You might remember a couple of weeks ago we had a little mini-adventure buying some cedar boards to trim out the big patio door in our living room. After letting these boards sit around for a little while it was time to start this project. The boards were still thicker than we thought would look good for the trim, and they needed to be sanded nice and smooth before Ramie could stain them, so he talked to one of the woodworkers here in town to see if he might be able to plane them down a bit more for us, and run them through the industrial sander so Ramie wouldn’t have to do it all by hand. While we know this guy is very busy (we originally thought about using him to do all of the woodwork in our house when we built it, but he was scheduled out much farther than we were willing to wait) he said he’d be happy to do this work within a day or two. Ramie dropped off the boards one afternoon, told him the thickness that we wanted it, and then the next day they were ready for Ramie to pick up.
This week Ramie worked on and off every day getting the trim boards stained and put up around the patio door. He worked on the project little by little while we were also working on our tax season work.
Since our original builder was not a perfectionist (or even very accurate) in any stretch of the word, while doing this project we discovered that the casing around the doors was not built straight, square, or consistently, so this did create some extra work for Ramie to make these boards fit and cover correctly. Eventually, after working on this whole project for just about an entire week, he got it finished and we think it looks nice and adds the touch that we were looking for.
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| Here is a before photo from awhile back, The large door on the left is what we trimmed out. |
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| And with the trim.. In our opinion its looks much better! |
Tuesday 2/24- Remember those 3 little casitas down on the end of our street that Ramie manages? Today the sister, brother in law, and nephew of the owners were scheduled to arrive at the house and stay there full-time. When Luke & Jess got to town today Ramie welcomed them & helped them out with a few things around their house. There were still a few projects that weren’t quite finished because they were bringing supplies from the States, but the house was “ready enough” for them to move in.
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| We also had this awesome Toucan come and sit right outside our kitchen window |
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| Ramie calls it a Rasta Toucan, but its actual name is Firey Billed Toucan |
The Official Casa Costa Breeze end of February rainfall total was 4.27 inches
Sunday 3/1- You probably remember in the last blog when we discovered that there was a problem with our solar inverter and the company would be sending us a new one? Well, after only a month, that new one arrived. This is actually on the short side of the timeline for having things shipped in and we were glad that it got here already. The shipping company that we used delivers things to San Isidro, which is about an hour from here, and Randall goes over there quite a bit either for jobs or just for his own reasons, and he has been great about picking up our orders for us. The inverter was no different, and he dropped it off at our house last night. We didn’t waste any time and hooked it up this morning so that we could start making more solar. This time of year, the hot, sunny time of year, with a fully functioning inverter we can make almost enough solar power to live completely off grid. Goodbye electric bill (almost)! Electricity is expensive here and any help that we can get from the sun is very welcome!
As we’ve described in the past, our part of Costa Rica has two main seasons: rainy or green season and the hot and sunny summer season. Our seasons are kind of opposite of what you northerns experience, and our hottest time of the year is typically late January through April or so. Right now we are in the height of the hot season, and the temps are hitting the 100s this week! At least it’s not as humid as it is during the rainy season, otherwise things would be truly miserable!! Yeah, it’s hot, and probably still more humid than it would be in Minnesota in the summer, but we still don’t use our AC. We have definitely acclimated to life closer to the equator and it isn’t as oppressive as it might have felt for us once upon a time. We survive the heat by staying out of the sun during the hottest parts of the day, running the ceiling fans, cooling off in the pool, and drinking lots of water. Yes, it still does feel hot, but we survive (and personally, I prefer this heat over the winters up north!!)
I honestly can’t tell you what happened this week other than we both worked. A lot. That’s about all until we hit the weekend again, and even once we hit the weekends, Saturday mornings are still work! You can understand why we don’t have much to write about for the blog this time of year.
Sunday 3/8- It’s next Sunday already and we haven’t had any time to do anything fun since last week. While I would be content staying at home and getting caught up on things around the house, Ramie tries hard to get me out of the house and to do something that is not just working all of the time. We decided to take an impromptu ATV ride up in the mountains by ourselves with no intent on anything other than just a ride. It is definitely cooler up in the mountains, so getting away from the heat was kind of nice too.
As we were driving by the place that smells like smoked meat, we noticed that they were open so stopped and got ourselves a chicharrónes lunch. While these definitely weren’t as good as Rita and Emilio’s chicharrónes, they still hit the spot. By this point we were only a short ride away from the coffee plantation, so we decided that we’d stop by and say hi to them as well. When we got there it was pretty busy, Deiner had a tour going and both of the ATV tours from town had come through at the same time for their little stop here. We stood out of the way while the ATV tours did their things, and after they left and a table opened up we sat down with Emilio for a cup of coffee to chat. Rita joined us a little while later, but Deiner hadn’t finished up with his tour by the time we were ready to leave, so we didn’t have a chance to chat with him. We love that they welcome us in like they do, and this is one of those places that will stay near and dear to our hearts forever.
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| One of my favorite views coming down the mountain from the plantation. I don't know exactly where, but our house is somewhere in all of those trees between the Whale's Tail and the power pole. |
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| Not everyone travels by car, so park your horse at the gate, while you visit your friends. |
Monday 3/9- Ramie was called to help out at the warehouse, but it was nothing special and the typical routine. Since we had now gotten our new solar inverter, we had the old one boxed up and brought that to the warehouse so that Lowell could ship it back to the US for us.
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| A Gladiator tree frog that was hanging out on our patio one night. |
Wednesday 3/11- As we’ve mentioned previously, our friends Ray and Wesley have accepted an offer on the sale of their house and will be leaving Costa Rica to move back to the US in about 2 weeks. They sold their house furnished and “turn key”, as many houses here are, but they did have some items that weren’t included with the sale of the house that they wanted to sell. Ray and Wesley don’t really do Facebook, so Ramie offered to help them sell those things by listing them on the local Facebook pages with Ray’s contact information. Ramie met with them to get pictures of the items they wanted to sell, find out the details and price, and get the items listed.
After work I often don’t really have any energy left to decide what to make for dinner or what to cook, and if I haven’t meal-prepped over the weekend this becomes a struggle. We know that Val and Marshall often go to Wine Wednesday at Mosaic, and we had to get together with them to talk about our upcoming vacation together to Bocas del Toro, so we got together with them for dinner, planning and conversation.
There are a lot of nuances with the process of becoming residents in Costa Rica, and Laura, the lawyer that we’ve been working with since nearly the beginning, is helping us through this next step. Basically, now that we have been official temporary residents for 3 years we can apply to become permanent residents. The main thing that this changes is that our CAJA (pronounced ka-ha)(national insurance) monthly bill could be reduced substantially. Saving money is always a good thing, and we wanted to do this as soon as we could. We had to physically sign some paperwork for this, and Laura’s office is in San Isidro, about an hour away from us, and as you’re aware after reading the last few months’ worth of blogs, we are busy this time of year and don’t have a half day to drive to San Isidro if we don’t REALLY have to. Laura would be in the area for some other things today, so she offered to stop at our house so that we could sign the paperwork. This took all of about 5 minutes, so we were very glad we didn’t have to drive at least an hour each way to her office to do this.
Sunday 3/15- After dinner this evening we had to drop Skye off with Paola the pet sitter because tomorrow we would have to be gone all day for something that was important enough to take a whole day away from work. Skye always enjoys her time with Paola because there are lots of other dogs there to play with, including her bestie Amber, the Doberman who was just a baby when Skye stayed there the last time we went back to MN, and now towers over Skye.
Normally, this time of year, we would never go out of town or travel unless it is for something that just can’t wait, and for this, I really didn’t want to wait.
Monday 3/16- What are we traveling for today? I had a doctor's appointment in San Jose at Cima hospital, which is kind of like the Costa Rican equivalent to Mayo Clinic. This is supposed to be the top hospital in the country, and I am hoping that the doctor that I am seeing there can help me find some answers to the reason I’ve been feeling so crummy lately. Today would be a very long day, as you know it’s about a 3.5-4 hour drive in each direction, assuming there are no traffic issues, and we didn’t plan to spend the night so we’d be driving both ways. We have learned our lesson, though, and did pack an overnight bag with basics like a change of clothes and a toothbrush because you just never know how things would turn out.
My appointment was scheduled for 10:20, but we were up at 4 am to be out the door at 4:30, just in case we ran into any bad traffic. We do know that there are several places along our route that have road construction going on and have seen very long delays. We also figured we’d hit rush hour in the city and didn’t want to worry about running late for the appointment. We ended up arriving at the hospital at about 9 am with plenty of time to spare. We grabbed some breakfast at the on-site café, and then waited for my appointment. I was glad that the doctor met with me for nearly 45 minutes and it wasn’t just an in-and-out appointment like so many doctors do. She gave me a list of labs that she wanted me to have run as well as told me that she wanted me to get an ultrasound to rule out particular problems. She said that I could check with the imaging department here at the hospital to see if I could get in today, or I could find a place closer to home that would be able to do what she needed. We headed to the imaging department and they told me that the earliest I could get an appointment would be at 2pm today. I told them to put me down for that appointment, and then we headed back out to our car to see if we could find a place closer to Uvita that I could schedule this ultrasound for on another day.
We spent the next couple of hours calling around to places that were closer to home, and didn’t have a lot of luck getting a quick response back or finding a place that had the specific equipment they needed. By this point we figured we were close enough to 2pm that we might as well just stick it out and get it done and over with. This day is just getting longer and longer, and we are even more glad that we brought Skye to Paola’s. With the appointment at 2, we wouldn’t get home until after 6. At around 1:00ish we headed back into the imaging department to wait in their waiting room, hoping that they might be able to get me in a little bit early if things were going well. We waited and waited and they didn’t call me up. At about 2:10 I went and asked what they anticipated for a time that I would get in, and THEN, after we had been sitting here for more than an hour, they decided to tell us that we had to take a number to get in line to pay for the procedure before they would call me back. Well, wouldn’t it have made sense to tell me this before?! I mean, they knew that this was our first time here based on the conversation I had with them earlier… So, we got our number and waited. And waited, and then when we got to our turn, it took another 15-20 minutes to get all of the paperwork in order for them to let us pay. By now it was about 3pm, an hour after my appointment time, and I finally got called back. Fortunately, the ultrasound tech was very good at her job and was quick to get the images she needed.
By the time we finally left the hospital it was 3:20pm, and we had a long drive still ahead of us. We let Paola know about this change of events and she was happy to keep Skye for another night. By the time we made it home it was about 8:30pm and we were exhausted; it was straight to bed for us! I sure am glad that in addition to planning ahead and packing our own bags, even though we didn’t need them, I also thought ahead and I had sent enough food for Skye for a couple of days! After the things that we have had happen with prior doctor visits, we are always sure to prepare!
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| After picking up Skye from Paola's she is always exhausted and spends the whole day sleeping |
After missing out on an entire day of work, both Ramie and I worked hard the rest of the week to catch up with the missed day. We didn’t do anything of note again until Friday.
Friday 3/20- This morning we both worked in the morning, but took the afternoon off to go spend some time with Ray & Wesley before they headed back to the US next week. We went up to their house for a few hours for snacks and a “pool party”. It was just us, them, and Jorge, who you might remember is the caretaker from the community that Karen & Dennis’s house is in. Ray and Wesley lived in the same casita after we did, and it was fun to get together with them and Jorge again. Jorge doesn’t speak much English at all, so conversations stayed sort of simple, but we still had a good time. Ray and Jorge played a couple intense rounds of the pool version of something like Skeeball, but throwing it at the board instead of rolling it up a ramp. After a few rounds of this it was time for Ramie to go against Jorge and they played some more. There were lots of laughs and good banter. Jorge was having the time of his life!
Ray and Wesley’s dog Izzy goes in their pool with them all of the time, and the last time we brought Skye up there we tried to get her to go in the water. She was far too scared to go in, even though they have an area of their pool that is only about a foot deep and she could stand and touch the bottom. She was even freaked out when I held her and stood in that foot deep water myself. This time Skye voluntarily got into the pool on her own, even without a ton of coaxing. It shocked us all!!! And, she even seemed to enjoy it, at least at the super shallow side where she could touch the bottom. I really wish I had snapped a couple of pictures, but I didn’t even think to grab my phone to catch it.
Saturday 3/21- It’s a Saturday during tax season, which means that we worked until about noon today. After that we did some work that needed to be done but has been put off for a while, but once we were done with that I finally did one of the more genius things that I always think of but never do—I set my computer at the edge of the pool so that I could work on the blog WHILE I was in the pool! Why do I never do this!? It sure makes working on the blog feel less tedious!
Even after going in the water at Ray and Wesley’s yesterday, we still could not coax Skye into our pool today. While we don’t have a super shallow end like they do, she won’t even go on the top step where she can easily touch the bottom and not even get her belly wet. Silly dog!
Monday 3/23- Adios Ray, Wesley and Izzy! They were leaving Costa Rica for good today. Bright and early this morning before heading out, Ray stopped by to drop off a few more things for Ramie to try to sell for them and coordinate a few other things that Ray needed assistance with between when they left Costa Rica and the house would be closed on. We said our last Costa Rican goodbye to Ray and promised that if we ever found ourselves in their area of Texas that we would get together again.
We don't recall which day, but we finally were able to get Skye to come onto the top step of our pool one day this week. She looks at the water so intently and is very curious, but her nerves get the best of her. When she walked over to the steps, Ramie went with her and patted the water, and she finally stepped down into the water and stood there. I’m sure it was very refreshing for her with the heat we’ve been having. She doesn’t spend a lot of time there but just gets her feet a little bit wet and then jumps out again. She seems to like putting 3 feet in and leaving the one out, and absolutely won’t even try to step down onto the next step; oh and she seems to love drinking the pool water… What a weird dog!
Pura Vida!
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