Saturday 8/24- It’s time for Spring Cleaning. Ok, well, it isn’t really Spring here, in fact, this time of year is probably actually more like winter because it's the rainy season, but regardless of the season, it's a chore day. With all of the work Ramie has done recently to install the wiring and components for the new solar system that we’re setting up, the house has gotten very dusty and dirty, I can feel it on the floors when I walk through so I did a much more thorough sweep of the whole house than I have in a long time. At some point in the near future we will have the cleaners come to do a deep clean, but before that happens I need to get the main dirt off the floor so walking through the house doesn’t drive me crazy (I hate the feeling of walking on a dirty floor!). Once the floors were clean enough to pass my “walk through” test, Ramie and I worked together to reorganized our pantry shelves in the laundry room.
Since the very expensive solar equipment will be installed where the bottom shelf of my pantry used to be. I have to find new homes for all of the things that were there.
Once that mission was complete, and since we were on a roll, we just kept going with other spring cleaning chores, putting away things that ended up tossed in drawers, dusting things that clearly hadn’t been touched in a while, and taking care of things that have been pushed off for maybe just a little bit too long.
Today Skye would get to have a little adventure too! Since we have a trip to the US coming up, we had to find someone to take care of Skye while we’re gone. Paola, the pet sitter here in town who used to watch Breeze when we had to go on border runs, would be taking Skye, and she wanted to do a meet-and-greet to make sure things would go smoothly when it was time to take her.
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| Weeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!!!!!!!!!!!!! |
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| The wind is a bit strong, I'll watch what's behind us. |
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| Faster, Dad! |
Ok, back to today. Any time Paola is getting ready to pet sit for a new dog that has never stayed with her, she has them come for an introduction to her dogs (she has about 4 or 5 of her own) and the rest of the guest dogs that she’s caring for at the time. At Paola’s pet sitting, the dogs are not kenneled, they all live family style at her house, so if you have an aggressive dog or one that doesn’t get along well with others, it could be a real issue! Paola needs to check this out BEFORE the day the dog shows up for pet sitting!! Doing this as her business, Paola has her method for introduction down to an art. When we showed up we stayed with Skye outside of the fence. Paola then let out one or 2 of her own dogs at a time to meet Skye and get acquainted slowly. One of Paola’s dogs is a grumpy old guy, and with Skye being a nervous dog herself, they had a couple outbursts. This was all new to Skye as she’s only had interaction with a max of 2 other dogs at a time before, and with almost 10 new dogs in her space, nearly all at once, coming to meet and sniff her, I could understand that she was a little bit overwhelmed! I would say, though, that things went fairly well for the most part. Paola figures that part of Skye’s tenseness stems from her being very protective of Ramie and me, and suggested that we drop her off for a half day to see how she does when we aren’t around. We agreed that this would be a good idea, so Paula promised to check her schedule for a good day (maybe a day that she didn’t have a lot of other dogs) and would get back to us.
Sunday 8/25- After all of the non-computer work we took care of yesterday, today was a computer work kind of day. Ramie worked on the blog and I got some work done for my two side jobs. Thankfully, this time of year, those two jobs are fairly slow and I don’t have to dedicate a lot of time to them.
The house flies were out full force today and were everywhere, being a real nuisance. When it came time for me to start cooking dinner they were constantly buzzing around me and it was truly driving me crazy. Since I was busy cooking, I asked Ramie to come in and swat them for me, but every time he came to my rescue they would disappear and hide, not a fly in sight. Every few minutes he would walk by to look for them, and he was able to sneak up on a few, but it was crazy, like they knew what was going on, and they would all disappear when he came in.
The few that he got was better than none, though, so it helped a little bit. After dinner I grabbed my phone for something and noticed that the screen was going wonky with odd flashing colors and a weird blurry spot with some lines coming out of it. Ramie mentioned he swatted a fly near my phone at one point but didn't think he actually hit the phone, but maybe. That’s really the only thing that could have happened in the last couple of hours since I last looked at my phone, but honestly, I’ve dropped my phone before and that never broke the screen, so swatting it with a fly swatter… ? Of course, with my luck, yesterday during the cleaning spree I ran across my old phone… and did a factory reset on it. Doh! After having a new phone for about 10 months I chose yesterday to reset it, and today for my “new” phone to die. I guess I’d be spending the evening getting the old phone set back up with the important things that I would need for work tomorrow, like all of my 2 factor authorizations.
Monday 8/26- When I woke up this morning and looked at the phone, it had gone from some black spots and lines obscuring screen last night, to a completely messed up screen with only a few spots and lines of color this morning. There was definitely no using this phone until we could get it repaired!
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When he found a couple of options that he thought would work for him, he started to look at what was available locally. Of course, when he saw the price of the phones here versus what that same phone would cost in the US, it was a no-brainer decision to buy it through the US and have it shipped down here. But, as you’ve heard us say before, it takes at least a few weeks, even with the “fast” air-shipping option, to arrive. This means that for now I’m stuck with my old back-up phone for a while. I guess I’ll be setting it up with a few more apps over the next few days. Ugh, I hate setting up new devices!
Tuesday 8/27- Other than working on the blog, another chore in our lives that just never ends is working in the yard. It’s a good thing that, for the most part, Ramie seems to enjoy it. It takes regular maintenance to keep the jungle from encroaching too far into our space and taking over our yard, so there is always work to be done. While he was cutting the grass he noticed a lot of leaves and flowers had fallen off of our Plumeria trees. He went to take a closer look and discovered that we had an infestation of the dreaded Sphinx moth caterpillars chomping away at our tree. Plumerias are the favorite plant of these particular caterpillars, and they can they devour an entire tree full of leaves very quickly. The caterpillars that we found are only babies, they get SO much bigger, which is why they can strip a tree of its leaves in no time. Ramie picked them off one by one and threw them over the fence where they could find something else to eat, and away from our precious trees. We have 5 more Plumeria trees that we didn’t want them to spread to, so we had to relocate them.
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| The babies |
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| This is a large one that we saw in July 2021 when we first moved down here. These guys are longer than Ramie's hand! |
Wednesday 8/28- Ramie is still doing his turtle walks and the season is finally starting to pick up and more nests are being found. Today they found tracks and a body pit where it appeared that a turtle had laid a nest, but could not locate any eggs. Even after he got home, being unable to find the eggs was bugging him so badly that Ramie reached out to Oscar, the coordinator of the turtle reserve, for help. Oscar would be available later in the afternoon to go back out to the beach and help Ramie find the eggs so, at about 2:30 Ramie left the house to meet up with Oscar and Cycy. Thankfully this nest was only about halfway down the beach instead of at the very far end. When they got to the nest location Ramie described the way the nest looked when they found it, before Ramie and his team messed up the area with all of their poking and digging. Oscar picked up his stick and started poking with it to see if he was able to find anything that Ramie didn’t. It took him about 10 minutes, but Oscar was able to find the nest, exactly where Ramie was certain they would be.
It turns out that Ramie and Val just didn't dig deep enough. As Ramie dug the eggs out of their nest, the larger size told them that it was a Green turtle nest, who bury their eggs deeper than the more common Olive Ridley turtles do. Ramie originally only dug about half as far as he needed to, and today he vowed that he would not let that happen again. This time it took extra effort, but in the end the green turtle eggs were safely relocated to the nursery where they will have a much better chance of survival.
This afternoon, and every Wednesday, is Wine Wednesday at Mosiac, and Val & Marshall often celebrate the occasion there. Val’s dad, Mel, is visiting, and they invited us along to meet him and hang out for a little while. We don’t always take them up on their invitation, but this evening we would join them for a quick bite to eat and a free wine sampling. There isn’t a lot of great wine in Costa Rica, but Mosiaic tends to always have something that we like. For those of you who knew us before our move to CR, you'll know just how much Ramie and I like good wine.
Thursday 8/29- Today was a mostly uneventful day, but in the late afternoon Ramie got a message that there was another nest of hatchling turtles ready to be released. It was a late release and it was raining out so Ramie opted out of helping with this one. Since Val’s dad was visiting and she wanted him to experience a release, they took care of this release. It was not a public release, and the weather wasn’t great, so it turned out that there were only a handful of people there to watch it happen. Val said that Mel was in heaven letting the little turtles free.
He is no IT expert, but he can troubleshoot computer problems pretty well (and has much more patience with technology than I do, thank goodness!!) He was able to get the computer into recovery mode and went through the steps that it thought it needed to fix itself, but it kept failing and giving him error codes. Ramie googled those codes and learned that the problem was something about the operating system missing important data. At this point it appeared that the only option was to basically reload the entire computer to the way it came from the factory, which would mean losing everything. Ramie was hoping he could back up the hard drive and all of his files first, so figured out how to give that a try. He was able to get far enough into the computer that he could create a backup, and then started the dreaded factory reset process. The computer gave him one more option to back up the files so he opted to do it again just, in case. It took a couple of hours, but the computer finally booted back up and was exactly like Ramie left it earlier in the day. All of his files were in the exact same place, and even the screen saver was the same. Thank goodness it worked out this way! Have I mentioned lately how much I hate technology sometimes. At least it was a rainy Friday night and he had nothing better to do than work on the computer & drink Black Russians this evening.
The Official Casa Costa Breeze end of August rainfall total was 32.05 inches
Sunday 9/1- Its Sunday Funday! Really, we are actually doing something fun today. (I know, that’s not really typical for us). It has been some time since we have been up to the Don Emilio coffee plantation and we were ready for a visit. The last time we were there was when we went to the cacao plantation with Geoff & Tracy prior to Geoff’s trip to Canada. Deiner didn't have any tours scheduled for today, so we offered to keep him and the family company for a few hours. We picked up Geoff & Tracy at about 10:30 and made the drive up the mountain. 
Today we met even more of Deiner's family who were hanging out at the plantation, and after some discussion, we decided to go to the Jungle Fish tilapia farm and restaurant, just right up the road a little ways, which is owned by Deiner’s uncle Romero. Juan Carlos, who’s name you have heard from many adventures that he’s gone on with us, also joined in on the fun. Geoff and Tracy had not been to Jungle Fish before, so Deiner wanted to give them a tour around the property. We first walked around the fish ponds and checked out the little casita that they are building as an eventual rental getaway, and then we took a walk along a jungle trail to the “enchanted tree” or “meditation tree”, a huge hollow living tree.
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| Yep, you can walk inside this tree |
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| Surprisingly, this tree was hollow but still completely alive. |
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| Diener couldn't hold it any longer and found a jungle toilets to take care of business! |
After our tour, Deiner ordered up some french fries and salad to share before it was back to the coffee plantation.
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| There were some really old soda bottles in this bar wall. It was cool to see them. |
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| This is Melissa, Diener's sister. |
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| Geoff's new friend. |
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| A lot of good food! |
The dogs settled down more quickly than they did the last time we brought Skye to Paola’s. We didn't stay long because the whole point of today was to see how Skye would do when we aren’t around, and Paola told us that she would message us later when it’s time to pick her up. We weren’t home for more than an hour when we got a picture from Paola of Skye on the balcony looking out over the land. A few more hours went by and Paola sent another picture of Skye laying down relaxing, she said Skye found her spot and everyone is very chill.
Skye passed today’s test and she is welcome to stay there when we go back to MN. We didn’t expect that there would be any issues at all and we know that Skye will be in good hands when we can’t be here.
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| A few of the friends at the dog sitter |
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| That was a lot of fun mom and dad. When can I go back? |
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| Its a good thing this croc was headed back into the ocean before they arrived. |
Pura Vida!
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