Costa Rica Dog Lover

It has been a long few weeks since I last posted.  My oldest son,who was thirty nine, died unexpectedly in early November and I have been in the United States taking care of all those things that need taking care of before saying a final goodbye.  What I found the hardest was just the sheer exhaustion that I felt while still having to make all the necessary arrangements.  My son Jordan and I spent hours and hours trying to tie up all the loose ends that have to be taken care of when life ends. 

I am back home in Puerto Viejo now and am just recovering and taking it easy.  There is no better place to heal and every day gets a bit less painful.  I have found that people are so kind and thoughtful, both here in Costa Rica and back in the United States.  I am so very lucky to have the family and friends that I have.  They make times like this much easier to bear.  Thanks to you all.

Both Tom and I have now been notified that our residency application has been approved.  Now we just have a bit of clean up work to do and then we will be able to go to immigration and get our cedulas!!    The cedula is the identity card that all residents have and allows you to open up a bank account as well as get the residency rate to enter national parks.  I’m sure there are many other benefits but those are two I know of off the top of my head.  The biggest benefits for us will be that we will be able to join the national health plan which is one of the reasons we moved to Costa Rica.  Before we can be issued our cedulas, we will have to pay for two airplane tickets that will take us out of the country in the event we are deported.  I am not planning on that happening   We also will have to go visit our nearest medical clinic in Hone Creek and get signed up for the national health plan.  The system here is heavily geared toward preventive medicine so, once we join, we will have to make an appointment for a complete physical.  Then you are expected to go back at least once a year to ensure good health.  For this we will pay around $60 a month for the two of us.  Not a bad deal!!

This week has been one for getting together with friends and acquaintances.  On Tuesday afternoon Tom and I joined about sixteen of our neighbors at a community security training given by the local police.  This was the second session of ten and I have to say I am impressed with this kind of community outreach.  The training is done in Spanish so I have to spend a lot of time out of class going over what was taught but it is really good for me and it is helping my understanding of Spanish immensely. We are learning what kind of community security initiatives make a difference in reducing crime and by the end of the course we will have a written plan in place for our neighborhood.  Probably one of the greatest things about it is that we are meeting our neighbors and that in itself goes a long way to make the neighborhood safer.

On Wednesday I was invited to the 50th birthday of a woman that I recently met.  It was a “girls only” get together and it was great fun!  There were nine of us and I really only knew four of the women so I made some new friends.  We talked and drank Sangria and go to know one another.  It was interesting to note that everyone of us thought that we were living the best time of our lives right now – here in Puerto Viejo

Yesterday, October 13th, was Tom’s birthday.  It was also supposed to be a meeting/party for the newly formed neighborhood association for Playa Negra.  The turnout for the party was not large but the people who came had fun.  I think we will probably just have meetings from now on and skip the party except for very occasionally.  At any rate after the party, we hung out at our neighborhood bar, The Point, and Tom got free beers which he generously shared with me.  We talked with friendsfor a few hours and then headed home to finish celebrating with the dogs.  All in all a very nice day.

Finally, this is the time of year when thousands and thousands of raptors from North American migrate to South America.  Our little part of the country is one of only three areas in the world that is in this flight path and  I have to say it is amazing.  The sky is full of hawks, vultures, kites, eagles – every type of raptor.  We will see them again when they return to North American in the Spring and I will definitely be watching!!

September 15th was Independence in Costa Rica and it just so happens that it also was my birthday   This was the second birthday I have had here in my new home and it got me thinking about all the things that we will be celebrating for the second time now that we have celebrated our one year anniversary of the move.  Tom’s birthday is coming up next and then all the holidays.  We also are once again watching the fall migration of all the birds from North America and it is wonderful.  We have birds all year long but the fall and spring migrations are just spectacular!  Our garden is also just going crazy with new blooms and plants all over.  Again – it is like this most of the year but right now is particularly abundant.

Anyway, on Independence Day we went to the parade that they have every year in downtown Puerto Viejo and it was fun.  Since the town is only a few streets long, the kids in the parade marched with their instruments up and down the streets for a couple of hours holding flags and dancing.  There were not floats or anything – just the music and the kids and it was great!!  At the school in town the students had made T-Shirts for the event and they were hanging from the rafters of the school – pretty amazing work!

Around the yard:

Orchids blooming

Squirrel Cuckoo

Heliconias

Toucan

Passerini Tanagers

Aracari

The darling little sloth that I showed just the other day was killed when she touched the transformer on the electrical wires she was crossing to get to a tree.  That is just one of the many perilous things that the sloths have to contend with here.  The other major ones are dogs and cars.  At any rate, I will miss seeing her in our yard………..

It’s been awhile since I posted – time just seems to pass by so quickly each day and before I know it, I am climbing into bed.  There have been several momentous events in the last couple of weeks.  The first was a huge windstorm that hit on Thursday.  I don’t know what the velocity of the wind was but I do know it was scary!!  Tom was in Limon getting the yearly car inspection done so I was here alone with the dogs.  Kaya and Sofi were as scared as I was but Wiley just hung out and slept.  It is really amazing to see the huge trees swaying in the wind.  It didn’t last too long – maybe 45 minutes or so, but when it was over, there were trees and branches down all over the area.  Only one tree came down in our yard and it was one we didn’t much like so no harm done  

I also am SO excited about a new hobby I have developed!!   I made chocolate the other day from the cacao pods in our yard! I didn’t follow the normal instruction which require fermenting the seeds for several days before roasting the seed but it still was really good!  It is very time consuming since I have no equipment or tools but well worth it.  It is a very dark chocolate so just a taste satisfies that chocolate craving.  I am excited to figure out how to get even more and better results.

On Friday we had our first visit from army ants.  We had been told that they come around every so often and that the best thing to do is pack up and go to the beach for a couple of hours while they troop through your house and flush out and kill bugs like cockroaches and spiders and scorpions.  We decided to stay to see what they did and it was fascinating!  They started at our bodega and flushed out one scorpion who wasn’t long for this world and then they headed to the house.  They systemically moved around the entire outside of the house walls as well as on the ground around the house.  Anything they found, they ate.  They did flush out one other scorpion who was evidently living around a window but that is all we saw.  Pretty amazing!!

Our neighbors Ron and Don arrived in mid August and it has been nice to have them back.  Ron headed back to Portland last Monday but Don will be here until September 14th.  We had a farewell lunch for Ron at Banana Azul before they left with the four of us and Kathleen and Rick from down the road.  It was great fun!  We are looking forward to the time when they are here more permanently

Finally – we have been seeing some wonderful wildlife lately around the yard.  Here are just a few:

  Chestnut and Fiery Billed Toucans

Young sloth eating a cacao pod

Same sloth smiling

Giant Helicopter Dames Fly 7” wingspan and 5” body – biggest in the world!

Same one with closed wings

Red dragon fly

Our little Sofi is getting big!!!

Yesterday I got the opportunity to meet two dog lovers who are as passionate as I am about those four legged heart stealers   A few months ago I was contacted through my blog by a young man asking if I could recommend a veterinarian here in Puerto Viejo.  His twelve year old black lab named Maggie was not doing well and he wanted to find a trustworthy vet.  I recommended my vet and he brought Maggie down.  A few weeks later Maggie passed away.  Early last week, he contacted me to let me know he was now looking for a new dogfriend and asked me to let him know if I heard of a dog needing a good home.  I decided to post his inquiry on a buy/sell facebook page we have here in Puerto Viejo and that same day was contacted by a wonderful woman named Iris.  Three months ago she rescued a dog that she thought was about six months old who was starving on the beach.  The dog was unable to stand because he was so badly starved.  She quickly took her two dogs home and ran back to the beach to get the dog.  She got it to the vet and nurtured it into a most beautiful and loving animal.  She may have to leave Costa Rica and felt that the best thing for him would be to find him a good home.  I gave them each other’s contact information and the rest is history.  The young man came to Puerto Viejo yesterday on the bus and I took the two of them back to his farm north of Cahuita.  It was very hard for Iris to give the dog up but she could tell that Clay was a dog lover through and through and so that may have made it a bit easier.  At any rate, Snickers (now Stegner) will be living the life of a very pampered friend.  He deserves it!!

It has been an interesting couple of weeks here in Puerto Viejo.  Two weeks ago the government decided that it was time to go forward with enforcing an order that was initiated in 1993 to demolish two hotels in our area.  It had been determined many years ago that both of the hotel had been defying the environmental laws and had contaminated both the ocean and the rain forest around their areas.  Due diligence allowed them to remain open for years.  However, all appeals ran out early this month and the bulldozers arrived to raze the hotels – accompanied by 200 or so policemen from around the country.  Before the police arrived, blockades were set up (by cutting down trees to fall across the road) so that the bulldozers could not reach their destination.  It was an exciting few days here in our laid back little town and the controversy will go on for some time as to who is right or wrong.  Tom and I will continue to take everything with a grain of salt on both sides………….

A friend of Tom’s from the University of Idaho came to visit last week.  He is a law professor from UI who came to Heredia in the central valley to teach a course on how the laws in different countries complement (or don’t) each other.  He finished his classwork last week so came over to our side of the country of a few days of R&R.  It was such fun to meet him and hear of his experiences.  He is not a novice visitor – he has been here many times – but this was his first visit to Puerto Viejo.  He definitely was enjoying himself and we are hoping that he and his wife will decide to come back for respite in the next couple of years  

Other than than that we have been tending to our amazing garden, snorkeling whenever the ocean is calm, and trying to catalog new birds that come into our yard.  Oh – and watching Sofi grow up.  She is almost six months old!!!

The first bananas from our very own yard!

Our newest batch of Heliconias

Ditto

Iguana hanging out in our tree

  Looking at the house from the backyard

Hummingbird on a Heliconia