The Ikhanosphere: 1st Quarter, 2009


THE IKHANOSPHERE Q1 09

Mar 25 / Puerto Jimenez

Tonight we pay homage to my colleague Sean McGraw, partner in the Costa Rican franchise of Coldwell Banker. Dialing his phone today when he did not return my email about a deal we have been working on for the past few weeks, his partner answered the phone to announce that they had "lost" Sean last night. Lost control in a curve, thrown from the car. Single vehicle, single occupant, single death. There but for the grace of God . . .

Dad has been in country one week to the day, and the news from the wider world has lately lined OWW's bed with eider down. I am bound to Palmichal on Sunday with four crew chiefs for a relatively major installation: 1.5 km of four inch penstock plus water intake; turbine housing; 420 meters of buried electrical cable; and one 10,000 gallon tank. And today a verbal go ahead came in on the Uvita job that has been swinging in the breeze these past couple weeks. Am expecting a go on a Tierra intake installation for the week following Easter, and there is a well in the offing, another threatened, two hydro inquiries tending toward resource eval contracts, and two solicited solar proposals pending, no shortage of work in Paradise. I have an ample stable of properties for when the buyers peak out from behind the petals behind which they have been for the past fourteen months crouched in doubtful hesitation, and the reservations business has been steady..

I have my car headed up to RITEVE tomorrow for following a day of fixing up things and tricking it out for its inspection. I have a frame under construction for the back to haul pipe that fits in the bed overhanging the cab with clearance for the toolbox, and I have Lalo headed out tomorrow to Playa Lapa to get the grounds all in shape and so depart Sunday and rest assured that the owners will arrive to groomed grounds and an immaculate house, perhaps with vases of flowers even. Katiana is in top gear, the excitement in the recent contract awards appearing infectious to her. I had her out on our still classified real estate scouring when the news of Sean's death came in. She has come light years in the reservations business and has CafeNet running very well, all orderly, neat and virus free. But it will be fun to watch her hit a big moment, like spearheading or supporting a property sale or putting together a solar install or something bigger than a week long vacation rental, which is of course nothing at which to sneer.

Despite the big warnings and the global imponderables, it has the feeling that the markets have found their base and that the fear and loathing has been hyped. The fundamentals would to this layman seem to have more draconian portents than the relatively minor suffering evinced by the erasure of 401Ks, the loss of homes by a whole class of pseudo-home-owners living on the time borrowed by the greed of derivative peddlers. And the unemployment index translates to thousands of households casting newly around for how to make ends meet, and that is of course a tough nut to crack. And there is the inescapable and curious consequence that every solitary object on the planet has lost a tangible portion of its value, across the board. In a bizarre way it is like a recalibration with reality, like we were all misled into thinking that everything was one way, when in reality it was another way, equal to one way times about 75% on average, more for strategic resources, less for intangibles, considerably less for the building blocks and constituent parts of the derivatives wonderland in which the hedge fund hogs and the re-insurer fuhrers introduced new integral calculus equations that serious people did not take the time to solve.

I am reminded of popular sayings in American culture and physics maxims: 1) A fool and his money are soon parted; and 2) A gas expands to fill the available volume. In a number of ways these two clichés comment amply on the whole intersection of the sub-prime mortgage derivative gambit with the larger crap shoot of credit default swaps in which the AIG dice were loaded from the get with eventual runs of snake eyes.

In paradise, or at least in the Crow's Nest, the whole paradigm of global loss and economic recession has been damped by changes in market share and apparently greater efficiencies. Of course, my inveterate optimism, however cynically espoused, is almost assuredly unrealistic. Surely we are headed for something worse than this. Time will tell, but it is certainly amusing to shade my eyes and caress the future with the tactile willfulness of a blind man led to battle across the wind-swept summits of Mozart.

Mar 17 / Palmichal de Puriscal

Mar 16 / San Jose, Dunn Inn

I imagine Dan pulling it over somewhere in southern Idaho. The news of his pulling the plug on the fish observer work on the eve of flying out from Anchorage to Dutch Harbor was stunning. With the snap of fingers a whole lifestyle is gone, replaced by something unknown, as yet un-invoked. Yes, I guess I can relate. Sometimes I think of doing something like that myself, again. After a couple times around the track it gets easier, like riding a bicycle, something that you can't forget how to do. My plan is to get up early and out to Puriscal, be out there no later than 7:30, which presumes a departure from here of around 6:00 a.m. That unsettling calculation sets off my early-morning neurosis; here at 9:50 I have about one more hour of time that will not count against me in the morning, though I would probably be best off if I went to bed right now. The disagreeableness of having an agenda, including a wake-up call, notwithstanding, today's advances were in line with ambitions: I got the latest replacement hoses bought and off on the transporte to Nicoya, this after three earlier hoses either did not fit or would not bend or could not be fastened, all bought sight unseen and shipped. Today I felt the hose, touched it. We'll see if that makes a difference. And I had an eye exam, bought new glasses, and had my present ones tuned up, sourced and purchased the rubber cement type spray can glue to do the map montage on formica for the Osa Pen map. I even made it to the pawn shops and priced car stereos and circular saws and in the end decided to wait. Dad reported buying the laptop, rechargeable field radios (four) with news that the AC/DC multimeter arrives from a branch location and will be soon in my hands.

Testing reaches its final stages at Laguna Vista, and I am increasingly hopeful that findings are tending toward a hopeful conclusion that there is not now and never has been any systemic dysfunction or sub-specified performance and that issues raised appear to be a result of mis-use and inappropriate load. It is preliminary to state that, but findings are tending toward that conclusion, which would be the most personally favorable of all possible outcomes.

Tomorrow I spend the night in Santa Ana at my client's apartment, and on Wednesday I find a new hotel and pick up Dad, then back on Thursday to the Cradle.

Mar 11 / Pto Jimenez

When the main quake struck, my world was already off its axis, the orbital of my atomic essence in asynchronous conflict with its center of gravity and magnetic polarity. I was like a dis-unified field theory, like a fuchsia and chartreuse striped blouse to set off a flaming orange skirt with lavender pumps and a hot pink handbag, like a bouffant with colored spikes, or dreadlocks to highlight peyos on a Hasidic Rastafarian, like sandals and a double-breasted silk suit, a turban at a Baptist revival, or a duet by Iggy Pop and Liberace. It registered 6.2 on the Richter mortis scale, and the aftershocks have continued ever since, with one of them seeming to exceed the main event in intensity. I had to hold onto my laptop and wonder at my priorities as my guests rushed out of my office to head down the stairs and into the streets where the dogs were baying, the tourists turning around in odd circles, and where the CafeNet and CoopeAlianza hotties festooned opposite sides of the same street like competing sets of Victoria's Secret models in business attire sizing up a dusty catwalk for the home town advantage, all flushed and chatty in the shaking of their respective and collective worlds.

With Laguna Vista Villas under testing by the owner and a crew deployed to Life's a Wave for the final scheduled work elements, I was like a mother hen here in the torrid center of town hovering over my nearly ready eggs. But then James came by unhappy with our inability to respond more quickly to their nonworking radio that we installed, and my AC downstairs began to fritz out, and my survivalist client called to announce that the Uvita redoubt may not be secure enough when social order collapses and is deferring the electrification job to an undefined future, and so my magnetic poles were all twitching with irrepressibly repulsive energy, and that was when the main temblor struck. Ten hours later, the aftershocks persist, and of all things as if to add a new color to the strange pallet, it has begun to rain. It is the third time in one week that it has rained in the driest month of the year. The rain falls and the steam rises. For perhaps two or three minutes the heavens pelt the still-shimmering zinc roofs to send a blanket of steam to open pores sealed tightly against the infringement of the dust's ubiquity and roll gently across this one-story two-horse town. Vice still trolls the streets of this tropical backwater, and despair evinced in a spate of recent suicides glides over the rooftops of the urba like an unfed vulture, and the sun castigates us all, indifferent to any class separators, oblivious to the number of trailing zeros on bank account bottom lines, flagellating us equally with cackling lashes through a cerulean firmament punctuated by the squawks of macaws through the day and the tintinnabulous chimes of parrots during the twilight air bracketing our heliotropic preoccupation with the day's belabored progression.

As aftershocks continue to roll through the region nearing ten in the evening, my aura remains segmented if not divided, promising a fecund dreamscape to look forward to tonight. I drifted through the grocery store just before it closed, decided upon a basil dish to go with leftover fusilli pasta. At first it was just going to be onion and garlic, and then I broke down and bought half a pound of hamburger. But then, no sooner did I return home and begin to mull the cutting board than the seafood truck rolled up, and I ponied up for a kilo of jumbo shrimp and a two-kilo package of tuna, all fresh. I cut the tuna into four packages and sealed them for the freezer and cleaned and de-veined the shrimp and did the same meal, replacing the ground beef with shrimp and adding a quarter stick of butter, and now I have a luncheon-sized leftover in the fridge after two helpings tonight and the better part of a kilo of freshly readied shrimp in the fridge. I plan to surprise the girls and Lalo tomorrow with lunch. I figure I should do something nice for the new girl, particularly since I expect to let her go in the next day or so. She's okay and with no vices or shortcomings other than being a bit normal and uninspired, a little too provincial for CafeNet El Sol, despite any qualifying physical characteristics of which she may be in possession. Let's face it. Chicks can't help it if they're hot any more than they can do anything about if they're not.

I don't think it is cynicism. I deny any penchant for misanthropy. I believe that humankind has a nature that is basically good, not evil, not indifferent. And I am an inveterate and proven and perhaps over-the-top optimist. Yet, I find myself in possession of thoughts that seem to me contrary to some of these purported values or areas of self-identification, and so I find myself in a bit of philosophical turmoil today, recently, tomorrow, always: one or the other or maybe all of them. Among other potential contradictions, I am finding myself singularly unsympathetic to Bernard Madoff's fraud victims. Certainly I am no apologist for the man himself, the apparent brilliance of his larceny notwithstanding. His wealthy victims patronized his services to make their money grow as much as possible, knowing full well that something was too good to be true and unwilling to give that a hard look. It would seem defensible to suggest that greed at the root of the dissipation of $65 billion was not restricted to the con man himself, nor his innocent unquestioning family, collaborators, or pliant and loyal company staff. His con played to his victim's greed and let them suck their own selves into his opaque little web. I am reminded of the Villalobos Brothers ponzi scheme here in Costa Rica. I had friends at the time with money with the brothers. They all swore by them, and the clients became the advertising. It was like a poorly held secret carried on the foreheads of clue-less ex-pats with more brains than sense that found a way to live on relatively modest capital amounts to partially finance their retirement to Costa Rica. Consistent above-market returns seem to sell themselves. And I am not seeing any difference between the Brothers' and Madoff's investors, except that the latter were as a group much wealthier, with vastly larger sums invested. If something sounds too good to be true, it almost always is, no matter, apparently, how much money you have.

Likewise I am of the unpopular opinion that my nation is getting a strong dose of its just desserts in this economic downturn. We have cruised through a decade and a half of an economy on fire with clear excess squirting from all the corners of a poorly engineered monster barreling down an unfinished thoroughfare, punctuated by fiscal irresponsibility along the way, social engineering, transfer of wealth, and the casual saddling of a gargantuan cyclopean debt on unborn Americans and other still in swaddling. Well, now we have crossed the Bridge to Nowhere, and it's time to hit the ground and scrabble it out and either move it or milk it. Adversity is the crucible in which the American spirit was forged, and it is that crucible in which the American transcendence will either conduce to a new American century or dissipate into the cracking and decaying fissures of an empire divided, an idea sublimated, hope thrown again onto the callous roulette wheel of the planetary march into the future.

And here in Paradise? Defiance rises gently through the air like tendrils of smoke from a mountain shack. And hope blooms like mushrooms in a cow pasture after the first rains. And manna from heaven still rains down from many little passing clouds to bless the land and take away for a moment the searing oppression of the sun. They're just a bit further apart, with more aprons outspread beneath them than before. But it is still there here and will always be, just like everywhere else. Only perhaps even more so.

Mar 9 / Pto Jimenez

Blondie blares in her eighties manner inside the Crow's Nest, loud enough that I would never make out a rapping, a tapping, a knocking or a rocking upon my front door. Even with an apparently deficient sound card and the ability to plug in only three of the six speakers in my new set it is still a bit reminiscent of the acoustics of the Kennedy Center, perhaps La Strada. The Life's a Wave water tank, all ten thousand liters of it, suffered a catastrophic fissure last night yet was miraculously replaced by Materiales de la Costa, the hegemonious hardware outlet of the region today, and Osa Water Wroks is to the rescue to install it tomorrow and will stop in at the Land of Miracles to see about the water intake and the hydro and the motion to the ocean, the tilt of the galaxies, the axis of the eternal. And while the gremlins at Laguna Vista still surf around the circuits at night drunk on Amaretto liqueur and grappa to be-devil a widening circle of affected souls, I wonder if it is hope in the soul or soap in the hole that is moving the rhythms of the oceans and rhymes of the universe and and we shall all, like always, soon see. In the Crow's Nest I am gearing up for the next job, the Uvita electrification, cited to Puriscal at the same time to lay the preparations for the hydro install there. The Ruby Racer is so tight she hums. There were a couple of loose fasteners and the whole back end had become a shimmering rattling shape-shifting mystery trailer behind my right shoulder until finally upping and putting my hands on my hips over it. Painted the cajon a kind of deep periwinkle, very atrocious and fixtures forest green, nice against the red body color. It can hardly anymore be the Ruby Racer so much as the Phoenician Flyer in all its purple majesticity. Well, no small brag for today. Cleaned both AC units with internal staff and a single extra contracted day laborer, Lalo taking charge, saving myself $70 net, counting the labor I pay and staff salary to clean the two I have. I am fallen into a rhythm with my resources and it pleases me.

Mar 7 / Pto Jimenez

March editorial: A great place to weather a great depression

Mar 4 / Puerto Jimenez

The air is light and breezy, the room leans out rather than in. The inbox is empty and the sent items are on steroids. There is a breathing space of this evening. I am not sure exactly why that is, given the number of challenges that confronted me today. In fact, today I:

1) met with the owner of LVV over the performance issues of the bedeviled power system.
2) successfully got the wrong sized hose at great expense to the bootoolies of Guanacaste only to realize it was a simple inside/outside diameter issue.
3) received news that the hot water and new plumbing is all golden at the Matapalo installation and got ready to deploy for a tank repair service call tomorrow.
4) completed and sent off the electrification proposal for the Uvita job.
5) and spoke this morning with one commercial hydro candidate in Guanacaste after getting a call yesterday from the Palmichel owner to proceed next week to define a hydro installation there.

I wonder if the meeting today wasn't a kind of catharsis. The LVV ghost in the machine is oppressive. All components check out. There are no measurable power flights anywhere. Each panel puts out its rated capacity. The batteries take a charge and by industry standards appear to be perfectly fine. Yet, the power goes out every night, even with minor power usage. I have never had a problem that could not be rooted out by a few quick measurements, but this one is not like that. Two more ideas emerged from today's meeting plus the decision to bring in a diagnostic tool and technician if these last checks don't pan. Yet, this has a physical cause, and we are going to figure it out, and today there is a sense of inevitability in that.

Mar 2 / Puerto Jimenez

Feb 26 / Puerto Jimenez

Blazing a trail
A Final coat of paint

Feb 24 / Nicoya Mountains / Guanacaste

Weird scenes from inside the crow's mind: top row Pelton housing; second row upper watershed water creation demonstration project

Venus beams down through the rarefied Guanacaste air. I sit on the porch beyond cell service, beyond utilities, cozy in my long sleeve shirt under a stiff breeze rebelling against its latitudinal confinement to the doldrums. Lalo kills a scorpion running across the floor. He and Wicho chat idly as we all fondle our cans of liquid bread, our muscles twitching from the sudden cessation of the day's labors. We have come from the mountain, carried our dirty dishes to the river, bathed there and prepared our mess kit for tonight's duty, and returned, all within the final bits of the twilight's last gleaming. It is our sixth day of labor here in the mountains, and tomorrow we complete our two job tasks. We have cooked cheerfully every night and eaten well, but tonight I am unusually tired and not at all hungry, and I am like as not to unroll my bedding and cavort with Morpheus's attendant sirens rather than mull my rice and beans and beef steak. Sometimes there is really nothing left to do but to drink one's dinner.

We have at least tripled the Madhuvan water supply in our week of spring development. Three times more water than before was the stated goal, so we have exceeded that and fulfilled our end of the deal. Still, what is there is less than a half gallon a minute, so it is touch and go for water supply. And there is no guarantee but that the extending summer will see ground water levels drop and leave these mountain sources high and dry. Since we have to disconnect during the day while we work, the facility out of water every day, but it begins to run again shortly after we get back, and it is a nice feeling to have carved water out of the dried and dusty land and delivered it to those that recognize what it is and are thankful to have it. There are springs with lots of water on this finca, and there is one river and two streams. However, all those sources are below the housing and central facilities. So, to use that water requires pumping. And since there is no grid power, that would represent a power draw on the hydro system. And the summer is when the lowest river flows carve into the power supply as well. So the idea behind our being here is to carve as much water as possible from up high on the mountain.

And below we are all finished with the pelton housing and tomorrow switch over and install the turbine in its new home. It will be a happy moment when we can call it a day and pack our gear into the back of the Ruby Racer and trundle on back down to home turf on the other, wetter, side of this country. On our January intake installation here we departed at 5:30 in the afternoon, and I did not reach the Crow's Nest till three in the morning. I am not up for a repeat of that, so if it is late afternoon before we button it all up, we will spend tomorrow night here glowing at the completion of our commitments and drive back Thursday.

My next scheduled obligation is Friday, so I have the luxury of driving back Thursday. Still, it would be nice to have a full day of down time in Jim Town before the next thing. Doesn't look like that's in the cards, and while the sun is shining, the Khan Man must make hay.

Feb 22 / Nicoya Mountains / Guanacaste

Feb 16 / Puerto Jimenez

VIDEO: Eight Howlers Howling
VIDEO: Another Osa Water Works success story

Feb 15 / Puerto Jimenez

The glaring brilliance of the sun is like the beacon of a civilization in full ascent, like morning in America, the Elizabethan dawn of a fleeting destiny to be fulminated under her descendent, Victoria, or the coppery smell of native blood dripping from swords along the Spanish main, like a small step for man, like the planet surrendering unto the sun in its co-dependent struggle between the searing heat of the deserts and the icy breath of highest latitudes, one pole of a bipolar universe, the bright side of cosmic schizophrenia. Here in the Crow's Nest, in the heralded Cradle of Western Civilization, beyond composing sophistic metaphors and clashing similes, your humble correspondent, the Khan Man, finds himself is a state of curious repose. Well fed, well paid, undersexed but adequately tempted, I am seated in my new executive office chair in this incredible space overlooking town, overseeing work in progress by the industrious and busy little CafeNet bees in their short little mini-skirts and freshly bathed smells within the ordered little hive known far and wide as CafeNet El Sol and newly known to a growing number of satisfied customers as Osa Corcovado Tour and Travel. As the second shift kicks off, I am on the verge of going through the papers that have accumulated under the last few times the girls have cleaned my office to dispense with the refuse and file away the relevant, as I print menus for Juanita's and pace myself for a thrust later on tonight in web site expansion on the reservations site, having published today the Spanish translation of Corcovado Guide. The latter remains a work in progress, as my technical girl (a title of my own invention) has been struggling with the translation and does not have all the hyperlinking and structure and a few other of the details figured out. But she is pretty smart and a quick study.

Yes, for those of you sharp-eyed, quick studies, I did say Juanita's. I have been asked to resume the daily reports and implementation of Juanita's Information Management System (JIMS), which was discontinued in November 2007 when Cuco leased the business. He has been forced by inventory flight and lack of monetary control and systems that can't catch it all to go back to the drawing board. We are walking him through the steps, starting with the printing and publication of new menus, to be followed with bar and restaurant order tickets, to be followed with a full system roll-out with daily input of everything just like before. I am very pleased at the development, as it makes it less likely that his administration will fail and force me to resume operations.

No time for missing beats or misfiring cylinders this week. We had leaks in the new all metal OWW filtration system prototype yesterday and were unable to complete that installation at the Urbanys. Tomorrow we install their solar hot water system and complete the filtration installation, install one final light, and that will mark the absolute end of our job commitments on that project. It has been a dream job, everything has worked perfectly, and the clients have been pleased and everybody has been happy and gotten paid. On Tuesday, we pack it all up for a one week return to the Krishna Monastery in Samara, this time for two job tasks to be led by two different foremen that I am taking and laborers and materials supplied by Swami: 1) a spring development in a highland canyon for potable water supply to the facility to be overseen by Lalo; and 2) a pelton-housing construction to replace their existing bush-league rube-goldberg version, to be spearheaded by Wicho. The two tasks are separated by around 600 feet of vertical relief, perhaps two miles in distance, and I get to shuffle from each site to the other to wave my arms, carry food and coffee and materials, and into town for materials and coordination with metal shop fabricators that I will have making the nozzles, base for the pelton, and the door to the housing, plus or minus any intake structure required in the upper watershed. Plus I need to come up with either a gas pump or a generator and an electrical pump to run pump tests on two existing springs lower in the section that may be needed should the upper watershed dry up in the driest of months or years.

We are taking a cook stove and prepared to be gone a full week. I am looking forward to escaping the torpid oppression of this weighty atmosphere in exchange for the light airiness of the dry Guanacaste mountains and the brisk chill of the evening breezes invading my bed clothes like a murmuring succubus. The Ruby Racer is hitting on all four with everything in place and all legal eagle, I have a cash deposit in hand, we have a work plan, and our schedules are cleared. It's all but a done deed.

Feb 08 / Puerto Jimenez

In Paradise on a Sunday evening, just as the sun falls and the tropical night speeds across the sky in its hurry to strip the raiment from the milky way's naked transcendence, I wonder if another kind of night is descending across the land. I pondered this a bit this afternoon in the form of this month's political editorial: That Great sucking sound. I keep looking for the other shoe to fall, for the tourism economy to implode and for my Osa Water Works business to crater as expatriate home owners and part-time Osa residents assess their losses and retrench their ambitions beyond the absolutely necessary. All indications are that this is inevitable. The wise ones are saying it is already happening. It is only momos like me that continue to imagine ourselves unimpacted.

Here in the Crow's Nest, it is a different kind of anxiety that has me grappling with the balancing forces that govern all hungry and eager endeavors, that being the unintended consequences of deviations from the ideal in materials and workmanship. I have never had a case yet in which my installation guarantee was bullied through the force of unintended consequence into a post-installation review, certainly have never contemplated a case in which there is a suggestion and possibility that I may have to replace components that have not performed up to specification and enter into the awkward and challenging battle of seeking an accommodation with suppliers and distributors residing in countries separated from my own by large distances and substantial bodies of water. Could I actually be facing a project resolution in which not only do I not earn "enough" but actually sustain net losses? Perish the thought! The jury is still out, but I think I will finally know what the stakes are upon the return of my partner any moment from the other side of the peninsula where he has been on a strange combination of trouble-shooting a solar installation (Friday and Saturday morning) and a family country outing (Sat afternoon and all of today).

Last night I sautéed a pound of medium shrimp in butter, olive oil, and garlic, accompanied with green beans sautéed with garlic and diced onions. The garlic and onions in the latter cooked slowly into a mushy brown paste of sweet culinary concupiscent zest. I think that with an equal part of carrots, a gentle reduction of these three ingredients, caramelized slowly in garlic oil, might then be pureed with a bit of salt and the odd additional spice plus or minus Worcestershire or fish sauce for a topping or dip capable of delighting the palate and complementing a whole host of food types, from succulent veggies rich in beta-carotene to proteinaceous entrees hungry for a bit of unconventional flavor-enhancing sidekicks. Tonight I was thinking about pizza, but it is now a bit too late to get the dough going and give it the time to rise.

I secured a return to the "Sweet Forest" of the hills of Nicoya on a tidy package for a potable water exploration and development, a return to the proverbial desert to coax reticent water from a parched and sun-seared landscape to enable my clients, a monastery of Krishna monks, to sustain their gardening and livestock management needs as well as the obligations of their daily human engine and spiritually ablutionary demands. There was a sense of deep satisfaction to arrive and install their hydro intake and to watch a circumspect hopefulness transform under our work and delivery into a proven and even boisterous establishment of our bona fides. Now the other side of the coin is a return for more piecemeal work, not a big contract, but one with no risks and no sideline complications of equipment procurement, lead times, complicated deployments. It will be just me and Lalo for a week of us against the earth, they put a crew for us to run and they pay that and all our food and give us a place to sleep with Internet. And we deliver water, the inevitable deal, any completed contract a steal at ten times the price given the limited alternatives.

And my Uvita client has scaled back his ambitions under the weight of the economy. Yet, he has asked for a final firm offer on the extension of grid power to the two homes, which is still a pretty major job. And that leaves Brad's request that we go out and figure out a formal water intake for him and the new owners of what was Tierra de Milagros, now divided among private ownership, the business an evanescent and instantaneous dissolution. It no longer is in any context other than the historical.

Meanwhile, the reservations business is off the charts for me, so whatever decline the economy has created in the market, my efforts in expanding web presence and market share has offset, apprently handsomely. Now with CafeNet's internal re-organization, I have Gabriela handling all correspondence, mostly with cut and paste English of my composition. But I see her learning as well, and the closure rate has not declined since she assumed the job. This is unexpected, and despite my exploration of all the possible explanatory perambulations, I remain pleasantly surprised and replete with the willing suspension of disbelief necessary to make all fictions credible. It has released me from a self-imposed yoke as the answerer of emails, and the flurry of correspondence has surpassed that point in which you can't help but remember the individual names and requests. I am up to around twenty discreet inquiries per day.

Let us now welcome the new week with all the felicity and enthusiasm with which all weeks should always be welcomed onto the protean scene of human industry and commercial passion.

Feb 02 / Puerto Jimenez

Bows and flow of angel hair, photos taken 27 and 28 Jan on way to and back from San Jose

Feb 01 / Puerto Jimenez

The world is able to breathe easily now that the Steelers have defeated the Cardinals in Super Bowl XXIII. In Puravidaville, your old buddy edges nearer trouble-shooting the Laguna Vista solar debacle, the ghost in the machine seemingly under retreat though clouds in early afternoon pushed us away from being able to confirm victory, forcing me to return all the way to Carate tomorrow for nothing more than a corroborating glance at a charge controller. Not sure how to feel about that job element but think that if the glance registers what I am expecting and hoping it to, the cost of the trip back out will be as nothing. With the Life's a Wave refrigerator and hot water heater ready for pickup and the Tres Palmas job in swing, tomorrow is a busy day, then showing Mogos again on Tuesday, and may take off Tuesday afternoon for Panama, maybe wait until Wednesday.

Jan 31 / Puerto Jimenez

January takes a bow, and the Crow's Nest is flavored with curry. A ten minute shower fell moments ago, and the three panamanian chilies made it just right for me but probably too spicy for Aracelly. I took her a piece of homemade pizza a couple evenings past, fresh out of the oven, black olives, onions, chinese sausage, feta cheese, all handmade, and she would not believe that I made it. She says she likes it; I hope she is not just being polite. It is a bit hot.

January's vocabulary is taken from a dictionary of the trades, its grammar the syncopation between the crews and bosses and the linkage between the the electrician and the plumber, between the welder and the mason, its punctuation marks in the red and black of accounts payable and receivable, the audience a mixed medium of clients, suppliers, partners, employees, associates, contractors, wannabes and has-beens, essentially the entire constellation of affected others. The pace of the dance has been invigorating and nourishing. As nice as it is to awaken without a sense of urgency to assume a gentle helm over steaming coffee a few feet from the bed and not be under any deadline or gun, it is nice in another not very comparable way to awaken with a head instantly woven with a cat's cradle of firing neurons and a constellation of links that dispel stillness and impel action.

And the world around in this first month of the year occupies a sidereal constancy that transcends the constellations of deception, the galaxies of illusion, the Rovian ethical sleight of hand that not so much darkened American existence with a perverse morality as much as left it in a state of perpetual flight, like that old Jimmy Cliff song, unable to run away from itself. I am reminded now that the acceleration due to gravity once again is 32.2 feet per second per second of that famous poster and tee shirt cover featuring an image of the milky way with a big arrow pointing to a tiny dot in the middle, saying "You are here." And here I am, sure enough, after all, in a universe that is both new and real at the same time, where the words that issue from the mouths of leadership bare some semblance of commonality with my notion of the way things actually are. It is time in which corruption is rewarded with disgrace, greed is met with porridge, and a bizarre moment in in which political principles and first principles actually share boundary conditions. The poor Republicans are united in their opposition to the tidal wave of dispersal washing over a bankrupt movement, its pillars winnowed and eroded by the corruption of its storied principles, its cement dissolved under the humid warmth of a changing climate, its social compact rendered ridiculous as much by hypocrisies among its vanguard as by a new paradigm ushered in by an improbable mulato half breed, the newly most powerful man in the world. I think that the corruptible Democrats are on no great rise either. I am living through the seminal phase of an American renaissance, and it's about damned time.

As goes January, so sayeth the economic soothsayers, so goes the year. As my old buddy, the ex-President used to say: "Bring it on."

Jan 27 / Puerto Jimenez

Rabbit finally does rest.

Jan 24 / Puerto Jimenez

Jan 23 / Belén de Nicoya, Guanacaste, Costa Rica

Jan 22 / Belén de Nicoya, Guanacaste, Costa Rica

Samara Highlands pan: video

Jan 21 / Belén de Nicoya, Guanacaste, Costa Rica

Infiltration gallery video

Samara highlands 360 degree view video

Jan 20 / Belén de Nicoya, Guanacaste, Costa Rica

Jan 18 / Puerto Jimenez

After washing the dishes and cleaning off my desk I managed an overhaul and upgrade of www.corcovadoguide.com, opening up a current news section as well as adding tide tables and refining the details page on the Sirena San Pedrillo trail. The site is reasonably comprehensive at this point. I want to add a documentation of the trail from San Pedrillo to Drake Bay next. And perhaps on the same trip up I may also do the Los Planes - San Pedrillo trail. Both are outside of the park but might as well be park trails. Also I need to refine options on the guided expeditions to accommodate the low rent crowd and further capture market share. I am definitely onto something with this site and will be well advised to sustain the pressure and to take this to the next logical step, the printed Corcovado Guide originally planned.

Accounting tonight will bring me up on office work to leave tomorrow's business to the province of the telephone and errands as Lalo and Wicho fabricate the filter for the Samarra job. Today's peacefulness in a cool, clean aerie has been peaceful and restorative. Listening to Sky TV music and following along the events leading up to Tuesday's inauguration has led me repeatedly look up from my computer screen and pinch myself. A microwave to warm beef stroganoff leftovers withdrawn from an icy cold refrigerator housing parmesan and feta cheeses among a range of conventional foods, a blender with margarita makings and half a pineapple for smoothies, with yogurt and ice, all populate corners of a well-ordered space that brings peace to the clutter of my impulses. The brand new tires on the Ruby Racer have tread so deep it is like a vulcan canyonland begging its meeting in that space of reality in intersection with tarmac and unimproved two-tracks. A string of payments coming in in an uncharacteristically timely fashion stands the moment in ironic contrast to the early years and lean times and even good times in cash-flow binds. Something happened on the way to 2009 and the curious result is a contentment that is unfair to describe. I don't mean to boast. But it is good to be alive and to be me in Puerto Jimenez, the Cradle of Western Civilization.

I should be so fortunate.

Jan 17 / Puerto Jimenez

Today I had six online inquiries about reservations or general park information from www.corcovadoguide.com. Of those three converted so far into reservations procurement with one additional that will be either a fully guided tour or at a minimum reservations. So that was a minimum of $120. Downstairs, Aracelly managed three reservations requests from walk-ins (we have a captive market on the weekends when the bank is closed) for $60 in earnings. That's $180 today, one day, in park business.

Last night's carpaccio was other-worldly delicious, but this morning it expanded the universe of my innards and led to a general system dysfunction, the details of which are best left to the reader's unenthusiastic imagination. It took me most of the day to get fully right again. I think my pieces of meat were too thick. They need to cook a bit in the lemon, I guess. Tonight it was beef stroganoff with half of the remainder of the tenderloin, and the leftovers look good to last at least three meals, well into Monday.

Still on schedule for a Tuesday departure to Guanacaste. Pana procured tires for me today along with his, and now they are nice and mounted. Following the front end overhaul of the other day, the Ruby Racer is smiling through sharpened teeth. Lalo knocked out round one of Tres Palmas, coaxing 0.6 gallons per minute from the drip gallery, 1.58 gpm total counting the spring input. Laguna Vista reported malfunction this morning, and Pana is set for a trip on Monday and will change out the final door fittings at Playa Lapa on the same trip. Lalo and Wicho will spend the day in the shop fabbing the infiltration gallery filter and preparing for our trip on Tuesday. I picked up Kerig's batteries, and Pana installed this afternoon and collected the payment. Cuco brought by the full month's rent. I have marine band cable to buy on Monday to complete the two marine band tower installations in Matapalo. My latest shipment is on the high seas and is likely to dock in Limon on Tuesday or so, and the Urbany's satellite installation is on Wednesday, Playa Lapa's realignment. With the Uvita project now back in forward motion, I must coordinate a visit with the ownership to explain to a skeptical but eager owner again what he gets for his one hundred twenty five thousand dollars. Then there is the whole series of permitting meetings needed for Nosara, Uvita, and also the Amelia Gardens project.

It is clear that the litany of tasks is self-perpetuating. And these little odd jobs are not the way in which I need to be spending my time. But I guess you cannot land the big ones without taking the requisite number of small ones.

Jan 16 / Puerto JImenez

1900

One margarita to the wind, I have dough rising and all the makings of a nice tenderloin carpaccio that will get underway in a couple hours. Today I visited FOUR clients / projects. Gorgeous George will be so happy; he is now back in the water from the world famous OWW drip gallery, and Sheila and James and the Urbanys each have new marine band radio base stations courtesy of YHC (Your Humble Correspondent), and the bus company did not send Dan's batteries today, so I had to deliver the bad news that his power system will not be back until tomorrow.

Here is a video of the drip gallery at Tres Palmas

0700

The departure of the boys this time yesterday morning was from their imagined perspective a gentle lift into a boundless blue sky, a headlong fling into the full-frontal launching pad of life. For me it was a bit like a chunk of my chest being torn out and tossed into a whirling propeller. The Crow's Nest yawned with a tingling emptiness, the dust motes hanging lazily in the air despite the swelling convection of the air outside, and I threw myself into the tawdry affairs of my little business life. I dropped my truck off to have the front end worked on, dispelled the sadness for as long as I was able through work, then washed the dishes, made iced tea, and pushed forward with crafting work plans. But by late afternoon, after picking up my truck with its repaired four wheel drive and litany of minor fixes to the undercarriage and front end, it was all over me, clinging to me like pollen in a flowering field of hemp, and I gave into the melancholy, channeling what I imagine to have been their excitement at the brave new return to the world of ice and academics and friends and all that stuff.

I hired Lalo at just the right time last November. I have him moving from job to job now and am able to take on minor new responsibilities that I would be hard pressed to do without him. I can just see myself now empty-handed beneath the rising clamor of eager clients, like dancing on the snouts of snapping crocodiles, hustling up overpaid and under-skilled contractors and forever in a dance of training and beady-eyed negotiations, slogging through the days within a pallor of suspicion and internal discord. Instead it is smooth-sailing and a steady hand whenever I need one, a sharp machete, a well-worn shovel, two pipe-wrenches working against each other to seal pipe joints, the convergence of mortar, stone, and steel into a happy singing conquest over entropy, the forging of order and elegance from a morass of chaotic jumble and intrinsic natural adversity.

I have a full field day to make rounds of projects where workers are engaged with projects, happy me, pictures later on this evening. I have the tenderloin. Perhaps tonight I will make more pizza dough and go for a plate of homemade focaccia and try my hand at carpaccio a la jimenena. Lookout cowboys, there is some yum stuff to emerge from the Crow's Nest kitchen for dinner tonight.

For pretty pictures from the park, http://www.corcovadoguide.com/trails/sirena-sanpedrillo-pictures.htm. I am still working up the write-up of the Sirena/San Pedrillo trail, but for now there are at least the pictures.

Jan 15 / Puerto Jimenez

This video is taken from the Matajambre Ridge on the northwest boundary of the Rio Tigre valley: video

Jan 13 / Puerto Jimenez

We dropped onto the Sirena Ranger Station landing strip at 3:30, registered at the ranger's office, and set off to the Sirena River canoe landing, where Greivin caught up with us to execute his proactive and welcome offer to do us the favor of ferrying us across the Sirena. As we waited at river's edge until 4:45 when the canoe paddled back downstream, he raised the idea of Internet for the station, VOIP, and we began our hike at five p.m. on the far side of the Sirena River. We crossed the Corcovado River around 7:00 p.m. and crossed the Llorona River at 9:30 p.m. and pitched our tent. Tuna never tasted so good. We were off the next morning at 7:30 and reached San Pedrillo at 10:30, a total of 25 km of mostly beach hike in seven hours forty five minutes walking time without coming across a single human being since landing on the northeast bank of the Sirena River. Videos include the morning at Llorona Beach and then mid-morning coming down out of the forest onto the San Pedrillo beach. We had a heavy meal of apples, oranges, sausage, cheese, and cookies at San Pedrillo and voted to wait on a boat into Drake rather than to schlep the remaining 15 kilometers through incomparable coastline, leaving me one more trip to complete the documentation for www.corcovadoguide.com, poor me. However, the main mission was accomplished, a few of the pictures enclosed for good measure.

Today was like a full-metal jacket fox-trot with clients old and new, right and left, landing two small but sure jobs, a call of continuance on a big job and a start date on another small one. The smell of the new year is like a ripe peach, its juice nearly as sticky. I will cut this short as the next round of pizza dough has now risen, and the blender is calling me toward the elaboration of the second of tonight's rounds of margaritas. I am not sure if I am a source of corruption or inspiration. Sometimes, perhaps, in arguably special circumstances, the two may occasionally be the same, or at a minimum dance with one another cheek to cheek to the tune of old ballroom standards.

Jan 11 / Crow's Nest, Puerto Jimenez

The walls press inward beneath the blaring torpor of the fierce sun. The balm of this morning burned off under the heliotropic assault, and by 09:15 it is morning of radiant light. I am reminded of that sinking sick feeling deep inside me that I had on the verge of my departure on the Great Central American Road Trip, like I am on the verge of a bit of willing risk taking. At four p.m. Orpheus, Aladdin, and I fly into Sirena on a charter plane. We huddle and muddle and work our way to the Sirena River. At 8:20 is low tide. We expect to cross it about 45 minutes after dark, around six fifteen, once the receding tide makes it low enough that bull sharks and crocodiles have less chance of dining on frickasee-ed white boys. Then we hike on through the night toward San Pedrillo. I have it on good authority that we can make it past the Corcovado and reach the Llorona River in five hours. That means that if we time it right, we can hit the last big river only three hours following low tide and may hopefully find it only waist deep or so. Our idea is to camp on the far side of the Llorona and then to hike the remaining four or five hours into San Pedrillo tomorrow morning, spend all day at the ranger station, the night, dine on tinned tuna and whatever fish we may be able to catch (ho ho ho) spend the night again, and then hike in on Tuesday into Drake and take the evening shuttle back to the Cradle of Western Civilization. This will mark the final trails that I have not documented for www.corcovadoguide.com, and I am most certainly taking my GPS and camera to get this last bit of field research out of the way to bulk up the content on the web site. After this, perhaps, I can compile the print version. If the reptiles get me, then this will be my last entry. I will try to play it smart, but I feel like a babe trundling into a bristling wood, a sheep grazing upon tender shoots of grass at the lip of the lion's den. I am launching, once again, upon something I know nothing about with only my will and wits that shelter me from mis-steps and misadventures. We shall see what we shall see.

Jan 9 / Crow's Nest, Puerto Jimenez

As the dough rises beneath its eager tumescence, as the colada permeates the blood vessels of my stomach to rise as a major seventh chord throughout my body to make my thoughts shimmer like light dancing on hot asphalt, as clients examine their charge controllers and partners heft happy children on their knees and wait for the pork loin strips to darken in their happy sizzle on makeshift grills, as the mannequins of main street let their hair down following the daily drill tempting bored passers-by with sultry fashions, here in the Crow's Nest there is nothing left to do but to wax within a khanosphere painted rising crimson.

Yesterday, Costa Rica shuddered at something caught in its craw and released a 6.2 Richter re-adjustment to its new distribution of internal forces. Plates broke. Bridges fell. Ground ripped. People died. I did not even feel it. How do you make sense of such disproportionality?

Rest in peace, Henry Berg, may you mesh seamlessly with the great cat's cradle in the sky, may you dance beneath heavenly pixie dust, may the great mystery surround you, may peace enfold you into eternity's gentle protean weave.

The Crow's Nest is a new space, and the khanosphere is a multi-apical shape-shifting dodecahedron with all twelve faces peering outward. The production of food is now a standard part of the daily fare. Tomorrow a new fridge, microwave, and flat screen television come from across the water. Already the living room set, cooking and kitchenware, new lighting, hot water, cabinetry, and food have unearthed new high-grade ore from which the base metal of existentium is forged beneath a low-latitude sun blaring like a flaming UFO lording it over town. CafeNet exhales beneath its happy face of color, lime green to the south, yellow to the southwest, peach to the west, the corner office jumping off the pallet like a rainbow made mortar, stone, and steel, space-waves draining downward through the two parabolic dishes into the innards of the fount beneath its abiding aerie, the crow's nest surveilling all, punctuating the ikhanosphere with lighthouse beams over a yawning ocean, smudges of tint on a hungry canvas, dribbles of letters on quicksand paper, a celestine symphony inside the spire of a snail.

It is nearly time to pat the dough down and break it into two and sculpt the pizza. Our toppings for tonight: bacon, pineapple, and pepperoni. For tomorrow's smoothie, we have bananas, watermelon, kiwi fruit, and blackberries.

Jan 3 / Dunn Inn: Katsi, San Jose, Costa Rica

After managing the holiday travels of so many others, I headed off on my own holidays yesterday, having left things in PJ orderly. I heard the sounds early and knew I should have stopped in Palmar. But when there was no noise for a long time I decided to try to make it to Uvita where I know the shop people, have had good experience with a problem I had in 06. I was able to turn into the Ventanas mall and managed to park decently before the right front seized. I managed a ride into Uvita, set up a deal where they would go out and fix it, caught a ride into Perez, and this morning caught a bus into the Hose at 10:30. I guess I melted the whole thing together, as they now have to machine a part, and the car will be ready on Tuesday. The boys fly in on separate flights tomorrow.

On New Year's Day I was able to complete the Bosque Verde write-up, which along with the Posada Verde write up, concludes the contracted assignment for that contract. That brought me up to date and able to resume blog entries and fiction writing absent the guilt of non-fulfillment of an actual paying job as opposed to a dance of pure vanity. I was able to finally corral my thoughts about ringing in the new, and I look forward to seeing years down the line what I think of how I was thinking all those years ago, i.e. today, the first blog entry of the new year.

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