Tidying Up

Bella and I are home today as Andy took the BeGo to the border to see how many parts have been "borrowed" from the Black Panther. And, by the way, yes a BeGo is a tiny compact car that we are managing to fit in just fine, all 6 of us! Usually we are on a bumpy dirt road or the beach road, rarely on pavement like you may be picturing, no "freeway" driving here. The kids took the quad to school so we are home baking bread, making cookies, and tidying up around the place. The power has been going on and off all morning and I am wondering if I have jinxed myself. The second to last time I baked bread the power went off in the middle of baking it with no fewer than 6 half baked loaves of bread in the oven, which proceeded to slump all over themselves and the oven, unable to support themselves any longer without the heat needed to chemically prop them and their dying yeast up, and when the power came back on an hour-ish later I had one huge mono-loaf attached to all 4 walls of the oven, given a real good visual for the term, "half baked" and I am praying that does not happen again today! With bread must come soup. So even tho I am sweating in a bikini with the effort of typing, we will probably be perspiring in our potato soup at dinnertime.

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But back to the tidying portion of the day. Since I have been teaching for the past couple of weeks, some of the meticulous cleaning I usually undertake, ahem, has been let go a bit. So after mopping the floor humming tunes from Cinderella, I dragged my shopvac outside, the only vacuum I have here to use which makes me dream of my sweet Miele at home in RI where she rests in her cozy closet while I am provided with no end of frustration or the f-word as the handle constantly falls apart when the plastic floor attachment sticks to the tile on every other stroke in spite of the rolls of masking tape I have used to try to tape each ridiculous section together. But don't get me started on that. I dragged the cursed appliance out to try to clean up the concrete dust from the patio that surrounds us as the concrete is not sealed properly so constantly disintegrates into a fine dust, eventually making its way into the house if not sucked up regularly. Now, you are probably wondering, is she really going to bore us here with the details of her housecleaning? No, that is just the thing. Any time you forget where you are, doing some mundane task like you might do if you lived in the Ukraine or the US or anywhere else in the universe, that's when you inevitably get blindsided, reminded that you are, in fact, living in Costa Rica.

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So there I was just leaning in to the unpleasant task, when I mindlessly moved the plastic bin of pool and snorkeling toys and surprised a large scorpion, which quickly scuttled back under it while every inch of my own skin started to crawl. Yuck. Of course I could not let it linger there, so close to the front door and all, and finally was able to get it cornered with a broom for a photo op, see above, which apparently it was in no mood for and then encouraged it into a plastic quart Pops chocolate ice cream container where it promptly hunkered down to await its fate. The photo is for Alicia, who stated bravely that she does not mind scorpions at all but the tarantula photo put her over the edge. As an aside, that same tarantula, or perhaps its twin, was waiting outside just below the door when Andy went to lock up two nights ago. It's tough to tell them apart...

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Now, I confess, scorpions really creep me out with their sinister little lobster-like claws and nasty segmented tails for maximum flexibility. I know they are my zodiac sign and perhaps I should have some kind of fondness for them, but I really wish my Mom had waited and pushed me out as a Pisces or something, possibly simultaneously landing herself in the Guinness Book for the longest pregnancy had she succeeded. They, including Micah, say that the beast's sting is like a bee sting, nothing worse, but the idea of having one of them actually on my body somewhere before flipping that nasty barb on the end of its tail over its head and into my largest organ gives me such agida that I am sure I would have a heart attack simultaneously from the creep factor alone. Others have said the venom can make you feel kind of high for the rest of the day but I'll take quaaludes or some moldy mushrooms over that any day.

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Here's an interesting fact, tho I have not tried this at home myself. When cornered and sensing its imminent demise, a scorpion will supposedly sting itself and head voluntarily off into scorpion heaven where I suppose none of us freaky humans abide. Rumor around school has it that if you make a little ring of fire and put my zodiac mascot in the center, it will indeed commit scorpion suicide, using its handy dandy built-in hari-kari barb. I prefer to toss them as far from the house as I can, hoping they are not vengeful creatures like their human zodiac signees, and will make their way with great determination back to the foot of my bed to wait under the covers, stinger in the up position, for my tired little toes to stretch out. Which, by the way, is the best reason for having white and only white linens in the tropics. I figure the beasties do serve a purpose and I did look that up in response to a student in my class who stepped on one after I explicitly stated, "Don't...," and the answer to "What good are they anyway?" was not all that impressive. I mean, they do eat spiders and other insects, ya-da-ya-da-ya-da, but nothing so amazing as to stimulate the sympathy of your average teenage boy. Frankly, I'd like to match up our tarantula with the stinging gymnast and see who prevails, as creepy as that would be. Rather like that footage of the killer whale and the great white shark wrestling with their teeth in the cold waters lapping at the ends of the streets of San Francisco, but with less splashing and underwater obscurity.

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Okay, I am off to make sure the ants have not discovered the rising bread. I fully expect they are capable of carrying off a loaf or two if they put their backs to it. Speaking of San Francisco, I will close with my new Spanish name, as coined by my friend Gloria from that fair city and the birthplace of Hannah - Kelita. This name is useful as it prevents every Tico I meet from saying, "Kelly? Oh, like Barbie's sister!"

I found Karen Carpenter!

I may be dating myself for missing her, but I have found Karen Carpenter! No, that's not her, that's Bella...

I used to listen to the Carpenters as a dreamy-eyed pre-teen and thought it was so cool that she and her brother sang together and were both so, well, groovy together, while me and my brother couldn't even play a decent game of croquet without fighting over who got the green mallet and if I got to it first he chased me and beat me up in front of the neighborhood kids until I agreed to be orange. Green was the best, by the way, because green went last so could capitalize on all the balls already in play. And yes, my brother usually chose to send me across the street as opposed to taking two extra shots when he gleefully hit my orange ball, humility not being in his vocabulary.
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But back to the lovely romanic innocence of the Carpenters, "long ago and so far away..."! They are alive and well right here in Costa Rica on the only radio station playing US tunes with a couple regular DJ's who broadcast in English. Radio Doce is nothing short of a blast from the past and perhaps the past is all they can play legally within copyright laws, I don't know. I find myself singing along to tunes I have not heard in 30 years or so while driving Bella to school, speeding over the improbable background of rutted dirt roads as the faster you go the smoother it feels, always on the lookout for blind corners behind which may be mulling a whole herd of cows, some of whom may even be laying in the road depending on the hour. As I am usually late, I move rapidly along sans seatbelt, which would only serve to continuously tighten until I am inextricably pinned to my seat, clicking on the radio and becoming instantly transported back to my days at Gaudet Middle School. I might find myself back at the 8th Grade Prom while a blast of Summer Breeze fills my BeGo. Or I might find myself lamenting along once again with the woeful sounds of Karen herself singing "Don't You Remember You Told Me You Loved Me Baby?" bringing my teenage angst and raging hormones right back while I belt out that heartfelt song along with her, "I love you, I really do," wondering if I had someone in my back-then self to feel so achingly for. Today she happily sang "Sing A Song" with all those adorable children in the chorus and I was so sure I could have contributed mightily to that, once upon a time in the back seat of our family station wagon. You would never imagine she had died so young and tragically to hear so much cheerful innocence.
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Hitting the power button for Radio Doce might bring me back to being both so cool and so insecure at Middletown High School on a different day. While I speed by the howler monkeys hanging in the trees overhead I find myself singing along with the Beatles to Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, thinking in my surreal surroundings about the lyrics to this particular soundtrack and their trippy implications. A trip, indeed, glancing over my shoulder at Bella in the backseat wearing her rose colored glasses rimmed in pink sparkles which could have come straight from those decades gone by. And this just after picking up our German stained glass artist neighbor, Adrian, with his pony tail and sober for a change demeaner, it being morning and all, delivering him to the bus stop humming, "Do you Know the way to San Jose?"
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I might find myself transported back to my college days by Pete Townsend, singing along to, "Let My Love open the Door," remembering my boyfriend dropping me off for our final farewell before I left for a semester in England. He died tragically while I was abroad. This too, while digesting my usual fake breakfast that Bella serves me cheerfully each morning with my coffee (see photo), a brown plastic waffle I sometimes supplement with a perpetually over easy cloth egg on a pink flower-shaped plate with some plastic grapes and an orange or pear. Yummy. I guiltily sneak them back to her play kitchen when I return home, not sure what else to do after I pretend to eat them day after Groundhog-ish day, thinking I wish the real food would magically replenish itself over and over in my own play kitchen. That would be the kind of recycling everyone could embrace!
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So even though Andy and I sometimes draw straws to see who has to change out of their pajamas to make one of the four daily trips out to school, at least if I draw the short straw I have the anticipation of some time travel courtesy of Radio Doce to look forward to and accompany me on my journey. And sometimes when I pull up to Educarte or find myself at the entrance to the Country Day School singing "It's More than a Feeling" or some other Boston tune, thinking I am in the bucket seat of my '64 Dodge Dart or sitting under the stars on the beach of our Maine lake, I am confused for a moment. But the palm trees and blast of heat when I open my car door drop me right back into present day Costa Rica. Perhaps I should listen to some Tico tunes for a change.

Erin Go Bragh-Less! The day after...

Top o' the mornin' to all you leprechauns out there still dancing a jig, or perhaps hiding under a shamrock recovering from too much exuberant jig dancing and green beer drinking. All that food coloring can't be too good for you, the rest of it aside... Who would have guessed that we could find a really good corned beef dinner complete with bagpipes and enthusiastic wearin' o' the green right here in the rainforest? Okay, not so rainy forest, but it was steamy all the same and green was the dominant color of the day tho the Irish Knit everything was conspicuously absent. Yes, Outback Jacks on the not so beautiful beach of Brasilito, one beach over from us, home of the infamous "Bye Bye de Bush" party, was the scene of some serious celebrating of all things Irish! I am not sure the Ticos knew what to make of it all on a Tuesday night, as they seemed to be watching with great curiosity as the distinctly non-Latino music and green haired revelers spilled out into the tropical night. Perhaps with time they, too, will become Irish by injection or simply adopt the enthusiasm for one day like the rest of Americans do.

For my kids it was perhaps the most enthusiastic wearin' o' the green I have ever witnessed as it meant a reprieve from their school uniforms. Isaiah even wore a green furry wig we brought back from Jordan's Bat Mitzvah! Christiana laid her Aunt Erin's age old lament to rest, perhaps, by wearin' Micah's shamrock boxers, yes, over a pair of spandex shorts after her father raised his eyebrows. Every year me Mum would hang the Erin Go Bragh paper shamrock in the cottage window to mark the 17th of March and she, in all her infinite young wisdom, would say with great embarassment, "Why don't you put Mark Go Underwear?" in response to yet one more excuse for said brother Mark to tease her endlessly as brothers are wont to do. So Christiana did the Go Underwear part for her Aunt anyway...

Meanwhile, back at Outback Jack's, where the sands were jumping... We invited our Irish neighbor Eileen to join us and discovered her talent for singing and bravery! They had a German sounding Karaoke singer who alternately entertained us when the poor bagpiper stopped blowing and marching around for a much deserved water break, kilts, sporran, and knee socks not exactly being tropical wear. Eileen got her New York Chutzpah and her Irish up and decided after listening to the singer butcher "Killing Me Softly" that we needed a song from the Motherland. She convinced the brazen imposter to relinquish her grip on the mike and sang "Tu-ra-lu-ra-lu-ra" acapella, there being a sad omission of Irish ballads on the karaoke selection! We all sang along while Eileen rocked Outback Jacks and their wasn't a dry smilin' Irish eye in the house! And she didn't even need the "mas fuerte" of turtle egg eating to do it! I am sure even the crabs stopped their incessant scuttling around the beach to hear the unfamiliar melody of her clear Irish lilt as it met their tiny ears on the warm breeze!

Back to the bagpiper, chilling in the corner. Turns out to add to his potential for heatstroke, that he hails from Alaska! I forgot to ask if he departed for greener shores because of their governer... He has been living in Panama for several months now and in his travels he somehow abandoned his bagpipes in Peru! So the owners of Outback Jacks actually flew to Lima to retrieve them so he could play and sweat for us all! Talk about an international affair and an admirable dedication to the saint known as Patrick. Surely they deserve some sort of honorary mention by the Ancient Order of Hibernians when they put their mugs down! And all so they could sell green beer and corned beef, which by the way, I have no idea where they got! Perhaps the corned beef capital of the world, Peru?

And speaking of cojones, the ocean water is finally clearing and warming up. Perhaps St. Patrick has done his thing here too as the sea snakes seem to have headed for other waters. So I strapped some on and started to whip my typing arms into shape with ocean swimming! One day in the school pool where my teeth got whiter convinced me that I don't need the monotony and chemicals it affords. So I am swallowing my apprehensions and swimming along the shores of Playa Conchal, snakes and sharks be damned! (See photo) Easy to say from this distance... I started on Monday and was about 2/3 of the way down the sunny shoreline, just about to start patting myself on the back in between strokes for my bravery, even tho I only stayed in water deep enough to pull my hand through without hitting bottom, like you used to do when learning to swim, "Look Mom, I'm swimming!" while your hands groped for the next sandy perch. When what did I spot just ahead? Why, a group of folks all gathered near the water's edge, pointing into the water. Damn. So I got out and they managed to convey to me in Farsi and a little Spanish and sign language and ultimately by drawing with a stick in the sand (!) that they were looking at a snake in the water. We went through the whole range of communication once more to determine that it was not yellow and black, like the deadly sea snake, but brown and white and mostly because the lovely serpent then consented to be washed in with the next wave I saw that it was, indeed, one of the beautiful brown spotted eels that are sometimes in the shallows.

So I assured them it was "muis simpatico", deferring to my "expertise" in our common language, and tried to be a poster child for cojones and encourage them not to beat it to death with their sticks by diving in just past its wiggling form and praying it would stay close to the bottom, swimming along my merry way thinking what a good example I was setting but also unable to get my wandering mind off sea snakes and how even tho their venom will kill you in a few mere minutes, they have such tiny mouths they could probably only bite you on an ear lobe or in the webs between your fingers, then putting that exact part of my body into the water blindly ahead of me... Thinking too of how Micah and I were walking the sea snake-laden beach just last Friday, no more than three days prior, when we risked our very lives with a stick and a t-shirt to toss one back into the water in an attempt to "rescue" it and to see how they look in their watery home. Because even if it is against your better judgment to perform such a "humanitarian" gesture, if your teenage son gets it in his head to move a highly poisonous snake you are bound to stop protesting eventually and help out at some point if he persists in proceeding. And sure enough, before the snake managed to get itself back to the warmth of the sand where apparently they were intentionally heading to escape the cold water, we observed that they do, indeed, swim on the surface and are very visible if you are looking from above, like from the safety of the sandy shore as opposed to at eye level. I tried to swim with my fingers locked a bit more tightly together and perhaps I exited the water soon after that thought, just shy of my intended destination, where I looked back and saw the Farsi speakers still pointing en masse and waving their sticks at the poor spotted eel.

I walked the rest of the beach sneezing all the way as even this salt water seems to have that affect on my damned sinuses. There have been 2 huge belted kingfishers plying the waters for food there lately and I watched them do their thing in between sneezes, not exactly able to sneak up on them and probably scaring them and their intended dinners to death with my explosions. I kept hearing things in the tree-lined shore and thought someone was following me. The snake god? Would he thank me or consign me to some horrible fate? Had I done more good than harm or vice versa? Finally I was hit on the head with an empty fluttering seed pod and realized the sound was coming from the trees themselves, as their hanging seed pods were popping open and releasing their seeds to the waiting warmth of the ground below. Another "aha" moment brought to you by Mother Nature. Time to get my littlest leprechaun off to school...

Beware the Ides of March!

And so we find ourselves in the midst of yet another Friday the 13th, so far, so good. I happen to like the number 13, having been born on it, and the next Friday the 13th will be in November on my birthday!

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Yesterday was much worse. We woke up to no water. None. Turning the faucets resulted in getting more of the same, air. They say the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over, expecting a different result. Well, it is amazing how many times we turned on faucet after faucet, toothbrush in hand, either forgetting or hoping for a different result! Tough to shower with air, shampoo not having much of a foaming action without it. So we harkened back to our Peace Corps days and went to the spigot below the pool, bucket, towel and shampoo in hand. The water temperature is not a factor here, it rarely comes out very cold and even if it did would feel mostly refreshing. So we all managed to get to school looking and smelling halfway presentable while the ants did the dishes. But it made us appreciate H2o with renewed vigor. When was the last time you were without water? I won't launch into a tempting tirade here on water conservation or the gloomy scenario of a warmer world with millions of people suddenly cut off from the Himalayan water company. But it is good to be reminded nevertheless of the preciousness of this commodity and retrain yourself to simly turn the tap off when you are washing dishes or brushing your teeth!
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I have lived in three places now where water shortages were a fact of life and we stored water in every available container for those times when the faucet produced only air. I remember one time in Jamaica when our neighbors flooded their apartment by inadvertently leaving the waterless faucet turned on and the water came back into the pipe, filling the sink and happily overflowing all over the floor while they were away for the day! For many of you, the most likely equivalent might be a rare power outage in your first world nation where you go to bed with no power and are suddenly awakened in the middle of the night by all your lights and tv and appliances coming to life with the restored flow of electrons you forgot to switch off in the dark! 'Nuff said. We are all dancing a little jig while we brush and shower and wash with abandon today and will soon forget to appreciate water properly once again.

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Speaking of ants. Was I? Maybe not, but I needed a segue. We have 3 types of ants sharing our casa. Hormigas, as they are called in Spanish. The first kind are the teeny tiny sugar ants that live by the millions in my kitchen, occasionally migrating to any room with a guaranteed source of sugar, even if it is in the form of toothpaste. They aren't picky. They love sweets! They form trails all over the place, signalling chemically to their buddies, hey, this way, cookie crumbs on the counter! Or, their favorite nighttime treat, the compost bin. You know ants are basically blind, right? We could possibly get rid of them if we were absolutely meticulous about leaving any kind of sweet food crumbs from ever touching or resting on any given surface of the house, but that is not very practical with 6 of us happily munching away. It also means that any open cereal bag or any other kind of thing that has sugar listed as an ingredient must be stored in our very cramped refrigerator and explains why on any given day you can open the freezer and have a bag of Golden Grahms fall on your head. I am sure we have eaten our share, like that protein powder you can boost your smoothie with in the good ole' U, S, of A. If you are not sure if sugar is an ingredient in any given food, they will let you know in a hurry. Did I mention how quick they are? And they have given us a newfound appreciation for both airtight containers and water, yes, water. They can not swim! So you might come into our kitchen and see the cookie container or compost bin stranded in the middle of a water filled cookie sheet. Anything I bake and set out to cool becomes a challenge between me and the ants; they usually know before I do when it is cool enough to touch.

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The second type of ants are usually outside of our house and we try to keep it that way. They are the black ants, as we so creatively call them. They bite. And it hurts! They are protein lovers so if you drop some cheese or meat on the floor they barge right in without invitation. They also have amazing powers of smell and communication and can locate a new source of protein before you know it hit the floor. Emerging from the house yesterday I found them doing their usual line dance around Isaiah's sneaker. Upon closer investigation, I discovered there was a dead tarantula wedged behind the shoe box they were happily breakfasting on. Yuck. As with their sweet loving cousins, simply removing the spider to a distant location causes them to follow immediately, like throwing a ball to your dog. Which, in the case of our dog, would be like throwing a coconut as Duncan has gone completely loco for chasing coconuts. (see photo of him waiting for his coconut to float by.) He will drop them on your feet if you are not paying attention or in the pool if you are swimming or on the ground where he will stare at it all day, occasionally picking it up in his what must be very strong teeth and flinging it around. If he does not eat his food right away, the black ants stand ready to swarm his bowl too.

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The third ant is my personal favorite, if you must have such a thing. They are the red ants and are bigger by far than either of the other two. They are my kind of ant. They come in at night only, clean the bathroom and the kitchen, and leave by morning. They don't trouble me any and never outstay their welcome, always leaving a place cleaner than how they found it. What a good ant! I will stop before I break into song.

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Well, that's all the news fit to print for this week. The fires are out, the truck is still at the border as the paperwork was delayed by another earthquake in San Jose, I just finished teaching second grade for 2 weeks, Bella had a tooth filled, Micah had a field trip to the beach to reenact World War II battles, Christiana is on an honor society field trip, Isaiah will be out in the field playing baseball with his school and the local Nicaraguan boys.

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K3
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PS Well, talk about timing! I just found out next week is national fix a leak week in the USA where it seems a trillion gallons of water are wasted each year! Ouch! For more information and facts to wow your St. Patty's Day party guests, visit the EPA website www.epa/gov/watersense. Come on people! It is one of those two things we cannot live without, after all! And no, the other is not Starbucks....

Critters

March 7, 2009

Well it has been a busy, critter filled couple of weeks here in sunny Costa Rica. The other evening Andy and I were sitting on the veranda by the pool talking when Bella came out of the house behind us and casually remarked, "Mom and Dad, there is a big spider next to you." She went on about her way and we really were only half listening but Andy turned and there was this huge tarantula on the ground next to us! Yikes! Some days you kind of forget you are in the tropics until something like this pops out to remind you!

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Last week I gathered the dirty clothes from the casita in my arms and carried them back to the house and when I had put them all in the machine, there sat a scorpion right on top of Christiana's sports bra, arrgh! I know they are my zodiac sign but they are the creepiest looking things and thank goodness it did not sting me while I was unknowingly relocating it! The winds are still blowing and the water has suddenly turned very cold with the upwelling. It is so dry that brush fires have been burning on all the hills around here, driving all these critters out. Monday night Andy battled the fire that burned behind our house for most of the night. It is amazing to see how fast the new growth begins but I don't think anything will grow in earnest until the rains begin again. In the meantime the orange lines of fire provide our nighttime entertainment and I keep singing to myself, "How can we dance when our earth is turning; How do we sleep while our beds are burning?"

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Well, one of the 99 reasons we jokingly gave last year when the 99th person asked us why we were moving to Costa Rica has come to pass. "Cheap plastic surgery," was my answer and last weekend I got my first implant! Yes, it's true. But not very centerfold-ish. Even though breast implants draw your gaze everywhere you go here, forcing me to bite my tongue before it says, "Nice boobs, did you get those here?" Mine, alas, is not so eye-catching, located a little higher up and of a singular variety in my mouth. Boring and necessary, I won't regale you with my tales of pain and misery from the past week. My smile is a bit compromised for the next 2 months with a new temporary tooth that is shorter than my old one so I don't bite on it and cause it to fall out as it is only glued in while my implant heals and I am having to relearn the "f" word, I mean sound, with this new little space in my mouth but at least I am not all stitched up like the bride of Frankenstein following a facelift. I won't attach a photo! And it does cost a fraction of what it would set us back in the States.

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I have been substitute teaching all week in second grade and it has been fun to be back in the classroom after many years. My class are mostly native Spanish speakers, one is French, the rest are Americans and the cultural diversity makes for an interesting day. Bella started taking hip hop lessons in addition to ballet. Isaiah is learning to alternate breathe while swimming which I love to see! Perhaps another Save the Bay swimmer is emerging! Micah, nicknamed the baconater, has not been frying meat shirtless this week and I keep thinking of writing about the perils of cooking in a bikini as we all wear as few clothes as possible around here. Christiana, Andy and I started scuba lessons and they both had their first thrilling experience of breathing underwater last Sunday! I am renewing my training as I lost my scuba card years ago and hope the ocean will warm up by the time we are ready to venture forth in our flippers from the confines of the pool!

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I hate to jinx him, but Andy actually had news that our truck may be released this week! For those of you not following the continued saga of the "black panther," our truck has been impounded since November in a secured lot at the Nicaraguan border, Penas Blanca, yes, that's correct, we call in Penis Blanca, the white penis also, while the Costa Rican aduana has tried to extort as much money from us as they can. Who can blame them really? So we have rented a series of BeGo's, zipping our family around in a tiny 5 passenger economy car while they have probably been slowly stripping our truck of all its parts! Stay tuned for the next thrilling edition of the Black Panther does Penas Blanca. And say a prayer for us!

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Ciao for now!

Bella is Five!

Well, as you can guess, Bella Grace turned five years old on Tuesday, the 17th, here in the land of Feliz Cumpleanos. She had a fiesta with cake and ice cream at school, where this photo was taken, and a birthday dinner with our friends the Hauns and the Lynch's who arrived just in time from the depths of RI winter to join us! She got a Puff the Magic Dragon book and CD and we are all singing about the land called Haunalee, which is not, coincidentally, where the Hauns are from! I don't know what Peter, Paul, and Mary had in mind when they originally wrote the song, I think it had something to do with Hanalei Bay in Hawaii and maybe they were high, Little Jackie paper rumor and all, but it has become a timeless classic, melancholy ending and all. So our little gift from God who weighed only 5 pounds at birth is now 5! We enjoy her sunny smile every day and are so thankful she is here with us! Amen!

So, what is new on the beach... Well, Monday was a school holiday here thanks to our dead Presidents. Christiana, Micah, and I took an afternoon walk on the beach where the tide was receding, leaving an indigo blue line all along the white, sandy high tide mark like someone had walked the beach dragging a thin blue marker! Closer inspection revealed an amazing collection of tiny blue jellyfish! I looked them up and determined they were blue buttons, with some variations. Google them and see for yourself. They are actually polyps, not jellyfish, similar to the famed Portuguese man of war. A polyp is a colony of organisms living symbiotically. Some of these were perfect little round blue buttons, like the internet shows, but others were like tiny air-filled clear balloons with one long thread-like blue tentacle trailing that was up to 2 feet long. As we walked along our attention wavered and if we accidentally stepped on one they popped! There were also one-inch long indigo blue creatures with feathery appendages that looked like dragons, speaking of Puff! They all seemed to have come apart from each other, these three distinct critters, as they were all the same amazing blue color, wiggling around the tide line and in the tide pools. Micah and I dipped into the water for a minute and one touched his leg. He said it stung just a tiny bit. So, that was pretty amazing. And the next day they were gone!

Yesterday we took our Bugs and Slugs class to the Monkey Park, an animal rehab facility nearby. We saw lots of cool critters, including toucans, parrots, scarlet macaws, an amazing spectacled owl, and three of the four CR monkeys. It is always sad to see a caged animal, especially the birds and the monkeys (monos, in Spanish), which were our subject of study for this week. Most of these creatures started as a bad idea for a pet and ended up at the park when their short sighted "owners" realized wild animals do not make good pets. Can you imagine thinking that trapping a coyote in your garage for a free watchdog is a good idea? Keeping our cousins, the primates, is greater folly.

The white faced capuchins, so-named for their resemblance to a group of monks, are highly intelligent and keeping them confined makes them crazy, literally. The two we saw yesterday are only 3 or 4 years old and are irreversibly psychotic. They could live another 40 years and have to be move into seclusion as having people around makes them nuts. They start biting and digging at themselves, self-mutilating behavior reminiscent of the cutting some teenage girls might do. A sad fate for a monkey who would live communally in groups of up to 30 in the wild and are known to use leaves and insects medicinally as well as tools. They have been seen clubbing the deadly poisonous fer de lance snake to death in the wild as well as beating boas to get them to release their death grips on kin!

The spider monkeys were busy with their puzzle feeders which force them to use their evolved brains to get their food, kind of like a primate Brain Quest. They are so agile with their extra long limbs, thus their name, and are the only monkeys here that can brachiate, or swing from limb to limb. They have the strongest tail of any mammal in the world and lost their thumbs as they evolved into long-fingered swingers!

The three tiny baby howler monkeys we observed silently from a one-way mirror were found clinging to their dead mothers, orphaned by power lines, which is sadly not uncommon here. The electric company strings monkey bridges periodically across the roads but monkeys do not always follow the same paths and are killed by cars when crossing the road or electrocuted by the lines which sometimes blow their hands off. Not pleasant, I know. There were no tiny spider monkeys, thankfully, at the park. All four species are endangered here; all primarily due to loss of habitat and a growing population of homo sapiens.

Well that concludes your polyp and primate lesson for the day! One of the reasons we moved here was so the kids could experience some of the amazing wildlife here around us before it is all doomed to history books and animal parks. I sincerely hope they can bring their own children here some day to see these amazing creatures in the wild, but I am afraid they will not have that option. I pray that I am wrong.

PS Well, I am guessing you can figure out which one is a photo of Bella and which one is the monkey? The photo of the monkey is one of the loco capuchins. I need a blogging lesson to figure out how to put the photo where I want it in my blog. Help if you can! In the meantime, bear with me. I am sure you can puzzle it out, your own little Brain Quest for the day!

Friday the 13th of February

Happy Valentines Day!

Or, if you prefer, en Espanol: Día de tarjetas del día de San Valentín feliz!

Okay, so maybe I won't be publishing more than monthly? We have had company. My parents were here for 2 weeks and my aunts for a week and we had a great time with them all! It is birthday month for my Mom, who turned 74 here, Christiana who just turned 17 (!) and Bella will be 5 on Tuesday! Fiesta!

Above is a photo of Christiana on the left and her friend Sydney at her birthday dinner at Mama's Deli, a great little Italian restaurant in Tamarindo. Mama is the mama of Bella's first boyfriend, Geronimo, her little Italian lover, but that is another story entirely.

Just when I thought I might be missing Winter with all that lovely snow and ice skating on the pond everyone keeps writing to us from RI about, we took my parents on a trip to Monteverde in the mountains. It was SO COLD! We wanted a fireplace in our room at the Trapp Family Lodge, purportedly of the Sound of Music family ilk, but had to settle for 4 comforters. It was raining and we had a nice walk in the cloud forest to a waterfall. Saw none of the creatures Andy and I had seen there in 1987, which included the elusive quetzals way up neck-achingly high in the canopy and we even found a group of the now extinct Golden Toad, a fluourescent orange little frog that lived only in that cloud forest and was last seen there the year after we tromped through the bush to find it. So the wildlife was a bit absent last week but the papagayo winds were howling at hurricane strength and only the most stalwart creatures could have come out to play without being blown to the beach. The road up was so precarious with steep drop offs and we did think we might get blown off that several times. Above is a photo of the beautiful emerald toucanet we enjoyed seeing at a bird feeder from a breakfast cafe. Also saw a bright orange baltimore oriole and a blue-gray tanager while warming ourselves over coffee. I am concerned that the wildlife of Costa Rica is becoming less wild and more bird feeder-ish.

I am teaching a bugs and slugs after school class once a week with the art teacher. It's a combo art/nature ed. We did ants, hormigas, the first week and anteaters, oso hormigueros, yesterday. Did you know the giant anteater can be 7 feet long including its bushy tail and its tongue extends 2 feet?! Unfortunately they are thought to be extinct in Costa Rica. I have seen one of the smaller, collared anteaters crossing the road one turtle-watching night. They stand firm when attacked, slashing out with their front claws; the Bribri Indians place their claws in the homes of pregnant women so their baby will be strong and resilient. There is one other kind of anteater in Costa Rica and that is the silky anteater, an adorable little golden creature with velvety fur. They look more like sloths, which they are related to. They are called serafin, or angel of the forest, as the indians believe they guide newly departed souls to heaven.

I have been back to walking the beach this week where there are many sea snakes washed up dead at the tide line. I don't know why. They are venomous, like 10 times that of cobras, but nobody ever gets bit as they are not aggressive and their mouths are small so they could only bite your ear lobes or finger webbing and the fangs are in the back of their mouths. They are pretty cool to look at with black on top, yellow on bottom, and yellow and black spotting on their paddle shaped tails. This is clearly a decoy as the tail looks much more interesting to bite from above or below. What eats them I do not know. On my Tuesday walk I just missed a hatching out of baby turtles, darn it!

I love my hour morning beach walk. Andy drops me off in Brasilito and I walk along that flat, brown sand beach then cross over a little path and onto Playa Conchal which is a beautiful white sand beach. The first half of the beach is tough to walk as it is all soft, shelly sand. Then it gets firmer and is easier going. At the end of the beach the dirt road turns up and I walk along a shaded dirt road to our gate and up the hill to our house where a jump in the pool is refreshing and necessary! It is like Fall in New England here now as the trees are all dropping their leaves. They are also blooming and there are pink, yellow, and white flowers everywhere! Unlike the temperate forest, they are preparing themselves for the heat that is coming. It is very dry and windy now and there have been several wildfires burning. The water is several shades of tropical blue and a bit cool now due to the upwelling the winds create. When it is cold in Florida the cool air is pushed South and through the gap of Lake Nicaragua and comes howling over us, the Papagayo winds. They can be hurricane strength, but of course nobody measures them, and it did lift up the edge of our roof last week on several nights, leaving a line of dirt and bugs on the floor below. These winds are important as they drive the upwelling which provides an abundance of food for the Pacific game fish, like the sailfish and marlin and tuna, as well as all the other critters here in the sea.

We were at the beach on Sunday when a feeding frenzy of amberjacks drove a school of little silvery fish, maybe sardines, right up and onto the beach! The whole beach erupted into a flurry of nets and hand-held fishing lines cast into the boiling water and the blue-green fish were thrown up onto the dry sand one after another! Andy and Isaiah were fishing so cast out into it, the only ones who had a gringo fishing pole, and caught one large amberjack they gave away. It is always nice to live in a place where the local people enjoy and use their environment so thoroughly and Costa Ricans do love the playa and to fish. Everyone scooped up the little fish too, stuffing them in bags and in their pockets. Andy impressed Bella by eating one of them raw!

Well, go and kiss your loved ones! And enjoy the day of Love!