searchi...

    My husband looking at the estuary at sunset. Estuaries are places in between, not quite ocean, not quite river. I get a sense right now that the world is sitting in a place that is not quite one thing or the other, just like an estuary. These last few days have been rather hard to stomach on many different levels. It has some horrific echos for me of our time living in a high demand religious organization all those years ago. My old church was all in for Israel. In case you’ve been living under a rock, or you do like I do many times which is take a break from the news, Israel has been in the news since Friday. Hamas fired a large number of rockets into Israel. They’ve also taken hostages and barged into a music festival to kill the festival goers. It’s an evolving situation that is beyond awful and tragic. Israel has declared war on Hamas. Let me ask you a question, how can you declare war on a group, not on a nation? I’m not sure. I pray for peace in this sit...

 I wish I would have had a bridge like this one to roll across in several flooded places today! Not today, just a random bridge between Arenal and San Jose. So six years ago today this happened...  Pretend you are looking at a photo of a massive flood.  We had Hurricane Nate roll through Costa Rica, only the second time a hurricane has hit and it happened to hit just as we were trying to fly back to the States to visit our kids after 4 months living here. I cannot even began to tell you what all we went through, but I know I posted here once it was all over. Scary times involving sleeping on the floor of three different airports because we could not get a direct flight out and then having to split up at the Fort Lauderdale airport because we got word while we were waiting that Jim's mother was dying. She died before Jim could get there. Our Journey Part 1 Part 2  Part 3    Part 4  Part 5  Part 6 I know, I know, it's a long read but there were lots...

  A few days ago I did my usual beach walk. It was just so much harder than usual because it was high tide. I’d forgotten to check the tide charts and moon phases before heading out. Few sea beans to be found. After a good hour I trudged back to the restaurant we routinely park at, the place above, and ordered a cold bottle of soda and a few glasses of ice water. The waitress who is a local Tico we know, served my drinks no problem, watching me guzzle the ice water hard. I’d stupidly not filled or packed my beach bottle. She gave me two menus, knowing that my husband would be joining me shortly. After a few minutes I called her back for more ice water and told her I wanted to order an appetizer and a lunch item. She says to me, “You need to wait until your husband gets back so he can approve your order.” I looked at her like she was touched in the head, even as I know that many Ticos hold very sexist patriarchal views. But this was the first time I’d run across...