What a week!
It started with a minor complication with the bed frame we are having made - and an opportunity to learn how a sticky situation with custom-made furniture is resolved here - and went downhill from there with no looking back.
I guess you could say it was a week of confronting the reality that "We're not in Kansas, anymore, Toto."
After a couple of days of digestion and a bit of Internet research, the information our neighbor shared about the local wildlife - coral snakes, constrictors, scorpions, and big black ants - probably won't keep me awake at night. Truth be told, lots of folks in the U.S. deal with those nuisances and more! We lived in scorpion country, ourselves, for about twenty years. How we managed to never encounter one in or around our home amazes me, but I won't let that history lull me into a false sense of security.
Just as the week was about to end - on Friday, May 13, I might add - we experienced our first "real" earthquake. It measured a solid 6.0 on the Richter scale and was centered about 13 miles from here. Luckily, it was also about 70 km (about 43 miles) deep! Our new block-construction home rocked and rolled for what felt like about 10-15 seconds, though it might have been less. By the time we made our way outside, the tremblor ended and we hit the Internet in search of details. Amazingly, reports started to trickle out within fifteen minutes, although it took until this morning for the facts to stop shifting.
And then finally, on the day when we were set to teach our Costa Rican friends how to make America's favorite - pecan pie - the water went out. Completely out.
We soon learned that the entire town of Palmares had been without water since early Friday. We, like many residents here, have a backup tank that keeps the wet stuff flowing during the periodic outages. As luck would have it, the landscaper was installing sod in our yard yesterday and this morning and drained the tank!
So for now, we're pulling the water jugs from the freezer for drinking and washing dishes and hauling the big backup jugs from storage to use for flushing.
We can't wait to see what next week has in store for us!
Pura Vida
One of our local squirley friends trying to outsmart Vic and his old "hang the plantains in a tree for the birds" trick.
