My First Few Days Back in Gods Own Garden Country

My trip to Florence was not ordained by the gods and so everything possible was meant to go wrong, it did and I am back home in Costa Rica in my new house chilling and still trying to get over the jetlag 5 days later. If you remember I lost my bags flying to Florence and that took two days and again my bags went AWOL on the way home and arrived 2 days later. Luckily I was coming home but if I was a tourist going on holiday losing both of your bags would have been a horrible irritation, sweating and stinking in the same clothes until your late bags turned up in your hotel. Jetlag is my biggest pain in the ass with my job, I lose sleep on the plane as I cannot really sleep and then take forever to adjust to the time difference. I am still waking up at 4 am and falling over on the new sofa at 8pm, what can an old fart like me do about it. Just suffer is the answer.
Anyhow life in the real world goes on, the water tank is leaking in the new house just like was predicted by the security guard and it is pretty obvious why to any plumber, they have used bother metal pipe work and plastic fitting so with the differential expansion of the joints they leak when the water in the hot water tank gets hot, basically pretty crap, I am replacing the whole thing with an instantaneous water heater, using some pipe and a couple of hoses, I am talking like a plumbing geek but I am pleased I can do it myself rather than get some peasant in who lies saying he can do plumbing.
This new house is much hotter than my old house as it lies away from the mountains that surround the valley and we get about a quarter of the cloud so the house is warm all day and I can slide open the patio door for breakfast, really quite nice and so much nicer to have breakfast with a fresh breeze. I have come home to have the cable TV installed and high speed internet for the first time ever in my life, I can leech music and software and films to my hearts content now. I am looking at going away to the beach and taking my new camera with me to take some pics for my CD book of the birds of Costa Rica and I have already included 4 pics of the Rufous Naped Wren in the book, but it is just a start.




Probably a few more months or maybe a year before i start hawking it around the tourist hotels and souvenir shops




The header picture of the Index of the Bird Book contains 4 species of birds the majority are of species not from Costa Rica, this would normally be sacrilege but I stole the header picture and liked it a lot so I don’t care, it was actually two pictures and I blended two together cutting off the names of some hotel I think.


I have started buying furniture for the new house and went around 7 stores to find a Sofa as I have particular needs, I have an unusually long neck and need a tall back and lots of lower lumbar support, so we did the ass test on hundreds of sofas and realised that anything made here in CR is a horrible crappy made concoction and bad, loads of the very fantastic looking leather ones from both Italy and Mexico are great but feel strange in this very humid atmosphere and still never got one that was tall enough or cheap enough, I tested one that was $9000 and a large multi seat corner unit that was $14,000 , the ultimate in crazy prices. I sat on one in the biggest store about 5 weeks ago and it was huge and very comfortable and a nice colour and expensive at $1700, so I hesitated and when we went back last Saturday it was still there, we tested all the new ones and went back to the old one and again it felt right and we said yes we will have it, the girl who was serving us said there is a 20% discount for mothers day which is weeks away, this is a crazy country, giving us a discount after we said we would have it and for some cooked up reason, but I take 20% from anyone, that night while watching TV we both fell asleep on the wonderful huge perfect sofa, the best buy I have made in a long time, other than the house of course.