The Sea is a Salty One

  Some years back. Need to take a new photo as the banana trees are putting out six bunches of bananas. Yes, we have bananas! Starting with a mangled cliche! There was a Jimmy Buffett song titled "Cliches" with the chorus lyric " Cliches, good ways to say what you mean, mean what you say. " I hope some I have listed below are largely devoid of meaning.  Yes, I am back doing D list actor who is not very deep's writing prompt. It's a good one today, cliches uttered by parental units. He was wittering on about his favorite Southern writers, O'Connor and McCullers, while admitting a) he's really not read them, but ha has seen the movies and b) kept confusing the two. C'est la vie!  I prefer the works of people like Zora Neale Hurston, Truman Capote and Faulkner for my navel-gazing Southerners. At least Capote was amusing. There are so many things, deeply fucked up things uttered by my parents that I am at loath to repeat them here. A sampling of a f...

Water feature from the Orchid Garden near San Jose. Well, it's been a strange week or two. I've lost days to this silly ankle thing. Took off the boot at a week to start doing physical therapy movements, made it two days and now the boot is back on and I'm down to two pain pills. It's healing so slowly this time. Have to do a medical follow up this week. Several days ago we went to a party for a lady we know who is throwing in the towel and going home to the U.S.A. Katie was trying to do that thing that is impossible here on the Gold Coast -- live as a gringo without a steady monthly income. Even a social security pension will not cut it here. It's expensive, but likely not as expensive as life in the U.S.A. is getting lately. Read that there has been a 40% jump in the price of vegetables and fruits last month. Deporting the folks that do all the grunt work there was one very bad idea mixed with those insano tariffs. We have high tariffs here and it inhibits the amo...

  If anything I should have stayed in bed the last almost week even without the ankle situation. Why? Three things that happened while I am just over here trying to live my life. First I bought a beautiful polished chrome set for my bathroom, A large pipe assembly coming off the wall with a large rain shower head that you could swivel and bend any direction along with a shiny hose and a hand held shower head. Installed it. Made sure both ran well. Turned off the tap and walked away only to hear a huge CLUNK!! The thing was so heavy it snapped the pipe in the wall. Plumber coming next week, the endless Tico "Manana" Second I am allergic to the stupid orthopedic boot. Apparently parts are latex, and when I sweat, which is a daily thing in Costa Rica, it leeches through to the latex part. Leg, ankle, foot all covered in an itchy rash now. Tried going with just the ace bandage this morning and spent the day eating pain pills. Back in the boot, itching scratching at it all. My lun...

  Arenal Volcano near La Fortuna, Costa Rica A few days ago a psychologist I follow mentioned something about the nature of PTSD and CPTSD. Sometimes it  keeps showing up long after the original event and wrecking you. Thinking about that led me to volcanoes. Why? Well, with volcanoes it's not just the initial explosion that causes you harm, it's everything afterward. I'm fortunate enough to live near volcanoes here in Costa Rica. There's several about an hour away, the biggest being Rincon de Vieja.  I've climbed Arenal Volcano several times now. Climbed Turrialba. I've seen the smoke and glow of  Poas from our hotel room near San Jose. Been up close and personal with volcanoes. Something I never dreamed I'd do when I grew up as a child in Louisiana, but I have. It's not just that explosion that will get you, it's everything after will continue on the damage. I like to use the analogy that when a toxic person explodes on you. When it happens it can ...

  View from our room in Copey eight years ago. Was I ranty on Sunday? I was livid after someone else invited folks to my pool followed by an accident that wouldn't have taken place had the husband just done what I asked him to do involving concrete stepping stones and our garage. We bought pavers today. Monday morning clinic, x rays, consultation with an ortho surgeon and exam by the lady that runs the clinic. Nothing broken, just a ton of degraded bone and old injuries, new sprain and new ligament detached. The pain had amplified so much by the time I got up that morning it was straight to the doc. Last time I did something like this to myself it was back in Virginia. Woman ran over my foot with an electric mobility scooter. It hurt worse, but not by much. The funny thing of this is my doctor oh so seriously and mournfully informing me that I had lots of old damage in the ankle/foot, the torn ligament and I wasn't going to benefit from ligament surgery. D'oh! I'm old! ...

  Massive gardening project going on right now at the house. We've been having the security wall painted a rich dark brown and now I've decided we need more flowering plants along the wall. Too bad it's going to be a few days before I'm walking again. Spite wall behind the pool getting a nice coating of those fake plant walls. Just to break up the brown on the metal wall extension that takes the wall from ten feet to almost twenty. Contractors in and out right now, new gate, new security system, bathroom expansion with a tub and a sun room just to name a few.  Today church. I go only to support my husband. 30 year old worship music, and a sorry excuse for a sermon that was the thrice divorced pastor preaching to himself again. All pretty standard. This is how it goes every week. The problem started after church was over and the bane of my existence, the church secretary, came over with 15 YWAM kids. She was prancing around, showing off, and squealing that she was hostin...

  Written in mid June 2025 I disappeared into the ether. I genuinely didn’t mean to but life handed me some psychedelic-soaked dramatic lemons and the lemonade is warped as a result. My mother. Before this is all over I may end up in a psychiatric facility myself. Ready a bed down at the state mental hospital in Mandeville, Louisiana! Ha! Where my long departed mean as fire great grandmother taught art. Oh, almost a month ago. Right around the time we returned from Jim’s radiation treatments I got a call from the Aunt Heap telling me that my mother was in the hospital with A Fib. Talking with her doctor I started to get a more complete picture of what was going on – she’s going into end stages of anorexia. Her body is breaking down the muscles, including her heart. It’s that serious. I don’t think she’s long for this world at this point. One thing that the doctors could all agree on is that she cannot continue to live in her dusty mausoleum of a haunted house alone. They didn’t...

  I love this silly photo. Many days that's what I feel like. Particularly when dealing with copious amounts of Sahara dust. Haven't posted here in a while. I was busy with getting the husband through radiation, myself through putting my mother into assisted living and now the fall out for basically not being home for five long months. Dirt! Dust! Laundry! Asthma! The relentless asthma inducing Sahara dust! There's a very low level dumb celeb who fancies himself deep that sometimes does these writing prompts. It's funny because his spelling isn't great and his usage of the language isn't either. But sometimes I do his challenges because, well, when you're stuck, like I am right now on the tines of the bad asthma and the second season "Happy Shiny People" I am kind of wrecked. It's killed my writing mojo to the point where I've been just using my computer to organize my recipes.  One of my three beloved children was involved with Teen Mania ...

  Naughty man standing in front of the " Beware Volcano " sign. So I am storing my writing prompts from a group I am in here on this mostly abandoned blog. I don't know why I participate in the group because the leader a) cannot spell in the age of Spellchecker, and b) his base of knowledge about life in general is simply shoddy. However I'm not sure which one of us is truly idiotic, him for his multitude of significant flaws, or myself for being a member of his group. Today his exercise involved going outside and writing about what you see, old school style on a notebook with a pen. First of all, I struggle with balance and would surely face plant right onto the cold hard surface of the side walk just from juggling a notebook, pen and cane. Not happening.  Add into this very awful scenario the fact that I am currently in a three star hotel in the industrial section of San Jose, Costa Rica, overlooking the John Deere warehouse. Plus for crazy ironic giggles check this...

So so tempted to rename this whiny ass blog "Sorry Side Up" with a photo of some janky fried eggs. The last year has just sucked so much, since the husband's cancer surgery in Jan. 2024. I haven't been posting for quite a while. I haven't much felt like it, yet I keep returning here to gripe on the regular. Just the short period of time of the current political administration has kept me busy writing at my Substack. If you're been watching the madness you know what's going on. The bit that concerns me that I keep returning to is the fact that the USA keeps sending deportation flights here to Central America where countries are in no way able to handle or accomplish what the administration wants. Panama is pretty much just turning them loose on the streets and telling them to ' self deport '.  Fly free my little deportees, fly free!! It's an evolving humanitarian crisis in this part of the world created entirely by Trump. One of the things I...

  Things are finally starting to feel more 'normal' as we return to our regularly scheduled programming and boring every day lives here. I am trying to download and edit a few of the many photos I took at Lago Arenal, the volcano and other places on the trip including a pile of rainbow photos. It was rainy and cold around La Fortuna during our visit last week, but it just made the adults only pool next to the cocktail bar at the volcano springs place the best place to be! Soaked so long and hard in 100 degree water I started to feel faint. Upside: We've managed to move everything back where it goes and clean. Fresh sheets on the beds, both bedrooms that were used are freshly clean. Guesthouse pretty clean, I can put off the sweep/mop/dust a few days. Good thing too because I discovered today that our other guests used all the towels and extra sheets. Guesthouse sheets on the line right now drying. Towels first thing tomorrow! On top of it all now.  I just started something ...

  We were here again, on that windy road with warnings not to feed the coatimundis, or as the Ticos call them Pizotes. Yes, I did feed a pile of them. Breaking the law, breaking the law! Sorry the sign is so fuzzy.  These guys. So I know I said I was staying home from Arenal and my husband was taking his two friends, but what ended up happening is that Jim talked me into accompanying him because he didn't really want to be around them either. One of them is just ridiculous! His brother was fine save for handing out those religious tracts. I went because the husband requested it and boy it was a huge mistake, pizote feeding or not. Why? Well, Timmy, the guy that's visiting. Not Mike his brother, but Timmy. Timmy started getting on my nerves and didn't let up even after he left. He pretty much ruined my Tuesday and parts of yesterday too. I've come to the conclusion after this trip that Timmy must be autistic, or OCD, or some other diagnosed 'ism.' None of this is...

View from a restaurant of a dried up river bed.  Lately life has been that twisted tortured two-step clown rodeo with disabled hijinks at the airport and church followed by beaucoup of sciatica. I've been mostly housebound and on pain meds. Jim went through quite the travail to get home from that funeral in Ohio. His second flight, from Dallas to Liberia was cancelled due to weather. Two nights sleeping at the airport because the airline played that silly game of keep delaying don't cancel until every hotel room from Dallas to Denver was booked. Then he flew from Dallas to Houston, spent another night away, this time in a hotel room before arriving home on the busiest travel day I've ever seen.  Many of those stupid flight trackers were wrong and I ended up trudging back and forth to the airport a few times on faulty information and Jim calling to say that they were boarding the plane multiple times. Right now we have the second of two sets of visitors here. First set was o...

Quite frankly I'd rather be riding one of these horses on the beach. New Year's Day started with death. I got up and saw the news coverage of the terrorist attack in New Orleans, where I still have plenty of friends and family living. I kept reading through the coverage obsessively, trying to make sense of the pathway up Canal St to a tight turn onto Bourbon St. It's too tight of a turn for the driver to get much speed going, and just like that my mind has been down a conspiracy rabbit hole. Jim had to drag me away to a New Year's Day party at the house of a friend. I did not enjoy myself because my mind kept working it's way back down to New Orleans worrying while the sorriest excuse for a pile of strange foolishly preening self-focused Gringos kept yammering on about inanities around me.  Life has been a pile of more strange involving deaths since the first of the year. Jim's aunt Ramona died, his last living relative from his parents generation. Tomorrow I ta...

 My son was just here, and I'm still trying to put my life back together. I've been so sick that my head feels like this vista from Copey de Dota from before the fire took out the ancient wooden church. See the clouds drifting down among the buildings? That's my head right now. The armpit infection has morphed into a down the arm infection. Too many antibiotics and doctors poking the infected bits. I've put an end to that because I believe they've made it worse by the constantly draining and scraping. Don't ever get an infection here because instead of being told to use hot compresses and antibiotics it's all scraping and prodding. Enough about that boring health shit. Part and parcel of having an immune system illness. I was so sorry to see my son leave for home a few days before Christmas. I miss him so much, and our just hanging around the house. He did go hiking three times with Jim. One day I felt especially grumble-y about it because they hiked Rincon ...

  Mentally I'm back at this place. Been an unusually usually weird time! What follows is a crazy tale of when para-social relationships go beyond haywire. Ah, the old Trans Allegheny Lunatic Asylum! It's a very weird experience having the lowly barnacle on the bottom of the boat level of internet notoriety. I'm not as noted as the "Horky-Porky Kid" but thanks to my ten years writing and editing a daily column at a media site I have the glimmer of the very extremely worm's belly low, shudder, gasp, fame. What that means is that para-social relationships can sometimes be tricky to navigate even now. For many years folks reached out to me in private messaging to talk about their trauma surrounding the issues of spiritual abuse and recovery. Very difficult conversations to have. Eventually some just took it way too far and I started to feel like a nursemaid to nincompoops, an unpaid therapist substitute when it was obvious real serious mental health sessions neede...

  I woke up this am thinking about writing about foibles and follies of the media. An industry that I was part of for ten years that has turned deeply toxic. But I realized after seeing the blog posts of a few people I know, and many I don’t about moving here thinking it’s going to be a piece of cake, and slamming up against their own ignorance I figured it was time to explain things. It’s not that cake and eating it too, for some it turns out to be a urinal cake, an old sodden urinal cake. Look, I don’t want to discourage anyone from pursuing their dreams. I just ask you do some basic research about the place, what to expect, how things happen here before you show up with stars in your eyes imagining it to be just like your luxurious tropical vacation. Moving here is not for the faint of heart, and knowing what you are up against can make for a much better experience. We were lucky, our research paid off, we did many things right, but we also flubbed up a few times a...