Monday 1/12- Ring ring… It’s 5:30 pm, we had finished dinner and were getting ready to relax for the evening when Ramie’s phone rang. It was Randall and he told Ramie that they just had an unexpected container show up and he needed help. Fortunately, according to Randall, everything was on pallets and it should only take about an hour to unload, so Ramie got changed into his work gear and headed to the warehouse. As they started removing the first couple of pallets, they discovered that things were not going to be as smooth as they originally thought it would. These pallets were not built very well and were very flimsy. This makes it difficult to move and unload them, as things are moving and shifting around inside of the crate as you’re moving them with a forklift. This causes problems. As they were pulling the 3rd pallet out of the container, the contents inside shifted and the pallet fell off the forks and crashed to the ground. While this would have been bad for any pallet of goods, this particular container was full of the pieces for one of those geodesic dome houses, and it contained 42 octagonal windows. The windows exploded all over the ground in the parking lot. There was glass everywhere!
At just about that time Lowell had arrived, and they had to fill him in on what happened. After taking videos and pictures, they checked all the other pallets and found that there were 5 more pallets of windows, all in the same poorly built crates. While yes, the pallet fell off the forks as they were unloading it, this was no fault of the warehouse and their crew, but of the company that built these pallets and packed this house in the container. Nothing in this container was palletized correctly and all of it was at risk of being damaged when it was moved. Even still, it has to get unloaded, but first they had to clean up all of the broken glass. The guys grabbed some shovels and rakes and they put as much as they could pick up into plastic shipping bins, in the end it was about 5 bins full of broken glass. Remarkably, despite the fall, at least 20 out of the 42 windows that fell were actually still ok.
Sometime around 8:00 Ramie made the comment to Randall “One hour, huh?” They laughed about it and kept working. Not everything goes as planned, and this always seems to be a theme here in Costa Rica! They finished up and Ramie got home around 8:30pm.
Tuesday 1/13- Ray and Wesley have recently returned from an 8 week visit to the US, and just like many people that visit the US for a while, they brought back quality upgrade items for their house. Ray asked Ramie if he could stop by to help install some new faucets and drains in their bathroom sinks. Of course Ramie could help! Once they got into the project, Ramie discovered that the original builder/plumber didn’t do some of the plumbing correctly, weird huh, and some things had to be fixed to correct the problems that this caused. Basically, they couldn’t connect the drain pipe directly to the sink because the countertop was too thick and the hole wasn’t drilled big enough for the pipe to fit. So, what they did was connect the drainpipe to the underside of the countertop and there was a gap that drain water had to seep through from the sink to the actual pipe. That’s just really shoddy work, so it took Ramie a couple of hours to do the work to fix that problem and he managed to get the new faucets and drains all installed and hooked up correctly.
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| A group of Rasta Toucans (as Ramie calls them), officially called Firey Billed Aracaris, perched on a tree in our neighborhood. |
Wednesday 1/14- You normally wouldn’t think of “Spring Cleaning” in January, but with the way the seasons work here, this time of year is kind of the end of spring or the early part of summer. The rains peak in about October, which is the peak of winter here, and the heat peaks in Feb and March, which would be the peak of summer, so we are kind of somewhere in between. That would make it spring, right? Ramie had started power washing the driveway a while back but didn’t finish it then; this week the goal was to finish power washing the rest of the stuff that needed it: the patio tile, the solar panels, and the rain gutters. Since he would be up on the roof for the solar panels anyway, this is the prime opportunity to do it all.
The first project of the day was the solar panels on the front of the house. There are only 4 panels here, so that went fairly quickly and he moved to the rain gutters on the front. When he finished cleaning these items, which seemed like it should have been a fairly easy task, he wasn't feeling very well. We had a very good reason why we suspected this was!
Recently we read an article about intestinal parasites and how they tend to be fairly common here in the tropics. There are particular over-the-counter (here) medications that you can take to get rid of these parasites, and there are some people who do this once or twice a year whether they are having symptoms or not. The article mentioned how years ago the writer had been having some weird digestion issues and gut problems, and after he did this parasite cleanse it seemed to have cleared it up. Ramie has had gut health issues for years, and I’ve been having some as well, so we decided it can't hurt to give this a try. It wouldn’t be bad to get rid of anything that we might have picked up since we’ve been living here for 4.5 years (and had several years of vacations here before that) and had never done one. I guess you could say that we were spring cleaning our guts too!?
Anyways, these anti-parasite meds were making us feel kind of weird, his head felt like it was in the clouds and he said he would get dizzy spells, so it's probably best that he doesn’t go up on the roof anymore for today and take things slow and easy.
Thursday 1/15- Ramie was feeling well enough this morning to clean the other 8 solar panels and power wash the gutters in the back of the house, but by the time he finished that, it had pretty much wiped him out again and he called it a day. I’m having similar symptoms, and even though this is supposed to be for intestinal parasites, the symptoms are mostly in our heads… not like “in your head”, but dizziness, pressure, and just a weird fuzzy mental feeling. While I did keep working, I will say it slowed down my thinking, and I definitely wasn’t going to take on any super difficult projects while I was taking these meds. It’s a good thing these pills are only for 3 days, and you can figure we’ll have lingering symptoms for a couple of days after that.
Friday 1/16- Randall called again to see if Ramie would come help him with another container that came in today, but there is no way Ramie was up for that! Randall asked if he would consider it, even just to run the forklift and not do any of the physical work. Unfortunately for Randall the answer was still no, as Ramie absolutely wouldn’t be able to help with any of the strenuous work, and he wasn’t feeling confident in his ability to safely operate heavy machinery (you know, just like they warn on certain medications… do not operate heavy machinery, that’s for a reason!!) He did feel well enough to run a power washer, though, and took care of the back patio this morning, which didn’t take long, but that was all he felt up to doing today. This evening with dinner we took our last dose of the parasite meds, so hopefully we’ll start to feel better and more like ourselves in just a couple more days.
Saturday 1/17- Ramie’s project of the day today was to seal the driveway. We did this last year at about this time, but the product that we used just didn’t hold up well. This year he checked a different store and got a different product that will hopefully last more than a year, and wanted to get it applied right away. Due to our weather here, it pretty much has to be applied early in the morning while it is in the shade and still cool-ish to allow for the best drying. Two coats have to be applied 24 hours apart, which means that he would have work to do both this morning and tomorrow morning. Also, obviously, we can’t drive on it until at least 24 hours after the 2nd coat was applied. He managed to get the first coat done and said that was enough for the day.
While we were hanging out in the back yard, we noticed that Skye was kind of agitated, but not in a bad way. She will often see birds or lizards down by the creek and chase or bark at them, but today it was different. She would run back and forth from the creek back up to us and try to get our attention. She has done things like this before when she “accidentally” dropped a toy down into the creek or something like that, it’s her way of communicating with us, so Ramie followed her. When he got to the edge of the creek he heard some rustling on the other side, and lo and behold, it was a little dog. Ramie whistled for it and got it’s attention, and it really seemed like this dog wanted to get to our side! The dog jumped down into the creek, but couldn’t get back up the steep bank, so Ramie went down to check it out. The dog seemed friendly enough, and came right to Ramie, so he brought it up to check it out. He wasn’t sure how friendly this strange dog and Skye would be, so he was careful to keep Skye back, and they came up to the house and called me out to handle Skye while he checked out this dog. He was calm and friendly but seemed very tired. Skye was curious but was shockingly calm around this dog; she usually gets very hyper and playful when other dogs come around, at least for the first 10-15 minutes or so. Not so much with this one.
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| Who are you? Want to be my friend? |
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| Mom and Dad, Who is this?? |
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| This must be a comfy spot! Skye really likes it there too. |
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| Fresh bath and its time for a nap, I'm so exhausted! |
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| I'll keep you company while you rest! |
We continued with our normal evening routine, and when it was time to close the doors, we let this dog decide if he wanted to be inside or outside. He came into the house and fell asleep on the floor next to the couch as we watched some TV. He would would get antsy and want to go outside so we let him out and he would come right back in and lay back down. This happened a few times until it was time to go to bed, and ultimately he did start in the house with us. That only lasted a few hours, and when we heard him get up in the middle of the night, Ramie let him out again, he went and laid down under the chair by the pool, but it wasn't long and Ramie saw him walking around the back yard. By morning he was gone. We have always said that while we are here in Costa Rica we are not going to seek out another dog, but if a dog finds us and wants to call this their home, we’d let them. I guess this guy just wasn’t ready to settle down with a family and wanted to continue on with his gypsy ways!
Sunday 1/18- This morning we received a message from someone who had seen our post on the FB lost and found pets group saying that the little dog was now at their house. We figured it was someone who lived close to us, but when we asked, we discovered that they were all the way on the other end of town. This little guy sure does get around!!
We were both feeling pretty normal again with only minimal lingering dizzy spells, but definitely much better than the prior 3 days. First thing this morning, Ramie had to get that 2nd coat of sealer on the driveway, and once he was finished with that we worked on the blog for a while and went for a swim in the pool. Even though the weather is supposed to be warming up by this time of the year, the water is still pretty chilly (to us), and hasn’t significantly warmed up since we had to drain & refill it after the re-grouting, so we didn't spend a lot of time in the pool and just had a relaxing afternoon after that.
Monday 1/19- Today is a US Holiday so I got a day off of work! Last week, before I realized that I got today off work, we had planned to go to San Isidro to go to the feria and stock up on supplies this Thursday, but since I had the day off of work we decided to go today instead. It’s coming up to that time of year again where we will both be busy working our US tax season jobs, so making the run to San Isidro will get less and less easy to schedule. You might remember from prior years that Ramie also works for one of the tax companies that I have been working for since we moved down here. For much of February through April he will be working nearly full time and I’ll be working both my regular job plus the extra tax season job, and we both know that we will be stuck to our computers 6 days a week. This is why we are heading to San Isidro now, because we won't have time to go shopping later. We stocked up on all of the things that we could, buying more supplies than we normally do, and hopefully that will last us through the tax season.
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| First they have to power wash the walls. |
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| The before |
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| 1st coat on the wall to the left? Did you notice the change? |
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| You can see the difference from the green to the fresh white look. |
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| Ramie decided to add accent to the wall and paint the columns a dark grey |
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| What do you think? |
One thing that our builder said more than once (and Ramie and I remember very clearly), and what we now realize should have been a big red flag at the beginning, but didn’t become apparent until now, is “I tint the primer before we paint so it covers better and we don’t have to do as many coats.” Well yes, that makes sense, but the problem was, he never actually put PAINT on the walls over the tinted primer. After 4 years of living here, we have finally put together that all of the walls in our house are still only primer!! The paint that Ramie buys to do touch-ups ends up being a completely different color because the builder never actually got the correct color or correct paint!!
In case any of that is unclear, yes, instead of painting the walls of our house, he tinted the primer and stopped without ever painting!! And, on top of that, he didn’t even get the primer tinted to the correct colors, he just picked a color that “was close” to what we had picked.
I can’t even express how frustrating this is, and although we spoke highly of this builder at the beginning, we have nothing good to say about him now and ABSOLUTELY do NOT recommend him to anyone anymore!!
{Fade back to current time} So, going back to the master bathroom, there has always been a spot on the wall behind the toilet that has bugged Ramie. You could see that they did not cover this area very well and you can basically see the raw cement board through the poorly applied single coat of primer. He has been mentioning that it bugs him for quite some time, and finally he wants to correct it once and for all. We actually already had ¾ of a gallon of the correct paint color that was purchased for touch-ups in the laundry room after the solar installation, so we didn't need to buy any paint this time, but he did need paint supplies like rollers, tape, and brushes. While he didn’t start painting today, he did make a trip to the store to get the supplies and taped the bathroom to get it ready for painting tomorrow.
Friday 1/23- Today was the day… Ramie was going to paint the bathroom to fix the spot on the wall behind the toilet that has irritated him for years, once and for all! He had his supplies and had already taped off the edges, so he was ready to do this, even though painting sucks! He started the morning by removing all of the towel hooks, toilet paper holder, switch and outlet covers, and was ready to apply the first coat. It was an obvious difference between the primer that was on the wall vs the true paint color we picked out.
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| The dark grey is the primer. The light grey is the actual color we picked out.. Big difference huh? |
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| Finished |
Today Ramie finished cleaning up the freshly repainted bathroom and I took some time to clean the rest of the house, and when we were done with that, it was time to work on the blog and have a low key rest of the day.
Monday 1/26- After taking the weekend off, the painting guys were back today to finish painting the carport roof, which would finish up that outsourced painting project. Now we have a bunch of nice fresh paint outside in the yard as well as in our bathroom. After my regular day of work at my main job, this afternoon we had the kickoff to tax season meeting with the tax prep company that we both work for. We know that “it’s coming soon”, and in a couple of weeks neither of us will be doing anything other than working. We are prepared for it and have already made peace with a very busy next couple of months. When in the tax industry, you just gotta do what you gotta do.
Pura Vida!
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