Wednesday 1/28- Last week when the guys were painting the back fence wall and the roof of the pump room and carport, we were toying around with the idea of hiring that same crew to repaint the inside of our house as well. About a year ago or so Ramie repainted our living room & kitchen area from a darker blue to a much lighter blue in the hope that the lighter color would make the inside of our house look brighter. I think it did brighten it up some, but Ramie has hated the “baby blue” color ever since the day it went up. Painting is not our favorite chore, so we had the same company give us a quote to paint the inside of the house. The price wasn’t terrible, and it would save Ramie a lot of work (since I don’t help at all with painting projects, I’ve been fired from that kind of work! lol).
The crew was back today to do this work. Even though I am not a fan of white walls, all of the houses that we visit that seem bright like we want our house to be have white walls, so we bought the same color paint that they painted the back fence wall because we liked the way that color turned out. I still had to work today, and with them working in the main area of the house where my desk is, I wasn’t going to be able to stay there. We moved my desk outside to the back patio, so that is where I worked from today.
The painters arrived at our house at about 6am, just about the time that I got started working. We moved all of the furniture to the center of the room except my desk, which was outside.
They started taping and masking things off right away. While I was working on the patio and the painters were painting in the house, Ramie was out front painting the front fence and wall. We’re still trying to get rid of all of the mistake colors that the original builder put on everything, and in the end, are liking the way things look much more than before.
I worked my normal day, and when I was done working, they were still hard at it. The original plan was to work on this both today and tomorrow, but it looked like things were getting finished quicker than expected and they decided to push through and work a “long day” to finish it all today. Well, I guess it wasn’t quite as close to finished as we thought, as it was after 6:30 this evening when they finally left and we could move my desk and the rest of our furniture back into the house. It was a very long day, and I was very happy to have my house back for the evening, but I guess I’m glad that they got it all done in one day and wouldn’t have to come back tomorrow.
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| Even Skye was tired of being kicked out of the house for the day |
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| Slowly getting the house back in order. We think it looks much "fresher". |
If you don't remember the blog were Ramie painted the living room, you can read it by clicking HERE to compare the baby blue paint to the new updated painted.
Now that the house is painted, Ramie wants to put some trim around our patio door just to dress it up a little bit and make it look a little nicer. In the afternoon after we had finished all of our cleaning, we decided to make a quick run to a lumber yard in Tinimaste, which is about a 45 minute drive from here.
Now, I wish I would have snapped some pictures of this place, because it is nothing like a lumber yard that you would think of back in the US. This place does everything from milling the raw logs down to finishing and building furniture, but they also sell wood for DIY projects like we want to do. There are no sections that you just walk to, to pick the sizes and thicknesses of your boards. We told the guy working there what we were looking for, and basically had to walk around the whole place looking for pieces that were the size and length that we needed. Because we needed such long lengths for our big door and didn’t want to piece together too many smaller pieces, we had to dig through everything to find some that were long enough. Once we found some pieces that would work, he ran them through the planer to make them a little bit thinner because what we found was far too thick for trim pieces. In the end, we got what we needed, and all together it cost us less than probably one similar board from Home Depot. It was definitely an adventure that I was not expecting when picking out some, what most people would call, basic boards!
Friday 1/30- After taking yesterday off, I was back to work this morning to work through everything that I missed yesterday. After all of the painting recently, Ramie really needed a chiropractor adjustment, so instead of waiting until his regular time tomorrow morning, Benny the Chiropractor agreed to meet us this afternoon so we didn’t have to wait in line tomorrow. After that, it was just a relaxing Friday at home. It was a beautiful night for grilling so we threw some meat on the BBQ for dinner and Ramie snapped some pictures while he was cooking.
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| Even Skye took a selfie in front of the grill! Mmmm MEAT! |
Saturday 1/31- We have been meaning to visit with Karen & Dennis for a while, and Ramie had some work that he had to do on their solar system, so this morning we headed over there to visit and to get that work done. I chatted with Karen while Ramie was busy working and Dennis had to leave for a short time to go pick up a delivery in town. Once Ramie was finished he was able to sit and chat for a bit before we headed home around lunch time. After that we didn’t do much but tried to catch up on the blog for a few hours while we had the time. Our days of “our own time” are getting short, and time to work on the blog (or to do anything blog worthy) will become scarce soon!
The Official Casa Costa Breeze end of January rainfall total was 6.83 inches
Monday 2/2- You would think that we wouldn't have much more to paint, but there always seems to be more... Even though Ramie has painted this before, our front gate and wall needed to be painted again since things don’t last long in the tropical sun here. Since we still had about 2-½ gallons of paint left from the back wall, we opted to use that, and today Ramie applied the first coat to the wall. Even though he finished around 10:30, the sun was already far too hot to keep going, so he will have to wait for another day to apply the second coat. He hasn't even started the gate yet!
After he couldn’t work out in the sun any longer he worked on installing the new breakers that we recently received for the solar system. You may remember a blog or two ago that after the cruise we came home to a very concerning problem – the breakers from our solar panels to our solar inverter had burnt up. We had high hopes that the problem was a freak accident and that new breakers would solve all of our problems, but you better believe that we will be keeping a close eye on these once we have them installed to make sure that nothing dangerous like this happens again!
Unfortunately even these new ones seemed to be getting hotter than Ramie liked so he contacted the manufacturer to discuss what was going on. After troubleshooting and going through all of the possible things that could be causing this problem, they thought that it might be because of the special ferrules (or connectors) that were installed on the ends of the wires from the solar panels so that the breakers had a solid surface to tighten against. He learned from the manufacturer that these breakers don't recommend those special connectors, which is the opposite recommendation of the company that our old breakers were from. This new manufacturer suggested cutting those connectors off and just clamping the bare wire into the breaker. Ok, that sounded easy enough, so that’s what Ramie did. We will wait for another sunny day to see if this made a difference.
Tuesday 2/3- The warehouse has been busy lately and today Ramie spent another day there working with Randall. While he was gone it was my job to keep an eye on the new breakers. Fortunately today, after the changes he made yesterday, the breakers stayed nice and cool and I didn’t have to deal with any problems while he was gone.
When Ramie got home I informed him all was good with the breakers, but for some reason that I couldn’t figure out we were still not making very good solar to charge the batteries even though it was a nice sunny day. Ramie inspected a bit closer and found that there was an error message indicator on the inverter, so, Ramie's Research dug into the website for our solar equipment and reached out to the company that makes it. If it's not one thing its another, and while speaking with the technician Ramie learned that this particular error message means that the inverter's low voltage solar input had crapped out and it would need to be replaced.
EcoFlow, the maker of our solar inverter and batteries, makes it fairly easy if you live in the States: you ship your old one to them, once they receive it they ship a new one to you. A simple swap-out. Unfortunately, you know how easy it is to ship things to/from Costa Rica. It takes more than a month to receive shipments down here and it’s based on weight- so this inverter itself would cost at least a few hundred dollars out of our pocket to ship between countries. This doesn’t even take into consideration shipping from Costa Rica back to the US which is even more difficult and probably more time consuming. Ramie told the technician where we lived and explained the situation with shipping and that we kind of rely on this solar setup to power our home. We can’t go several months without having an inverter at all, because at least right now we are getting half of the input instead of none at all. Ramie asked if it would be possible to have the new inverter shipped to us first, and after we receive it, ship the old one back. The technician was willing to consider it, but this request would have to be escalated higher up for approval and would have to wait to see if they would approve that request.
Wednesday 2/4- As we’ve been preparing for, the tax returns have finally started rolling in for Ramie. The beginning of the season starts out slow, but we absolutely do not want to fall behind at the beginning because in just the next week or two we might be inundated with work that we can’t keep up with. I didn’t have a lot going on for the company that Ramie works at with me yet because Ramie has to finish with the first steps of input and gathering missing documents from the clients before sending it to me for my part. It didn’t take long for him to get through his part on at least a few cases, and by the afternoon he had already sent a few to me for my finalization steps.
Thursday 2/5- Here we are in tax season and today was the first of many full work days for both of us. Ramie’s workstation is set up outside at the picnic/dining table, which means he has to set it up and take it down every day; fortunately it’s just his computer and extra monitor and doesn’t take too long. This morning he got to work early so he could get at it for the full day. It takes a few returns at the beginning of the season to re-familiarize yourself with the software again, so the first few are a bit slower.
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| She knows we're busy so she spends time near us when she can... like when I'm walking and working. |
Of course, Ramie didn't to ease into the season with easy returns to start off so he had to jump right into the thick of the difficult returns. Are we ready? Well, we don’t really have any choice but to be ready.
This evening we had the most unreal sunset, we've ever seen here. No filters were used for these pictures.
Friday 2/6- It was another full work day for both of us again, which is about to become a theme, but in addition to that, this afternoon Ramie had an eye doctor appointment. We live near an eye clinic and drive past it every time we leave our house, and Ramie has been saying for a long time that he should make an appointment. On his way home from working with Randall earlier this week he stopped in and scheduled one. Doctor and dentist appointments here are not like in the US where you can’t get in for weeks or months, he was able to set it up for today. This wasn’t the only thing going on this afternoon either, though, so before going to his appointment he first had to go pick up Randall, as he would be taking our truck for the evening and bringing it to San Isidro to Dekra for its annual inspection. So Ramie picked up Randall, and then Randall dropped Ramie off at home where he waited for a short time before walking up to the eye doctor office.
Ramie does have prescription glasses but only wears them when we are going on a long drives. He has also been wearing cheaters for reading, but rarely wears them except for when he is working on the computer. The eye doctor ran through the regular tests and checks, and as he suspected, Ramie needed a new prescription. It turned out that instead of just regular glasses, he actually needs progressive lenses OR 2 separate pairs, one for reading and the other for distance, but the drawback here is that there is no “in-between”, which he also needed. They would be able to use his current frames and just put new lenses in, though, which is fortunate because then he didn’t have to buy the full set and only had to pay for the lenses. He didn't want to decide whether to get the progressives or the separate long and short distance glasses during the appointment and wanted to talk to me about it first. He got all of the details and headed for home.
Of course he had forgotten his sunglasses in the car, which was now on it’s way to San Isidro with Randall, and had to walk home into the sun with his pupils fully dilated. Before his eyes had a chance to fully recover from the dilating drops, we had to leave the house again. We were meeting Val and Marshall at La Choza for dinner. Since we didn’t have the truck, we would be taking Dusti. At least we have an extra pair of sunglasses for Ramie to wear on the drive there! Brian, another friend of theirs, joined us as well, but his wife Landon couldn't make it tonight.
Ramie’s favorite drink at La Choza is their spicy margarita which comes with some jalapeno slices in it, and everyone had a good laugh at him as he reached in with his fingers, pulled it out, and set it on the napkin, and then proceeded to wipe his eyes that were still watering from the dilation... Luckily for Ramie, he didn't actually touch his eyes with his spicy fingers, but it was a close call and hopefully he learned his lesson to NOT reach into his drink, especially today! Since it was still early, after dinner we decided to stop at the brewery for a beer before heading home. We timed it just right and made it home about 10 minutes before Randall was back to drop off our truck, and Ramie had to bring Randall back home. Oh, and yes, the truck passed without any issues. We haven’t had any inspection issues since our very first year. You can read that very old blog post By clicking here!
Saturday 2/7- During tax season we both work Saturdays, so this morning we put in a few hours before having plans for an afternoon out. Earlier this week Juanca invited us up to the little village of San Luis, where the coffee plantation is, for the town fiesta which would include a futbol (soccer) game, karaoke, bingo, food and drinks. They have this fiesta every year to help raise money for the village for road repairs and to help with other projects that the village needs completed.
When we were finished with work we hopped in Dusti, picked up Geoff & Tracy, and headed up the mountain. The futbol game was the first thing going on. The men of the village were the players and we learned that it was married men vs. single men. We cheered and booed for both teams. Deiner was the goalie for the married team and Juanca was what appeared to possibly be the captain for the single team. It really was a fun game to watch as both teams really tried their best and got into it. The final score was 5-5 and we joked that they did that on purpose so everyone won.
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| Prayer first before the game begins |
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| Warming up! |
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| The only way to cheer for your team! |
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| The whole community sat along this hillside and watched the game! |
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| The girls in the green shirts are Deiner's twin daughters, yellow shirt is his wife, and the white shirt is his oldest daughter. |
After the game they started serving a homemade dinner, presumably made by the ladies of the town. It was typical style Costa Rican meal of rice and beans, pork or chicken, chayote (which is a type of squash), boiled green banana, and yuca (similar to a potato). Before you turn your nose up at the description, I will say that you have to try it just to see. While Costa Rica isn’t known for amazing food, we do find this “casado” or typical meal quite tasty!
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After everyone had their fill, we hung around for a little longer with Deiner & Juanca while they played a couple games of bingo. We didn’t get to stay all night as Geoff and Tracy had some guests coming in to stay at their Airbnb, so we had to leave around 7:30, and missed out on the evening karaoke party when, I guess, everyone really lets loose.
Sunday 2/8- Since we are so busy all week, during tax season we make sure to keep Sundays to ourselves and do not log onto the work computers. This is the one day a week for us to catch up on things around the house, work on the blog (we can’t let it get behind otherwise there won’t be anything for you to read), batch cook food for easy dinners for the rest of the week and try to relax. Today was just that. It was a nice relaxing day for both of us.
Tuesday 2/10- It’s that time of year again: time to pay the property taxes! Thankfully, they are inexpensive here at only .25% of the value of our property. The system for determining value is similar but different than you might be used to in the US. There really isn’t an assessor down there that comes around and takes a look to see what your property is. It’s more of a self-reported value if you've owned your property for a while, or it is based on the most recent sale price if you purchased it in the last few years. For instance, if you were to buy a house, like Frank and Rose the owners of the Airbnb next door did, you pay on the value you bought the house for. Since we purchased our land with no structure on it and built our house later, we have only been paying tax on “bare land” for the past 4 years. Which makes our taxes extremely low.
Ramie always goes to the Muni to pay the taxes in person, and today he and Ray drove down to take care of this task. Taxes can be paid annually, quarterly, or even monthly; we just take care of it all at once so we don’t have to worry about going in more often, and will also be making the payments for the properties that he manages. Since Ray has basically sold his house, he is only going to pay the first quarter of the taxes
Today when Ramie got up to the counter to make the payment on our house he got a bit of a surprise. He was told it was time to do our declaration. What is the declaration? Like I mentioned above, it’s basically the self-assessment that is required every few years, and it's Costa Rica’s way of making sure everyone is paying their fair share of property taxes.
Instead of being able to do the declaration with the gal at the first counter, Ramie had to wait to be called to another office where someone else asked questions about our house. We were coached a long time ago about doing this declaration. Basically only answer the questions that you are asked. They will never send anyone to verify your answers, so don’t volunteer any extra information.
-Question 1. Is your house 2 bedroom and 2 bathroom?
There’s really no way you could lie about this, she had our building permit pulled up on the computer that shows that is what we built. Ramie’s answer was obviously yes.
-Question 2. How many meters of land do you have?
When we purchased this property it was originally two separate lots, but then we went through the steps to have them officially combined into one. Ramie told her the size of our total land and she looked confused. It turned out that she was only looking at the one original plano (property description/deed) of our land. She did a bit more digging and found the other one as well as the new updated one and verified this was correct.
That was it, no more questions. She didn’t ask if we had any additional structures, added a pool, or if we perhaps built an addition on the house. The last part was super easy, she just needed Ramie to show her our passports (even a picture of your passport is good enough), verify our phone number, and verify our address; you know, the long style one that is something like 100 meters from the tall tree, turn west, go 450 meters and it's next to the big rock on the right. Once that was all verified and everything was input in the system, Ramie had to sign the declaration. Since I wasn’t with him to sign he had to bring a form home for me to sign saying that I approve of it as well.
When that was all finally done he and Ray headed back to Uvita, but not without stopping at a couple of hardware stores for a few things along the way.
Wednesday 2/11- Ramie had a break in tax work today and Randall needed help with a delivery, so Ramie went with him to take care of that. It only took a couple of hours before Ramie was back home.
Saturday 2/14- Saturdays during tax season we work, but today we only worked until about 11 because we had afternoon plans again. Since they finally got the signed offer on their house and would be closing on it and heading back to the US fairly soon, Ray & Wesley invited us over to visit, hang out in the pool, and help “drink up the alcohol” that they have to use up. I don’t think we made a very big dent in it, but it was a fun afternoon. Skye and Izzy got to play, but even when Izzy was playing in the water, Skye still wouldn’t go in the pool with her. Silly dog!
Thursday 2/19- Even though it’s tax season and he has very clearly told the guys at the warehouse that his availability will be limited, they still reached out to Ramie to ask if he would be available to help out at the warehouse today. Remember the story about all those pallets of glass windows that they unloaded a little while ago? Well, the person that owns that house is about ready to need those windows at his property and Randall would be delivering them. The problem is that this property is located up a very steep mountain road and it is not a smooth ride. These pallets that the windows were shipped in, in the condition they are, would not survive the trip.
The plan was to disassemble the pallets, unload all of the glass windows, rebuild the pallets stronger, and then re-stack the windows on the new beefier pallets and brace them much better so that they don't move around inside the pallets. There were 4 pallets of windows that had to be rebuilt, and this took them all day. Aside from the actual labor that had to be done and paid for, some of the biggest down sides to having to do this include not only the risk breaking these windows, but all of this work is being done in the full sun (because there is nowhere to do this in the shade) and the only place to set the windows safely is against the side of another shipping container.
They knew those original pallets were built poorly and the pallets had around 40ish windows, each of varying sizes, in them and weighed a lot. Just how much are we talking? They ended up weighing one of the completed pallets and it came in at 3,620lbs. That much weight on a pallet made of plywood, no wonder they were falling apart and the windows were breaking! While they were working in the hot sun they made sure to take breaks and cool down. Ramie said it was tough to finish, and he was glad there was no additional work to do because he was overly exhausted and there was no way he could do another one. He certainly remembers what happened 2 years ago when he had his emergency room stay so he is vigilant and is more careful now. If you're new and want to read about Ramie's heat exhaustion click here
Friday 2/20- Ramie was asked yesterday if he was available to help again at the warehouse this morning. Ramie has been doing pretty well at keeping up with his tax load so he offered to help out. Randall had a delivery up to to Guanacaste so he would not be at the warehouse, but they needed was someone to run the forklift because a customer was coming with some of his own workers to do all of the physical labor themselves. When Ramie arrived at 7:30 he saw our neighbor Nick there, it turned out that it was his container they would be unloading. Ramie did help with some of the hand unloading until it was time to operate the forklift. He jumped on the forklift while Nicks workers did the physical labor. It took Ramie about 3 hours to unload that container and he was home in the late morning.
Before bedtime we always take Skye outside to do her thing, and since she's a nervous dog to begin with and there is a chance that there are critters out there that we don't want her to encounter, Ramie always goes out with her to look for snakes, toads or things that could hurt her. Generally this is never an issue except for the cane toads that we find during rainy season and it's more just routine now. This evening though, Ramie noticed a huge line of leaf cutter ants marching through our back yard.
Not even kidding- this is what it ACTUALLY looks like!
The past two days he has seen one of our Jasmine bushes slowly losing leaves to the ants, but there was never any sign of the ants themselves. Well, I guess that's because they have been working under the cover of darkness. This afternoon he even sprayed the plant with a liquid that is supposed to deter them from eating the leaves, but I guess it didn't work. They were out in full force! Ramie said there had to be thousands of ants in our yard. The leaf cutters are his nemesis and he is on the hunt for them whenever he sees them nearby.
He came into the house with Skye, put some socks on, grabbed the flashlight, and said he was going looking for them. I objected because I don't want him walking through the jungle in the dark, you know, because of those critters that you don't want to encounter in the dark (mainly snakes in this case) but he said he was only going to see where they were entering the yard and would go track them down tomorrow. He was out the door with the flash light and to the bodega to get the pump sprayer, and then went to the brush. He sprayed along the front of our yard, by the gate, then followed them along the edge of our house to the back corner by our garden. Here he saw all the leaves they had cut and probably 200-300 ants swarming around the leaves. He sprayed them with the liquid and continued toward the back wall, stopping by Breeze’s butterfly garden where there was another huge pile of leaf cuttings and another 200-300 ants. He sprayed them all as well, then continued to walked down to the lower property, but there was no sign of them there.. Wait, what? That's odd, where are they going then? He walked back to our upper yard and traced them from the beginning, still spraying the liquid. They were now starting to disperse and leave. This stuff doesn't kill them, but it makes them leave. He made it to the back corner again and there were even more ants now, probably those that already were sprayed trying to get away.
Its not atypical for them to drop the leaves in a pile and then other ants will come pick those up and carry them to the nest, he started looking closer at where the ants were gathering and noticed that they were coming from a small crack in the concrete wall. The problem is they barely fit and there was no way they could get the leaf cuttings through. The strange part is normally they would just crawl up the wall and back down the other side, but they didn't figure that out yet. Well ok, it looks like they may be coming from the large empty property on the other side of our back wall. That's enough tracking them for tonight, it at least gives him an idea where they are coming from and where to start tomorrow.
Saturday 2/21- It was early-ish, about 7:30am and Ramie had only had one cup of coffee so far, but those ants were on his mind and he wanted to track them down. He got dressed in his long pants, rubber boots, and bug spray, got the pump sprayer with the powder that kills the ants, and his machete, and he was off into the vacant lots.
While he was out tracking the elusive leaf cutter ants through the neighborhood, I had review meetings with clients whose returns we have completed. Once I was done with those, I worked on reviewing a few more returns to get ready for more meetings. Our firm does video calls with the clients to review the tax returns and to answer any sort of tax questions they may have before we file them. We have clients that have some pretty complicated returns and it gets technical and its easier to talk face to face than going back and forth in emails.
Ramie returned from his expedition and was very glad that he found them... Well he may have actually found 4 or 5 nests of them! They may all be from one colony, or they could all individual colonies, each with their own queen. The thing is, if you kill the queen the rest of them cannot survive without her so they all die within a couple days. It's hard to say if these 4 or 5 entrances are all part of one nest or multiple because they have a massive network of tunnels underground. He had to track them from our property across the empty lot toward the highway, from there he found a major trail and followed that through some dense jungle chopping his way through with his machete until he came to a fallen tree that they have been using as a bridge to cross the creek. He had to back track to get up the steep bank and walk around to where that tree was, then from there he found the trail again and followed it across a different piece of land up towards the church. At the edge of the church's property he found his first nest. Once you find the nest you look for additional openings that they are using and put the tube of the pump sprayer into the hole and start pumping the powder into the nest; you have to powder all of the holes you can find. Once he got that nest fumigated he continued his walk and found more ants and more nests. One after the other repeating the process until he hoped and thought that he had them all.
After he was done with that and I was finished with work we just did regular things around the house, worked on the blog, odds and ends, and all that good stuff.
Sunday 2/22- Ramie seems to have gotten the ants under control for the time being.. but it's just a matter of time before they are back again. It's a never ending cycle with these ants and they can literally decimate all of the plants in your yard in just a few days if you don't stay on top of it. The plants do survive, but it takes time for your yard to look nice again.
We did laundry, worked on the blog, and sewed some tears in one of Skye's beds... nothing exciting, but things that had to be done. We also tried a new way of trimming Skye's nails. She tolerates her hind legs getting clipped, but she hates her front paws being clipped. We bought a dog nail grinder to try that instead and she hates that just as much. Grinding does allow us to get them shorter than clipping them, but it takes forever and this tool seems to be severely underpowered. Ramie has a Dremel tool and the sanding tips that look just like the one on the under powered nail grinder, so why not give this a try? The Dremel tool is a variable speed so we can adjust it as needed and the whole process might just be easier and less traumatizing for her if it can grind her nails faster.
The first question, though, is does it still work? It's been in storage since we moved here and we know how hard this climate is on things. Ramie got it out and tested it first...it works, great! He got it set up and showed it to Skye who was already nervous and knew something was going on. We let her sniff it, then turned it on and let her check it out some more. She was unsure, but as I held her, Ramie got her front foot and tried it out. She didn't fight or try to pull back like she does with the other one, she just let Ramie grind each nail. This worked fantastic and her nails haven't been this short for a long time since she just would not let us grind or cut them easily, and we could only take the small point off of them. We’ll have to do this more often and maybe she will allow us to do it more easily.
The rest of the day was spent doing absolutely nothing! Perfecto!
Pura Vida!
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