Oops, I did it again!

Sometimes I wonder at my amazing ability to do the same dipshit thing over and over again. For example, I have broken yet another water pipe at this damn house. Unbelievable. This time I was only trying to water my plants, and someone (not mentioning any names here but I think you all can guess to whom I might be referring!) left the hose in a tangled mess, so as I was yanking on it to try to untangle it, I pulled the spout right out of the wall, breaking yet another PVC pipe in the process. Sigh. So I had to shut off the water to the house again, leaving us without water for the simplest of things (toilet flushing, hand washing, showering, etc.). And of course since esposo has this "job" whereby he has to actually live at the freaking hotel where he works instead of being home at night like most normal people (thus stranding me in God-awful Grecia for no reason whatsoever when I could have stayed in the neighborhood I actually liked), I have to wait who-knows-how-many days for him to get home to fix the damn thing. Ugh. Grrr. Crap. Crap pants. Yes, I suppose I could do it myself, but I don't think plumbing is one of those things that comes naturally to most women (and if you are a woman who fixes your own plumbing, all I can say is, you go girl! I'm impressed!), at least not to this woman. If you need me to figure out why your computer is crashing, I'm up for the challenge, but ask me to slap some silicone on PVC and forget it, it just ain't happening.

In other news, something fell on the roof last night, probably a big branch from the very, very tall tree behind our house, and must have loosened a tile or something up there, because an iguana got in to my ceiling this morning and I heard it scrabbling around just over my head. Since Kiki Monster also goes up into the ceiling (because, you know, an architectural "feature" of this house is several square, open holes over the front door through which Kiki and Olivia jump to get into the ceiling), I was worried she'd get into it with the iguana. But I think that the back of the house and the front of the house have separate ceiling spaces, if that makes any sense. It will be weird to leave the iguanas when we leave this house. I feed them scraps every morning and now they don't even run off when they see me throwing food up on the roof; they actually run toward it! We have a new iguana (I think it's a green iguana whereas most of the others are grayish-green garrobos) with the back spikes and throat wattles and everything. He/she is quite beautiful, very different from the others (who are smaller). I think it's a he because he does that head-bobbing thing that male iguanas do to attract female iguanas, and I have seen Stumpy Stumpleton cozy up to him, so who knows? Maybe Stumpy is a female after all and iguana love is in the air!

Another good day

Ok, so some of you know that my birthday was last week. What I really, really wanted to do for my birthday was go to the Cinepolis VIP and see Speed Racer. (Call me crazy! But I can't resist those Wachowski brothers, and is that Joel Silver of the-very-best-show-on-t.v.-yet-recently-canceled-anyway Moonlight I spy as one of the producers? Why yes it is.) Unfortunately, they only had the overdubbed version playing at the VIP theater, so I'm holding out until they decide to stop showing Iron Man and have a go with Speed Racer in English. Either that, or until Indiana Jones comes out on the 23rd. Because, really, why go all the way to Cinepolis if you're not going to the VIP theater? Which, by the way, is totally worth doing. Big, cushy seats, waiters that bring you a full menu from which you can order everything from crepes to sushi to wine! Drinking at the movies, really you can't go wrong there.

Instead, I thought we'd go shopping and then over to Nau at the Intercontinental Hotel in Escazu and then have dinner somewhere, preferably Bacchus. Well. Best-laid plans and all that...

I wanted to see if there was anything this kinda fat girl could fit into at Aliss, because sometimes they do have "large" sizes (not really large, just L, which is really like M here) that can almost fit somewhat large people. I found a great pair of pants, but nothing else. Being my birthday, of course esposo had to go shopping, too, and bought a bunch of stuff for himself. I ask you, was that rude or what? (Yes, dear, it was. It was rude of you to shop on my shopping day.) Then on to Nau.

Nau was horrible. It used to be a cool, lounge-y type place with great music, relaxed atmosphere, and extensive drink list (with something like 50 different mixed sake drinks). Not anymore. A real circa-1975 lounge act was playing when we went in (anyone remember Barry Manilow's Mandy? Oh yeah. Manders I thought of you, girl!), and the drinks menu is gone. I really wanted to order something off of their menu, and the rather stupid waitress was like, well, tell me what you want and I'll just have the bartender make it! No, no, I want to know what you have. A cosmo is not going to cut it on my freaking birthday! Never mind, I'll just have water. So she brings us two half bottles of Evian (Naive? Yes we were.), and esposo orders a vodka and soda with a twist. That's it. I'm ready to leave about 10 minutes after we arrive, so we get the check and ... wait for it... $6 for a half-bottle of Evian! Oh fuck! Are you kidding me? So the total bill for two half-bottles of Evian and one vodka soda was something like $18. Nau is so then. I will never go back there again.

After getting that bill, I was starting to get a migraine, but somehow esposo talked me into having dinner instead of going home. We first tried Bacchus in Santa Ana, but if you don't have a reservation on a Friday night, you can pretty much forget it. Which is too bad, because it looked wonderful. We wanted to try somewhere we hadn't been, so I thought, how about Essentia? It's just outside of Ciudad Colon, and esposo said, why not, so there we went. First off, the building is amazing. It's an older house completely decorated with artistic flair everywhere. The courtyard was booked (note to self: make reservations!), so we sat in what was like a patio. There isn't all that much vegan food on the menu, but I did order the summer rolls, miso soup and a salad. Personally, both the summer rolls and miso soup were entirely too heavy on mushrooms for me, but if you like mushrooms, like esposo does, you'll probably quite enjoy them. I didn't. I did, however, love the salad. It was simple: baby arugula, cherry tomatoes, and pesto dressing. That's it. Yet, it was the best salad I have ever had. Ever. Hands down. So I ordered a "giant" salad, though what came was what I'd call a side salad (and actually the bill showed I was charged for half a salad). I really could have eaten four or five of those salads. At the end of dinner, they brought us out a little chocolate terrine on a spoon; just a taste, but honestly I don't think I could have eaten more than that. Quite rich and delicious. Esposo also had a four-cheese pasta (again with mushrooms -- bleh!), though he said it was disappointing. And the meal came with homemade bread and two different kinds of spreads -- yum! Anyway. I'd definitely go back there for salad and desert. What more do you need, really? Oh and wine. Salad, desert and wine.

Happy birthday to me! Did I tell you I'm 40 now? Yep. The big 4-0.

Leaf-cutter ants

...are the bane of my gardening existence. Or at least my attempts at gardening in what seems to be an ant-infested lot. I know, you probably thought from reading the title of this post that I would say how interesting they are, or maybe how they use the mold that grows on the leaves they cut to feed themselves, or something else flattering about them. But no. You might have gotten that response from me, say, ten years ago when I first came to Costa Rica. After living with them, however, I have a completely different opinion of the little bastards.

Here are a few things that leaf-cutter ants seem to like (and thus, if you have an ant-infested lot, you may wish to learn from my costly experience):

• Roses. They can devour a rosebush in a matter of hours.
• Scorpion tails. I actually don't know what these are really called in English; I'm translating from Spanish here. Hummingbirds and butterflies love them; so do leaf-cutter ants.
• Hydrangeas. Forget it.
• Begonias.
• Gerbera daisies. They even take the petals off all of the flowers.
• Orchid trees (buy a big one and it should be okay; they keep eating the leaves off of my little one every time it tries to come back).
• Pomegranate trees (same suggestion as above).
• Canna lilies.
• Raspberry canes.
• Bird of paradise flowers. Mostly the leaves, thus not actually giving the flower itself a chance to, well, flower.
  
• Butterfly weed.
  

Well I think that's most of what I've tried to plant in this yard that has been done in by those freakin' ants. And here are a few things that, surprisingly, they leave alone:

• Most herbs, including parsley, lavender, and basil.
• Tomatoes.
• Lantanas.
• Cosmos.
  
• Grass.
• Not much else.

Actually I take it back about the lantanas; I have seen them with lantana flowers. I think this plant just grows too fast for them to eradicate it totally.

The ants are so-so on passionflower/maracuya/passaflora so far. Sometimes they cut them down, sometimes they don't. I think if they have better plants to destroy, such as my beautiful roses or scorpion tail plants, they'll leave the passafloras alone.

Well, today I put all of my roses in pots, so let's see how they do.

And just for fun, here are some pics of leaf-cutter ants doing what they do best:

"Sharkwater": See it!

If you want to know the real scoop behind what's happening with the sharks and illegal fishing and finning off Costa Rica's waters, you can't do much better than to see the film Sharkwater. Here's a great review; please make the time to see this important film, and then visit the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society's site to see how you can help end this tragedy in our oceans.

Sharkwater on Blu-ray Disc: Review By Brandon A. DuHamel

Canadian underwater filmmaker, photographer, and biologist Rob Stewart set out in 2002 to make a film -- his very first -- about sharks, with the modest aspiration of, to paraphrase, capturing some pretty pictures and debunking some of the myths about sharks as gruesome killing machines. He hoped, at the very least, to enlighten some people along the way. Read more...

Sharkwater trailer:


The making of Sharkwater:

INBio Parque photos

As promised...