168. Resurrection of an Old Hobby & Trips to the Doctor

    Friday 11/1- It's our 10th Anniversary, so Happy Anniversary to us!

So, this whole story was kind of funny & I wanted to share.

Yesterday we saw on FB that some people were going to have a garage sale here in town today, and sales like this are kind of rare down here, so when we see one, we want to check it out. Also, Ramie kind of knows who these people are through the turtle walks, he doesn't actually know them, but he knows of them, and knows that they are moving out of Costa Rica and there’s a possibility that they have some good stuff.

Anyway, I was working this morning & on a video call, and all of a sudden, Ramie runs out the door and just says "I gotta go".

He came home about an hour and a half later and told me it was a good sale and "I can't be mad at him". I was in-between calls and just had a second to look out the front door on the way to the bathroom and saw a giant road sign that said "ATV Permits & Info", I asked him how much he spent and he told me that it was over $350, but we didn’t have time to talk about what he might have bought because I had another call that was just about to start. 

A half hour later I was finally finished with my call and he said he needed help unloading… and this was when he showed me two very large black and yellow bins in the back of our truck. But, before he showed me what was in them, he held up a fishing reel that he bought in addition to the sign and whatever was in these bins. I was unimpressed with the fishing reel and knew that he couldn’t have spent very much on that, so I wanted to know what was in the closed up boxes. I looked at the bins again with a questioning glance and he proceeded to tell me that he bought the bins and the fishing reel but got the sign for free. I couldn’t wait any longer, and that's when he popped open the lids on the bins. They were completely full of Legos.

  

The top of one of the bins was covered in manuals, he grabbed a stack and started flipping through them. The stack that he grabbed wasn’t even close to all of them, and I couldn’t even estimate how many were there. There would have to be thousands of Legos in these bins! Oh, I'm definitely not mad, but I did think that it was funny that he thought I would be. This is a lot of freaking Legos, what are we going to do with all of this?!

Yes, we’re kind of Lego geeks. Definitely not nearly as much as some people (including people that we actually know... you know who you are! lol😆), but we do enjoy them. We had a handful of sets back home but sold them all when we were downsizing to move here. Lego doesn't really seem to be a thing here so it was unexpected to see this huge collection of them. As I mentioned earlier, the reason they were selling these was because their family is moving to Thailand and their autistic son loves to build Lego, but only likes to build them once and doesn’t do anything with them again after that. The parent’s don't want to pay to ship them if he's not going to play with them again.

So, what did we do on the evening of our Anniversary? We spent several hours going through partially built Lego sets and disassembling them, looking through the manuals to see what we got, and discovering what treasures might be buried in these bins. Let me tell you, there was some odd stuff that was tossed into the bins that didn't really belong. There were some Hot Wheels cars (nothing special and all in bad shape), sharks teeth, bubble gum (yes chewed), weird electronic things that we have no idea what they even belong to, and the most random little stuff.

 

There was not one completely built set in the boxes. 

Most where partials and pieces

All of the manuals

I’m ok with spending my 10 year anniversary this way. It isn’t Palau like we originally said we would do, but I’m in the tropics, and really, who doesn’t love Lego!? 😉

    Saturday 11/2- Yep, we are nerds. We spent all day sorting and disassembling, then washing the Legos. Yes, we had to wash them, they were disgusting!

It appears that after he built them, the boy had them displayed in his room, and most were full of dust and dirt from being neglected. Due to the humidity here along the coast, they even smelled musty. Yes, plastic bricks can smell musty! After we had them taken apart we placed them in mesh laundry bags and ran them through the washing machine. It worked great until the zippers split and we ended up with tiny Lego pieces all over in the washing machine! 😖😬 

This is just round one of the washing. We have many more to go.

Our fingers were very sore from separating them manually all evening yesterday, as we hadn’t found any of the tools they give you with the sets to remove pieces. We did find some tools today and it was much easier to take them apart using those brick separator tools!

    Sunday 11/3- After doing Legos all day yesterday, I told Ramie we had to work on other stuff today. But what did I start the morning with? I created a Lego spreadsheet...  I took inventory of all of the manuals that we had and sorted them in kind of category-related stacks. At least it wasn’t disassembling, cleaning & sorting! It turns out we have instruction books for 115 different sets.

The manuals all organized by type

I then turned to working on the blog; I have 2 months of writing to catch up on! I keep good notes, and Ramie has started the basic writing for me, but I still have a lot of work to do. I have to keep all you loyal followers and readers happy! We did a few other odds and ends around the house, but when those chores were done, Ramie got back to the Lego disassembly while I went back to the blog.

    Monday 11/4- I woke up with a very sore back today but figured it was from leaning over, working on the Lego project all weekend.  I popped some Advil, and didn’t think anything of it. I made it through the day with the help of a few more Advils and figured after a night of sleep I'd feel better in the morning.

    Tuesday 11/5- By mid-morning today I could tell that my sore back was something very different. I had the chills even though it was 75* or more, so I dropped off work early and took a nap in the afternoon, which has fixed me when I have felt like this before. Usually I figure it’s some sort of food poisoning and just has to work its way through my system. The nap didn’t help and when I woke up I felt nauseous. There would be no dinner for me tonight, all that sounded even remotely appetizing were peanut butter & hard boiled eggs. Sounds delicious, right?? I wouldn’t be eating them together, but they would have to be good enough, separately, to get me through. After being up for a couple of hours, it was back to bed for the night. I didn’t sleep very well, and all night I was back and forth between being too hot and too cold. After thinking about it a little bit more, I think it might be a kidney stone(s).

Yeah, today was election day too.  We dropped off our ballots when we were back in MN.

    Wednesday 11/6- I woke up feeling a little bit better but that didn’t last long. By 12:30 I was back in bed and slept for about 4 hours. When I woke up, I still felt awful. I guess it's time to try to get a Dr. appointment. Unfortunately the doctor couldn't get me in until Friday morning. I guess I’ll have to tough it out till then. She did recommend some pills to hopefully make me feel a little bit better, so Ramie ran to town to buy those for me. You know the stuff is strong when the pharmacist tells you “if this doesn’t work, you better see a doctor”. Ramie was sure to tell him that there was a doctor appointment scheduled, and this was prescribed to get me through until the appointment. This afternoon, after my nap, I only got out of bed long enough to shower and move around for about 20 minutes before it was back to bed for me until Thursday morning.

    Thursday 11/7- Once again I had an awful night but I did feel well enough to work for a few hours this morning. At least I was up and moving around, but I still can’t eat, nothing sounds even remotely appetizing and I’m still living on a few cold food items that don’t make me want to gag. The meds put a little dent in the pain, but not much. I really hope the doctor can figure out what is wrong with me quickly tomorrow and recommend something that will fix it!

    Friday 11/8- This morning I finally had my appointment to go see the doctor. Ramie was asked to help Randall with some work that needed to be done, so I reached out to Nancy (Loren’s wife) to ask if she could give me a ride to my appointment. The doctor took a urine sample and prescribed some stronger meds for the pain. She and I agreed that this seemed to be either a kidney stone or a kidney infection, so she advised me to schedule an ultrasound, in the event that it is a kidney stone, so we knew exactly what we were dealing with. She would be in touch when she got the test results and knew more. When I got home I had enough energy in me to work a little bit more, and lasted a couple more hours.

Today Ramie and Randall's job was working for a lady who was moving back to the US. She hired the shipping company to go to her house, inventory and pack up all her belongings, and send them back to California.

It reminded Ramie a lot of what we had to go through when we were packing our pallets to be shipped down here. Ramie was home fairly early from his work, and since I was feeling so crummy, we didn’t do anything this afternoon.  All week while I've been out of commission, he has continued to work through the separating and washing of all of those Legos.

    Saturday 11/9- Since Ramie made such a dusty mess in the laundry room when he was installing the solar system, and that mess continued to spread to the rest of the house, we decided that instead of trying to deep clean everything ourselves, it was time to call the cleaners to help us out. They showed up this morning to do their thing, and the pain meds were working well enough for me that I felt well enough to work on the Lego project out on the patio while they were inside.

Geoff & Tracy mentioned to us that they wanted to get together for dinner one evening before they headed back to Canada, if, of course, I was feeling well enough. I was feeling somewhat better today and made it through the day feeling decent. Then, late in the afternoon, I got a message from the doctor who informed me that my urinalysis came back and it turns out that I had a kidney infection, not kidney stones, and gave me a prescription for some antibiotics. When we originally thought it was kidney stones she wanted me to get an ultrasound done to check them out and the nearest place to have this done was San Isidro. I was scheduled to have this appointment this coming Monday. I’m glad it turned out not to be kidney stones, because now that we knew that wasn’t the issue, I could cancel the appointment.

Since I continued to feel well enough until dinner time, we went out with Geoff and Tracy, and where did we go? Our favorite Mexican place. It was delicious, not to mention that it was the first real food I’ve eaten since Monday. It sure beats peanut butter and hard-boiled eggs!

    Sunday 11/10- The antibiotics kicked in quickly and were starting to help, but I still took it easy today. I wrote more on the blog, and we did some more Lego. We have gotten to the point with the Lego project that most of them have been washed and dried and it was time to start sorting them by color. How were we going to do this? We didn’t have anywhere to keep them all. We decided that the best way to sort, organize, and separate would be to use those plastic stacked drawer style bins. Luckily for us they had these types of plastic drawers at a store here in town so we bought one as well as a couple of other small storage bins for sorting some of the other smaller pieces. Ramie also spent some time researching each set and updating our spreadsheet, and found that we had about 35,000 Lego pieces here, assuming we had all of the pieces to all of the sets that we had instruction manuals for. This project is going to keep us busy for a long time I think! 

This will work perfectly to keep the pieces sorted, but it definitely won't all fit in this one set of drawers!

    Monday 11/11- Veterans Day, Thank you Veterans for your Service!

Since it's a US Holiday, our office is technically closed, but I took the opportunity to work for a couple of hours while I wouldn’t be disturbed and could actually get some stuff done. It turned out to be a productive use of my time after being out of commission for much of last week.

    Tuesday 11/12- I’m finally feeling a lot better, not 100% but definitely well enough to dig in this week at work. I have a lot of catching up to do, so it’s good that I’m feeling up for the task.

Ramie’s project for the day was to work on sorting more Legos. This evening after dinner during our typical “relax time” we continued to work on the sorting as well, we don't have a lot going on in our lives right now so why not!?

    Wednesday 11/13- Yesterday Ramie got a call asking if he was available to help out at the shipping company to finish creating pallets, packing and weighing all the stuff that they packed up at the lady’s house last week, which occupied most of his day while I was working.

For the last week or more we’ve been getting a lot of rain, even for Costa Rica standards, so much so that there are road closures all over the country because of landslides and washed out bridges. The South Pacific region, where we live, is in the highest/worst warning category right now and it's advised to stay home and not leave unless absolutely necessary. There were even a few days where the Liberia Airport had to close because there was damage to the runway due to all of the rain. This is not typical for this time of year, as it’s typically starting to get drier and more like our typical summer weather by now, and it's due in part to a hurricane in Honduras that is sucking all of the warm air from the Pacific across the country. Who knows how long this is going to last. While the rainy season was less rainy than some years and the extra rain is probably good for the plants, hopefully it doesn’t last too much longer!! But even if it does, we've got plenty of groceries in the house to last us a while, and plenty of Lego sorting to keep us busy, so I guess it is what it is...

Pura Vida!