Saturday 5/25- Since we missed the last two Saturdays, today was time to get our exercise on at the beach! We didn’t miss the last two weeks on purpose, but Val and Marshall forgot and I guess we did too. This morning, because of the tides, we got a later start than we typically do and decided to walk at 7:20. Well, that sure wasn’t the best decision we’ve ever made! The last half of a 5 mile walk gets HOT when you start that late in the morning!
Having not thought ahead and realizing that the sun would be above the tree line and at full force by the time we were on our way back, we didn't prepare with sunscreen, hats, or sunglasses. On these walks where it’s just the 4 of us and we aren’t actually looking for turtles like they do during the turtle season, Val and I walk faster than Marshall and Ramie, and we always leave them in the dust. Us ladies made it to the end but Marshall and Ramie had turned around so early in the walk that we never did end up catching up to them on the way back. When we got back to the trucks, we found the guys sitting on Marshall’s tailgate sipping on pipa frias (green coconuts with the coconut water inside), relaxing in the shade.
I think us girls deserved those pipas but they were gone by the time we got there. It was a good walk, but Val and I were both glad to be done!! Note to self: future walking times will be no later than 6:30!
Sunday 5/26- I started out the morning working on the blog until the battery on my laptop had to be recharged. I do have the charging cord, but it is routed all nicely behind my desk, and I’m just too lazy to take it out and put it back when I want to work outside and my battery is dead. Once I was out of the blog stuff, Ramie took over and I got to baking a batch of cinnamon raisin bread for him & some cinnamon raisin scones for myself while my laptop recharged.
Deiner reached out to us earlier this week and said that he wanted to see us and asked us to come up to the coffee plantation today for a visit. We headed up there after he was scheduled to be done with his morning tour and were surprised with a plate of Chicharrónes waiting for us. There was another family there who also lived here in Uvita so we all chatted and ate lunch together. After they had eaten, the family left and we hung out for a while afterwards with Deiner, Emilio & Rita. It's always an enjoyable time hanging out together with these guys.
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| For the longest time this dog just laid out in the middle of the intersection. It's a good thing no cars were coming along! |
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| This may be the view when you're higher up the mountain.... |
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| But the view clears up as you head down to lower elevations. |
Monday 5/27- Happy Memorial Day!
It’s kind of weird for us since obviously Memorial Day isn’t a thing down here. I didn’t realize it until about last Wednesday when there was no work scheduled on anyone else’s calendar for Monday. Since I wasn’t expected to work, Ramie & I took this opportunity of a day off of work to go to Panama.
We decided that on the way South we would stop at the post office to check on the status of my passport since they haven’t updated the tracking number since they mailed it off to the Embassy in San Jose at the end of March. Fortunately, they had it there waiting for me! Or should I say fortunately they STILL had it- apparently, according to the label on the package, it was shipped from the embassy on 4/26. We also know that it's pretty typical that they will only hold mail for about 1 month before returning to sender. WHEW! I’m glad we decided to stop and check otherwise who knows how much longer it would have been before I could track it down and get it sent back!
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| Inside the Post Office that is nearest to Uvita- about 45 minutes away. |
Now it was on to City Mall where we would shop for the regular stuff: house supplies and groceries. By the time we were done there we were tired and ready to go home. We originally wanted to stop at the new mall just a few blocks away, but we just weren’t feeling it today and, even though there were some things that we wanted to look for there, we just didn’t have the desire to shop any more.
Tuesday 5/28- Today marks 3 years since we left Minnesota. Yes, 3 years ago on this day we hopped on a plane with Breeze and a few suitcases to start this new crazy adventure. Happy Costa Breeze Anniversary to us. If you haven’t followed along since the beginning, there are a WHOLE LOT of crazy adventures for you to read about if you go back to blog Post #1. Trust me, the stories from the beginning were way better than they are now. Life got boring after I had to start working again.
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| We practice our Spanish using Duolingo. This was one of the exercises and thought it was relevant for this blog post. |
Wednesday 5/29- Tracy has had her new car for a couple of weeks now and reached out to Ramie when she discovered a weird issue with the doors locks. She asked if he’d take a look, and Ramie was happy to dig in to see what the issue might be. While I worked on work, Ramie took a couple of hours to take apart her door, and in the end he was able to confirm what Tracy originally thought the issue might be stemming from. Tracy asked Ramie if he could fix it, and, as is typically the case here, he would be able to fix it IF he can find a replacement part. Ramie is good at researching, so after Tracy left, he spent the rest of the day researching, comparing options, comparing prices, and trying to help her find the best solution to her door lock problem.
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| This is me at my home-office - I spend a lot of time here, but it's rare that anyone but Ramie ever sees it. |
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| Helper dog making sure dad knows what he is doing. |
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| Oh Boy! That looks like a mess, I'm glad its not my car! |
Thanks to Tracy for snapping some photos!
Thursday 5/30- If you recall, last week Ramie was helping Karen coordinate bids for moving some big boulders on her property prior to the start of construction on her new house. As suspected, the bid from Karen’s builder ended up being more than two times the cost of the guy that Ramie had bid the job. Before giving the go-ahead on the less expensive excavator, Karen requested that Ramie meet with her builder, Michael, to confirm exactly what needs to be moved to facilitate the building of the house. They met at the property this morning to go over the details, and there were no surprise changes, which was good. That didn’t take too long, so on the way home Ramie dropped Dusti off at the Yamaha dealership to get an oil change. She only has 800 miles on her, but this is a recommended service so it’s something that just has to get done. Fortunately, the dealership is close enough that he can easily walk home, and will walk back later when it’s finished to pick her up again.
Ramie also reached out to Randall who helped facilitate the guy with the excavator and told him that they wanted to hire him for the job and to coordinate a time when he was available to do the work. It turns out that the excavator was available tomorrow morning, and they’d get this taken care of right away. Wow, this may be the only thing that has ever happened fast down here!! hahaha
Friday 5/31- Right away in the morning before Ramie was even awake yet, I heard the notification go off on my phone that one of our cameras had been triggered. Usually it's a car going by the front gate, but I was shocked at what I saw. I just had to go see this for myself. I put on some sandals and went to peak out the front gate, and this is what I found in our neighborhood. Really!? More farm animals?! Some days I really wonder what is going on in this neighborhood!
With an 8am planned start time, Ramie got his morning routine out of the way and was set to meet the excavator at Karen's property. Sometimes you just never know if the planned time will be the time that they actually show up, Tico time, you know, but the excavator was right on time this morning. Ramie explained in his best Spanish exactly what needed to be done once again, just so there was no confusion, and said he will be back in about 3 hours to see how it's going, and he left the excavator guy to do his thing.
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| The main pile of rocks is the crescent shape pile on the left of the picture the other random ones you see also needed to be moved. |
On this morning’s agenda was also to go back up to the rental house that he has recently been doing repairs at for Loren. I guess they have been having some electrical issues because now the fan that Ramie just repaired not too long ago stopped working completely and some switches were sparking when they flipped them. That’s never a good sign and should probably be looked at sooner rather than later.
It took him some time, but Ramie was able to diagnose the reason for both of the problems. The fan has one of those remote controls with the receiver box in the fan, and it turns out that the receiver box is junk. All of the power surges and outages that we’ve been having lately were the likely cause of the failure and an easy enough fix. To be honest, electronics crapping out on you like this because of the power surges is not uncommon down here and just one of the things that we have to deal with while living in our “tropical paradise”. The sparking switches was a whole other situation.
As he worked on diagnosing those issues, he found an old termite nest inside the junction box that the switch is mounted in, and the wires were loose. Another spin on this particular issue was that the switches are very old and they don't make this style anymore, so he had to try to figure out how to rewire to a “new style” switch where this old style would have to be removed. Once he had figured out what needed to be done, it was time to go to town to see if he could find the parts that he’d need. Thankfully, Loren had a new remote assembly and Ramie was able to find a switch that would work. Once he had his parts in hand, he headed back up the mountain to return to that house and fix the things that needed fixing. He started by installing the new remote assembly in the fan first just to be sure that the fan works for the renters again. Since the switches would take more time and effort, he saved that for the 2nd project. It took some time and a fair amount of trial and error, but he was able to get everything to work properly again without causing sparks and other bad things. It would have been a lot easier just to rewire these switches completely, but here in Costa Rica you're lucky if you find a house that has the proper color wiring. In this case, it did not, so he really had to troubleshoot each wire to find the right combination and once he had that, just had to go with it. Trying to re-wire this would have been an absolute nightmare!
Before Ramie was completely finished with the electrical issues, he got the call saying that the guy moving the rocks was finished. Ramie finished up everything with the electrical repairs, packed up all of his tools, and headed back to Karen's property to talk to the operator and make sure everything was good.
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| The original Casita above and the now flattened lot for the future house. |
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| Some of the rocks were so large even the excavator had trouble moving them! |
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| Ready for the new house |
Even though we are generally home-bodies and it isn’t real often that we like to go out, it turned into a very a fun night of a lot of laughs at each other. I felt a little bit bad for Inca at some points, because her dad ended up being the butt of a lot of jokes, but I think she thought it was funny too. In the end, I’m glad we went out!
The Official Casa Costa Breeze end of May rainfall total was 30.3 inches
Saturday 6/1- As we were leaving Mosaic last night we talked to Val and Marshall about our Saturday morning beach walk that we hadn’t coordinated yet. We decided that we’d meet at the beach at 6:30 this morning so we didn’t have to walk in the sun and heat like we did last time. It turns out that Marshall didn't end up joining us this morning due to stomach problems, so it was just the three of us. We did the nearly 5 mile walk in about 1hr 45min. so it was pretty much on par with the time Val and I typically take. After we got home and cleaned up, the rest of the day was just a lazy laid back day of doing little things around the house, blog, gardening, and of course, taking some time to relax in the pool. I like days like this, I wish we had the opportunity for more of them. Work just gets in the way too much!
Sunday 6/2- I wish I could say we did something fun today, but it was another kind of lazy day at home. Working on the blog, doing chores, getting some groceries, doing some laundry, and trying to fit in some relaxing time.
Monday 6/3-
This morning I woke up not feeling very well, but I continued with my morning routine and logged onto the work computer by 6am like I always do. By the time Ramie got up I was feeling worse, and after a little bit longer I was shivering uncontrollably to the point where I could barely control my mouse. I only got about an hour of work done before I messaged the boss that I was sick and needed to take some time away. I decided that I needed to go back to bed because there was just nowhere else that I could try to get comfortable. I was all bundled up as much as I could be, considering we don’t really have blankets because we don’t need them, and still couldn’t get warm, so I pulled out a beach towel and covered up with that too just to add a little bit more warmth. After about an hour of shivering, I finally fell asleep and slept for about an hour. Of course, Skye wanted to play and snuggle as I was laying there, but eventually she fell asleep along with me. When I woke up, I felt well enough to sit at the computer and work again. After thinking about it, I think it may have been food poisoning from some chicken wings we had for dinner last night, and I’m glad that whatever it was it seems to have passed fairly quickly.
It's been about a week since there have been any guests in Adam & Katie’s house, but a new one arrived yesterday. After being at the house for a little while, she informed Ramie that the refrigerator didn’t seem to be working right and the popsicles they bought had all melted in the freezer. He went over to check it in the hopes that maybe the cleaners accidentally changed the settings or something, but it turned out that was not the issue and it would require a service call.
Ramie reached out to a repair tech who said that he would be available to come check it out this afternoon. When the service tech arrived, it only took about 15 minutes to diagnose and fix. Thankfully he actually had the part with him that was needed to fix the problem. The day had been saved; they could keep their food cold now. As it turns out, the fridge only got to run for about an hour before the power decided to go out for the next few hours. Well, I guess that meant that this guest still wouldn’t have a cold fridge yet. In the meantime while they were waiting for a cold fridge, we’d been holding onto some of their refrigerator items for them at our house, I guess they just wouldn’t get them back yet. Such is life in Costa Rica!
Pura Vida!
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