Thursday 3/26- It was late afternoon and Ramie got a call from Randall who wanted to know if he was available to unload a container that came in late this afternoon. Ramie was done with the tax work that he had and was available, so headed to the warehouse for what would likely be his final day working with them for a while since we truly were in “crunch time” of tax season. The container went surprisingly quickly and he was back home in a just a few hours.
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| Ray and Wesley left us some toys for Skye, we named this toy Izzy after their dog. This is Skye's current favorite and she loves carrying it around with her everywhere. |
Saturday 3/28- We are only a couple of weeks away from the US tax filing deadline and we are in push mode. We’ve been working all week and will work on Saturday to try to get as much as we can finished as quickly as we can. We worked on taxes in the morning and worked on cleaning up the dry room in the afternoon. Our dry room is basically a large walk-in closet with dedicated A/C set to dry mode (it used to have a dehumidifier but we upgraded).
This is where we store everything that we don’t use on a regular basis: extra clothes, Ramie’s tools, extra things for the house, electronics, basically all of the things that we don’t want to have destroyed by humidity or mold. This is really a catch-all for all things that need to be stored, and you can imagine how disorganized it gets when we take something out to use it, and it just gets thrown back in the room without being put away where it belongs. Today we worked for a while on putting things away where they belong, organizing, and looking for any items that we might want to throw out on the local pages to sell while we’re selling the remaining items that Ray and Wesley left with us.
Sunday 3/29- Today was another Sunday of taking care of chores and getting ready for the following week. I did more cooking & baking of some basic things for us to eat throughout the week, since I’m often too exhausted to think about, much less cook dinners most nights after work. We re-potted some plants that weren’t looking so hot and worked on the blog for a little while as well. Our tax-season Sundays aren’t exciting, but they are usually full of things that just need to get done.
Monday 3/30- If you read our last blog, you’ll remember that the doctor had ordered a whole list of bloodwork that she wanted done. I couldn’t get the blood drawn that day, as it had to be done on a particular day, and that day was today. She wanted the blood drawn first thing in the morning, but the earliest that the lab could accommodate due to their hours was 9am. Ok, that’s probably fine, so we showed up a little bit early and waited in the parking lot. By about 9:10 there still wasn’t anyone there, but fortunately Ramie had the contact information for Stephanie, the receptionist who we had been dealing with to get the appointment scheduled. It turned out that the other front desk girl that was supposed to open today called in sick at the last minute, but Stephanie would be there in just a few minutes. When she arrived, the lady who was supposed to take my blood hadn’t shown up yet either. We waited around for a little while for Stephanie to get a hold of her and find out what was going on. Well, it turned out that she was coming from San Isidro and was stuck in some bad traffic on the way; she wasn’t even particularly close to town yet. Since we don’t live far from the clinic, Stephanie told us that we could go home and wait, and that she would let us know when the lady was close and we could come back. We went home and waited, and waited… and it wasn’t until about 11:00 that we got the call to come back for the blood draw. So much for the first thing in the morning!! At least it happened on the correct day, though, right!? Hopefully this would still be ok for what the doctor needed to see. Such is life in Costa Rica…
The Official Casa Costa Breeze end of March rainfall total was 3.13 inches
Thursday 4/2- Quite some time ago, Ramie had let Lowell and Randall know that he would not be available to help out at the warehouse much, if at all, this time of year because of tax season, and especially these last couple weeks before the filing deadline. Despite that, they had still been begging him to come in and help because they have the largest shipment that they have ever done that needs to be palletized and ready to ship back to the US next week. I think Randall maybe even cried a little to convince Ramie to come and help him, he was that desperate, (just kidding Randall). Ramie has been excellent at keeping on top of all of the tax returns and he was caught up enough that he would be able to take a day away from tax work to help them today.
Saturday 4/4- Another week of tax season has gone by, and it was another Saturday morning of work. As soon as I was finished with my meetings, though, we had to get some food together and head out the door… today we were celebrating our friendiversary with Geoff & Tracy and we’d be BBQing up at their house for dinner. If you’ve been following our blog since the beginning, you might recall that we celebrate our friendiversary with Geoff & Tracy each Easter. Yes, we know that Easter is a different weekend each year, and yes, I know I say that every year… but the reason behind this is because Easter was the first time that we ever hung out with them and was the start of this friendship that has lasted ever since. It’s just far easier to remember Easter versus remembering an exact date… plus, then we can make sure our celebration will always fall on a weekend! We spent the afternoon and evening at their house, made a delicious dinner, and enjoyed the conversation and reminiscing. We talked and chatted so much that we didn’t even get to play the games that we were going to play, but that’s ok, it was enjoyable anyway!
Sunday 4/5- Happy Easter!
Even though we worked in the dry room last weekend, today we were going even deeper. Basically pulling everything out and throwing away all the stuff we thought we would need and never did. This mostly consisted of spare parts that Ramie has collected over the years for those “just in case moments”. We also spent time reorganizing all of our storage bins and putting away clothes that we never wear. We haven't seen the dry room this empty since we moved in (and it was all just pushed out into the living room and our bedroom, so it’s not like it would stay this way for long). We finished mid-day and spent the rest of the day doing nothing, which was great!
Wednesday 4/8- While April is still one of our hottest months, the start of green season (rainy season) technically starts in May, and the rains have arrived a bit early. Not a lot of rain, maybe a half inch or so each night, but that little bit of rain is starting to wake up the dormant plants, and they have been growing like crazy! Ramie spent some time doing yardwork today while his tax return work was slow. He can’t go crazy pruning and cutting things back yet, though, because it’s still a bit too early and too dry to do that.
Thursday 4/9 & Friday 4/10- During this last week or so of the push to the filing deadline, Ramie logs onto his work computer each morning and goes through all of his emails and works on the returns that he can. Since we only have a few days left, he is pretty much caught up, which allows him to do other things during the day too. He leaves his computer on and checks it throughout the day working on work things as needed. In that in-between time when there is no tax work to be done, he works on other projects. One thing that he has been wanting to do is refinish our outdoor picnic table, which is also used as his work desk.
Over the years it has become sun faded and discolored, even though it lives under the patio roof. His plan is to fully sand it down and refinish it. If you’ve ever done refinishing work, you know how sanding varnish goes and how quickly sandpaper gums up. Here it’s even worse, though, because the sandpaper is very poor quality and he can really only sand about a 8”x8” section before he has to change the paper. Initially he bought 25 pieces of paper that he thought would get him through this job, but that stack quickly ran out, so he ran to town and bought 50 more. It didn’t take long and that stack also ran out, so back to town he went again! He had to go to all 3 hardware stores and buy out the entire inventory that they had. After he had gone through at least a hundred dollars of sandpaper, and before he was completely finished with the tabletop and benches, he had to dig through the massive stack of “dead” sandpaper and pick out the best ones to continue sanding. Sadly, he wasn’t able to do the legs of the table or benches because there was not enough sandpaper in this town to do it. Once everything was finally sanded, he applied 3 coats of stain and 3 coats of marine varnish to the tabletop and bench tops. All said and done, I think this took 2 days to finish and probably cost more in sandpaper than if we had paid to have it refinished. I will say, I forgot how pretty our table was! Sorry, we always seem to forget the before pics but here is an after pic.
The reason you never hear about what I do is because I'm glued to my computer all day (my work isn't light or caught up, I'm still as busy as ever) until I'm too exhausted to do anything else, and then basically crash until it's time to go to bed.... then I do it all again the next day. Back in college when I decided I wanted to be an accountant I knew what I was signing up for... but who makes any good decisions while they are in college? Lol... just kidding!
Friday 4/10- Even though we are in the big push at the end of tax season, we both finished working fairly early today. For the most part, we have caught up on all of the tax returns that we have been assigned and are waiting for responses from clients to finish things up. I don’t schedule any review meetings for Fridays anyway, but I do have my last 4 meetings of the season tomorrow morning. I didn’t feel like cooking dinner tonight after this busy week, so we reached out to some of our friends to see if anyone was open to go out for a last minute dinner. No one was available, but I still didn’t have any plans for anything to cook, so we went to Los Gatos by ourselves for some of my favorite nachos in the country.
Saturday 4/11- I had my last 4 review meetings for the tax season this morning.
While I still had plenty of work to do before the 4/15 deadline, I wouldn’t be doing any more live client meetings. I finished working at about 11:30 and then we headed to Loren & Nancy’s for a while. Ramie sees them a lot more than I do and they always say it would be nice to visit with me too, so we are making that happen. I think the last time I was there was Thanksgiving, and because there were so many other people there too, we didn’t really get to talk. Time always goes by so fast when we socialize with friends, and it was after 3:00 before we knew it. We had to get going because we had dinner plans tonight with Geoff & Tracy. Oh yeah, I forgot to mention, when we asked if they wanted to go out for dinner last night and they couldn’t, we opted for going out tonight instead… so back down to Los Gatos it was!! That’s quite alright, though, since there are enough tasty things on their menu that we can go back again and again and get something delicious and different each time.
Sunday 4/12- On the weekends Ramie often starts the day by asking “What are we going to do today?” And honestly, after the last few months of work and the last day and a half of running around, I truly just want to do NOTHING. Well, doing nothing isn’t really feasible because there are so many things to do and I feel guilty for not doing things when they are there to be done—so today I started the day by working on the blog. There aren’t any more ready for you to read, so we really need to get some content ready for our loyal readers. We just haven’t had the time to keep up with blog writing during the busy tax season, and truthfully, didn’t have too much to write about either because I’m sure you don’t want to hear us talk about taxes. So, the moral of this paragraph is, if the next few blog posts seem rushed, less refined than normal, or my proofreading has gotten worse, it’s because we were rushed! Sorry, not sorry 😉. While letting Skye out before bed Ramie found that our old friend had returned and was hanging out on our screen door. Ramie always has to take a selfie with these frogs.
Monday 4/13 & Tuesday 4/14- We both worked hard at tax stuff for a couple more days in order to close up the season strong. We are excited to finally be able to catch our breath from another hectic tax season. It’s not completely over yet, as we still have a lot of tax returns on extension, but for now we will get a chance to breathe.
Ramie had time in between tax work again this week, and he was ready to pick up a paint brush AGAIN! Yes, we have been painting a lot lately. We told you why in the prior blog... you'll remember that our builder never did paint our house, he only colored the primer that he put on our walls. Today Ramie would be painting our bedroom while I was doing tax work. I helped him move everything from our bedroom outside, and then he went to town putting new paint on the walls. We didn't do a drastic color change, we still wanted to keep the fun color that we had originally picked, but now we'd actually get to see that original color that we picked now. Think of this as just freshening things up!
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| At least the color our builder put in our room wasn't SO far off from what we originally requested |
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| Yes, that is our bed sitting out on the patio... |
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| And the mattress! |
Wednesday 4/15- Happy Tax Day to us!
It’s only happy because the most difficult part of this is done. Ramie worked for Randall in the morning cleaning up the warehouse, then was called back again in the evening to help unload a “surprise” container that was arriving. Fortunately, that one only took less than 2 hours to unload.
Thursday 4/16- A few weeks ago we met with a new insurance agent for our private health insurance and we decided that we were going to switch companies. The insurance was pretty much the same as our current one, with one big benefit… it would be saving us around $1,300 a year. Ramie was approved right away, but I had to have some blood tests done before they would accept me. We didn’t get to choose where I had these blood tests done and it was also being paid for by the insurance company, so we had to go to San Isidro this morning for the appointment.
We left the house at a little before 7 because we were told to be at the lab when they opened at 8. We were there a few mins before 8, and I got my blood taken, but were told by the lab tech that he called the doctor who he said he wouldn’t be here until about 11, so we would have to come back later at 11:00 or 11:30. We were irritated because we were told this would all get taken care of right away at 8am, but we had some shopping to do anyway so we went and ran our errands.
At about 11:00 we went back to the clinic and were told he still wasn’t here, “so go get some lunch and come back at noon.” So that’s what we did. There was a nice little place across the street that Ramie had eaten one time when he came over here with Karen and Dennis, so that’s we got lunch, then headed back to the clinic at noon. We were told again that he still wasn’t here and we’d have to just wait. There was another guy here presumably doing the same thing that we were doing, who was here before we went to lunch, came to lunch at the same place at about the same time we did, and was back at the clinic now as well. We didn’t talk to him at all, but could tell that he was just as irritated as we were, and he finally got fed up and left.
At about 1:30 I had had enough and demanded that they call the doctor to find out where he was and why I have been waiting on him since 8am. At that point they told me that he was here in the building. I told them to go get him now, as I have been waiting 5 hours to see him and there is no excuse for this. They told me, “He can’t be interrupted, he’s doing botox”. I was not at all thrilled about any of this and told the lab tech, in a very Dana fashion “You go knock on his door or I will.” He left quickly and when he came back, said that the doctor would be out in 10 minutes. Finally, now, after I had a fit, the doctor came and got me. He brought me back to the exam room and when he asked me “how are you” I responded with “quite irritated”. He didn’t apologize or anything, just said that there was a scheduling problem and he didn’t even know I was here. I knew there was some BS going on either from him or the lab tech that told me at 8am that he spoke to the doctor, but it was pointless to argue. The whole appointment with this guy ended up lasting less than 10 minutes, just went over the same “yes or no, do you have any of these types of issues” kinds of questions that we answered on the paperwork that we filled out with our insurance guy, and took my blood pressure and weight. He didn’t even check my height, just asked me how tall I was. What a freaking joke! When we got home Ramie called our insurance agent who set this appointment up and informed them of what happened. They told Ramie that the other person had also already reported the same issue, apparently he was also from the Uvita area, but they were very thankful that we reported it as well so that they could report it to corporate. It’s unfortunate about this whole scenario because this clinic that we were at had some other services that I was curious about and would have considered having a consultation for, but now I will absolutely not give them my business.
Friday 4/17- This evening we went out to dinner with Josh & Steph, the owners of the 3 small casitas at the end of our neighborhood that Ramie manages. They were in town for a short time and wanted to take us out to dinner before they left. They chose to go to Sebas, a restaurant that we’ve heard a lot about but had never been to. When we arrived, they were already there and had a drink, so we quickly glanced at the menu and were shocked. The dinner plates started at about $60, the drinks were $12 for the cheapest item and went up from there. We flipped to the appetizers section and decided that we would just get a few of those instead. In the end, we all decided that the food was not worth it and none of us would plan on returning here again. We did have good conversation, though, and it was nice to catch up and get to know each other better.
Saturday 4/18- When we were in San Isidro we stopped at the place we typically get all of our beef and bought a nice sized brisket, and today were going to smoke it. I don’t know if Ramie saw it somewhere before, or just thought we’d give it a try because we have so much in the freezer, but we were also going to give smoking some tuna a try. There is still so much tuna from when Ramie and Steven went fishing that we figured if we wasted a couple of tuna steaks it wouldn't be the end of the world, and if they were good, we had another way to prepare it. While the meat was on the smoker we decided that we would work on building some Lego sets to pass the time. It had been quite a while since we pulled out the Lego due to tax season. The tuna didn't take long to smoke and when it was done, we tried it right away... I have to say, that was certainly worth trying! It was quite tasty and we would do it again! The brisket took about 12 hours to smoke and wasn’t ready before dinner, so we will save that for another day.
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| That's a BIG Brisket!! |
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| Skye, licking her chops and was hoping some would fall on the floor for her too! |
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| I'm 3 years old!!! |
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| This is true, We've taught her Spanish words as well! |
Monday 4/20 thru Thursday 4/23- In the exact same way as right before we went on our cruise last December, the week before I am going on vacation got super busy at work. I worked longer-than-normal days so I could get everything done before getting away. This would be a non-working vacation and I told the office that I would be turning off all work-related technology. Ramie spent a lot of time washing the windows and cleaning the screens, things that have been neglected for a while, and once that was done, doing yard work. Ramie also stopped at Loren and Nancy’s to coordinate the Airbnb check-ins next door while we’re gone on our vacation, as Loren and Ramie back each other up when needed.
Friday 4/24- The cleaners were arriving bright and early this morning to get the house looking all spic and span for the photos scheduled for tomorrow. After they left and we had the house organized we packed our bags for our exciting get away.
Saturday 4/25- Today was picture day!! What? What pictures? Today we’d be having professional real estate pictures taken. The photography crew flew a drone around the outside of the house, around the property and down our creek. Then moved to the inside of the house to photograph all of the rooms, the yard, and everything about our property. Thankfully our house is only about 1200 sq ft. so it went fairly quick and they were only here from about 9-10:45. We thought that it would take the majority of the day but were quite happy it didn't. This allowed us to continue packing and get the house ready for us to leave for a week.
This evening around 5pm we brought Skye to Paola’s for her week-long slumber party! As we were leaving Paola’s we got a message from Val and Marshall that they were at Mosaic crying in their beers (because they were leaving their dog Buddy with Paola this week as well and this is the first time they are leaving their new pup) so we decided to stop and join them for a drink before heading home and getting to bed early. We have to get up very early tomorrow morning to leave for our vacation that we are very excited to go on.
Ok, we know the end of this blog is confusing. Why the heck are we having professional photographs taken of our house?? Well, we have decided to list Casa Costa Breeze for sale. There’s a WHOLE lot that we have to say about why we are making this decision, so we decided that we would write an entire separate blog post to go into more detail. That will be the next post coming up in two weeks, so you’ll get to hear all about that before we tell you all about our vacation, so stay tuned.
Pura Vida!
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