Tuesday 7/1- As we mentioned briefly in the last blog, Ramie has a new property to manage in our neighborhood. The previous owner who built the 3 small houses decided that it was time to sell the property and move back to her home country of Belgium. The new owners, Josh and Steph, got word through his realtor that Ramie did property management in our neighborhood. They are from the US and have plans to eventually move to Costa Rica, but in the meantime they needed someone to manage these 3 houses for them. The property consists of 2 long-term rental houses and the main house, which he plans to move into eventually, but it will probably be 2-3 years before that happens. In the meantime, the plan is to make that property into an Airbnb after he makes some updates and changes.
Ramie had to spend some time figuring out the account numbers for the bills for the 3 houses and making sure he could get them paid, and in order to make sure he can keep good records for incoming rent and outgoing expenses he had to prepare new financial spreadsheets for this set of properties. This isn’t as quick and easy as it may sound, and he spent quite some time working on the computer to get it all finalized.
He also has been working to collect the money from the neighbors for all of the road work that just took place and is trying to coordinate yet one more load of rock to add to the road to make it just a little bit better. Over the last few days we got some rain and it was evident that there are still some low spots on the road that need to be filled in, so once again he has reached out to everyone in the neighborhood to see who would be on board with helping pay for it. Needless to say, it has not been easy asking over and over again for more money, but it seems like much of the neighborhood agrees that having a road that was in good shape to hold up against the coming rainy season was important. He also worked on some more landscaping. Outdoor work when you live in the jungle just never ends! I guess you could say that he had his plate full today.
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| You may laugh but this is kind of accurate! |
Wednesday 7/2- Ramie’s Repairs was back to work again today; today’s job was fairly easy, though, as it was just a request to go to our friend Mike’s house to replace some light bulbs. The fans and lights are pretty high in this house, and Loren, who manages this house, is not comfortable going that high on the ladder. It didn’t take Ramie long, and he was finished with that job, but then had another one at Josh and Steph’s rentals (the 3 new ones) to repair some screens that have apparently been torn. After all this was done, he was back home and working on those spreadsheets once again to get them finalized.
Even though it was a short week for me due to the 4th of July this Friday, it sure was a heck of a week! Not only was I training our new employee, but I have been getting tasked more and more often with helping run the operations of the firm on top of doing all of my regular case work. I worked a lot of hours this week and it was a full and busy one, but given all of the recent changes, I am confident that in the next few months things will get better, having another person to share the case work with will make a huge difference. For now, though, I was exhausted and glad that this didn’t come a few months ago during tax season!
Friday 7/4- Happy 4th of July to our US readers!
A lot of people ask us what we do for the 4th of July, and the answer is…. nothing really. You see, 4th of July is not a holiday here. Costa Rica’s Independence Day is September 15, and there’s no reason for this country to celebrate; this is a regular day in July for Ticos and for expats from other countries other than the US. Yes, there are things like “gringo fests” where they throw some kind of party to get the expats to come in and spend money at their bar/restaurant, but otherwise it’s just a regular day here. Even though there is no celebration, I am just happy to have a day where no one expects me to work at my paid jobs! I will, instead, work on regular life stuff and relax, much like I do on a weekend. I am thankful for my 3 day weekend! What will I do? I'm not quite sure yet, but I spent the morning doing some chores and things around the house that I had to take care of.
Ramie, on the other hand, DID have to work today. There were turtle nests to hunt for at 4:30 in the morning, after that he got to come home briefly for his morning routine of coffee and Chicky cookies, but he didn’t get to sit around for very long; he had to get to the warehouse at 7:30 to help Randall unload one container and load a different one.
He got home a little bit before noon, but that didn’t mean we’d have a lazy afternoon at home. Nope, shortly after Ramie got back, we headed up to Tracy’s to visit for a while and to help her brainstorm a fix for a problem she was having with her wireless doorbell. It was a nice afternoon for us and did end up being a nice way to wind down our day.
Saturday 7/5- You’ll never guess what we did today, we did projects around the house! 😂 I started my morning with a little bit of baking (just muffins, nothing fancy), and worked on the blog. It was a very laid back weekend, but sometimes that’s better than having too many plans and not enough time to rest.
Monday 7/7 thru Wednesday 7/9- To be honest this week has been a blur for both of us. Ramie thinks he may have gone up to Karen and Dennis’s to help them install their new replacement Starlink dish to replace the original one that died. Yes, he only installed their Starlink just a little while ago, but you may remember that it was a used system. Yes, it sucked they only got a short amount of use out of it, but at least Starlink has good customer service and provided a new dish at no charge. Of course, this new one was a completely different “generation” which means that the cable and mount weren’t compatible, so they had to replace everything and run a new cable that had to be secured in place again like they did the first time. This project took about a half day.
He has also been helping Frank and Rose out with the house next door (previously owned by Adam & Katie). The are visiting for about 10 days and are glad to finally spend some time in their house. Frank is pretty handy, so he was able to do a lot of the projects on his own, but he did have some questions for Ramie and asked for his opinions, as well as needed to borrow Ramie’s tools since they don’t have that kind of stuff here.
Ramie is also still trying to figure out how to build a homemade smoker. Even after watching all of the YouTube videos, it's proving more difficult than he thought. Not so much the build “process”, but more so trying to find the material that he needs in small quantities. For example, he only needs a few square feet of expanded metal and tubing, but there is nowhere here to buy a small amount, you have to buy a whole sheet which is 4’ x 8’ or an entire tube that is 21 feet long. This is why he was digging through a scrap metal pile in our last blog… yeah, he doesn’t just dumpster dive for fun, there’s a reason behind the madness!! While looking for this material he also continually had another thought: How long will this barrel made of very thin metal that we are going to use for the body of the smoker even last? Is all of this trouble to build a smoker even worth the time, energy, and expense, compared to buying one, especially given that it may not last long?
Thursday 7/10- This afternoon I would finally get to meet the new owners of the house next door! While Ramie has talked to and messaged Frank & Rose on the phone many times, and even met them earlier this week when they arrived, I hven’t had any interaction with them yet. Tonight, we had dinner plans together to hang out, get to know each other, and talk about things other than the rental house. Sometime during the day they messaged Ramie saying that their teenage boys were driving them crazy and they were ready to head to the restaurant for a drink whenever we were ready, so instead of waiting until dinner time, we headed out at about 3:00.
We went to La Choza, one of the Mexican restaurants that we like, drank a couple Margaritas and hung out and chatted until about 7pm. It was nice to finally meet them, and I think we got along well and enjoyed the company.
Friday 7/11- Out of the blue today we got a message from Karen & Dennis asking if we wanted to go to La Choza for dinner tonight because they were really craving their burritos. At first our initial answer was no, we were just there last night, but then after thinking about it for a little while, we decided that there were enough things on the menu that we liked and we went back again. It’s kind of funny that this was the particular restaurant that we ended up going back to twice in a row, it is almost reminding me of our very first vacation to Uvita when we rented a house at the end of the street by this restaurant and kept going back nearly every day. They’ve got good food and good drinks, so I’m happy to make it one of our “regular” go-to restaurants.
Saturday 7/12- While it isn’t a Thursday for the feria, this morning we made a last-minute decision to make a run to San Isidro. Building a homemade smoker just didn’t look like it was going to work out like he was expecting, so before he got too deep into the project Ramie decided that he wanted to look for a “real” one. There are a few outlet stores that we know of that just might have something that will work for us. While we’re missing out on the feria, at least I didn’t have to try to coordinate a last-minute day off work, so I guess that was the tradeoff we were going to make.
We didn’t end up having any luck finding a smoker, but we did stock up on all of the other things that we typically buy when we are over there. When we got back to Uvita we headed straight to Colono, one of the local hardware stores, where Ramie knew that they did have a smoker. They only had one, it was the floor-model and you could tell by the layer of dust on it that it had been around for a while. After a little bit of negotiating on the price, we ended up buying it. It would have saved us a whole day of shopping if we would have just bought this one that he has been looking at for the last couple of weeks from the start, but you just never know what types of deals you might run into on a trip to San Isidro. It’s all good, we’re just happy to have a smoker, and Ramie is relieved that he doesn’t have to engineer one made out of scraps of metal or buy all that extra metal that we really have no place to store.
Sunday 7/13- Since yesterday was spent shopping, today was the day that we’d have to catch up on chores & the blog. That’s usually the way things go around here, right? But one of the chores today was a little bit different. We were excited to use our new smoker fairly soon, so Ramie oiled it up and burnt it out to put the first “season” on the metal. We didn't end up smoking any meat, but now it will be ready to use whenever we’re ready. Of course, we made time to jump in the pool and float around for a little bit before calling it an end to the weekend.
Tuesday 7/15- Since Frank & Rose are only in town for a little while longer and we only got to hang out with them once, tonight they invited us to their house for dinner. It was another good evening of getting to know each other a little bit more and solidifying the relationship beyond just the business of managing the house. It was a simple dinner, Frank grilled some burgers and it was a BYOB type of night, but low-key is my favorite kind of get together… nothing fancy is expected by us!
Wednesday 7/16- Ramie sure seems to be a busy guy this month (welcome to my world!!). The tides are not in their favor for turtle walks this week, so this morning he had to get up at 2:30 am so that they could finish the whole walk before the tide was too high. While these middle of the night walks are not ideal, they are sometimes necessary. Usually they wouldn’t be too much of an issue if he could come home and go back to bed until he wasn’t tired any more, but tonight he only got to sleep for an hour or 2 when he got home because Randall needed his help again to unload another container.
Ramie sucked it up, and he is able to handle days like this once in a while, but hopefully it doesn’t happen too often! Just like always with these days at the warehouse, he was out the door and to the warehouse around 8am. Thankfully, these containers have been pretty decent to unload and almost everything is on pallets, so it goes fairly quickly. He was home mid-day sometime, but didn't do too much else for the rest of the afternoon, you could tell he was tired and all he wanted to do was sit around.
Thursday 7/17- Busy Ramie wasn't done working at Karen & Denis’s house yet either. Unfortunately, after using them for a while, they discovered that the original locations that they mounted the solar panels was not ideal, especially for this time of year. The Earth's tilt has changed the position of the sun since they originally installed them. Now, with the way that the sun is coming over the other sections of the roof, its causing a bit of an issue. During the rainy season we have the least amount of sun available since it often gets cloudy and rainy in the afternoon, and the change of the angle of the sun has made it so that they really only get a few hours of good sun directly on the panels during the day and it’s not enough for them to recharge the batteries. In the last few months since they originally installed the panels they have also finished adding their carport, so there is an additional roof space that they can consider moving the panels to now.
Dennis has been paying attention for the last week or so of where the sun hits on the roofs and at what part of the day. The carport seems like the best spot, as it tends to get good morning sun starting at around 7:30am and lasts all the way until about 3pm. This is way better than what they get where they are located now.
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| This was around 9am in the original location. Not good at all! |
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| 9am on the carport roof. This is much better! |
Friday 7/18- All of these turtle walks that Ramie does do come with some satisfying results once in a while. Today his team actually got to tag a live turtle, as opposed to just finding and rescuing a nest of eggs. Don’t get me wrong, there is nothing wrong with collecting eggs, because that’s truly the goal of the reserve, rescuing the nests to help more babies survive. Actually tagging a turtle is the extra added bonus that he gets once in a while during his volunteer time. The purpose of tagging the momma turtles is to track where she moves to or is spotted in the future. For instance, a couple of years ago volunteers spotted a turtle that was previously tagged in the Galapagos Islands. That means that this turtle traveled a distance of about 1,300km or 805 miles to lay eggs on our beaches in the southern zone of Costa Rica. Crazy right?
Ramie will explain the process of tagging a turtle.
Its pretty rare that the turtles in our area come ashore during the
daylight, hence the middle of the night walks, so we are walking with
flashlights. In the photos and videos below it was just starting to be
daylight but looks much brighter than it actually was. Keep in mind, the exact steps depend on how & at what point in the process of laying they find the turtle. Has she just started laying eggs? Is she still making her way up the beach from the ocean to look for a place to nest? Or perhaps she is already done laying or headed back into the water. For this example, let's say she was just spotted coming out of the water and making her way to the top of the beach toward the high tide line.
● When we spot a turtle we immediately turn our white lights off and switch to red lights. The turtles are not affected by the red light, as they can't see that color spectrum.
● We keep our distance, letting her make her way to where she wants to start nesting and make sure not shine her with our lights. Usually we just keep them off during this time if we can.
● Once she starts to dig her nest, only one or two of the experienced team members walk closer to her, making sure not to cross in front of her, but only to the side or behind her, to monitor her every now and then.
● Once she starts to lay her eggs, she goes into a trance and at that time the other team members can get closer to watch her lay the eggs. Again, always to the side or behind her.
● At this point we can take a picture/video but we must still be careful to not disturb her. We also check to see if she already has tags or not. We put on rubber gloves, gather our tagging kit if no tags were spotted, recorded the tag numbers, clean the area where the tag will be pierced with iodine, and get our tape measure ready to take measurements.
● Once she finishes laying and starts to fill in her nest and “pack” it (she basically rocks back and forth as she puts sand under her, packing it down over the eggs) we move in to start the hands-on part.
● First, we take two measurements: across the widest part of her shell (left to right) and then across the longest part of it (head to tail)
● Once that is done we finally get to tag her. On our team, I am the one that does almost all of the tagging, the other team members are squeamish and the turtle can also put up a pretty good struggle, so having strength to hold the flipper helps.
● We tag the front flippers, one tag on each side. Some turtles hold still while I am working with them, while others do not. Applying some pressure to the back of their shell usually calms them down so they don't thrash all over with their flippers, but I have had to play “turtle rodeo” on some especially rowdy turtles. No, not actually riding them, but holding them by a different method that is safe for them. One hand holds the front of the shell by her head and the other holds the back by her tail.
● Once the tags are in-place we are finished and we let her go.
● If she hadn’t left the nest yet when we tag her, we wait for her to move far enough out of the body pit and nesting area before we start to work on locating nest and gather the eggs to bring them back to the nursery. This way the whole team can stay busy, with some people working on the tagging and other people working on the nest.
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| This was the Olive Ridley turtle we tagged today. |
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| This was a Green Turtle that we tagged last year. Notice the size difference. |
Since we’ve installed the solar, we’ve been paying more attention to our energy usage. I think this comes both from wanting to optimize the “free” power that we are making, but also because the app for the system makes it easy to really see where we use power and how much we are using. Since it’s so easy to see, it makes it easier to come up with ways to use less power or be more thoughtful about the things we use it for.
One of our biggest energy consumers is the dehumidifier in the dry room. Even though we have it set to only run on a schedule instead of allowing it to run all of the time, it still is quite an energy hog. Karen and Dennis installed an AC unit in their dry room and have been playing around with different settings and paying attention to how much power it draws, and it seems possible that an air conditioner set to “dry mode” may actually use less power than a dehumidifier. The dehumidifier that we have is quite old (2012) and was bought used, and we don’t know how much longer it will last before it craps out on us anyway (this is the 2nd one we’ve owned in this house already). Since it’s old, it probably isn’t the most energy efficient either, which may be part of the reason why it uses so much power. We know that it isn’t going to last forever, so to prepare for that day, we’ve decided that we are going to bite the bullet and install a small AC unit in our dry room too. Another plus of having an installed unit as opposed to the portable dehumidifier is that the heat and water condensation will be outside, instead of heating up the dry room, and we won't have to try to remember to empty the bucket regularly. When we forget to empty it, it doesn't run and the humidity in the dry room raises, then it's no longer a “dry room”, which means our things could start to get musty and moldy.
Ramie’s Research has been searching around for the best deal on an AC unit and weighing the options of the different brands available. He found a deal that he thought was just too good to pass up and went and bought the unit today. Fortunately, Ramie’s Repairs would be able to do much of the prep work for the installation, like running the electricity to the place where it wasn’t previously, but we will hire an actual AC guy to put the unit in and charge it up, since Ramie doesn’t have the tools to do that part on his own. Apparently we never run out of projects at this house!
Saturday 7/19- Remember that smoker that we bought last week? Well, today we’re testing it out! While we did have a propane smoker back when we lived in MN, this would be our first time smoking with charcoal. After Ramie did some research, he was confident that he knew how to do this and we decided, since we had it going, let’s go big! Yesterday we prepared pork chops, chicken, and steak all to be smoked today.
Hopefully this all goes well and we don’t wreck a whole bunch of meat! The plan was to try out a bunch of different things, have several meals of leftovers, and maybe even throw some back in the freezer for a future dinner of smoked meat without having to go through all of this work again every time.
What did we do while we waited for the meat on the smoker? I decided that it would be a good day to start on the top half of the cushion covers for the outdoor patio furniture. Just like when we did the other ones, I made Ramie do the final cutting, both because I really don't like that part of a sewing project, and because I trust his tape measure reading skills more than my own, I mean, I can do it, but it would take me twice as long to double check. Once again, the portion we wanted to finish today was only the cutting & getting the zippers pinned on. I would sew some other day.
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| Supervisor Skye making sure that we're doing it right |
At the end of the day, I will say that the smoking went well, and of course, when it was done, we had to sample a little bit of each type meat. It all turned out delicious!
We had some for dinner tonight, put some in the fridge for leftovers to eat for the rest of the week and even threw one meal of pork chops in the freezer. I guess this is going to become a hobby once again! Let me tell you, we’ve had a little bit of smoked meat from restaurants in the area and love it every time we eat it. We are really looking forward to getting back into one of our old hobbies from back home and adding some variety to are meals (which is very much needed since dinners seem to be very repetitive and are getting boring).
Monday 7/21 & Tuesday 7/22- As we mentioned earlier, Ramie had some work up at Karen and Dennis’s again. Today he would start the removal and relocation of the first 10 panels and installation of the additional solar panels. He requested to get an early start on the project, to avoid the heat of the sun and potential rain in the afternoon, so he was out the door around 7am. Dennis was at Ramie’s disposal and assisted him through the whole process.
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| Before. The panels are currently mounted on the side of the roof that you can't see in this photo. |
Tuesday morning it was another early start and the plan was to finish moving the 4 existing panels and mounting them in their new positions. Once those were removed from the original mounting rails they had to remove the “old” rails so they could finish mounting the new panels. Today they were able to get as far as mounting all the rails for the full array and re-installing the other 4 original panels. Ramie’s intent was to get the original 10 panels hooked up so they could start producing solar again. Dennis was there to help carry the panels from their old positions to the new positions, and Ramie says having two people to move the panels on the roof was a lot easier than doing it himself. You might remember how much I dislike going up on the roof, so when Ramie did the work on ours, most of the days he was up there moving things around by himself.
Once the 10 old panels were all in their new place, it would be time to start working on running all of the new conduit and cables that would be needed for the 6 additional panels. Then, of course, the rain started. It was somewhat light at first and they thought they could work through it. Even as it got more intense Ramie kept on going, he said it was “refreshing”. He worked for about another hour in the rain on his own and Dennis would pop out from under the eve to lend a hand when he could. Dennis wears glasses so it was a lot more difficult for him to see and work while the rain was coming down. That was ok, though, as he was helping to gather up all the tools and clean up while Ramie was still up on the roof. Ramie would have kept going, but when the thunder started, that was his queue to get off the roof. That was it for today, I guess it will require another day get it fully online.
Wednesday 7/23- Ramie is just a busy body, and he has commented so many times already this year about how busy he has been compared to prior years. I think some of that has to do with the fact that he has built up his "client base" and people are starting to know his work. Word of mouth from people we know telling others about what he can do and how well he does it spreads quickly, as there are few very “good” handymen down here who really know how to do a job right. Today Ramie had to meet with the A/C installer to bid installing a couple of A/C units at the 3 new houses that he has started to manage. The prior owner didn't ever plan to install AC, so there was no thought of running power to those areas of the rooms, and the houses are made from prefab concrete slabs, so some creativity would be needed to get power to where it needed to go and get the units installed.
Later in the afternoon Ramie met with Michael, the same builder that Karen and Dennis used, here at our house to get some opinions and pricing for adding onto our pool patio. Ramie wants to expand the patio outside of one side of our pump room to accommodate sun loungers, and the other side to build a grilling & smoking area. This would also require moving the outdoor shower to the back of the pump room, possibly enclosing it so you can actually use it as a “shower” and not just a rinse off.
After a lot of conversation and measuring they guys came up with a plan. We have an idea of where we think the price should come in at, but we know Michael is on the expensive side, so we will wait and see if this is something that we will even consider moving forward with.
The day isn’t over yet and there are more things to be done before it’s time to shut down for the evening. Today we had to get our septic pumped……again! It's only been 8 months since we had it pumped last, but recently we noticed that after we did a load of laundry, the tank would overflow. Something is not right with our septic system! We should not need to have it pumped every year, and we didn’t even make it a year!! The company arrived this afternoon and got everything all set up, pumped it out, washed it up, and was finished within about an hour. While they were working on this, Ramie asked some general questions about the size of the tank and why we needed them back so soon. The guy's response was that our tank was very small, and even though he didn’t know how the drain field was done, he suspected that it may not be correct either.
Is this another issue that our builder took a short cut on? It's starting to sound like it! The main septic guy said that he would have someone from his company get a hold of Ramie and to schedule a time to come out and look at the system to figure out what we needed to do to make it better.
Thursday 7/24- Ramie’s days are looking just like mine—always busy (although his are more exciting to write about because it’s not just working at a computer all of the time). It was back to Karen and Dennis’s for one more day to finish the solar panel install. Ramie and Dennis worked out a plan to lift the 6 new panels from the ground to the roof, and once all the panels were up there, they mounted them. Finally, the end is in sight! Ramie finished installing the conduit then both he and Dennis worked together to pull 100 feet of cable through the conduit. They had to run two sets of cables, one for the set of 10 panels, the other for the set of 6 new panels, and by the end of the day, they were back online producing solar from the original 10 panels. The 6 new panels had to wait just a bit longer for some special parts to arrive from the US, because they had to be wired differently. For now, though, Karen and Dennis will monitor the solar input to see just how much better those 10 original panels work in their new positions compared to where they used to be, and most of the work is done on the 6 new ones, it would only take a little work to get them running after the new parts arrived.
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| After |
Pura Vida!
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