Thursday 9/11- Today Ramie’s to-do list would be to run around town paying bills and going to the bank, which is a necessary evil that is truly no fun here. As I’ve mentioned in the past, it can take an hour or more just to deposit money into your account. If you need to do more involved things, then expect it to take two or more hours. There’s no convenient drive-through, and it’s a VERY slow-moving line!
Ramie was also recently asked if he wanted to do some work at one of the houses that Loren manages. Ramie has done quite a bit of work at this house before, but the most recent owner just sold the house back to the person he originally bought it from (long story!) and the guy that most recently owned it really didn't take great care of it. The new (original) owner who just bought it back had a list of things he wanted updated; things like the installation of a new kitchen sink, faucets throughout the house, and new fans, all things that Ramie can do. There were other things like cleaning out all the junk that had been left behind, redoing sections of the roof, fixing and replacing the gutters, re-grouting the pool, and more that Ramie obviously won’t be doing. We didn’t even consider re-grouting our own pool or replacing our own roof, and he definitely won’t be doing that for someone else, but he can take care of all the plumbing and electrical items. After about an hour or so walk through with Loren, Ramie had his list of to-do’s.
When he got home, he stopped by to check on the tree trimmers who got the go-ahead to start cutting and pruning the trees at Josh & Steph’s property. They didn’t arrive until the afternoon today, so they hadn’t gotten too much done yet, but they would be back tomorrow to finish “round one” of this multi-step job.
Friday 9/12- After Ramie got home from his turtle walk, he opened up the gates for the guys doing the tree trimming again, and then had enough time to fill up his to-go coffee cup and hit the road to go to Ojochal to look at a job for Stuart & Gem. They have purchased a small Tico style casita and are in the process of remodeling it. They wanted Ramie to come take a look and figure out whether it would be possible to get hot water in the shower, as well as look at a few other plumbing and electrical items. This house was very simple, just a one room “studio style” house with a separate bathroom. Before they had purchased it there had never been electricity in the house so they recently had that installed, and the plumbing was a simple one-pipe system; no option for hot water, just one pipe going from the main to the bathroom sink, one to the shower and one to the toilet, that was it. We aren’t positive, but I don’t even think there was an indoor kitchen or plumbing for a kitchen sink previously, as they also had to add a section onto the house to make a small kitchen and sitting area. Why would they even invest in a property like this? Mainly for the location and the view. On top of all of the work they did to make the house livable, they added a beautiful patio area that goes out over the edge of the mountain with a view of the valley below and the ocean.
The discussion today focused mainly on how to get hot water to the shower. Truly, the simplest way is to install what is affectionately known as a “suicide shower”. I’m sure most of you reading this blog have never heard this term before, and of course, we will explain what this weirdly named thing is. A “suicide shower” is an electric shower head that heats the water as it passes over a heating element. It is literally an electronic piece of equipment with a heating element that is attached to the shower head and also wired to the electricity. Typically there are just a couple of wires coming out of the wall and wire nuts connecting the device right above the stream of water. As for the name… well… think about the whole toaster & bathtub scenario, and you’ll understand. Yes, these are a thing and a lot more common here that you would think!
Now, back to the house. Unless they wanted to tear open a wall and install more water pipes to connect an on-demand water heater, which there was no simple way to do, this electrical appliance in the shower is really their only option. Since they hadn’t planned for this when they had the electricity installed in the house, Ramie would have to run new electricity to this part of the bathroom. They also inquired about adding another electrical circuit for a potential future washer and dryer. This was a long-term wish, though, and for now they just wanted to focus on getting the hot shower installed. They would be leaving Costa Rica for a week, so this was not an urgent project that they needed done, but just wanted Ramie to figure out the pricing and logistics for them and wait for the go ahead when they got back.
Saturday 9/13- Today we had the cleaners come to our house.
After all of the work that was done in the yard for the replacement of the septic system, you can only imagine the amount of dust and dirt in the house due to all of the moving of dirt and rocks, cutting of the concrete culverts, etc. I could see and feel the coating of dust on everything! This time of the year the yard is also muddy and Skye tracks in mud every day anyway, and even more so now that the yard is all torn up. This would take us forever to clean ourselves, and I just don’t have the time or energy to do that, so we called in the cleaners for a deep clean. This time, in addition to the regular floors, bathrooms, and windows that we usually have them do, we booked extra time so they could wash all of the walls, outsides of the cabinets, and really get the details that typically don’t usually get done. This is great, because the labor down here is inexpensive and we wouldn’t have to do it all ourselves. The only downside to having the cleaners come is that I feel like I’ve been kicked out of my own house while they are here, so starting at 7:30 this morning when they arrived, I confined myself to the table outside and worked on the blog and Ramie made himself busy in the yard while they made our house all nice and clean again. Let me tell you, when they were finished, the floors felt so nice to walk on again. Keep in mind we have tile floors, no carpet anywhere, as that would be a disaster in this climate! The feeling of clean floors on our bare feet was like heaven because the feeling of walking on dirty floors drives me bonkers!
Sunday 9/14- Ramie and I often reminisce about the vacations that we used to take before we moved to a place that was typically a vacation destination for us. Once in a while we talk about going on cruises and how much we enjoyed them, and today, just out of the blue, we decided we wanted to go on one again. Since we hadn’t been back to the US at all in 2025, and are very cognizant of the number of days we spend in the US for tax related reasons, we decided that we should make this happen before the end of the year so that we don’t use any days that we might otherwise want to spend going back to MN to see family and friends. Today we spent a good chunk of the day researching cruises to see what was available in the next couple of months. By the end of the day, Ramie’s Research, assisted by Decisions by Dana, had narrowed it down to just a couple of options that we thought would be the best, but didn’t pull the trigger to book any of them quite yet. Since this was a very spur of the moment idea, we thought it might be best to sleep on it for a day or two before committing to this.
This week 9/15 through 9/19- As you remember from our last blog post about our big project, the work of the new septic system was done, but the work to fix the yard had barely just begun. While the septic guys were digging all of the dirt out from the places that the new tanks and large drain field would be located, the pile of dirt that they dug out got so big and so high that they couldn’t really dig anymore because there was nowhere for the dirt to go. Ramie told the guys to just push that dirt down our hill toward the lower property, as he didn’t see that there would really be any problem with extending the hill just a little bit. Now that they were done and he was looking at how much dirt had got pushed and what had actually happened to the area when they pushed it down the hill, he decided that he didn’t like it and spent the next several days working to move thousands of pounds of clay from one part of the hill to different parts of the hill. In the same area there were also some heliconia plants that he wanted to move, but these particular plants aren’t easy to dig up and relocate. The roots of heliconia's are kind of like hostas in that they spread and reproduce, and if you miss just a little section, they will start to regrow from nothing. Not only that, but they are also on steroids, with roots that go way down deep and are very hard to get out of the ground. Ramie’s gear for this job are clothes that can get caked with red-clay mud that stains your clothing, rubber boots, and gloves, and he’s armed with a pickaxe and a shovel, and hopefully plenty of muscle and energy to go with it.
For the plants, the job would be to pickaxe down to the bottom of the deep roots so that he could get out as much as possible now, and hopefully not have to go through it all again if/when they regrow. As if it needed it, to add to the difficulty level of this task, it has started to rain more recently and the hillside of clay is very slippery. The newly added clay is also very soft as it has not had time to compact and harden after just being pushed over the edge. Standing on a hillside that is about 45* or more incline and in soft clay, he would just sink in and slide down the hill. This plant excavation would have been a difficult enough task before all of the new clay was added, but now with an additional foot or more of the new mud piled on top of what used to be the surface of the ground, he had several feet of earth to dig to get to the bottom. Also, keep in mind, this isn’t just one plant, this is a whole “patch” of heliconias that is about 10 feet by 3 feet.
As you can probably tell by the description, he wasn’t going to get this done in a day! Over the course of several days this week, working only for a few hours in the morning before it got too hot or he got too tired and sore, he got a lot of it done. Little by little! Fortunately, this was a project that he could take his time on, there was no rush to get this finished. When he was finished for the day, he would be covered in mud looking like he had just laid down on the hillside and rolled around in it. If he did lie down, he would probably blend right in!
He knew better than to come into the house like that, especially since we already had the cleaners come, so he would just hose himself off, in his clothes and all, and leave the dirty, muddy clothes outside.
After a big project like a septic drain field has been dug in, you can imagine just how tore up that part of our yard was too. They did try to repair as much of it as they could, but Ramie likes things done in a very particular way, so in addition to the mud pile project, he also did some additional work to flatten out and clean up the side yard where all of the work was done.
Fortunately, this week Ramie didn’t have any outside jobs on his schedule, and because those pesky tides were not very convenient again, he was doing middle of the night turtle walks. He would go to sleep for a couple of hours, have to get up for a few hours in the middle of the night, and then would try to sleep a few more hours when he got home. This led to him being really exhausted during the day, so working on these yard projects at his own leisure worked out well. The night walks are starting to take a toll on him, hopefully the tides get favorable again sometime soon!
While I worked, Ramies Research also continued to do more cruise research, and by the end of the day, Decisions by Dana chimed in and we booked and finalized the plan for our 2025 cruise. I would like to apologize to the participants of our traditional Christmas on the Beach, as this year, we will be spending Christmas on a Cruise. Back when we cruised regularly, (we haven’t been on one since 2017, because then we started coming to Costa Rica on vacations) we always talked about doing a cruise over Christmas. We never did one back then because when we lived close enough to the families, we would spend time with them over the holidays. Now is our chance, and we are going to take it!
These days, you probably couldn’t pay me to voluntarily go back to MN in the winter, so cruising over Christmas became a reality, and in just a few short months, we’ll be trying it out! Now, after living here in Costa Rica for a few years, we wonder if cruising will be as magical for us as it used to be. Back then, we used to go on our tropical vacations in February when we had sub-arctic temperatures and had to escape to somewhere warm. We were also going to “exotic” locations that were nothing like life in MN. Now, we would have warm weather anyway, and we are living in one of those “exotic” locations, so how will this change how we feel? I know one of the things that I’m looking forward to is not having to cook or work for 9 days. The most difficult decision that we’ll have to make will be what to order off the menu. WOOHOO!!!
Saturday 9/20- As we mentioned earlier, Ramie has been busy trying to dig out all of the heliconias. By the end of the week he had finished removing everything that he wanted to remove from the side hill, filled in the holes that resulted from removing those plants, and spread out and evened out all of the clay mud that was tossed over the hill after the septic project. Now the question was “what are we going to do with this to stop the erosion”. We are in the thick of the rainy season and it’s just going to get worse for the next 6 weeks or so, so we’ve been brainstorming plants that we could put in that will stay low, act as ground cover, and hopefully hold the dirt from washing down. We remembered that Geoff and Tracy have some short ground-cover plants in their yard that look nice but are constantly spreading out. We reached out to Tracy to see if those plants had to be “trimmed up” at all, and if she did have extra that she wanted to get rid of, could we come up and gather them from her? Fortunately, those plants hadn’t been cleaned up recently and they were in need of thinning out and pulling back, so she agreed to let us take the excess in exchange for Ramie hanging a TV in her living room.
DEAL!
We started our morning up at Tracy’s today. We sat around for a while visiting, and after we had finished the coffee that she offered us, she and Ramie went into the house to hang that TV, while I started to pull up a bunch of those plants. I got a whole pile of them pulled by the time they finished with the TV, but there were still some areas that Tracy wanted to thin out some more, so together the 3 of us spent a little bit more time pulling up plants before we headed home a little after noon.
Of course, before he was finished, it did start to sprinkle, which then turned into rain, but Ramie just kept going. He was this far in, he might as well get them all
in the ground! Ramie often says that working in the rain is refreshing and he stays cooler that way, so it doesn’t bother him too much. He is
usually already soaked in sweat so he can't tell the difference, I suppose, except maybe the smell. 🤣
Sunday 9/21- Most of the time we try not to make any big plans for Sunday and typically start the morning by running to the grocery store if we have to restock anything, and then plan to spend the day around the house. This morning, we did run to the grocery store right away in the morning to get that out of the way, but shortly after we got home, out of the blue we got a call from Deiner. He said that he and his wife Ana were out for an ATV
ride and down in Uvita and wanted to know if we wanted to get together to hang out for a little while. Sure, why not!? So, at about 10:30ish Deiner & Ana stopped at the house for a little while. We visited and had a beer, and then at about lunch time we headed to a little restaurant close by to grab some food.
Monday 9/22 through Wednesday 9/24- Ramie found more things he wanted to take care of with the hillside of clay. The backwash pipe from our pool pump runs down toward the lower part of our property, but currently just ends at the edge of the hill on the upper yard. Over the years, Ramie has noticed that it is washing out part of the hillside. To fix this he wants to extend that drainpipe to the bottom of the hill. He took some measurements and went to town to get all the parts. It didn't take long for him to connect the pipe and run it down the hill, but now he had to cover it up. Thankfully there is a whole bunch of fresh, heavy, wet, clay he can use for this job! He gathered the excess clay from the bottom of the hill to define the edge a little bit better and removed some excess clay from a different part of the hill and used it to cover the new drainpipe. This part of the project took a few more days of playing mud-man. This clay is so wet and heavy that it was almost impossible to throw it by the shovel-full, so instead, he just took his gloves off, picked up huge clay balls and threw them as hard as he could into the hillside where it would flatten out and pack in, like when you throw a snowball at a solid surface. Of course, after playing on the hill, he once again finished his day covered from head to toe in slimy clay.
Thursday 9/25- We haven't been to San Isidro in a while and we were due to do some restocking. It has been even longer since I’ve been to the farmer’s market because the last couple of times we went over there weren’t on a Thursday. Today’s first stop would be the farmers market. There is a guy that sells homemade peanut butter and I needed some. Karen and Dennis went to the market a while ago and I asked them to pick up a bucket for me, I liked it, and I needed another one. Yes, I said bucket. This peanut butter comes in a 4kg (just shy of 9lbs) bucket. He sells smaller jars too, but I eat a lot of peanut butter. The reason I need this particular peanut butter is because it is all-natural peanut butter with no preservatives or sugar and you can’t find that in the stores down here. I can find almond butter by the regular jar, but this peanut butter is significantly less expensive. It’s also a nice change up and addition to variety for me. After we had obtained my bucket of peanut butter and all sorts of different vegetables, it was time for the next stop.
Breeze’s Butterfly garden needed a refresh on flowering plants so we made a stop at one of the viveros to look for some pretty flowers for her. We decided that we would load up on all sorts of different flowers for her garden, add to the hummingbird bushes that edge the yard, and look for some plants that would live well inside the house too. Once we had all of that stuff loaded into the truck, we had to make a quick stop at the Agri store to get more fertilizer for our hybrid hibiscus plants; to make these guys thrive, they require a different ratio of fertilizer than the typical stuff, and we aren’t able to find this specialty stuff in Uvita.
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| Yes, these are our own Hibiscus plants |
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