Sweet Sixteen and Puppy Dogs

This is a sad commentary on our school room! They look pretty darn bored ha? Can you imagine how bored the girlies are? Actually the dogs love hanging out in the school room every day. It is the warmest best place to be in the house. Actually it is a built in room at the front of the house, but it has a clear roof and sides so the sun can come in but no rain or wind. It is a family favorite.

Yesterday was Sweet Sixteen for our lovely teen. She had a great day and even better today she got to get the chip for her phone and is on again. The one problem is when you live in a concrete house reception is not good, no matter if you have the latest chip or not. The problem with having only one provider, think MaBell, is that there is no competition. We are supposed to be getting two more companies in the next couple of months, will be interesting to see if they are any better than ICE.

COSTA RICA RAINY SEASON

I know I have blogged about this before, but I really can't get over this wet season. This is our third wet season, and I can't even call it wet. After our first year here we all voted and decided we would always leave for the month of October. It is notoriously the wettest of the wet months. Now here we are with no rain. Once in awhile some mists, but no big rainfall. In fact we have only gotten caught in the rain one time this year. Even with running and training for the marathon, only once in the rain.

This is a great thing right now. In a few months it will be a real drag. In other words we will be having rolling blackouts all dry season. What this means is they will decide what hours they want to black out the whole darn country and blink, everything goes out. Of course they don't do it during the day when you actually have light. Oh no they do it in the night when you really need the light. In fact they don't even do it in the middle of the night when people are sleeping. They usually do it when everyone is just starting dinner.

More than once my son would bring dinner to his friends house. We had a little gas stove the first year we were her, so when electric went out, we could still cook. We were going to get a 7% break on our electric, which has doubled in the past two years, but ICE decided they really could not afford that!

We spend about $45.00 a month on electric. I know this sounds cheap to those of you who pay heating or cooling bills, but consider this. We have no hot water, just on demand heaters on the showers. We have no dishwasher, no drier and no heating or cooling. When you consider all that doesn't that sound a little high?

SCHOOL BREAK

I was looking at my baby today and wondering how I would have felt when I was five if I got to spend my vacation watching my mom teach massage! Considering all the fun of hiding in my homemade fort I guess I would have been pretty happy.

I have not posted for a few days as our computer has been sick. Yes unfortunately our computer has a virus and is not feeling well. We are trying to get everything of value off of it before we lose it. Poor thing.

Other than that we have not had internet because, well I don't know why as we did not quite get the reason when the ICE guy came out to fix it today. All I do know is we now have a half way working computer and are back online.

We have been working with another amazing student and received rave reviews about her work, after only two weeks no less! I just love teaching people and seeing the response of the people they work on. It is very rewarding.

The fun is also getting better with our marathon training. We are up to 25 miles a week and boy am I beat, to say the least. I think in judging how I feel and look between 20 and 25 miles a week is the perfect mileage. It feels good without feeling like too much, and keeps the weight off. Another benefit I have found from upping the mileage is no migraine the past two months with the cycle. No IB profin at all, cool!

ICE

The name of the phone monopoly here is ICE. They are in the process of getting broken up but in the meantime we have to go through them for everything. Today our internet went down. It has been very windy and sometimes the lines get knocked out. In fact they have already fixed it once. So it has blown away again.

My daughters boyfriend was over so I was going to have him call them to put in a work order. Low and behold a ICE truck pulled up a couple of doors from us to work on a line. So we ran out to ask them to look at our lines and fix our internet. He said no can do. You have to call in a work order and wait your turn.

He did come in the house to take a look. Of course then he wanted to know who hooked up our internet. I wanted to tell him, but dont have enough words in my spanish vocab. that we had a friend do it because they had screwed it up. Probably good thing I did not have the words ha?

Anyhow hopefully soon we will get reconnected with the world as we know it. In the meantime guess I will get some cleaning done and maybe even get my classes organized. It is sure amazing how connected you get to the internet. We have only had our connection for a few months but I sure hate coming to the internet cafe. Plus it is up to three hundren colones, or better known as fifty cents an hour. Plus I have trouble typing on these computers as they put all the exclamations different places, so you just don{t get any!

INTERNET

I have been thinking all day about the miracle of the internet. For the two years that we lived in Costa Rica we had to do all of our internet business at the internet store. It is really cheap here, but it was a real hassle.

When we bought our house the first thing we wanted to do was get hooked up to the internet. We started the process. The first thing you have to do here is get on a waiting list with ICE. After six months of waiting we were ready to go. My husband went with my son-in -law to talk to the people, after waiting in line for 2 hours of course.

They were told that because here in Costa Rica the original owner of the home also owns the phone line we could not get the internet without the original owners permission.

Enter Darwin, the original owner of our house. He was also a gringo and gave us a smokin deal on our house. He is a decent enough guy and we figured we would have no problems with him. Well he was not the problem, his wife was. For some reason unknown to us she did not want to give permission for us to get the internet.

Enter our good friend Jens. We told him the whole story and he went to ICE with my husband and went to a different office, with no waiting by the way. They met with a guy who told them pretty much the same story we had heard the first time around. This time Jens told them the truth, he did not know where the heck the owner was and he could not be reached by us.

The next week we had the internet. That is the perfect example of the way things work here in Costa Rica, kind of weird. We love having the internet in our home, and because of having the internet we can now get a voip phone, which makes it possible for us to keep in contact with our kids everywhere.

Just one of the many things we have come to appreciate on our adventure here in Costa Rica!