Monday 6/1- We got an early start today and headed to San Isidro to run some errands. We had some last minute appointments that we had to go to today, and other than those, didn't really have a plan for this trip. Since we were parked in “downtown” San Isidro for the appointments, we decided to walk to a couple of stores that we had not been to for a while. There is a particular grocery store that carries things that most of the other ones that we go to don’t always have, and it’s always interesting to walk around to see what they have. We did end up buying a handful of items.
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| A stormy, and clear sunset |
Across the street was an Amazon Outlet store, and those are always interesting here. These stores carry all sorts of Amazon (and sometimes other stores) return items. My understanding of how this works is that these stores will buy pallets of returned items, and you just never know what they will have, and whether you will find a good bargain. Sometimes you'll also find that these stores get things that are kind of funny and not at all expected or needed in Costa Rica. We’ve seen snow blowers, snow shovels, and so many un-identified car parts, snowmobile and ATV parts that are just thrown in a bin with no label or information about what it is for. Good luck figuring out if it's what you need for your car! As we were waiting for the store to open we joked that this must have been "the place to be" this morning because there was a line up at the door waiting for them to open. Once it did finally open, we walked around, but it was so hard to look for anything because it was rows and rows of huge bins with all of the stuff just thrown in haphazardly. This is NOT how most of these stores are!
Once we were finished in downtown we still had to make a few more stops and some more shopping since we were all the way over here in San Isidro. Walmart was on that list, of course, and honestly I think we broke a record for walking out of there with the least amount we have ever spent. Then off to Mayca, the restaurant supply store, to get some meat, and other bulk items on the way out of town. It was a pretty uneventful day, and we finally got home at around 3pm and Skye was very happy to see us!
Wednesday 6/3- Today was a rainy gloomy day, and on days like this we don’t really do too much. Well, I mean, I worked, but you don't want to hear about that. This afternoon we did have appointments to get our teeth cleaned, so we ventured out for that, and this time Ramie was the one that had a cavity. It seems like there’s always something… The really crappy part is that this cavity is actually under the crown that he had replaced a few years ago, so you know what that means… yep a new crown… UGH! They couldn’t do any of the work on it today and he would have to come back next week to see the dentist that did the original work to have her fix the cavity and make the new crown. Dental problems are just a joy, aren’t they?
Thursday 6/4- Since we did all of the painting and little things to spruce up the house and property over the last couple of months, Ramie has been talking about sanding and re-staining the wood on our front gate. This hasn't been touched since we had it installed more than 4 years ago and it was due, so today that was the project on his agenda. Thankfully, Ramie has come up with a plan so that we don’t go broke buying sandpaper like we did for the picnic table.
He has some paint stripper wheels to put on his grinder that removes the stain or paint very fast. The reason he didn’t go this route on the table is because these can gouge the wood very easily, but the gate has a rustic look anyway, and if it gets gouged, it just adds more character. This project doesn't have to be perfectly smooth like the table did, so these grinder wheels will work perfectly.
While I worked, he started gathering the things he’d need for the project: his grinder, safety glasses, extension cord, and music, and then got to work. It took him about 2 hours to strip the entire outside of the gate. When step 1 was finished he had to run to the hardware store to buy stain, and by about 10 am he was done with the first coat of stain as well. By this time of the morning the gate was already in full sun and it was too hot to keep working, so that was enough for today. Besides, this will allow the stain to dry, in case it decides to rain this afternoon.
Friday 6/5- Lately we’ve noticed that we have been using a lot more solar power than we were before, and when we wake up in the morning our batteries are much lower than they used to be a month or two ago. The app for the solar shows a breakdown of the stats for each breaker including how much power is used by each circuit and noticed that the dry room A/C was using a lot more electricity than it should be. What this means is that the A/C is working harder than it was before and Ramie figures that it likely needs to be cleaned.
Ramie contacted one of the A/C repair techs that we use and got an appointment scheduled for him to come this morning. The nice thing about this specific tech is that while he is working he takes pictures of the problem areas to show you exactly what he found. It turns out that the A/C was certainly in need of cleaning, I mean, it has been about a year now since we had it installed. It would need to be cleaned more frequently if it was in a common area, but since it's in our dry room which is kept closed up all of the time and it's not as dusty in there. Another chore checked off the list. Now lets see if this helps with our battery consumption.
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| A interesting bug we've never seen before. |
Saturday 6/6- Dennis reached out to Ramie early this morning about a water leak up at their casita. They were able to do a video call and Ramie helped Dennis isolate and shut off the water to the pump and have it run through the by-pass. Then we each went about our day not really thinking any more about it. Ramie and I put in a few hours of tax work, yes, we still have extension clients to complete, and didn’t have any other plans for the rest of the day.
A couple hours later Ramie got another call from Dennis saying that now there was no water at the casita, and that is a problem because they have a renter living there right now. After doing a bit more video-calling, Ramie figured out that after they had the casita remodeled and before the contractors left, they had changed the water pipe configuration that Ramie had originally installed in order to bypass the water pump that was no longer needed, and now the bypass was no longer there and everything had to run through the pump. Dennis asked Ramie if he could come up and fix it today, so he gathered up his tools, and I finished up the tax return that I was working on, and decided to tag along to keep Karen company while the boys worked on the problem. Fortunately, it was a simple fix by removing the pump altogether, this would make sure that there wouldn’t be any more issues with that pump.
Since he was already there, Dennis asked Ramie if he could change some wiring on their solar so that they had a dedicated outlet in their dry room for their Starlink internet. That project didn't take too long either since Dennis had already identified which breaker that outlet was connected to. Finally, once that was finished too, Ramie got to sit down and chit chat with everyone for an hour or so. It was good to catch up since we hadn’t hung out for quite some time.
Sunday 6/7- While we’ve been in the rainy season for a little while now, it hasn’t been particularly rainy lately. In fact, earlier this week Ramie made the comment that “we need some rain”, and nature decided to deliver! It rained all night last night, we woke up to rain, and it continued all day… It makes for a gloomy day and no solar production, so we have to manually charge the batteries using the electrical grid. This doesn't save us any money on the electric bill, but what it does save us from is the power outages that happen frequently. We don’t even know the power goes out unless someone from our neighborhood chat asks if anyone else is out of power or if our batteries are too low because it isn't sunny and they haven't charged.
Tuesday 6/9- Today Ramie had his follow up dentist appointment for that cavity under the crown. Of course, as expected, they had to remove his crown to fix the cavity, but since part of it was along the gum-line, they also had to do some laser cutting of his gums. This dental stuff has come a long way and this laser thing feels fancy and advanced. Do they do it this way in the US too? They installed a temporary crown for now, but would have to wait for the swelling to go down and his gums to return to normal before they could take the mold for the permanent crown. He would have to come back in about another week.
Thursday 6/11- The rain has finally stopped for long enough that the wood on the gate was able to dry and Ramie could do a quick sand and put the final coat of stain on it. He got to work around 8am and was finished in a couple of hours, just in time to avoid the full sun.
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| This is the inside of the gate that was not done "before" |
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| The outside that was refinished "after" |
Friday 6/12- Randall has once again put out the call for help… and today Ramie would help do a packing job at a house about a half hour south of Uvita. Ramie doesn't mind this stuff because he likes to see so many new areas that we just never knew existed. There are so many communities that are only a little way away from the highway, but you’d never find them unless you knew where to look. This packing job turned out to be for another person moving back to the US. She had a ton of very expensive knick-knacks, and that’s most of what Ramie and Randall would be packing today. They took their time, extra care, and used lots of packing material to keep it all safe for the trip. They spent about 4 hours on this today and packed 12 boxes of keepsakes.
Saturday 6/13 & Sunday 6/14- We had another quiet weekend around the house again, mostly because we still can’t go out for food or drinks to be social because of this diet detox protocol. I will say, though, we are both so tired of eating the same old food! Only one more week to go and this will be over… we hope that in the end it was worth it because neither one of us can tell the difference so far.
Ramie also designed the a new t-shirt for the turtle reserve and those came in. Of course Taylor and Dylan wanted a new shirt and the rest of the family wanted to see them as well so here he is modeling it.. Ya, I was laughing too.
Sunday 6/21- Another week has gone by, and I wish I had something to write about, but we truthfully didn't do a single thing that we could write about. All this week consisted of regular workdays for me, probably some of the typical yard work and things for Ramie, and some turtle walks, but nothing exciting there either because none of the teams have found any nests yet. It makes it tough to write a blog when all that is happening is “regular daily life”. We might not have enough to release a new blog post every-other-week until things get more exciting around here for us!
There was one exciting thing for us today, though. Yesterday was the last day of the food protocol, which was actually a day earlier than we thought it was supposed to be. That means we get to add back some food and flavor again! While I knew we should take it slow and reintroduce only a few new things at a time, Ramie just went all in and just decided to eat everything that he wanted to. Lucky for him, he said he didn’t feel sick or have any adverse effects. I knew that I wouldn’t be able to get away with that and just added some onions and cheese to my omelet and could already tell that my body was not used to these things. I think I’ll be taking this adding-back phase slower. Unfortunately, now that it’s over, neither one of us really felt any significant change after the 30 day protocol, except that our gut health seems to be a bit better. That was the point of this, after all, and maybe it just isn’t a profoundly noticeable thing.
Tuesday 6/23- My days don’t change much from day to day, so you get to hear more about what Ramie does than what I do (trust me, you don’t really want to hear about my work…). Today it was back to the warehouse to help Randall get another container that is heading back to the US ready to ship. On days like today they inventory the things that people are shipping back to the US if they don’t already have an inventory list or if the lists look like they are trying to ship back prohibited items, and then get the pallets put together to be loaded when the container shows up. It was a productive day, but not quite productive enough. They didn’t finish everything. Randall loves how much quicker it goes when Ramie helps, so Ramie will have to go back later this week to help Randall finish.
While he was working, Ramie got a call from Keith, our realtor, who asked if we could do a short notice showing tomorrow around 10am. He typically likes to ask a couple of days ahead of time, but this client was leaving soon and didn't have any more time available. Ramie texted me to make sure I didn’t have any meetings that I couldn’t get out of, and it was late enough in the morning that my normal Wednesday morning meeting would be finished, so I told him to give the ok and we’d spend our afternoon and evening doing the work to get the house spic-and-span for the showing. When I finished enough work for the day I logged off and started putting away all of the clutter that builds up when you’re living day-to-day life, dusting, and things like that.
When Ramie got home he helped me finish cleaning the house and loading a bunch of our stuff that we don’t like to leave in the house, like the dog kennel and some other things that just take up too much space, into the truck so tomorrow morning I could work until they would be showing up for the showing. It took a few hours but everything was looking great by the time we were ready to settle down for the night.
Wednesday 6/24- House showing #2. Yes, our house has been on the market for about a month and a half now and yes, this is only showing number 2. This is expected and normal… and exactly the reason why we are listing the house now, even though we aren’t necessarily ready to leave yet, and not waiting until we are at a point that we want to get back to the US ASAP. You see, there truly is a method to our madness!!
The showing seemed to go well, and the client spent a fair amount of time at the house looking at everything. Apparently, he was interested in building an additional small casita on whatever property he buys, so spent quite a bit of time looking at all of the different areas on our property that this would be possible. We were told that he was very interested in and understood the value of the solar system already being installed, and that it would be a plus for him, all things considered. We will find out more in a day or two.
This morning Val, his turtle walk partner, told Ramie he had a headlight out when he arrived to the beach for their early morning walk in the dark. After he got home and changed from the walk he went into town to buy new LED bulbs. Unfortunately, for our truck, this is not a quick swap of the bulbs and Ramie spent about an hour taking apart the front end of the truck to replace them. He's done this before so he is fairly quick at it, but this is what has to happen in order to replace them.
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| Yep, the entire front end has to come off the truck to get the bulbs out. Poor design by Toyota! |
Later this afternoon Ramie also had the follow-up dentist appointment to get the mold made for his replacement crown. As he was sitting in the chair, they popped off the temporary crown, looked everything over, and cleaned up the remaining tooth. They then stuck this wand like thing in his mouth and moved it all over. He wasn’t sure what it was or what they were doing, and then the dentist told him that it was time to put the temporary back on. He asked about the mold and was told that they don't do that anymore. Now instead of that big hunk of goo that you have to bite down on, it's all done by 3D imaging! That wand that they were using earlier was taking a 3D image of his entire mouth. They then send that image to a special 3D printer that makes the new permanent crown. Apparently technology has come a long way since this same dentist installed the original crown in 2023. How crazy!! Something like this is definitely not something either of us expected in Costa Rica. Maybe the US, but not here. It will take about a week for the new crown to be ready, then he will come back to have it put in.
Thursday 6/25- I had a follow up appointment with my doctor today to discuss how the elimination protocol went and talk about how I’m feeling now that it’s finished. She was kind of surprised that neither of us feel any different now that it is complete. I really like this doctor because she spent another hour with me going talking about the next steps that we can look into and takes the time to explain things instead of rushing through everything. The next step is to try some more, different supplements and continue on the prescriptions she has already started me on. Then, in about 3 months I’ll see her again to see how things are going and how I feel.
Friday 6/26- While I was working, Ramie was back to work at the warehouse. We’ve been talking about the fact that we have never showed you what he’s actually doing when he says he’s going to “build pallets” and mentioned that today he was going to take some. Unfortunately, this didn’t end up happening because, he said, they get into such a routine that he doesn't even think about it until they take a break and then forgets again when they start again. Fortunately, you may remember from a few blog posts ago, there was a film crew taking some video for advertising, and I was able to grab some screenshots from those videos to show you the guys working 😉
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| Wrapping the pallet to make sure none of the smaller items fall out. |
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| Randall on the left, Ramie and another helper. Discussing how to fit things to the max. |
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| Ramie and Randall strapping down furniture |
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| Ramie cutting off excess plywood from the pallet. |
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| As always Hunter supervises |
Pura Vida!
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