THE IKHANOSPHERE MAY 2009

May 31 2009 / Puerto Jimenez

May 23 2009 / Puerto Jimenez

Mainor's collapse last night was uncanny in its utter miserable completeness. Until last night everything looked good, and I had hopes for some laboral stability. I was called down by Aracelly around nine with the report that he was stumbling drunk and arrived onto a jarring scene, a totally drunk Mainor behind the bar, a crushed pineapple smeared on the bar top, a nervous Graciela flitting here and there chased by Mainor who kept touching her and leaning in to speak in her ear, and a row of patrons lined up behind the bar enjoying the show.

He took offense when I did not want to talk to him any more, and he threw some chairs around and even through a bottle with beer in it as he stormed off. Aracelly hovered outside after her shift ended knowing what was coming and calmly walked in and began to close down the shift as he stormed off as if it was her assignment. The cash drawer was short C5000, not bad given the circumstances. And there were 54 beers missing from the bartender's many drunken invitations to his friends to drink my beer. Tonight Aracelly has the shift and the overall operational management of the joint and a raise of C50,000 a month, and Mainor is out of a job, and I have a help wanted ad up for the next CafeNet night girl.

The transition to this new laptop has been grueling. If I had all the same old programs as before, it would only be the acclimation to Vista, which is hard enough. But transitioning from Frontpage to Dreamweaver and Coreldraw to Indesign has been arduous and frustrating. Things that I did intuitively before now require me to research how to do them, taking me completely out of the flow of what I am doing. It makes it seem like work all over again. On top of that, the latest versions of the Office suite have undergone fundamental changes so that it is like relearning the same software you've always used all over again. Access has been particularly beguiling, with all its tools accessed by new ways. What a bad way to upgrade software. But I can see the light at the end of the tunnel, and this train has left the station and is picking up speed. It will all be smooth again. I will never take a computer migration lightly again.

The I-Pod deployed for Juanita's music is great. It hops around a database of great songs, current and classic, latin, and continuous and low maintenance. For all the unhappy feelings of sitting downstairs for two hours as Mainor culminated in his drunken meltdown, I could not help but notice how cool the music was, as well as the ambiance. Two meals into the Juanita's experience, both the chimichanga and the taco plate were fully up to snuff. It has been a pretty stumble free rollout in one of the slowest months of the year. Tomorrow we have seafood soup special, and it is already announced with a flyer on the door. Monday the bocas menu emerges, and on June 1 we open for breakfast. Juanita's is ramping up to full activity, and we are going to be a force in this town to be contended with.

And in the meantime the Osa Water Works case load blossoms. I am headed to Nicuesa on Monday to look into the disinfection system that has been failing them and then out to Casa La Luz following up on a lead by Lara, bless her heart. We head out as a convoy of three Toyota trucks with fat drivers Monday afternoon, me, Pana, and Copete, with Lalo and Wicho in tow, Manuel Antonio bound. I have had work for the past three years from Verdemar, and the rainfall capture job coming up is one of those cool niche jobs. I am concerned for the Palmichal pipeline, but we head up on Wednesday to conquer that problem and migrate Erick up for the hydro install and power system commissioning. And they want a water intake for their main water supply, likely a spring box, and I can migrate Luis up for that if the timing works out. Or it may turn into a Wicho thing. And then as soon as we're done with Palmichal it will be time to head up to Nicoya for the Madhuvan install, itself all cool and multi-faceted.

It feels like I have reached a point at which the ball that is rolling will continue to roll of its own momentum without my having to do a bunch to keep it in motion. It must have some centrigal attraction going on as items at rest seem drawn into my orbit and enmeshed with my world.

May 22 2009 / Crow's Nest

Kind of weak but you can't hit the ball out of the park everytime you step up to the plate. My editorial for May: Sometimes a great notion.

May 19 2009 / Linthicum, Maryland

The morning dawned blue and cloudless, the horizon stretching like an expanding universe in all directions, nothing but limitless imagination, no Baltimore but blue. Gone was the Grey Met and in was a picture perfect spring day. I left with plenty of time, turned the car in, got to the airport with time to spare, checked in, ate lunch, found my gate, then repaired to a concourse eatery and got online and drank a beer and missed my flight. It cost me $275 to reschedule for tomorrow, plus $95 for this hotel room. I watched my plane pull away from the jetway. I was present ten minutes before scheduled departure.

I goofed. It was my fault. I have been punished by loss of time and loss of money. I am not fully beyond disappointment in myself in allowing this to happen, but I am not interested in any excessive need to browbeat myself. What is done is done and time to make the most out of what remains in the shopping basket and not what has dropped out and spilled across the supermarket floor. Oops. Guess I'm human, fancy that.

At least I have cable tv, Internet, air conditioning, a wake-up call, Steinbeck, and Guinness Stout. Things could be worse. I could be moping around jetways and lying down on the thin carpets of concourses or getting drunk at $8 a beer and dreaming of being in control of the remote.

May 18 2009 / Baltimore, Maryland

May 17 2009 / Baltimore, Maryland

As the day's final light suffused unceremoniously into the murky greasy pallor of the Grey Metropolis's advancing night, I gave Dreamweaver a whirl and appear to have found my post-Frontpage web dev tool. Now I must see if I can similarly displace Coreldraw with Adobe Illustrator or another in the Adobe package. As busy as I am with paying work and that old irrepressible compulsion thing, I cannot affort the precarious position of having to learn new software for fundamental tasks. But I am getting there. The transition to this Dell has by been by far the most challenging computer migration yet.

Today I met Anna Li and Jack, finally. While I was made to know that I would be welcome at the party underway now at Nina's house, it seems appropriate to not be in attendance. It is not really my thing. Better that everybody can just be mellow and not have to feel any tension in the air. It is sad that there has to be any. Despite all intentions in the opposite direction, her proximity makes my blood run cold. To touch her eyes with my own makes the hair on my neck rise. It is like there is a dimension in which only we are aware exists and which surely we both fear and loathe (certainly I do) in which each of us finds ourself thrust in one another's presence. Emotions have grown feral inside the confines of the gentling parlor and the neighborhood is unable to ever encroach the cyclone fences of the soul's circled wagons.

The Grey Metropolis abides its ghosts with a familiar shrug of indifference and boasts its new generation and attendant finery, conflicted philosophies, and jaded self-absorption with the same degree of disaffectation and intellectual ennui. How can it be that this geography has been formulative for me? How can it possibly be !? Yet, how can it be otherwise?

Today it was Orpheus's art show. Below are some pictures I took of some of the exhibits. Tomorrow is his graduation. Tonight I am ensconced in the Comfort Inn, the same place where I overnighted the night before taking Aladdin up to scout out housing at Purchase in 2007, a moment in which life as I knew it teetered precariously on a precipice.

What a difference a couple years makes !

MARYLAND INSTITUTE COLLEGE OF ARTS: Commencement art exhibit

May 16 2009 / Purchase New York

We are moments away from completing Aladdin's semester commitments and hopping into the rental mini-van for the rewarding return south along the Atlantic seaboard to that reservoir of broken dreams, that pustule of human ambition, that wasteland of personal dissipation, ethnic rage, historic schizophrenia between its competing northern and southern poles, that urban apocalypsis of dread and doom, the Grey Metropolis, known by those unfamiliar with my personal mythos as Baltimore, Maryland, birthplace of Edgar Allen Poe and Orpheus Alvah Jerome Rutledge Collar.

I have had a good run here with Dino.  He hooked me up with a dorm room, and the experience is a bit like a post-apocalyptic deja vu of life inside an institutional setting replete with all the remains of recent occupancy, down to unswept floors and piles of abandoned effects outside dorm rooms, evacuated of all remnants or traces of human life.  It has been odd but at least there is an Internet connection, and since I never lived in a dorm in college, it is like a chance for me to revisit a past that existed on a parallel universe through which I never strolled.

Well, that is enough of an entry to catch me up and include at least a Purchase by-line, likely to be the farthest point north that I am likely to achieve unless and until I head up to Washington State to huddle with the Canyon Industries folks and maybe not even then . . . the trip has been a potpourri of flashing memories, a coterie of recollections, a furious storm of neural connections flashing like warning lights on the great divided freeway through the unclothed night of the American soul.  It really does not get any better than this, I fear.

And the food has been pretty swell as well, Spanish food last night, french onion soup, fried calamari, and greek salad the evening before, and a cornucopia of Thai sinus opening delights on the night of my arrival in the Grey Met.

More soon, we trust.

May 9 2009 / Upper Rio Negro Watershed

The rain has held off.  It's 3:00 p.m., and only now is the tater wagon rumbling across the sky.  The vapor is rolling down the canyon, seeping, like a magical mist enveloping centenarian trees, invigorating mosses and leaving secretive ferns in anticipation of what is to follow.  We are testing the pipeline, and there is a lot of sitting down and waiting for the pipeline to fill and then to empty when a union pops out and requires repair.  I rolled in around noon from San Jose, and the boys had been at it all day long from the mid point of the pipeline to the intake.  We hope that this last fix will do it for the upper part of the pipeline,  My dateline is the top of the tool box in the mighty ruby racer, the fleet Phoenician flyer.  I figured might as well download and size pictures and make a journal entry rather than stand around kicking rocks and feeling the chill set in.  The pleasure of last night's hotel room was nearly sinful, and for a moment I nearly felt guilty in the abandonment of my loyal crew up here in the coffee field outback of the mountains of Costa Rica, and then just as I was about to, I decided, nah, why do that.  I got some obscure parts (air release valves, double ought cable, and spiral wound black plastic conduit hosing, and so my justification in the city run was complete.  On a personal level, I walked Kati through a real estate showing in Jim Town and got Madhuvan's pump air freighted in and Laguna Vista's replacement inverter as well.  It looks like we will not be finished here in time for my Tuesday departure, or if so just barely, so that I will not be able to go through testing onsite.  Can't win them all.  I think I have myself positioned to be able to get away for the six days I will be gone without losing any clients, jobs, or other vital components of my curiously spinning universe.

Juanita's revamped	Mainor behind the bar	The new front restaurant area	Graciela	Yeudy in the kitchen

May 3 2009 / Crow's Nest

Later:

A half dozen buffalo wings and a couple hours later, I have all my email messages ported over from Outlook Express on my XP machine to the next incarnation of that program, now named Internet Mail on the Windows Vista platform.  The next step will be to import these messages from MS-Outlook on the same machine and platform, a step that I think is routine.  Also, looks like the hard drive is sufficiently larger on my new machine to make it no loss to port over all my historical data and leave it as an archive on that machine.  The only thing left to do now is to get the software that I absolutely have to have on the new machine, which at this point, other than downloadable programs, include:  Microsoft Frontpage, Adobe Photoshop, and Coreldraw.  Online sources are recommending moving away from Frontpage to Nvu.  I am downloading it now to give it a shot.  I am getting close to being able to shutter this XP machine and send it downstairs the the CafeNet glue factory for old laptop work horses.

Earlier:

The serenity of this Sunday night is preternatural, the town nearing somnolence in its early May stupor.  The rains have come gently, and the days are dawning grey and clammy, the sun beaten into a sullen banishment, the colors damped by the steely light.  Much of the morning I spent sparring mentally with one of my transient tradesmen, a man with a thousand skills and a devastating problem with binge drinking that is propelling him into a state of full and complete irresponsibility.  I was so angry with him for not showing this morning as promised that it was all that I could do to focus on those that did show.  Erick came over to pick up his brother's slack but was resentful for being asked to do so, and the disruption for me is in the suite of OWW jobs in progress off peninsula where Wicho is factored in with a part to play.  The irony is that he is a model worker out of town but devolves into a sloppy, bibulous, sneaky, irresponsible mess when he gets back in town and around his wife.  Lalo made the comment of going over to get him at his house that it was like going to a soccer match featuring Nicaragua versus Panama.  The drinking problem notwithstanding, I am finding the limits of all work all the time on morale, attitudes and quality.  This is the third Sunday in a row that I have expected work out of various sets of crews, myself included, and there is some grumbling and a decay in quality of work and eagerness.  To my possible credit I did not ask Lalo to come in today and even gave him off tomorrow as well.

With Juanita's opening tomorrow, there are still a day's worth of odds and ends to get things ready, and training is going to be on-the-job, and I suspect that our administrative controls and paperwork will undergo a tumultuous roller-coaster to readiness for Tuesday's first daily report in a year and a half.  Perhaps I may still make it out of here on Tuesday afternoon and as far as Manuel Antonio to plan the rain fall capture addition for Verdemar, then on to Palmichal to get Soncho onto the second tank on Thursday with supplies to buy on Wednesday and final outfitting and form removal and miscellaneous finish work on the first tank Wednesday afternoon.

Today's onerous task is that of migrating content from my old laptop to my new one, with email migration from Outlook Express to Outlook being my largest personal challenge.  I am in the middle of it now, and think I am finally on the right approach.  I am not going to put all of my old content on the new computer but rather to keep it backed up on an external hard drive and set my new computer up without all the constraints of my old system of organization.  It is not great fun to negotiate the learning curve of migrating across operating system platforms from XP to Vista and also across software versions.  But I guess that is called progress, and only troglodytes cling to the old familiar and safe things. 

I have a gen-ex mentality struggling inside a boomer's aging body.  And I can't stand cigarettes.  How's that for a change of heart on the way to Damascus?

May 2 2009 / Puerto Jimenez

It has been a long haul, but Juanita's is just about ready.  Tomorrow we do the final cleaning and a few final odds and ends, including the multimedia system.  Today I orchestrated the final painting.  And we hung the sign. 

At 6:49 with a pizza cooling down enough to get into, I am sitting in front of my computer and CNN a bit stunned and dazed.  The materials bill came to around $3000, and there was another $1000 or so in labor and contracts, perhaps $1500.  There was $2000 paid back to Cuco, and I have paid out $1200 in beer and another $800 in kitchen supplies.  I have another $600 commitment in chairs and perhaps $500 in food.  So I am invested right around ten grand into this grand re-opening and will at some point be legitimately accused of being bonzo certified high-security looney tunes.

But the other side of the coin is that the best restaurant in any town is always going to work, no matter what town it is, assuming basic standards of business administration and managerial competence are exercised.  It is exciting to have my hat back in a tough ring, to be playing to a crowd that loves a bloody nose and nobody sympathetic to a gringo.  It's a market that is unsympathetic to personality and intent but vulnerable to excellence and eager for a place that is classy and good but not too expensive with good music and pretty girls, the lights not too bright, the music not too loud . . . I have a good feeling about this latest incarnation.

Pictures tomorrow!

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