My new car

I'm gonna get me one of these. Ya like it? Yes, I'll be paying for it forever, but I want a new car. And, in its favor, it does have all kinds of great safety features a mom wants, and gets good gas mileage, and is a Consumer Guide "Best Buy" car for 2008. But it doesn't come in green. I do promise not to park like an asshole with it.

As moving day approaches

I've been sitting on the porch out back, enjoying the last hours of our time in this house. It's a beautiful, though HOT, day, and that means the birds and butterflies are out in force. One of the plants that esposo stuck in the ground when we first moved in here in February is now a huge flowering bush that the hummers and butterflies just go crazy over. I will miss them. And my other feathered friends -- my many, many swallows that live in the little nooks and crannies around the house, my great kiskadee and his new girlfriend, who both come to the porch now to steal dog food. I'll miss them, too. Not to mention my human friends who live in town, Amy, J. always riding her bike around town, E. and M. and the chickens, who we never get to see enough of, even los viejitos, among many others... it is a really, really small town (a lot like living in Pacific Grove, CA, once upon a time), where you see someone you know every time you go out of your house. (Which, really, can be claustrophobic after a while, and I think esposo is not going to miss living here as much as I will.) Today, I would like to walk a few blocks to the farmacia, pick up more Benadryl (thanks, Amy, for the tip!), stop off at the ice cream place for the last time. These are things I probably won't be able to do in our new town, which doesn't even have a supermarket within walking distance (currently, we can walk two blocks to Super Mora).

It is a time for a change. I'm actually looking quite forward to the move, the new house, the new life, lest you think I'm not. I still have so much packing to do, and I'm battling a chest cold that has pretty much knocked me out for the past few days. Esposo is so much better at packing. Most of the rest of the house is packed, save for my sewing room and my office (which is TONS of stuff, actually). Since there are no closets in the new house, we've been purging quite a bit, donating three big bags full of clothes and another big box of kitchen stuff to the Red Cross, who will see that it goes to those who have lost everything in the recent floods. We have so much "stuff," it's ridiculous. Feels good to purge. How we are ever going to leave this country, I have no idea...

Ok, back to packing.

Do you park like an asshole?

I just discovered this site, youparklikeanasshole.com. It's great. There are so many asshole parkers in Costa Rica, mostly driving their gas-guzzling SUVs taking up more than one space or just enough of your space so that you have no room to park your little Haunted Hyundai. More than once I've come out to my car to discover a hole has parked too close for me to enter my own car, at which point I usually have to get in through the passenger side and then, what I do just for fun, is to open my door with a vengeance, and bang it as hard as possible into the hole's car next to mine, repeatedly if necessary, until I make a nice dent in the door of the hole's car. Yes, I do. I don't give a rat's butt about how my own sorry excuse for a car looks, so one more dent isn't going to bother me any. And I really hate rude people. So they deserve it. There are so many rude people in Costa Rica, you probably wouldn't believe it unless you lived here.

Back to the site. You can download "parking tickets" for asshole parkers. I'm gonna get me some and translate them into Spanish. And you can also take pictures of the asshole parker's car and upload them to their gallery.

Bucket of cat poo, anyone?

Another oddity of this town: people are always going through your garbage. The other day, in anticipation of our big move, I threw away about a lawn-sized garbage bag full of old videotapes, most of them too moldy to play in a VCR. I saw a guy hauling the bag away, and though I tried to explain they were total trash and not usable, he didn't seem to understand me, so I had to ask esposo to tell him to put the trash back.

This morning I saw two women trying to decide whether or not to haul away a bucket of cat crap. Let me back up. We buy the cat litter in the big bucket size from PriceSmart, as they are the only ones in the country who carry clumping cat litter. Then, we dump the clumped litter (aka waste) back in an empty bucket, which is later taped shut and set by the curb to be hauled away as trash. Last week, esposo set out two buckets that were gone by mid-day; however, the garbage picker-uppers had not yet been by. So I guess someone just wanted the buckets, but after they opened them and realized there was cat poo inside, I can't imagine them wanting to keep said buckets. Now this morning, I hear the littles barking in front, go out to see what the deal is, and two ladies are trying to determine what, exactly, is in the bucket. Never mind that there is a big picture of a cat using a litter box on the front. One of the ladies was going to attempt to untape the bucket, at which point I asked if they were looking for something, they sort of mumbled and put the bucket back. Then they tried to sell me some towels.

I will be glad when we move.

This'll gross you out

I removed one of these disgusting things from our dog Bonny today:

Ewwww....

Doesn't look familiar? It's a lovely botfly larvae, which is laid as an egg by mosquitoes and then hatches under the skin. Believe it or not, this is actually the third botfly larvae (or torsalo, as they are known in Costa Rica) that I've removed from a dog, the first one was on Isabella, and the second one was on Muneca, a dog that lived at a house we rented. I first noticed the bump on Bonny's leg a few days ago, and though I tried squeezing the botfly larvae out then, it was too small. I am not going to describe how to get a botfly larvae out of the skin, but let me just say, it is one of the most disgusting things I've ever seen. If you want to read more about it, this site has a lot of "great" information. Please be sure to scroll down and read about the guy who got bitten by a botfly in his scrotum, right here in Costa Rica!