THE IKHANOSPHERE                                                                                                                                        JULY 2009

July 31, 2009 / Crow's Nest, Midtown, Port Jimmy, Puravidaville:  18:10

Tonight we toast the memory of Corazon Aquino, bearer of Philippine democracy, thrust into power from the awkward pedestal of her husband's corpse to topple a tyrant and to go on to withstand seven attempts by the military to to oust her.  People power, indeed.

There is a basal note throbbing through my universe, inaudible to the human ear but palpable in certain organs and spheres of my body as echoes of their intersections that set the larger spheres of the universe in motion, a building tintinnabulation that penetrates on all things of substance with the brush-stroke of its terrible change that is terrible only in its anticipation and inevitably pedestrian and unremarkable in its occurrence.  The building change pulses in waves that infect all things, passing right through them, changing the molecular qualities of everything, it touches, proving all over again in that old uncertain Heisenberg way that absolutes are elusive and that beyond a frame of reference the existence of anything at all remains hypothetical and arguably a subversive and dangerous form of intellectual mysticism. 

Every day that the balance sheet emerges black in both the downstairs businesses and the progression reveals the trend is stable should be a day of corvine celebration around here.  But that would be the way perhaps of the blue jay or the sparrow or one of the other ornithological brethren with attributes other than unflinching self-preservation.  When the businesses are off kilter and there are issues with inventories, cash drawers, personnel attitudes, turnover, tardiness, that is the time of vitality, when work can bring it around and names itself out loud.  But when everything is going the way it should and the whole show is on schedule and even-keeled and balanced, it is a dangerous time, one for either expansion with new segments or ventures or the inevitable decay of impotent self-satisfaction.  It is not enough to let it play out without using it as a springboard and it is worse to replace satiety and decay with micro-management of what is already ably managed by others assigned to do that..  In the life cycle of all enterprises every day spent not growing is a day spent contracting.  The good personnel will not stay with a ship that merely floats.  The bad personnel will not remain with any other kind.  And since nobody can do it all by himself, entrepreneurial success hinges not around genius or novelty so much as around forming and protecting and inspiring the human teams that carry the mission forward.  It's obvious intuitively, but with eight years at the helm of a po-dunk restaurant in a backwater paradise, it is not easy to always invoke the optimal frame of mind and do everything in the best possible way. 

While a portion of me preaches the faith, the bigger part of me wants to abandon it to its current existence and in the hands of trusted managers and take exile to places other than Port Jim, both here in this country and abroad.  The Khan Man itcheth.

Goodnight, July, 2009.  Take a bow.

July 30, 2009 / Crow's Nest, Midtown, Port Jimmy, Puravidaville:  22:45

You can hear the wing beats of July's valkyries as they hone in on the approaching death and begin reflexively to flex their hoary claws.  Birth and death, are they two?  Or one apart in store for you?  Seven Pounds made me cry tonight.  He took a face from the ancient gallery, and he walked on down the hall.  How I can sit here above town and insert discs into my lifebox and watch a movie.  It's not much to ask in today's world, but the whole notion of it at my fingertips and the reality that the next step would be my choice of anything ever filmed, all for the price of simply wanting to see it. 

When the band for tomorrow cancelled tomorrow, begging off for heath reasons, I scrambled up and will lay out $180 tomorrow night for a replacement band, a Jimmy standard, the Villalobos.  I am proud of Aracelly and the staff for adapting and rising to the bar.  We had the replacement band lined out in less than an hour of the cancellation of the other and in the next three hours all the publicity pasted around the town had been changed to reflect the name of the new band.  It was a little bit scary how smooth it went.  It suggested that a band is only as goode as its commitment to play in my bar.  Or, that's the way it seems in a fleeting brush with imaginary greatness as a backwater music promoter.in paradise.  Well, perhaps I exaggerated.

But I warn you.  Tonight I strung my guitar.  In a couple days the strings will be stretched enough to hold their tune.  Live dangerously, drink the wine, crucify upstarts, and respect one's elders.  I made a pizza tonight, but after having a feta caprese salad and munching along the way on pizza ingredients the only damage I could ultimately sustain was a small slice, perhaps one sixteenth, the rest of pie in the fridge.  But it was fun to cook, and I'll have another piece tomorrow and the girls can enjoy and I have a ball of dough frozen for another as needs.

July 29, 2009 / Crow's Nest, Midtown, Port Jimmy, Puravidaville:  12:07

I have a barbecue pork sandwich on the make downstairs and have delighted the morning away with a surge of reservations and some OWW orders and emails, including setting up a real estate visit in late September with a captive client with whom I think I have an exclusive avenue to shuttle him around to all the options.  The curtains seem to be falling upon the global depression and the streets are filled with tourists.  Juanita's has several tables full for lunch and the fiscal activity is brisk and colored black.  I have still not sunk a penny of my own into the business since May, and am expecting to walk away with a grand or so at the end of this month.  We have LIVE MUSIC scheduled for Friday and KARAOKE for Saturday, and I am on the verge of securing a firm karaoke contract for a weekly Friday night gig and will make this live music a foundation for doing it again and more often.  It may be time to start looking at other specials, ladies' nights, dinner specials, email advertising, perhaps a billboard outside of town.  And over at the shop, my boys fixed my car seat today and are working now on the prototype hot water heater.  I will test it for performance in heating / cooling against leaks in the coming several days and assuming it passes the smoke test will fabricate the frame and insulation and add the cellophane, glass, aluminum siding and waterproof flashing next week when the materials arrive at La Costa.  The excitement over this is so high that I have to grab hold of my desk to keep from bumping into the ceiling.  Now that the steel has been completed in Juanitas, we have gone over a week without another break-in, and I am tentatively hopeful that I beat the bad guys, at least the little lazy burglars that could get in before.  I am looking at the house next door with longing eyes, imagining its transformation into a kind of office, retail outlet for sophisticated equipment, panels, filtration equipment, pumps, generators, inverters.  It is a curious time to be alive and to be taking nourishment in the Cradle of Western Civilization!

July 28, 2009 / Crow's Nest, Midtown, Port Jimmy, Puravidaville:  18:19

Finally, finally, has there come a toad-strangler in Paradise.  It is now blissfully raining down hard, taters wagoning in the distance, thunder rolling down the range across the gulf like a caravan of grumpy conquistadors bringing enlightenment to brown-skinned cannon-fodder running nakedly for the remainder of their short-lived tenures on the pristine beaches of the ephemeral earthly plane, like the climax of a Boschian bacchanal of Mephistophelian rapture.  Well, maybe not that bad, but it is raining pretty hard outside the crow's nest.  And it is about time.  The little summer has dragged on from its expected week and a half to five long weeks of hard sun-baked summer.

I am marveling at my new electric gate lock and buzzer/intercom system.  And today Wicho and Lalo completed the gas line running to next door so that my upstairs landing is henceforth free of gas tanks, cooks free of the penury of huffing heavy cylinders up and down the stairs.  I laid out the design of my passive solar hot water heater and will tomorrow begin fabrication of the prototype using sanitary drain pipe.  If it works it will almost not be right.  But copper pipe costs as much for the amount needed as an entire brand new progressivetube system, so I figure it can't really be that simple.  But it takes doing it and r and d is cool stuff.  I can't imagine how much difference there could be between the performance characteristics, at least given the heliothermal exaggeration of the Jim-Town noon time sun dance.  We shall see what we shall see.  I think the biggest trick is not in the thermal qualities of the reservoir piping but the insulation to protect from heat losses at night.  And I think for the losses in thermal conductivity in the day in plastic as opposed to copper, that the same principle will better preserve what heat is achieved from being dispersed at night.

I guess we will see.  In the meantime the reservations uptick is on a bit of a roar with X-mas inquiries flooding my inbox.  I have my fingers croxxed for this next big job, the Hatillo grid extension, Phase I of a potential long work junket in the mountains of the mid-Pacific coast, and despite the sluggishness of the world of development and capital investment, I am gently watering seedlings that have broken the surface of a fertile earth and am actively whispering naughty endearances to my fresh babies as they stretch their little dicotyledonous first leaves tentatively into the happy but unforgiving glare of a sun that is both nurturing and be-numbing, a cooing serial killer rocking the cradle of its hungry babies into a fitful and sweaty doze on empty stomachs.

July 27, 2009 / Orquideas Inn, Alajuela, Costa Rica:  07:35

The morning is smitten with a stiff and bracing wind that sweeps down from Poas's verdant slopes to buffet the bougainvillea and ornamental palms and play havoc with the napkins and discarded sugar packages here in the Marilyn Monroe bar of the Orquideas Inn.  I am predictably helium-like, kundera-esque, rocked with an anticipated reduction in density and must hold onto the table to keep from being swept into the splendid atmosphere to float over the town and country-side jostled here and there like a beautiful, a beautiful balloon.

I hustled Mom's bags out to the lobby this morning at 4:05 a.m. where the taxi had diligently arrived and assisted with the luggage, bright and beaming as though he had been awake for an hour and tanking on coffee.  I returned and slipped back between the sheets and rode a somnolent phantasmagoria of odd dreams centering strangely around failed business partnerships.  First there was Peter Lim, only it was a younger man and rather than be of Chinese extraction, he was a white man and instead of being dour and judgmental, his parachuted replacement was a salesman type, booth-tanned, blue-eyed, disarming smile.  I had an airplane on order from somewhere in China for my businesses, and Peter (or his new caucasion replacement) wanted to engage me in some sort of business in which I was not overly interested but listened politely.  Later, I was on one side of a sprawling house doing works in metal and wearing heavy work boots in which I danced around the work area.  Leaving a worker (a fellow from Jimenez who has never worked for me) painting with one hand while holding a little Chinese girl who was for some reason in my care in his other arm, I ran around the other side of the house, where David Rice pulled up to watch me give instructions on the dimensions of metal that had to be cut and welded.  He was stand-offish but close and on the verge of something, had clearly taken a job, for he showed it in his face and was in his final hours of being around, and I asked him what he would be doing and he asked me what business of mine was it but did so in a tone that did not seem to offend.  I shrugged it off and after awhile I offered my hand and in peace-making and told him I had never wanted to be enemies with him.  He took my hand but advised me to never expect him to be chummy with me.  That's the word he used:  "chummy."  I ran around another side of the house and hopped aboard a departing box truck from a truck landing to swing to the ground and bound over to the landing on the far side of the house where Paul was crouched awkwardly beside a skimpily dressed young girl, perhaps of age, perhaps not quite, and as I approached I felt awkward, realizing suddenly that they were making a pornographic movie.  The girl's handler appeared as if from nowhere to confirm this in a kind of verbal code and cheeriness, urging me to be on my way, and I retired from the scene in my magical boots, Paul having never spoken a word, marveling a the oddness of being dispatched from a portion of my own home.  But I left them to their movie-making without rancor and returned to a place where there were many things to do and where I was expecting the arrival at any minute of a former US president, though I don't which one, Reagan I think, who was going to spend the night in the spare bedroom.

How's that for a dream?

The week of bouncing around the country with Mom seems like it began a year ago.  We have seen so much of this country and spent such a long amount of time in close contact that I feel like I must now relearn the norms of my existence, like I have been in a kind of existential vortex of illusion and falsity from which I must now return to a gritty but many-splendored world where people die while flowers bloom, where the world again orbits the sun while whirling wildly on its axis.  I am an hour away from opening the last vein, this one for payment of this hotel.  The hemorrhage of funds has been non-trivial yet also of no import and easy.  Reach, grab, give, walk away.  And repeat.  As July wends its way toward its conclusion, I have only the 9th of this month in which I neglected to make an entry on its day.  I wonder to what end it all is, if in my golden years I shall read back upon these words and find hidden in them the seminal foundation of a fulfilled greatness or the scattered ashes of a talent frittered on things of no consequence.

I guess the answer to that dilemma shall forever reside in the momentary passage of each new moment.  Now is an awesome time!

July 26, 2009 / Orquideas Inn, Alajuela, Costa Rica:  12:15

We are landed in Alajuela at the quaint and breezy Orquideas Inn, on the road to Poas Volcano.  No reflections for the moment, just some pretty pictures of the scenery in the San Gerardo area.

And a flower collection:

July 25, 2009 / Rio Savegre Lodge, San Gerardo de Dota, Costa Rica:  16:30

San Gerardo de Dota is spectacular!  San Gerardo de Dota is awesome!  It is an amusement park for the eyes, an orchestra hall of nature for the ears, a slithering wet salamander for the touch, a sprig of wintergreen for the smell, and in a few hours I will report on the mediocrity it presents for the palate.  Rio Savegre Lodge is serviceable but strangely typical of the hotels expectations game, which is best played considerably south of what is proper and professional.  They had our reservation and they had us correctly allocated in a junior suite, correctly indicated for two beds, the negotiated discounted price correct, all very well, but the room they assigned to us had only one bed.  It began to rain moments before we arrived at the wrong cabin, and the route there was purely fortuitous.  I must have a natural homing beacon.  The signs were deceptive, and our room was not among those with arrows, and the parking lot about ten light years away was full, so I exercised the prerogative of the willfully oblivious and pulled it over and decided to occupy that space even though it was clear that the facility discourages renegade parkers.

"Just dial '0' if you need anything," the receptionist had said, and so I dialed '0' and waited and waited while it rang and rang, and I did this several times and finally shrugged my shoulders at the actual conformance of things to a dawning expectation of the reality's divergence from the stated and projected, and drove back down to the lobby, where Jeffrey dutifully lambasted whoever had assigned me room 119 and gave me the key to 115, just below yours a little he said.  This time my homing beacon was out of kilter.  Perhaps it fails me when I expect to need it least and if so that is a good thing.  Room 115 turned out after a review of a sprawling clutch of junior suites to be in another area of the facility.  But we made it and the rain died down and I was able to make it out of the lobby with a borrowed umbrella. 

Mom's mood has not recovered from her intense distaste for the winding and steep and narrow roads.  Stress bordering on fear, is how she put it earlier.  The road from San Isidro was not overly congested, but the clouds were thick in places, and as she put it the experience combined two fears of hers, that of heights and of vehicular conflicts.  Distastefully but dutifully I backed it down to 30 mph and skipped over passing opportunities in consideration of her state.  She was intensely uncomfortable and snippy with me, and it reminded me that what to one person is cool and neat to another is hostile and savage.  As we turned off from the Cerro de la Muerte near its apex, the road turned into a narrow little windy thing with a steep grade.  I put the car in 4WD and came down the entire way in either first or second, 10-15 mph, and her fear rose inside the cab of the vehicle like foam on the lips of a rabid dog.  In selecting this point as a reasonable stop over to break our return to San Jose, I never imagined, never conceived that the road would raise itself as an impediment to satisfaction and diversion.  Yet, there are things that you don't know about other people, even your own mother, and even things that are stated may be so alien to one's own experience as to not seem truly possible, yet there was no doubt but that her white-knuckled trepidation was anything but an invention.

Perhaps in the experience of having come tomorrow she will be able to appreciate the unparalleled splendor of this watershed.  The valley is spectacular, one of the unquestionably most beautiful mountain places I have ever been, not just in Costa Rica, but anywhere.  And poor you, my camera battery was not charged, so I was unable to document our passage from the tundra-like paramo to this sanctuary of the resplendent quetzal, this traverse of the trogon, the Costa Rican original trout fishing destination par excellence. 

There is nothing that I can do to make it better for her, and I hope she will decide that this is not so bad.  I think that the process of being stationary in the room awhile will surely settle her nerves, though I imagine she is perhaps troubled by being unable to put out of her mind tomorrow's requisite return out of this spectacular valley on that same road.  I figured it was best to give her her space and retired to the bar to engage in Internet.  Naturally I arrived to discover that the outlets are not polarized, and so I have only the battery power in my computer and these words are therefore precious since they are consuming valuable Internet time.

So with that I will upload this minor missive and get on to the business of navigating the ether to learn if the world has news of newly import.

July 24, 2009 / Crow's Nest, Puerto Jimenez, Costa Rica:  18:00

On tap:  curried jumbo shrimp and grated cheddar caprese salad, fresh basil, a half cup of minced garlic, yellow sweet pepper, yellow onions, honey, white raisins, crushed cashews, culantro, carrots. . . don't listen to me:  check out the picture!  My return to the nest was as if to a fine-honed machine, and Kati had every reason to feel coy if she felt that.  Everything was just so.  The grounds were in order, the staff doing what the staff is supposed to do.  The intercom door lock was installed, and the kilo of jumbo shrimp was peeled and ready, the kilo of yellowfin tuna on its way.  The Crow's Nest was immaculate, the air conditioning turned on, no sticky film this time on the floor to trouble bare feet, and the Internet popped up my first connection.  There was nothing left to do but to sit back and be pleased, and I had Yeudy whip us up a plate of tuna tacos from the trimmings of the kilo that had already thawed, and they were slightly in between this side and that of Paradise, absolutely divine.  Must-adds to the menu, and I had to feel a bit smug about the casualness of excellence and the promptness of its delivery here overlooking the cradle of western civilization. 

With all the fixings ready for nothing more but the doing, I have one fourth of the shrimp left to make jumbo shrimp omelets in the morning, and we are reserved tomorrow evening at the Savegre Lodge at the enchanted mountain redoubt of San Gerardo de Dota at ten thousand feet above sea level, Sunday night booked at the Orquideas Inn in Alajuela, and I have my return flight on Natureair scheduled for 11:30 Monday.  My Central American Road Trip round two has been deferred by at least three days possibly indefinitely, and I am pirouetting with a proposal in the client's hands for a job in Hatillo and summoned to Villa Neilly for a commercial rainfall capture system.  And today's system review at Verdemar was purely routine and pedestrian, the trail blazed to Jimmy unremarkable.

At breakfast this morning I had the blessing of speaking with Orpheus on chat to learn that his turn in the professional roller rink is turning to the screw of his thumb rather than thumbing his turn at a screw, and it is settling and fulfilling to enjoy his distant excitement vicariously and to imagine his turn in the sun of consequence.  There is no small irony in my own history emerging fully educated in 1986 with a master's degree to find myself unwanted anywhere for the turns I pretended in my chosen profession, and I recall with particular pain the second interview of a pis-ant gravel company in Cumberland, Maryland.  I was handled that day by an old geezer geologist and treated respectfully and well and went through all the people in the company meeting them and shining and putting on my best, and the last meeting of the day in front of all of them, one of them took me to task personally for having failed to publish the results of my thesis in a recognized journal.  He gave a brief speech to the board in which he seemed to contend that any school that would grant a student an advanced degree without having published his work in a recognized and refereed journal was not a school worth issuing such degrees.  And the job I was applying for was for a pis-ant $30,000 a year job as a staff geologist working for a quarry.

We in the sciences were expected to disdain those in the arts who had nothing of significance to offer and I share vicariously the small glory of Orpheus's professional self-launch to a welcome reception and with interviews with companies like Disney, Dreamworks, and (can't remember the other one, but it is one I've heard of) and can recall only being ridiculed by a silly mid-level quarry manager miserable person with no business running down an honest person just out looking for an honest job.  At least my son is not saddled with a shallow fraud of a wife and trying to live and do good in a place where they laugh at decency and worship deceit as a form of art.

July 23, 2009 / Hotel Verdemar, Manuel Antonio, Costa Rica:  16:30

Following a nearly four hour journey off the top of the mountain and down through the lowlands and along the coast, we have arrived at Hotel Verdemar in Manuel Antonio, and I have slept for an hour, and in a bit we will head out and check out the beach and maybe the pool a spell and then turn our thoughts toward dinner.  I am growing a bit restless with all this time spent in the pursuit of little or nothing and will welcome my homecoming to the Crow's Nest tomorrow and an opportunity to feel vaguely like I can be of some consequence.  I have ambitions this evening of finishing Part II of the solar series, but then I have had that ambition for very nearly two weeks.  Time to get off my duff and just do it.  Tomorrow will be great to put a wrap on this stage at Verdemar, particularly in the timeliness of the rainfall capture water supply system inquiry from Villa Neilly.

In Costa Rica, a bizarre veranillo has persisted and brought days upon days without rain to the entire country.  It is not just Manuel Antonio, where it has still not rained since late June sometime, at least not significantly.  Even the Rana Azul folks report that the rash of dryness has allowed them unprecedented ability to work.  And it did not rain on us in Arenal nor even in Monteverde, as thick as the clouds were.

One minor calamity to report.  Today while stopped to take a picture shortly after leaving Monteverde, I dropped my camera onto the ground, and it landed lens open on the rocks and seems to have dislodged the mechanism that opens and closes the lens somewhat.  It still opens and closes, though I have to tap it to get it to its totally closed position, but the zoom is history, and with that, essentially the camera.  Below are the photos that I took with the camera in its new crippled state, so it is not a total loss, but I will start shopping now.

Kati has the kilo of shrimp and tuna waiting for me back home and says all the receipts are pretty much in hand and ready to go.

July 23, 2009 / Trapp Family Lodge, Monteverde, Costa Rica  07:30

Sitting here at a breakfast alcove at the cozy Trapp Family Lodge I am transported back similar settings on the Great Central American Road Trip, catching up on preserving the fleeting and immemorial before my traveling partners awakened.

For a couple of weeks I have been waiting for something to happen.  The pending things with my Palmichal clients, the absence of a definition of the next OWW project, the dwindling cash reserves, the adversity of the tax-man's calling, my distraction from an ability to do anything with the dual commitments of mom's week of travel and the planned trip to the States to drive down with Dan. . .  Yesterday, as we were pulling out of the driveway to head into Santa Elena for Internet and window-shopping, the call came in from Roger asking advice over difficulties and recommendations on the pelton wheel that had suddenly left off working.  And then in the day's harvest of emails, his manager acknowledging all my emails and messages with the explanation of having been out of the country but that all was well and I could expect payment by Monday.  I will see if my advice to them was able to resolve or if we need to get Erick there for a check see, and in the remainder of my emails, lo and behod, an inquiry for a rainwater capture system for another commercial application, this time a restaurant in the mountains between Neilly and San Vito.

With second thoughts under a weave of complicating new family developments in Denver, I don't know what to make of all that stuff but figure the likelihood of going through with the original plan has now fallen to probabilities in the single digits.  I am decided to be ambivalent about this.  I would love to take this trip, but the significance does not reside with what I would like but with what would be right and good.  And I am uniquely unqualified to make that call. 

July 22, 2009 / Trapp Family Lodge, Monteverde, Costa Rica

July 21, 2009 / El Tabacon Lodge, Arenal Volcano, Guanacaste, Costa Rica

I awakened at 4:30 a.m. and stared for a bit outside the sliding glass door overlooking the garden from the veranda to drink in the quickening birdsong of the aurora's first blush and sank back into a dreamscape peopled mostly with procedural pleasantries, even a brief sex dream featuring one of the standard deviations from middle of the road missionary puritanical pre-Kerouac America that in polite company would be referred to if absolutely necessary with flushed cheeks by its Latin term, which begins with the letter "c."  Somewhere toward dawn's progress toward fulmination, I had a very strange dream in which I am a fly on a wall as a young male vampire attends the filming of a scene in which a young male movie star is being kidnapped in a tire-spinning car.  The dream then cuts to a candle-lit dinner in which the two are dining together when suddenly and with such economy of motion as to leave in the mind not even the hint of a blur, the vampire throws his fork across the table and lodges it with a smile into the carotid of his startled dining companion, who sprouts viscous crimson rivulets, one for each of the three tines of the unusual fork.  The fork was strangely similar to the one that was presented at dinner last night with the tiny complimentary salad that was served to Mom and I last night, even though I ordered one of their regular salads.  The big salad came with a normal salad fork, and I suppose the three-tined fork made a strange impression upon your old buddy.

I awakened congested but relaxed, content to dawdle and lounge on mattress as thick as the walls of a ziggurat, as soft as the belly down of a baby eider, as comforting as a script for medical marijuana under the siege of nausea.  I drank coffee and blew my nose and remembered feeling a bit like a pig last night over the sequence of courses and foods and am nearly positive that I have somehow come down with the swine flu.  Don't oink for me, Monteverde..

July 20, 2009 / El Tabacon Lodge, Arenal Volcano, Guanacaste, Costa Rica

Everything clicked with Swiss precision.  I had packed my bags and awakened congested and with a hint of a cold and deferred my rising until 8:15 and tidied a few little affairs in time to make it to the air strip one hour early.  My plane took off on time, and there was turbulence coming into Josey, and as we taxied in, I eyed the sickup bag and felt a passing delirium of fever like a gentle hallucination, and as we were frog-marched into the lobby, we had to pass first by a health inspector, to whom I was not completely truthful about my health.  In fact I did have two or more of the symptoms alluded to but suppressed the temptation to sniff and could not remember my age.  I finally came up with 38, and she looked at me funny and looked at my passport, and I remembered then it was 48, and the immigration guy waved me through and if I was a few days off on my visa I may have had my plans disrupted.  But as always, I was completely legal, and a half hour later found that my rental car was waiting for me, not the slightest hiccup, and I ate at McDonald's in Alajuela and finished Winter of Our Discontent in front of the out door of the airport, and after briefly flashing "delayed" Mom's flight actually arrived five minutes early and pretty soon there she was and the next thing you know we were on our way to Arenal.

El Tabacon is plenty cush, and my beef tenderloin with yorkshire pudding, foie gras, onion compote, and salad with strawberries, walnuts, and goat cheese was passably tolerant.  Our bill for two in the restaurant, with one glass of wine came to $95.  We will head for cheaper fare for tomorrow's meal.  Malcolm Lowry's got nothing on me.  Our picture window looks out upon the mountain above, and it is barren and lunar and steep.  The crater is enshrouded with clouds, but when they thin, you can tell that the mountain itself is also smoking.  Tonight's reward on a mattress about ten feet thick is going to be transcendental.  I don't think Mom will be up for Texas Chainsaw Massacre:  The Beginning on the wide screen high definition television, so I will settle for eyelid movies.

July 19, 2009 / The Crow's Nest

21:04, and I have met with Kati, written more, and my clothes have arrived clean.  I have nothing now impeding me from wrapping my day and packing in a timely manner.  Whudduya bet I am unable to clear that baby bar?.

At 20:00 I have now packed a little bit and done a fair bit of calculating on the Solar Part II analysis and am awaiting Kati for a final huddle.  I have a laundry list under compiling in an open email I am drafting, but all that is not what I am thinking about.

The snake enclosure is sadly barren.  It is sad to look in and see only sand and rocks and water and no life.  I miss that surly slit-eyed glare that I am so used to getting in return.  Today as I extricated her from the enclosure I broke into a sweat and thought about the Darwin Awards and all the silly ways there are in this world to accidentally die.  I suppose even if I were to have been bitten I would likely not actually die, even perhaps without antivenin intervention.  Still, imagine how proud I would be of myself were I to have slipped up in the operation and sustained a bite?

It's not like I have not dreamed lately of her managing to lodge her fangs within me.  I am handling her roughly and carelessly, as if drunk, and she bites me on the top of my wrist, and in my dream the bite comes as such an embarrassment that I do not seek treatment, preferring to endure the consequences of the venom than the humiliation of admitting to being bested by a reptile whose liberty I had deprived.  In my dream the defining sensation is not one of fear nor morbidity but one of sloppiness in casually mishandling the snake.  I know that this must have reverberations in the world of meaning beyond the simple mental associations of keeping a poisonous animal behind glass in the same room in which I sleep . . . there can be no mistaking the significance, and it is a somewhat dire one.

It is like a wholly new universe, a post-Juanita incarnation, and I can travel without having to be concerned for the health and welfare of my former brood.  Many will be happy about this decision.

By 18:20 I have slipped into the neurosis attendant on all impending wake-up calls and early morning travel plans.  I have not packed a lick and am still nominally catching up.  I did advance the program in SICES for the final surge of receipt ordering for the Tax Man's contemplation.  But I have not packed.  I am charging batteries and washing clothes.  But I have not packed.  I updated my Facebook page, of all things.  If that is not a neurotic symptom of the malady of packing procrastination and eventually sleep procrastination, then nothing is.  Perhaps tonight I will impress myself.  And to think that my ambition included getting out Part II of the solar series.  Perhaps I should go work on that now.  Maybe I should pack my electronics and office stuff. 

At 12:45 I have dispatched two important tasks for today:  1)  the release of Juanita and the remaining six of her spawn; and 2)  my formal reply to my client's spurious claim of defective workmanship in a solar installation done eight months ago. I am winding my way down toward a free and clear departure tomorrow morning.  Guess I had better stick with the progress and leave the crowing for later.

10:22:  Tweet tweet.

July 18, 2009 / The Crow's Nest

Orpheus spends his second night at Amherst.  Landed this morning at 1:30 and spent the day and gets off tomorrow, following an apparent detour through Georgia where his bearings were apparently located.  Our great road trips have every possibility of intersecting.  It is a great time to be alive and to be in the blood circle that defines and makes me possible.

Today's minor whoops are web updates mostly, including the addition of Casa Tres Peces to my online menageries of guest homes in Sol de Osa and Jimenez Hotels.  And I got the Corozal House listed on Osa Pen Realty.  On the OWW front, I wisely shelved the Hatillo proposal last night and this morning labored through about noon whittling it down to its final form, which I got to the clients and off my chest.  To round it, the accounting progress is promising, the reservations up-ticking along with daily sales in both businesses, and I paid for two nights in El Tabacon, my Monday flight to Josey, and am booked for Monteverde and Manuel Antonio and am confirmed for the rental car, so Mom is in for a kind of cool trip.  Settled up on the Playa Lapa window grates today, and the pix look great!  And semi-finished the new steel for Juanita's; Wicho wraps tomorrow, and tonight is hoped to be Lalo's last night as security guard, though I may reconsider for this upcoming week while I will be mostly away . . ..

Sssh!  Don't tell anyone, but I am thinking of turning Juanita loose here on the Osa.  I think it will be okay without changing the balance of things.  I know she is not pregnant, and if there are no others of her kind, she will not reproduce, and if she finds a mate, then this is habitat already anyway.  I agree with Kati that she is sad. 

I don't know where the state of the world is, but I am thankful that I do not have to listen to Bob Woodward tell me what it is, for if I had to suffer that without a mute button, I might otherwise have to seriously contemplate suicide.

The furious winding down is like toward a whirling vortex of evolving motion and existential poetry, and I just may make a kind of crazy ground zero by Monday's departure, ahead of the eight ball, all my dice nicely loaded if unevenly, ready to leave again, lungs full.  About this we shall soon see.  I can imagine worse ways to feel.

July 17, 2009 / The Crow's Nest

Today we doff our hats in memory of the legendary Walter Cronkite.  And that's the way it is this 17th day of July, 2009, as the quintessential network anchor sinks peacefully into the depths in full exploration of the great mystery. . .

It has been many years now since I no longer find that seventeen year old kid peering back at me from the mirror.  He followed me around through at least my mid-thirties.  His doppelganger is the opposite, an old wrinkled man that taunts me for the deepening wrinkles, thinning hair, bulging waistline, and the infirmity of the musculature.  No sex-god stares me back in the eye when I brush my teeth or scrape my face.  I bet Karl wishes he were so fortunate.  Watching girls turn into women and babies into boys and lean lads into paunchy mid-lifers and the young grow old and the old older is sport here in this town.  Maybe it is just that I have never lived long enough anywhere else to watch people age.  I suppose it is only right to turn this observational pastime inward.

Shortly I will get the Hatillo electrification proposal off.  It is looking like $40,000 firm.  There is an incredible lightness of proposition, whatever it is.  A proposal is a potential juncture, the possibility of an invoked wrinkle in the time-space continuum, active and planned change, an enemy of entropy.  A proposal is giant juju of options in juxtaposition with that of 'no action' always challenged by that progressive potpourri of possible alternatives to the status quo.  It makes me think that maybe I should sit on this and go through it tomorrow on yet another new day.  But it is not fiction, and all the pieces are in place, and if the wording is sometimes inelegant, so too is engineering and planning often hopelessly tedious and anal, inelegant at best, however necessary it may be.  There is nevertheless a sense of fulmination upon the issuance of a final report or proposal or billing summary that is like a minor hurdle cleared, worthy of whatever meager emotional reward I might allow myself to indulge in the space of the day's remainder. 

And I am tending toward that very pinnacle of satiety tonight, not tomorrow. It's just in the cards.

July 16, 2009 / The Crow's Nest

Counter to the way it normally works, the week feels like it is farther along than it really is.  Today really does feel like Friday and is only Thursday.  I will take this as a small victory in a time in which a non-trivial shroud of uncertainty and ambiguity seem to follow me around.  The impending travel time with Mom and then the trip with Dan are not diversions and not distractions but the actual fabric of my life.  I have to finally face up to the fact that even if I work every day straight for a month, I am still on permanent vacation from the real world.  Here we have a hamster wheel instead of a rat race.  Choose your own poison.

I got billing off on Verdemar and worried over another full day without rain.  Forecast is for more of the same.  Am thick in the first draft of the proposal for the Hatillo facility electrification.  Am angling for an August 24 launch date, an auspicious date for me, plenty of time to get back down from the States. 

I am thinking two nights at El Tabacon in Arenal, one night at the Trapp Family Lodge in Monteverde, one night at Hotel Verdemar in Manuel Antonio, one night in the Crow's Nest, a night at San Gerardo de Dota, and a final night in San Jose in advance of her early morning return on the 27th.  It will be odd to take off like this on a self-pampering odyssey around the country all justified on the occasion of Mom's trip down.  I am greatly looking forward to seeing Arenal for the first time! 

July 15, 2009 / The Crow's Nest

Completed the final report for the Verdemar installation.  I like the use of the word "final."  We never even got any rain to test out the rainfall capture system, so the best that this could really be called is a preliminary final report, or an interim infrastructural installation completion report.  But let us not kid ourselves about any finality to today's state of system installation and configuration.   Am reviewing the accounting for project billing tomorrow.

It is a GO!!!  The great Central American road trip, part II is now on the burner.  Dan bought my ticket today.  I fly from Josephine on August 3 at 0630.  Orpheus oddly settles into his own cockpit as early as tomorrow for his transcontinental sojourn.  I am hopeful that we can intersect strangely in Denver.  How cool would that be?  And we can all go rafting. 

Mom lands on Monday, and I have a car secured.  I have to secure the Arenal arrangements.  I am thinking two nights at Arenal, one at Monteverde, one at Verdemar, two in the Crow's Nest, and a final night at Chirripo or perhaps at San Gerardo de Dota, one of those high mountain lodges.

July 14, 2009 / The Crow's Nest

VIDEO:  Good Morning Costa Rica, Villas Manu, Hatillo, Central Pacific

VIDEO:  Another shitty day in Paradise!

So that you will not be bound by the manacles of curiosity, the problem with my car turned out to be front brake pads.  Miraculously, I was able to insinuate myself into the long-faced line at a garage by the mangroves and after a wait of a single hour, the mechanic fixed my car in an ensuing half hour, and propelled me upon my truly happy way.  As if that were not enough, the progress at Verdemar was consequential.  We finally got the hot water heater successfully deployed (see video links below), and following the laying of plans between mice and men, I hit the road and found my montane destination after dark and shared a late dinner of grouper cooked in a Peruvian (and otherworldly succulent) style and a second course of squid cooked some other (and unremarkable, to use Dad's most excellent descriptor of the stories of Steinbeck's Pastures of Heaven) way.  I retired shortly before ten to the delightfulness of my own company and found the air too vivid for a fan, its molecules quickened by the night.  The Pacific yawned beneath me under a half moon, and the forest inhaled deeply, and the house grew thick with different varieties of praying mantis and katydids, kinds I have never seen, and the large jungle gecko, spotted like a leopard and large enough to actually look predatory padded upside down through the top of the open doorway and peered at me fearlessly as I reviewed correspondence and checked out the progress of the world on online news outlets.  It was too chilly for just a sheet, the air turgid with moisture, and I found a blanket and rowed into the Styxian realm of Morpheus undeterred from my insistence upon a passive fulfillment of quiet and private elation, my dreamscape peopled with happy riddles and unimagined conundrums, and the next thing I knew dawn's rosy fingers strayed to touch even the western horizon that lay outside the open doorway from the king size bed upon which I found myself regally reposed in the supine susurrus of my somnolent soliquoy.

I awakened refreshed and drew the morning's air into my lungs with a conquest not too unlike what Achilles may have felt as he was tying the legs of Hector's corpse to his chariot and imagining his triumphal orbit around Troy.  Well, I may not have felt quite that good, but it seemed like it at the time.

We had a fine return to the Hatillo highlands for a third look at the site where Alex's clients' house is under planning, the driveway under construction, and we hiked the trajectory where the power cable is to go.  Alex marveled at my readiness with no more than rubber boots and a GPS, and there is a kind of smug satisfaction to not have to lug the sixty meter tape measure around with the obligatory helper, snagging it along the way on intrusive vegetation, free from encumbrances to simply push buttons to mark waypoints and jot a few notes and sustain an ongoing line of queries and project boundary conditions and dialog to round it out and be done with the beginning of it all in order to next concentrate on the continuance.  We finished by eleven and I took the back way out through Lagunas and copped a cell signal on top and landed Iguana at Verdemar.  The fabled 1:30 p.m. bus turned into the actual 3:00 p.m. bus, which would have presumed a nearly six hour wait for me in Dominical to collect Marvin and Iguana for our return to Jimmy, so I declared Plan B and stopped briefly for an icy coca-cola in Baru and made it back to Manuel Antonio by 12:15 on the new and transcendental tarmac and the base for what has not been lain, miraculously catching the boys just as Luis was about to spirit them off to lunch.  I knew I would be pissed if I got there and they were at lunch, and the hard miles at high speed in this case managed to intervene and allow me to scuttle my own disappointment, what a marvel development, and it made me glad.

I pulled rank right quick on that lunch call and had them finish and by one o'clock the three of us were pulling out of the hotel parking lot in the Ruby Racer, leaving Luis Guapo, an ambulatory ceviche under his belt, to replace two hot water tees of ours that were leaking.  The bosy and I had casados memorable for their marginality in Uvita, and that pushed my itinerary off by fifteen minutes, even though the stop for lunch took a half hour, and we rolled into the St. James Infirmary at 5:20 following a ten-minute delay at the Gallardo junction held up by a signalman allowing a grader to hog the road a bit. 

I returned to find my extended serpentine family all with a pulse and not particularly peppy but still with water, however stagnant and befowled, in their dish.  I'm not sure how that happened, that week-long permanence of water in a cereal bowl, and you can bet that I was the last one to open the cage door.  Following essential rounds I found myself Crow's-Nest bound with all the requisite necessities to review my email and update the Khanosphere and navigate the exigencies of the great vital now with just the proper mood ailerons and will propellants, and I want for nothing more to compose the music to which the digits dance upon the keyboard ballroom floor, which tonight has a distinctly nineteenth century Russian formality to it.  The wine that was left in a house too far to walk to recover last night (Bosque del Cielo) is tasting at least half as good tonight as it might last night.  It is a wine finer that I would buy purely for my own consumption--an arguable suggestion of alcoholism) and the one that I left Alex and Grace is even better than the one that I retrieved for myself, theirs a $26 Spanish cabernet with a 2002 vintage, and I can imagine them spiritedly toasting my health tonight as they dine above the distant Pacific, eyed by one or more geckos and an orchestra of nocturnal predators, from praying mantises to panthers..

There is a wild flowering of untamable will and  irrepressible imagination sprouting from a tortured and barren peneplain at the final stages of a cycle, and I feel like oceanic crust subducted beneath a continental margin, my belly warmed by the process of orogeny, hot fluids rising rich with minerals to flush my orifices and fulminate a giant exhalation into the sky to darken the horizon.  It will not be a good time to stand near steep inclines nor to swim too near the full moon nor to dawdle on a weak surface where fissures might open as a kinesis certain leaves suspect the permanence of all things and offers in its protean and labile ephemerality a hint of the aroma of the sublime.

Can you smell it?

July 13 2009 / Villas Manu; Hills of Hatillo

VIDEO:  Hoisting the solar hot water heater onto the roof, Part I

VIDEO:  Hoisting the solar hot water heater onto the roof, Part II

July 12 2009 / Manuel Antonio

Video:  Shoring up the roof superstructure to support the weight of the hot water heater.

My front wheels sound like a burlap bag of squirrels caught up in a corn mill.  My plan was to leave it in Quepos to not take a chance and get it to a mechanic first thing in the morning, but I exercised my standard impoverishment in mechanical engineering judgment and transported myself in it back up to Manuel Antonio.  it has only to endure another couple miles to make it to a shop without seizing and perhaps damaging other parts, and I may just make it. 

I could not have predicted how pleasant it is to be back at Hotel Verdemar.  There is something to that daily sucking sound of C45000 in hotel fees that is unnerving and unsettling.  Plus the whole thing of being somewhere away from the job at hand.  I had Internet at the Le Priss Hotel and here I have to beg access and then huddle in a miserly little corner of the office to get online, but even with that hardship I prefer this.  I have 302, the only room without a fridge, and I moved the table to sit smack against the picture window, and this will be a wonderful work platform tonight. 

I plan to rewrite Part II of the solar series tonight.

I am now scheduled for a full field day on Tuesday in Hatillo, and I will take off from here sometime in the late afternoon early evening and drive down tomorrow, stay at Villas Manu (www.manucr.com) in the Kopoo House, do the work on Tuesday, return to Manuel Antonio in the afternoon to pick up Marvin and Iguana, blaze to Jimenez, send my truck out Wednesday on the Hauser install and drive back up Wednesday night to meet with Luis here at Verdemar for final commissioning on Thursday.  Then Friday I can meet with my auditor in Perez, file my sales tax document for Juanitas, return to Jimmy, spend Saturday contemplating the shifting contents of my navel then get on a bus or a plane on Sunday to head to Josey and pick up a car Monday morning to collect Mom in the afternoon and begin down time.

We are going to disassemble the hot water unit tomorrow and study it.  I have the potential for three more here at this hotel and can likely interest Alex in three or four for his houses if I can make the price right.  And with just a couple more installs along the way and an evolving story line, I could make a push to putting one on top of every roof in Central America and from there take it to Colombia, Venezuela, and Mexico.

I have been struggling with the implications of the client set out to stiff me for two grand and the other one that won't return my phone calls or emails that owes me thirteen thousand dollars.  Despite all confidence that I am doing right and well and good, when a client does not pay it suggests that at least the client is either not in agreement or is crooked.  I think the two grand guy is just ignorant and put himself in a position where by pride he cannot now back down and do what is right.  That is hardly better than being an open grifter, but the extensive review releases me from the doubt that maybe I did something wrong technically.  I know I could have handled the politics better.  But with the other guy there is no communication upon which to found any sort of opinion, and I don't know what to make of the silence treatment.

It is the onward roll of the ball that keeps everything in perspective, and I must not take my eye off the target as I wend my way through the labyrinth of speculation and doubt.

July 11 2009 / Quepos

There is a sign on the wall above the toilet in all the hotel rooms of this hotel in Quepos that reads:  "PLEASE DO NOT STAND ON THE TOILET SEAT LIDS THEY CAN EASY LY BREAK."

A sign like this can't help but invoke unwelcome images.  How, after all, could it have come to pass that this injunction came to be posted in all the rooms of this hotel yet in no other hotel probably on the whole planet?  There almost had to have been a rash of toilet-seat standing at some point.  Hopefully the signs have tempered this clearly anti-social phenomenon.  Being the rebel that I am, I had to try it out.  I have never stood on a toilet seat before; it has never even occurred to me to do so.  But after the new experience, I am here to tell you that there is something to this toilet seat standing business.  I kind of liked it.  I may do it again.

At the all-you-can-eat sushi joint down by the malecon, the air was thick with gringos, a few locals, mostly tourists.  I read a bit in my book as I waited on small orders that I placed.  It was warm but not sweltering, the tables small and crowded together.  I got the last one available and it was the one closest to the kitchen.  You could feel the heat gradient moving from the sidewalk, but it was not unbearable.  I had options.  I chose to stay. 

On my left was a couple and a friend, all early twenties, and the friend was a self-styled sushi connoisseur.  Outwardly he looked like a surf bum, raggedy, a young man's sparse unkempt beard, wild hair.  But he was clean and comported himself from the corner of my eye like a college kid, full of his intellect and predilections, almost the definition of the word 'sophomoric.'  He spoke of how after a couple times of doing it you got the knack of rolling and how sushi was not that hard to make and how there were restaurants in Japan where the waitresses ordered for you based on what kind of sushi they determined you needed (probably from a phrenological examination) and how if you ate it with too much tamari or committed other sushi infractions they would eject you from the restaurant.  His pompousness rose nearly to the level of comedy, and his companions has squinty bloodshot eyes and did not speak much nor as loudly.  I was able to overhear the male inform the waitress in broken Spanish how to divide the checks.

There were a number of young American women in the restaurant, several of them quite striking in conventional female pulchritude.  Yet their American-ness suppressed and harnessed any sex appeal, and I could not amuse myself by mentally undressing any of them.  I tried it out on the waitress, a coppery skinned local, thin and early twenties but found myself mentally putting her clothes back on in reaction to the way she responded to a Gringo's effusive thanks.  He was fifteen years my senior, dining with a lady that I assumed to be his wife, and as they got up to leave he introduced her to the waitress as his mother and kissed the waitress on the cheek in departure.  The waitress recoiled as little as she was able to control herself and wiped her cheek as she made her way back to the kitchen.  I did not really blame her and imagine the guy had his own local history and was trying to be nice and decent with his mum suddenly in tow, but there was something about her private revulsion that turned me off of her as well.  It didn't seem to need to be that bad, somehow. 

And at the bar a handsome and shining couple in their late twenties arrived, followed in by a Tom Arnold look alike, gregarious, stocky, and he immediately fell into a conversation with his new lifelong friends.  As Ethan was laying the ground of the betrayal of his lifelong friend, Danny Taylor, and sowing the seeds of his own climactic suicide in the Winter of Our Discontent, George (that's how the extroverted Tom-Arnold guy introduced himself) turned out to be from Chico California, via Laguna Beach near Los Angeles, where Crystal's father was from.  But Crystal and Alex lived in Denver, Lakewood, actually.  I remember the night I spent in a nurse's apartment in Laguna Beach all those years ago, a former student and apparent speed freak.  And how I missed the Rendezvous in Chico this year but Dad didn't and how I may be flying to Denver in a couple weeks.  If by these pedestrian coincidences we are led to say that the world is small, then it is true.  The world is small in this way, and Costa Rica is oddly a focal point of this planet's personal smallness.  George explained how his wife had left him and his family and he had been in Costa Rica for six months with his four year old and one year old children, owning up to being a trust fund kid when asked what he did down here, and this is probably just a thin cover story for having kidnapped his children, the youngest one still nursing when the mother abandoned the family.  He invited them on their next trip to come and stay at his ocean-view apartment, where there was a pool and air conditioning, and how it could be better like that to have a local contact than to come down on their own, and as his plate emerged, heaping with an array of sushi and shrimp and other things, a girl sidled up and tugged at him, and he came back in to have it all put in a go bag, explaining to his new fast friends that he thought he had been stood up and he had been chasing this girl for three months, and how he had just not waited long enough where they were to have apparently met for dinner, and how she had come looking for him and he had to be going because she did not like sushi.

The stroll back through the Quepos night to the Le Priss Hotel (how d'ya like that for a comedic name?) was not unpleasant.  The temperature is nice, and it has still not rained, and it is not only not hot but it is also not muggy.  Still, Quepos has a thickness to it that its atmosphere cannot shed even under pleasant weather, and walking back to the hotel was like wading chest deep through a thin fluid, possibly derived from the nearby mangroves and its interwoven biotic secrets.  For each molecule that brushed past and touched me, a memory or imagination was sparked from my neural firing line in obedience to Newton's second law of physics.  The displacement of parts of me by the impingement of the outside environment is like an association melded by gangly teenagers in the backseats of someone else's car, which is to say, awkwardly and without premeditation or any semblance of elegance.  Why anybody would come to Quepos on vacation is a mystery that is worth its contemplation.  For every third world privy, turns out there are a lot of rear ends waiting their turns, cash in hand, with expectancy and glee.

I live in a world strange and frightening but a world real and uncompromising.  Neither a virgin nor a whore, a drunkard nor a priest, past being a student but not yet to becoming a teacher, neither an investor nor a spend-thrift, but somehow all at once and in all degrees distributed as normally as a bell curve (or jar), the world is its own oyster, its own Rockefeller, and its own maker of oysters Rockefeller.

July 10 2009 / Quepos

21:45

The events in today's world are like the syntax of a language that you can make out only from the body-language with which it is spoken.  Take Sarah Palin's televised resignation speech as a quick example.  Beyond the momentary titillation of Palin's bizarre personal odyssey, the rapid-fire succession of occurrences around the nation and world that would have been impossible to imagine just three years ago become almost like plaque on the brain to confuse the synapses into seeing connections that may not exist at all, into projecting connections or disconnections that a vested interest wants the public to perceive, or that actually exist but in counterpoint.  And my sense is that the American public--perhaps even the world in general--is as though being born for the first time into a culture, society, country, continent, hemisphere, planet (choose your scale) that has never before existed and which finally makes almost perfect and rational and even moral sense.  And it is not something that happens every year and perhaps not even once every generation.  It is a special time of which we are in the thick midst.

This notion returns to me with nearly every online opinion piece that I read, a sense of a justice long abandoned as fictional roaring to the fore of every headline, peopling the waking hours of all people in their respective parts of the planet.  The election of an essentially socialist black man in the center-right, semi-racist United States epitomized the sudden rallying of the submerged and unimaginable and set it loose on the world stage to challenge and delight those that like to think about such things.  The practical disbandment of the Republican Party following its years of finger-wagging moral superiority and values-inveighing would have been too far gone even for leftist dreams as recently as mid 2006 and is today is yesterday's old news:  a fait accompli.  The social upheaval in Iran's theocratic autocracy following presumptively rigged elections has grist greater, I feel, than any news outlet since the Persian Times in the reign of Xerxes may be capable of projecting.  The Honduran hard-handed democratic double-take pitting Zelaya and Micheletti (who could have ever anticipated the world becoming familiar with obscure politicians in backwater banana republics?) will take many doctoral dissertations to even have its contexts sorted out, and it may take a political science Einstein to be able to fit all its angles and contortions into a single neural space that will enable reasonable responses.  Kindly, Dr. Kissinger, do not take this mission upon yourself!  While the list goes on, there is one final part of that list that has to be near and dear to all Americans that grew to feel their national identity undercut by the George Bush years.  Barely seven months out of office, and already we now know that many of the things that creeped us out during Dubya's reign turned out to be not just rumors after all, not wildly exaggerated by a liberal elite media, after all.  Today we learn that the domestic spying allegations that played with such cavalier abandon with our constitutional rights as American human beings were underestimated even by administration antagonists.  Add this latest revelation to a litany of things that many suspected but only recently have been confirmed as founded in fact:  that the reasons for war in Iraq were premeditatedly conflated and not just an error in intelligence, that vast meddling with social constructs was not the will of the governed but a social agenda pushed on a nation by a political class reeling in pedestrian hypocrisy, that environmental science was relegated to the scientific relevance of Bible studies and Bible studies were elevated to the social relevance of science, that there was a full-throated and catastrophic tolerance for corporate malfeasance and greed that fostered a business ethic of larceny and deceit, that rather than leadership by a paragon of economic wizardry, the Fed team headed by Alan Greenspan comprised a cabal of fiscal irresponsibility unprecedented in American history, absentee functionaries at the highest level, arguably indictable for treason, and the math continues, just add in your own favorite one to the list of betrayals foisted on the idea of America by its presumptive leader.

Yet each new turmoil that the world presents and each new revelation of a past sin or confirmation of details of things we always felt were going on but being hushed reaches the light not as a thunderbolt or calamity but as a lightening and ascension.  Amazingly, the new President has an uncanny reservoir of cool with which to brush off boiling vitriol cast at him from the right and the perfect insouciant ignorance of the many that suggest publicly that he is out of his league outside of community organization and on the planetary stage.  Even his staunchest political opponents must admire his collected coolness in rolling out an agenda that probably won't work but is at least ideologically cohesive and is founded in schools of thought originating from the minds of men rather than the personal channeling of the Almighty. 

Not since Ronald Reagan has America had a grown up living in its White House, and as the world spirals out of control and goes into conniption fits in exploring the boundaries of the new American and planetary paradigm, after nearly a lifetime of everything seeming false and unfathomable, everything seems to suddenly make sense again.  I am going to be sure and enjoy the feeling, because surely it can't go on for very long.

17:45

As Day Three concludes, the advances are dramatic, the conclusion of this deployment in sight.  The array of water treatment modules is elegant, and our re-plumbing of the pump room is way overdue.  The whole rainfall capture concept itself is elegant, and all the pieces are now installed.  As if the gods were arrayed in a titillating strike of humor at our expense, here in the middle of the rainy season it has refused to rain now for three whole days.  It is a bit unusual for me to be praying for a rain.  Usually I am supposed to be praying for the opposite.  It is nice, however, to be able to practice karmic balance in my wishes.  To be perfectly honest, I don't actually pray, ever.  It's just a figure of speech.

Another electrification job took a step closer toward my pocket.  I am scheduled for a final field visit in Hatillo for this coming Wednesday or Thursday, and the work could get underway within days of that time or I could schedule it to get underway upon my return from the States.  The news from today puts the probabilities of another Great Central American road trip back over fifty fifty, and we are hashing out actual dates and meeting up places.  The options are Portland in late July or Denver around the 4th of August.  This is beginning to get exciting.

July 08 2009 / Quepos

Nearing the conclusion of the first full day on Phase II here at Hotel Verdemar, I spent a little over a grand in materials in two trips to the hardware store and the boys have put together the filtration assembly without glue, what we call "presenting" the pieces, and we have decided to hang it from the ceiling.  We fabbed a rimmed water drain beneath and will plumb in a faucet so that the filters can be cleaned and replaced in situ without any need to carry them elsewhere to empty the water or hose them down.  And the assembly from the roof down means that you can actually stoop and get in under them, since the one in the corner will be hard to take the housing off without doing so.  To those who do not recall, my job assignment at this hotel is to migrate their water supply over to rainfall capture and to install a solar hot water heater for trials to see how much money it will save on their electrical water heating costs.

Vetcomer is always a place where your whiskers come in and perhaps even begin to grey a bit before you actually get your order completed and make good your escape.  Today I took Winter with and I read pleasantly as the attendant hustled off after fittings and valves and connectors and paint and welding rods and to check on structural steel and hot water pipe and pressure valves and teflon and sandpaper and paint and nuts and bolts and all the other things I bought.  In paying the bill by online deposit I noticed my account was a few thousand heavier than yesterday and figured it was a deposit toward the Palmichal payment balance that is due.  That is a bill of around $13,000, and that is big money for me, and it has been due for two weeks with no word, so I was elated to see something start to hit the account.  When I made it to an Internet to take care of the day's business, I discovered that it was a deposit for another job, the Saladero batteries, surge protectors, and inverter repair and not partial payment of Palmichal after all.

I figure it is better to be pleased at the news of a new deposit for a new job than to see part of a past due payment come in.  Wicho and Lalo got started on the small security window bars contract for Playa Lapa, and that is the first independent steel work paying job for the shop, and I have to be pleased about it, even if my personal profit on it is a pittance of a hundred bucks.  Still there is money there for the shop and some for electricity as well, and you cannot take daddy steps until first mastering baby ones.

The editor changed my title to Alternative Energy Sources for Costa Rica, but he published it on his new southern Zone newsletter web site (www.sellingcr.com), and gave me a link to www.osawaterworks.com.  It is a modest continuation to The Greening of Costa Rica, but it is significantly the first one published by someone other than myself.  It is clear to me that the most reasonable path for me to convert the aspirations and potential into something of physicality and merit is by taking up the pen aggressively and setting standards of excellence and applying a disciplinary rigor and just sticking to it. 

If this blog keeps me in practice, it does not pay for pinot noir nor beluga caviar nor inspires fat-cat escapades to Cartagena or Manhattan or heaven forbid Seville, Prague, Istanbul, Sebastopol, Mumbai, Shanghai, or Rio de Janeiro.  If the call does not come from Dan, I think I will look south to Colombia for my passport renewal, and depending on how the next two months evolve may repair to Brodey Bend for the month of October to retreat into a literary sabbatical.

Reading Steinbeck leaves me sweaty and feverish, in touch with a steely capacity that I know I have.

July 07 2009 / Manuel Antonio

When the call came I forgot it was coming and got up, the good soldier, to answer the wayward nocturnal soul and to re-direct him, cheerfully even.  There was not a sliver of antipathy or rancor in me.  It was just a lonely misplaced call in the middle of a long night.  It was almost a welcome disruption to my slumber in that the return to sleep would be so pleasant as to inspire my thanks for getting to feel so good about being able to lazily return into that delicious world.  I realize this is analogous to banging your thumb with a hammer for the sheer pleasure that you get from stopping, but these were the thoughts that piled up against each other in my mind when I discovered my phone ringing in the middle of the night and found its echo racing through my head with the room jarred and my bare feet padding across the cool and welcoming ceramic tile.

Imagine my stunned awe to discover that it was my wake up call.  I cradled the phone afterward and looked out across the room, craving relief, some catch that would allow me to duck it all and dive back under my beckoning sheet, some excuse that I could pull out of my hat like rank to disabuse my deluded workers of any notion that I was going to be shepherded out onto the road behind the ruby racer's eager wheel and into the fading darkness of the tropical near-dawn.  But it does not work like that, and I had packed everything the night before and had only to carry my things downstairs.  It was 4:30, and I was ready by 4:38, and outside the moon hung low on the western horizon, swollen, completely full, pale yellow, every crater indelible and distinct, the milky way a belt of blindness lighting the sky from one side of the universe all the way about a zillion light years to the other side, and I worked on a tall glass of steaming sweet coffee seated inside my truck, my neural circuits a morass of potholes and mud to wait for my crew to barrel down main street and urge me on my benumbed way.

I pulled over in Mogos and lay down for twenty minutes, and the boys were waiting on me over coffee in Chacarita and then at Palmar I had Marvin take over the wheel and I slept the rest of the way.  And while that tumble with Morpheus was delightful, it did not replenish the purloined stores of fence-leaping sheep, and for the rest of the day I walked around a bit stunned and sapped.  When the truck with the equipment reported a breakdown upon our arrival in Quepos and a delay in El Aguacate near the pass out of San Jose, I remembered that the first day of a project deployment is always a disheveled mess and wondered why I had not planned this in such a way that it did not require the self-flagellation of this morning's prying out of sleep's enfolding arms.  When Lucia at the hotel hemmed and hawed and said it would be better if we postponed and came back next week, I laughed into the phone and told her she was crazy.  She assured me icily she was perhaps many things with crazy being the single exception to any of the possibilities, and I realized that I was in the middle of exercising the wrong end of my political acumen (again) and bit my tongue and apologized.  But gee whiz, I called her up yesterday to confirm all of this, talked to her twice, and have been telegraphing the significance of this date with the owner for a month and can hardly be blamed for finding her initial suggestion that we come back next week somewhere out in the realm of Alpha Centauri or further, perhaps a red giant, a white dwarf, a black hole or straying in an attention deficit disorderliness outside the astronomical metaphors to include perhaps even a scarlet letter, a blue ball, a yellow bird, a green thumb, a pinko commie fag, and yes, even a giant purple people eater.

By one thirty the truck was still not here, and I had already been back to Quepos and bought groceries and huddled with my foreman and drawn up a plan, and there was no room ready for me in the hotel, no place for me to go, no work to be done, and I was wet and sticky all over from the oppressive torpor (it was an abochorno [translating approximately to 'oppressive torpor']), nothing to do but to wait on a delinquent truck coming at the tepid pace of prosperity from San Jose.  I changed into a different set of shorts, jumped in the pool, and then slept for an hour on a concrete lounging divan poolside, awakening every few minutes to a sky moving through the stages of a storm's gathering.   Sometime around three thirty they finally came up with a room for me, and I slept for another thirty minutes or so until the truck finally arrived, and by the time we got it unloaded and everything checked off it began to rain big gloppy drops, minutes before dusk, and then the power went out.  I strayed outward for some food and tucked into sashimi at the Mar Luna and forayed as far afield as Quepos to kneel before the Great Electronic Altar and tithe at her Internet Cafe places of worship and am now back at the hotel, thick with the allure of tonight's sleep ahead of me.

I found Winter of Our Discontent in my glove box, the edition that Toby gave me in Baltimore upon the occasion of my admiring his literarily beefy bookshelf.  He had duplicates of that and Of Mice and Men and insisted that I take his spares.  I protested, having read them both, but I had admired them and observed them as duplicates, and he did insist, and there was really no other correct course but to thank him while complimenting him on his excellent taste in literature.  His bookshelf has the highest quality / acreage quotient than I shall likely ever again observe.  I do not think that I could conscientiously compile a bookshelf more universal and classic than Toby's.  Dan's bookshelves have always been weightily impressive and somewhat vast in my impressionable awe, but somehow Toby's relatively small bookshelf (four feet high, two feet wide, four shelves) was not as eclectic and more generic or perhaps universal, as opposed to Troopian masters like Borroughs, Dostoevsky, and Kesey and probably additional luminary weirdoes like Kierkegaard, Nitzsche, and maybe even Kerouac and that Howl guy on this side of the pond as well.  Just pure masters on Toby's shelves, from Plato to Lawrence to Turgeyev to Marquez to Steinbeck, not a single tome outside of the realm of traditional and contemporary classics.  Not a single piece of popular fiction, pulp, nothing on that shelf but pure gold (including Catch-22).  The kid has impeccable taste, and he's just a kid, working through all the great junior mysteries, hunkered down at the time over College Algebra, one of the primary languages of physics and indispensable for even a rudimentary and superficial appreciation of pedestrian reality..

July 06 2009 / Crow's Nest

Sarah Palin.  Now there is a woman that you'll just never figure out.

At 19:45 I am gassed up, paid up, instructed up, delegated up, contacted up, and putting off the only remaining requirement for my morning's departure:  packing.  I am reasonably satisfied with the progress made in the office in the past few days in coming up to speed for my famous audit, leaving the girls with a series of final tasks, more routine and drudge than anything requiring decisions.  Lalo is getting left behind on this one, and I hope that the chance affords him as well as I to reflect on the nature of the work that Osa Water Works does and its meaning.  It is only a few days, and all the players, and the two retail businesses, and all the neutral parties and everybody else for that matter will do just fine in my absence, and I am ambivalent on the eve of a five a.m. departure as to this job, jobs in general, life and times, and all things emotional and related to feeling.

There is an oddness to the contours of the hollow into which my soul has flightily settled.  There is an asynchronous offset between my biorhythms and the metronomic pace of the larger life outside my window.  I am here and not at war with myself over it and not discontent but not happy either.  Sources wiser than I suggest that predictors of long life and contentment include the existence of strong interpersonal relationships by the age of forty eight.  I turn that age in a month and a half and cannot point to anything in this realm to succor me in moments of doubt, delusion, or cold-hearted plain dealing truth.

Ambition is a cloak most auspiciously worn by men younger than me, and mine is mostly lip service, an echo of a former feeling that I maybe never really had but just imagined neatly for myself to satisfy expectations I imagined were implicit in my privilege to experience this amazing ride called life.  The death of Michael Jackson has engaged the region of my brain awkwardly sponsoring today's blog posting.   The cautionary tale of the false philosophy of a chemically/surgically micro-/macro-managed existence notwithstanding, the paradox of this man's legacy is too complex to bend my mind fully around.  Whatever the caveats that his apparent psychological aberrations might imply, his gift to the world at large and the manner in which he defined and shaped his own trade in specific is legerdemain.  Like Bernie Madoff, he is going to prove a tough act to follow, and Justin Timberlake is cut from a bolt of cloth with a thread count that pales beside Jacko's.  Pederasty can hardly be a deviance of choice, and nurture may turn out to be a cruel leveler of nature, a tragi-centric reminder that to every astral burst there is a constant gravitational pull, and that for every exquisite ordering of the most bizarre assemblage of components, entropy surrounds everything like an umbrella of anarchy and chaos.

What is enough?  What is over the line?  When does a life take on a relevance outside of itself and become a consequence to society, or even humanity itself?  Is it enough to be happy but not wealthy?  Wealthy but not happy?  Is it enough to be liked and famous or is it too much to be reviled and infamous?  And is pure ordinariness not only just acceptable but perhaps the most exalted of all conditions?

The tiredness and disaffection that I feel from a dispute that I have with a client has me reflecting on things and questioning in a manner that could be construed as weakness.  My failure in the dispute is in personal relations, not in the technical end, and so I see myself through the prism of my eccentricity as faultless.  My adversary is a people-person by nature, wholly non-technical, and in our dispute we speak right past each other.  He never makes the mistake of mentioning a single technical issue, and my recognition and allegation that the dispute is spawned from personal rather than technical complaints goes conveniently ignored, and he is jerking my chain and I know it, and he knows that I know it, and it is a well-lit windowless room painted in a light grey with no furniture, and I am the only one there.  Knowing this does not bring me peace, does not let me walk away from it, does not let me release it into the futility that it's dimensions presuppose.  I will get there, but my path is irreconcilably tortuous and winding.  It's not about the $2000 that is the physical sum at the root of the dispute but the principle of truth, honesty, and decency.  How I can allow these values to guide my actions remains the most cherished and elusive of goals.  If I can manage that, then all the other questions and concerns can't help but fall into place.  But I am not the best Buddha-boy around, and I suppose the best thing to do is to look on this dispute as live-action training, an opportunity for an emotional defibrillation with stakes still at the level of a pittance. 

What lessons I may take away from this dispute remain to be seen, but I am unable to dismiss it.  No matter what degree of rightness I feel I am backed by, the mere existence of a dispute points to my own failure.  How did I not control this outcome better?  It was a mere moment of impatience in a business where patience is not strategy nor virtue but a fundamental commodity, the coin of an uneven and unsympathetic realm.  How did I allow myself to take my eye off the ball, even for a moment?

Well, enough whining.  I'm ready to knuckle down, I think.  But I still haven't figured out just where, how, and with what intent.  For now I can be content that I am street legal and if not setting the world on fire at least playing the game and remain the lead architect, however untalented I may be in this type of architecture, of my own existence.

I think it is time to read The Fountainhead for the third time and to make my peace with whatever little orange-haired Howard Roark may or may not stroll around my cerebral cortex to inform to the extent he is able my daily ambitions and focus.

Sarah Palin.  Now there is a woman that you'll just never figure out.

July 05 2009 / Crow's Nest

The word for today is "fulcrum," and like "navel," words that rhyme with it are obscure and unwieldy.

The fulcrum quality for today is its sharpness, and the most relevant comparator is that of the razor blade.  The mere existence of a fulcrum presupposes the action of opposite forces in torsional synergy.  Perhaps they balance, perhaps their motion produces energy, perhaps it requires energy to set into motion.  But it is not this presumption of Newton's Second Law that is the quality of the fulcrum that is of most interest today but rather the sharpness of the fulcrum itself.

And today's fulcrum is as sharp or sharper than a razor's blade.  And this analogy is meant to be interpreted as a superlative, as if a razor blade is the very sharpest thing in the universe, much like the much bally-hooed photon is supposedly the fastest traveler. 

And the reason that the word for today is fulcrum and its most pressing quality is its sharpness is to remind myself that by sitting on a fence, I might find myself sliced in two from extended dalliance with neutrality and balance when force and mass and momentum may be the more appropriate order of the day.

I think that strategists on both sides of the fascinating Honduran political conundrum are probably seeing things a lot like me on this.  I am not sure what to think of its theatrical manifestation live on CNN.  It is all good in a way in my fascination from a safe afar.  But I wonder what the guy that died is thinking about it all at this point.

I bet that for him this is all sucking really hard at this point.  "How the hell did it come to this?" I bet he is asking, trying to rationalize the inanimation of his body and its progressive rigor mortis, too late by half for a doctor.

Panita broke into Juanita's last night again and made off with the cash drawer, $125, and a couple beers.  I hired my guard back to watch.  Lalo's moving into the house next door was clearly not the key.  Kati stared me down on this to just make the thing secure with real steel, and that is the only real option.  Plus or minus alarms, but maybe we just need to keep the money elsewhere and lock up the booze.  When it happened the first time it felt like being personally defiled and violated.  This time it does not feel that way at all.  It is hard to even work up any disappointment in anyone other than myself for not making this a more unlikely outcome.  Why this town can't take care of this little crackhead thief is beyond me.  The first time it happened I felt like having a personal stake in justice.  Now it feels completely different.  Panita will get his but not from me.  I just have to deprive him from mine, structurally, I guess.  And until I do that, I have $11 a night invested in a night watchman.

There but for the space of a nod Godiva in mounted purity and natal garb all innocence a-kimbo, nipples rubicund in a suppuration of fecund desire, pubes as shiny as chitinous claws of three-toed sloths in slow, tight. heat-sinking curls.

July 04 2009 / Crow's Nest

I need me my own little island, better than Sancho Panza's.

On this day I am torn in my commemorative tributes between our noble forefathers on this Independence Day, and a contemporary of Leonardo da Vinci, one Luca Pacioli, whom I allowed to guide my hand today, much as Virgil might have Allighieri's.  I waded all the way--and bravely--through eight months of bookkeeping to order and cross-reference the data to make it interpretable, a task beyond Katiana's abilities.  I have one final month (Sep, 2008) to enter in the wee hours, following this entry, to tomorrow may begin the database analysis for duplicates and outliers and comparisons with the man's numbers to get toward a full and final handle on the real numbers and who I have receipts from and to whom I will be needing to pay a visit.

You can tell you're living in the real thick of times when a terrorist group is elected in free and fair elections (as in Gaza) and when a Latin American military deposes a freely-elected president to suppress dictatorial impulses and preserve the newly democratic tradition.  It's not exactly World War II or anything, but God I love this place! 

Toupees off to America on her big day !

July 03 2009 / Crow's Nest

Forty years ago today I landed my seven-pound bass from the Ezra Brooks hole in Lake Erling (or Bodcaw if you prefer) in southwestern Arkansas.  It was about three in the afternoon, and I was rewarded with a Miller beer when we got back to the landing where Nant and Nana had their trailer on "the lake."  That was back in the days when cans were still made of steel and could not be crushed by hand.  Two hundred and thirty three years ago tomorrow the United States declared its independence from its colonial taskmaster.  The length of time since landing my biggest fish has been seventeen percent of the entire history of the United States.  The country the passport of which I bear is only five times older than me.  Thinking about this a little bit places a number of things into perspective, like eternity and instantaneity, forever and now.  They must be opposite sides of the same coin.  I am reminded of that poem I wrote in creative writing class that threw my teacher into a tizzy related somehow to the fact that her father had bedded down with the fishes of his own accord and had not left a note.  The opening stanza of Homecoming, penned all those years ago:

Birth and death
Are they two?
Or one apart,
In store for you?

I imagine she did not like the fact that it rhymed either.  Poetry must either rhyme or not rhyme depending on the generation, and any failure to adhere to the literary precepts of the day makes the guilty either foot-draggers or dreamers, throw-backs or visionaries, either way suspicious characters to be maligned and feared, excoriated and banished, imprisoned and suppressed, or at the very least ignored and reviled by the beautiful and consequent.

Puerto Jimenez is a town that warps the mind.  It is where you come to get away from it all but once you are here find yourself ensnared by the rest.  I exist in a teeter-totter equilibrium between coming and going to this place, always as eager to leave as I am to return.  The faces of the people, more familiar to me now in my aging residence here than the faces of any people anywhere have ever been to me, incite revulsion and love.  It is where I belong but am not wanted, where I am a vital cog of a machine with grit in the gears.  In the dawn of this era I posit that there are no places any more that have more sophistication or erudition than other places.  Wherever the Internet permeates, the culture and intellect tend toward a median outside of the governance of the country or state or region.  Maybe this is not really true for people who need people (after all, remember, they are the luckiest people).  But for hermits and the object-oriented, I cannot imagine any great world's capital in possession of any composite set of attributes superior in their totality to those possessed by this second rate dusty cow town on the edge of the planet.  Of course, I may be clearly delusional, but with the advent of Google's street view, you don't have to be in Manhattan anymore to merely stroll through Central Park.

This notion is both terrifying and liberating.  And for the children and teens and young adults that know and understand no other reality it is the baseline humdrum measure of existential continuum.  It is the big "duh," that we older generation are not able to fully get as to us it is a learned rather than intrinsic layout of the universe, never new, never old, only itself in constant change and remolding of its constituent elements.  Among the addled and disturbed rises a rare and glowing consensus about this. 

Yet the band plays on, never missing a note not missed on purpose.

July 02 2009 / Crow's Nest

You know that you're in need of a life when you lean back and consider it to have been a productive day at the office.  Yet, you may still have a chance if you lean back and wonder if that's not just an excuse.  Still, the graphical work with Juanita's promotional stuff was even fun, and I transcended my frustration with InDesign into a sort of resigned willingness to forbear, perhaps even conquer.  And it wasn't so bad.  Consider my fruits:

and

The appearance on the horizon of a possible road trip simply dropped into my lap has me wetting my lips with a nervous tongue.  I should just settle down and work.  Yet the idea of surfing the cordillera from the Colorado Rockies to the Talamancas in what would be my fourth trip up or down the spine of Central America is such a wild ride, so tantalizing in its breadth and scope as to leave me breathless and flushed, at a bit of a loss for words. 

A full two weeks loom, days populated by things fruitful as well as needful, by momentary destinations of my choosing as well as others chosen for me.  I have good work to wrap in Manuel Antonio and a vibrant potential product coming out of that, a meeting with the tax man on the eve of mom's arrival, one week of squiring her around the country, followed possibly by a flight to the States, even accompanying her as far as Houston, and then another two or three weeks on the road. 

Well, we can only see. 

July 01 2009 / Crow's Nest

It was a brisk canter through the day, right from the ring of the opening bell all the way through the checkered flag.  Never stopped, never slowed, never lost the pace, never rolled my eyes.  Never a single part of it curled my toes nor made me cringe, all just a continuum of an existence that is only better than the existence of others through the delusion that it is.  It reminds me of that movie, Brazil, in which the protagonist projects himself out of his lockup by big brother and into an imagined fantasy world.  There is nothing special about my world other than the imagination with which it is infused. 

Take the curious case of Bernie Madoff, for instance.  Now there's a guy that you just won't ever figure out.  Faced with the option of being an honest multi-millionaire or being a crooked billionaire, he opted for the latter.  You get the feeling that his motives were not the money but the illusion of power projecting itself from the deception.  The man had some of the world's smartest people eating out of his hand, and he fancied himself no doubt a kind of king-maker, though in a fantasy kingdom that he controlled.  Why did he fess up?  If he could not sustain the racket any longer, why did he not take the only honorable exit available.  Why did he not bed down with the fishes?  What kind of a mind can willingly accept the reversal of fortunes of his magnitude.  Bernie Madoff.  Now there's a guy you just won't ever figure out.

Today I revised and hammered away and concluded Part I of a two-part solar series.  I sent it to the www.sellingcr.com editor but could not resist posting it as the most recent SDO editorial and the latest addition to the Greening of Costa Rica.  The article is entitled No Carbon for Me, Costa Rica.  It came just at the right time to be approached from the outside and have the article solicited0. 

I loaded Frontpage 2003 on this computer and am back now to this faithful standby.  Sorry, but Dreamweaver really just does not work for me.  If I were a flash guy, it might be  different.  But I'm a stash guy, and Frontpage is a tool that enables me to get my content up in an orderly manner. 

I also do not like In Design.  I am trying to like it.  But I would so much prefer CorelDraw.  Corel is my tool.  It is my graphics interface.  It is the software in which I have designed around a million dollars to date worth of systems of one kind or another.  In its absence I grew frustrated with InDesign in today's design of my cash receipts for CafeNet, and in the end I reverted to Word and felt like I was skimping.  But I still got it done.

Tonight I watched one of the babies drink water.  Now I know that rattlesnakes do actually drink.  They put their mouths in the water and move their lips and you can see their throats moving.  It is the real deal.  It's not something that any of you are likely to ever see for all the rest of your lives no matter how young you might be.  The best you will be able to do is imagine it.  Kati tells me that Juanita is sad and wants to return to her land.  I confide that I do not think that reptiles are capable of such emotions as sadness and happiness.  She insists that the snake is sad.

But I will tell you one thing.  Don't let anyone tell you that snakes aren't smart.  She learned very quickly things about her enclosure and about me.  I watched her global awareness evolve in a very short time period.  I would have considered that unlikely.  She knows damned good and well that that glass wall is there, and she is not the least bit bothered by me anymore.  At first she would rattle for a full hour on end, making the air throughout the crow's nest tremble with the instinctually hair-raising sound.  It's time to find her a nice kitty cat.

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