December 31, 2009:  Crow's Nest, Jimmy

23:00

Well, the tv sat signal failed most of an hour ago, and I am now left to the Internet for my countdown and a shuffle of my endlessly familiar music collection.  We wind our way down . . .

22:00

CNN is marvelous company, and the Concha y Toro Brut sparkling wine had a two glass run for me before reverting to Guinness and as the memorable hour of ten p.m. gallantly approaches with all the subtlety of the ten o'clock local news with thunderstorms on the way, my desk is clear.  The little pieces of paper have been distributed, disbursed, consigned and eighty-sixed.  My office is packed, my virtual world is in the bag or lined up.  My cables are packed.  The batteries are charged.  The accessories packed.  The surveying equpment pouched, the field fest packed.  Could sweep it all up and fly out of here now in minutes if I had to.  Now I have just to pack my clothes.  Imagine if I were to disposition that huge closet of clothes that I will never again wear. . .  

Things are warming up in paradise, and the new decade is a whole two hours away.

20:00 p.m. 

Moving forward.  My sparkling wine is now plenty chilled, coming out of the freezer and into the fridge.  Ten years ago, I was at this time of night in the aftermath of the fajitas dinner with Lisa Boos, Horace Smith, and Orpheus and Aladdin.  Horace brought a bottle of black label Johnny Walker and left me with what we did not drink.  That night the boys and I celebrated the arrival of the millennium.  I had for some reason not been able to buy champagne and had Corona beer, and I encouraged the boys to celebrate with me, and they drank a glass dutifully.  But Aladdin did not like it.  And within twenty minutes they were asleep and I stared out over the park and worked my way through the rest of the scotch and paced the dark apartment and studied the lights from the second story balcony, both the near parking lot lights, the midrange park night lights and the light pollution from the farther east of Allentown and perhaps the glow of Bethlehem a few miles away as well.  I had by then already decided to return to Costa Rica and imagined introducing the kids to it and what the new decade and millennia would bring.  It was one of those crystallinely vivid images that you know at the time that you will forever remember it, vividly, and the hope and aspiration that peopled the cold breathed air . . .

18:00 p.m. 

It's New Year's Day in London, headed at the speed of the earth's rotation toward the Cradle of Western Civilization.  Got everybody paid.  Tried out my new cell phone Internet connection successfully and am still reeling with the brave new world it represents for my connective versatility.  Bought ribs and have them parboiled.  Bought a couple bottles of Guinness Stout and a bottle of sparkling wine.  Am about to get underway with final organization of the clutter on my desk and get packed and ready for my trip tomorrow to San Jose.

9:00 a.m.

How timely for the pillars of my universe to come crumbling down around me.  I went to the police today to see what all this nonsense is about these mysterious calls to them.  The man in charge is a short man and is sitting in for the big man and appears to have a bit of a napoleon complex.  He went through the events of last night and maintains that "somebody" called the police station to yell at them and complain that they were persecuting Juanita's and to try to go over his head.  He all but accused me of doing it, or of some friend of mine.  I am unable to tell whether it is a fabrication by the police, who just had second thoughts about cutting us a break, or whether there really is a mysterious trouble-maker that makes anonymous phone calls to impersonate me or something.  When I pressed them to identify this caller, they said he would not give his name.  When I asked them if it was a man like they had claimed to Aracelly, they said that right after a man called a woman called to say the same thing.  Little Napoleon did not invite me into an office to discuss this, so it was in the middle of a gathering crowd of blue shirts when I told him that I had no problem with them doing their jobs and acknowledge that it was my own fault that the permits were expired, but that I was not there about that simply to make it clear that neither I nor any of my staff called the police station at any time yesterday.  He told me that the call came from Juanita's, that it had to have (the geniuses don't have call tracking or anything) because it came in right after they made their first visit.

I am looking at it as a nice vacation for the staff.  The timing of the police action makes it such that we cannot do anything until the 4th at the earliest, so it was quite a nice little stroke.  Again, it is my own fault for trusting in my staff to stay on top of things like this, but the police and I have no beef, so it is unlikely that they are doing it for sport.  Perhaps, somehow, it is strains of the fired cook, but I don't see him as clever enough to have figured this all out and played it this way. 

As if that were not enough, my AC unit in CafeNet threw a breaker yesterday when Lalo ran an electric drill, and since then the compressor will not come on.  I have the old lumbering behemoth trying to nibble into the day's heat, but the news is challenging.  Erick can't fix it, and while it is under warranty, it was bought in the deposito, which is also not open until the 4th, and I can see that it is going to be pulling teeth to get some traction on a review of that and in the meantime we will struggle and sweat.

As the year and decade wends its way toward its closure, my universe seems sucked into a southerly trending maelstrom where the walls of the perilous universe are adorned with entropic tapestries and small tears in the time-space continuum seem to reveal a hungry and impassive vacuum eager to suck up the crumbs of human industry dribbling from the maw of fate.

It will be nice to slide behind the wheel of Ruby tomorrow and see if Katiana can sort this stuff out on her own.

December 30, 2009:  Crow's Nest, Jimmy

New Year's Eve's Eve . . . it is probably more momentous than it's famous son, if not bereft of any part of the glory.  Yet it is filled with an odd kind of magic and loathing, its own kind of release and constriction.  I walked into ICE this morning after Dan came by to say he had a ticket three people away, and I sat down on 23, and in less than 60 seconds, the person at the counter got up, and neither 24 nor 25 were in the room, so we were next, and it was just amazing!  Yesterday Dan held ticket number 82 and they were on customer 26, averaging fifteen minutes for each customer to get their new cell phone, two tellers.  Dan reported today that his three days of attempted place-holding revealed to him that the ICE employees wear different colored shirts each day of the week.  It leaves me to wonder if on casual fridays they don't all wear different colors and today's world is so much very different than even last year's.

The planet is on either a tractor beam being pulled by some dark force outside of man's grasp or else a conveyor belt fabricated by his own hand, nose in the head wind like the family dog out the station-wagon window.  Staring into the new year, it is also a new decade, and staring back at the old year, I cannot help but to gawk at the decade.  I spent it in Costa Rica, yet in the world ever nearer all along.  As we move in a forward direction through time, the world shrinks unto itself and borders and boundaries expand like the universe beyond their own intersections, leaving in their wake eddies of human commonality in pools resounding with the breadth and promise of individual human aspiration and reach, both in the astral heights of unimaginable success as well as the abysmal depths of catastrophic reversal.

New wormholes in paradise, lapsed permits, the girls falling down, police involved, mysterious calls to the authorities by anonymous third parties pretending to be me, strange declarations before government authorities as the final moments draw down in a strange government world unaccustomed to being open this time of year and halfway jones-ing, it would seem to mess with good people just trying to earn an honest living.  Tomorrow a full day in the nest and then the first a coop gets flown.  Today Ruby returned with her undercarriage glistening with new steel and shiny parts, perched petulantly up above the road, a bit hungry for the humor of bumps.  I have a list of four other things to look into that are not now urgent.  Ruby now has her personal physician and the universe is right again, Mercury remaining the planet nearest Helios, the third rock still a watery one and infinitely beautiful, clearly alive, throbbing with vitality, incandescently vigrant . . . 

December 29, 2009:  Crow's Nest, Jimmy

There is a constellation of forces aligning in the shifting heavens of my personal world to form a giant cosmological signal, such as perhaps a virgin mary, or perhaps a prince phillip, or a charles de gaulle or a steaming zeppelin, flying bicycle, scuba-diving dog, avant-garde cochin rouge, der zeitgeist und mitre box.  Waves of the probable and points of unlikely gravitate around the increasingly dense gastric center of my gravity, and I frequently mull the worm's feeding.  In the brilliance of God and idiocy-savant of man, a crux rests in the fallen residuum and in its nexus with imagination lies the future.

Day two of Santiago's feigned kitchenry.  Poor bastid.  Can he survive the hardships to surf the cream?  He is the only candidate in nine long years for possible managerial oversight of Juanita's.  Well, okay, I said it in public.  I hope it comes to pass.  For the moment he's on Day Two, so don't set the press quite yet, or do, if you must.

Filtration unit in.  Day one of two day front and rear end job on Ruby done, yesterday's AC causing me to shiver with cold in frosty Corvinia, the windows a blizzard of Nazca diagrams and Atlantean city-scapes sketched upon the glass in revelation of the nature of not only god and man but also that of the universe and jazz.

What the banshee-boogie will they possibly think of next?

December 28, 2009:  Crow's Nest, Jimmy

Awakening this morning sometime before dawn, I dropped back eagerly beneath the viscous surface to bob in the near-waking turbulence somewhere between the worlds in neither yet both at the same time.  It was a familiar moment of unrivaled contentment, emerging from a dream with the clarity of the world's workings to find it still dark enough to sleep some more, the dawn near enough to taste its promise, the chirps of morning birds a melodic trill in the morning's coolness when the sheet no longer stood its ground alone against the tropical chill of the lumbering air conditioner.

Lalo made the rounds early after seven as I slurped the happy thick sweet first gulps of strong coffee and was unable to turn up Wicho.  This morning Wicho's wife left him with their child, bound for San Jose and onto Nicaragua.  It was an announced departure, and It was an easy call to  anticipate that he would wallow in booze and would not live up to his commitments, today, even though he told me on Saturday that he would work for me today.  I bought the AC yesterday and have a new water filter and he was to have come in and helped first to order the parts we will replace on Ruby and then install those two pieces of equipment.  With our unhappy developments next door, that plan was changed to include changing all the locks on the house.

Plan B was remarkably smooth in coming together.  Geiner came over to pick up the slack on fixing up my truck, and Erick signed up for the AC installation.  I got the parts ordered and on their way and supposedly delivered on the boat this afternoon for Geiner to start tomorrow, his mission:  change the front steering "rotulas", bushings, and shocks, and to put in the large leaf spring on the rear on both sides and those shocks as well.  He will review my 4wd tomorrow while he has the front disassembled.  He is a private contractor without a garage, and I am pleased that he will be doing the work, even if it will cost me $150 with him and one third of the cost with Wicho.  Erick and Lalo got the AC installed, and it is sub-arctic in the Crow's Nest, the windows all frosted over, me huddling here with long johns and a jogging suit, shivering as I tap out these words.

Tomorrow as Geiner works on my truck and Lalo accompanies Graciela to do lawn maintenance at Playa Lapa while she cleans after our current renters in advance of those arriving the day after tomorrow, Erick will bring his brother Chito, fresh in from Panama, over to switch out the water filtration system and get me back in the business of selling fresh filtered water in the crow's nest and marketing my water filters.  In the kitchen Erick's other brother, Santiago, had a red banner first day as new kitchen chief, guided by the assistant cook, Memo, who happens to be the new cook's son, something that is more coincidental than by design.  We had a busy day in Juanita's, with a variety of dishes ordered, and they all came out, they all looked good as far as I saw, and the kitchen at the end of the day was twice as clean as when he arrived in the morning, Santi with a big smile on his face. 

Inside the Crow's Nest, shading my eyes against the light coming in from the windows in my stern monitoring of Main Street, the calls I made bore fruit.  I low-balled my Barva hydro client to come and do a survey and tell him what he needed on January 2 for a mere $100, which will cover my gas up there and my hotel the night before and offset travel costs that were sunk already.  And I expect to get a sale out of this and an installation contract; this one has a very good feel and is a small system.  Second call was for a larger system, corroboration to get underway with an electrification project that has been under revision and proposal and revision and study and counter-proposal for eight months.  Now it's a go and just waiting on the money.  Then drawings for a building from an existing client, wanting a quote to build the bungalow and making noise about wanting to upgrade his hydro system to an induction unit.  I have since met with Copete and handed off the drawings and am expecting a list of materials and labor quote tomorrow for me to put together a formal reply and lead in to a likely proposal.  If you saw the movie, La Femme Nikita, the original, you will remember the "janitor" that arrives at the site of the botched hit to clean up the mess caused by a goof in the job being done at the time.  I like to think of Copete as my janitor, and have referred to him before as the cleaner.  He's the go-to guy when the thing's on the line.  No matter what it is, no matter what field, no matter how hard or fucked up, Luis will fix it and make it not just work, but look good. 

The fiduciary flood-gates are disgorging frightening outlays of cash.  Air conditioner.  Car parts.  Vacation housing.  Rental car.  Juanita's equipment and supplies.  And there is more to come.  I have to buy things in San Jose on January 2-3 to complete preparations for our little January adventures.  Tomorrow Dan and I go to ICE where he will get a cell phone under my company name, and I am certianly going to get a second line and new phone for the company.  The spending is a little nervous-making, but you can't make anything happen with a static bank account.

With only days away from my launching what I expect to have the potential to be a spectacular vacation, I am giddy with the progress internally toward a perception of readiness for this adventure.  The streaming flow of emails and phone calls, reservations, water, power, real estate, are like little lights that blink on and off in different colors throughout the day with a pulsing and variable luminosity that turns chemical levers in my brain, like chocolate, sex, or cocaine, making the whole thing coast on its own circuit of magic, a little imaginarium of my own here in the Epicenter fun house in paradise.

December 27, 2009:  Crow's Nest, Jimmy

It is raining for the second evening in a row in Jimenez, an advent so unseasonal that it has the locals furrowing their brows.  It's not like an anomaly so much as like a spaceship set down in the front yard.  Well, maybe not quite that out of the usual, but it is not what the weather does here.

I had to give my day chef the old heave-ho, loss of confidence, and have his replacement starting in the morning.  I deplore the little mini-drama of it and the interruption but in its aftermath feel light and breezy, tickled by gentleness settling around me.  His replacement is not as skilled in the trade and is not a cook by vocation.  But he is energetic and capable and eager for the challenge and change of pace.  He is Erick's brother, Santiago, the father of my nighttime assistance cook.  The lines are moving downstairs, and no matter how much difficulty it is to train and transition to new kitchen staff, it is better to suffer intensely the transition period than to suffer perennially the nagging submission to mediocrity and surrender.

Orpheus and I worked through doubts about the ambitious itinerary that I have lain forward.  He worries that it is too hectic and does not give him the town time with his girl in Jimenez which is where he knows and is familiar.  I can dig where he is coming from but there is not an optimal solution without cutting something else out.  We settled pretty much for the original itinerary with the possible exception of them splitting off from the group to spend the Manu Villas days in Jimenez while the rest of us lounge on the Hatillo mountaintop.  I am hopeful and pretty confident that the unfolding of this trip will be remarkably more chill than the itinerary looks to be on paper.  But we will just have to see about that.

Tomorrow is a near return to normalcy, Monday, thank goodness.  I have a new air conditioner for the Crow's Nest.  There were no 24K BTUs left and I settled for an 18K unit rather than to bump up to 35K.  Let's hope it does the job, and tomorrow I shall have both the AC and the new filter assembly downstairs in CafeNet while parts arrive to do the mechanical work on Tuesday on my truck and see about a little dental work for myself as well this week and cleaning up the shop and getting the Uvita bunkhouse bills paid and perhaps building the bunk beds and lining out pending project work options in Hatillo, Manuel Antonio, Nicoya, and for the Barva hydro eval for the 3rd.  Not to mention prepare myself for a January 1 departure back to the capital area, ready with my

December 26, 2009:  Crow's Nest, Jimmy

There are always labor problems around Christmas.  It is just an integral part of the Christmas season in paradise.  I would perhaps be wise to remember this in advance and be impassive when it arrives.  This year it revolves around the mysterious disappearance from the storage room of six cases of beer that happened sometime between closing time on the 24th and 9:30 this morning when it was discovered.  We were closed Christmas Day.  We have positive knowledge that the cases were there at closing time on the 24th.  It was not a break in as there were no damages anywhere, and no forced locks.  The back door has a chain and padlock and the front door is dead bolted, so that you cannot get out from inside without a key.  All indications point to an inside job.  In the very tenuous and challenging industry of food service, it is often a relief just to break even many months, far less to turn a profit.  And to have $200 in beer walk like that is one of those sobering moments when I have to question the wisdom of continuing to operate at all.

But you can't be emotional about these things.  We are packed tonight, everybody eating, tons of food flying downstairs, drinks, everybody humping, and this is just the beginning of months of the same.  I look forward to a turn at righting the helm and trimming the sails in the full-throated advance into the season.  Perhaps there shall be some more hiccups before we hit our stride.  But no matter how bad things seem like they could be, they can only be worse when betrayal steals among the shadows of the staff to sow doubt, suspicion, and rancor.  With tumors, you cut them out before they can grow at the expense of healthy cells to eventually threaten the very life of the host.  You excise such pieces of malevolent cells.  And you throw the excised mass of malignant flesh into a pail and dispose as a biohazard.  That's what you do with tumors.

December 25, 2009:  Crow's Nest, Jimmy

The latest iteration:

As Christians and consumers and children celebrate one of the big days of the faith, www.ikhanman.com celebrates its second birthday and gleefully enters its third year of existence.  Staring at a blank page--or screen--those two years ago sitting not twelve feet from where my ass is presently planted, I remember the dilemma that it posed for me.  I was not sure why I felt compelled to create such a thing and had battled through months of telling myself it would be arrogant and egotistical to do such a thing and serve no purpose beyond unhealthy ones.  Yet in that Christmas Day's solitude, I overcame that inertia, purchased the domain and made the initial framework.  I took the content down a week or two later, embarrassed at my own audacity and it was not for several more months that I returned the content to the public sphere.  But it was not until August 1, 2008 that I wrote my first weblog entry that the overall project began to take form and to assume its own internal logic and purpose.  Today, it is so much mindless blather over subjects of interest to few to none outside of myself, and since I write it, it's not like I need to actually see it since I know and feel this stuff anyway.  Yet, this is the eve of a new decade and the drapery that adorns today's house is different from that of earlier years, and it must be true that we do things for reasons that we may not be able to explain but that derive from some requirement to do them that flowers from some part of the subconscious or the hyperconscious or somewhere internal for a reason, however unknown that reason my be to us at the time.  Today, there is no doubt about what this web site is for, but the beauty part is that its meaning and purpose are no more static than the weather, and that the meanings and purposes evolve and change in such a way that nothing takes something from something prior or future. 

Today Keystone Qaeda has struck again, to a predictable outcome.  For whatever America's calamitous missteps in the wake of 911, the progression toward where the world exists today and where it existed on September 10, 2001 has been dramatic.  For all the necessary debate over whether this enemy was really an enemy on the level of which a "war" might be waged or rather just an organized band of sociopathic international criminals blinded by lockstep religious adherence to a cult that values despotism, hatred, and human oppression, this battle of ideas is way overblown.  There are those that admire Osama bin Laden or his ideals.  But there are those within our own country that admire and honor the American cop-killer Mumia Abu-Jamal as well.  America has flirted dangerously close to the suppression of its constitutional civil liberties to do battle against its declared enemies.  But these enemies war against themselves through their own ends, and their only hope of any degree of success is the ability to goad the great standard-bearer of freedom and liberty to abase itself to the employment of tactics beneath itself to rout out and kill these fanatics.

It is not possible for a political entity to dismiss these criminals as beneath the level of battlefield adversaries, yet al-qaeda is not anywhere near as dangerous to the average American as lightning.  There are one thousand times more people slain in internal wars among gangs in America's heartland in one month than there will be American casualties of terrorism in any given year following the single anomalous outlandish success of 911.  Hunger in America kills more people than al-Qaeda does.  In its protracted war with extremists, many people have lost perspective and balance.  These cave-dwelling fringe fanatics are not enemies of America.  They don't rise to the significance of being an enemy of America.  In the post cold war the only enemies of America are those from within, and I am not talking about secret planted cells, either.  The enemy of what we value and cherish in America's national identity and values is the subversion of that identity and those values by its people and leadership, not necessarily in that particular order.

In six days we shall conclude the most important decade in the evolution of American identity since that of the sixties at a minimum and possibly since the forties.  And the world has emerged from the decade of America's experimentation with despotism and tyranny intact with our national values restored and lifted back like the trophy they collectively represent back onto the national hearth to turn inward upon our brethren and outward onto our other brethren.

The Khan Man is bullish on the planet and its major and minor powers as we turn a major chapter and stare into a crystalline horizon rippling with the friction between energy and matter and lubricated by that great equalizer, human imagination.

December 24, 2009:  Crow's Nest, Jimmy

It was just after noon today when the receding rush of emails suddenly just stopped altogether.  Even the spam is down to nearly 1997 levels, and an awful lot of people out there must be doing an awful lot of things offline, and it gives me reassurance that the world is not as hopelessly wired as it pretends to be.  I stand proudly as a token standard-bearer, the lonely watch over the abandoned virtual world, a sentinel of solitude, like the winner of a Shirley Jackson lottery, taking it on the chin for humanity.

Perhaps now, I like to joke to myself, I can get some work done around here.  Well, I am working on a bottle of Malbec and have not even gotten past my second sip of the first glass.  I responsibly went to the grocery store and bought enough things for a fine feast tonight if I summon the muster to cook, and the ingredients for a pizza tomorrow.  Or a nice salad.  I have a whole chicken that I have decided to bake but have not gotten it prepared and into the oven yet.

The entire day passed without a single problem with extant reservations, testimony that something in our internal system is holding up and working.  This season has far exceeded any other period of reservations taking ever.  And I am content that it is an off to the races thing with my web sites dominant and the years of consistent service paying off in good reviews in guide books and travel web sites and fora and word of mouth.  I delight in pondering it all and reminding myself that I created it all, that I generated this little engine of revenues.  And however modest, it is nevertheless not bad for Paradise, and it is a construct erected from the zippy nada, an apple pie created in a vacuum, an opportunity seized in a timely moment and husbanded into tenuous commercial adulthood. 

Enjoy it while it lasts, Khanster; you are going to move on soon to things of greater merit.

Merry Christmas, Costa Rica, America, world.  Merry Christmas Christians, Muslims, Krishnas, Buddhists.  Merry Christmas doctors and longshoremen.  Merry Christmas hookers and carneys, professors and porn stars, beggars, bailiffs, bounty-hunters and barnstormers.  Merry Christmas one.  Merry Christmas All.

And to all a good night.

Revised trip itinerary

DATE	PAX	FLUX	SLEEP LOCATION	WEB	POTENTIAL ACTIVITY	ATTENDANCE
1-Jan	1		Pto Jimenez - Crow's Nest	www.ikhanman.com	Preparations	P
2-Jan	1		Heredia hotel	in progress	Transit	P
3-Jan	3	R H in	Atenas:  Casa de Megumi	http://casademegumi.com/Home_Page.html	Hydro eval; pick up at airport	P R H
4-Jan	7	O A B M in	Atenas:  Casa de Megumi	http://casademegumi.com/Home_Page.html	pick up rental car; real estate closing; airport	P R H O A B M
5-Jan	7		Pto Jimenez - Crow's Nest	www.soldeosa.com	Transit	P R H O A B M
6-Jan	7		Carate / Jimenez	www.playalapa.com	Catchup, Internet, Beach afternoon preci-osa	P R H O A B M
7-Jan	7		Carate / Jimenez	www.playalapa.com	Drive Carate, beach, lounge	P R H O A B M
8-Jan	7		Carate / Jimenez	www.playalapa.com	Corcovado / Waterfall / Beach / Lounge	P R H O A B M
9-Jan	8	S in	Turrialba hotel	in progress	Transit, airport, Transit, hotel Turrialba	P R H O A B M S
10-Jan	8		River	http://www.whiteh2o.com/whatsnew.php?newsID=7	raft, camp on river	P R H O A B M S
11-Jan	8		Puerto Viejo	in progress	raft to take out, transit to PV	P R H O A B M S
12-Jan	8		Puerto Viejo	in progress	Beach Town Party	P R H O A B M S
13-Jan	8		Puerto Viejo	in progress	Beach Town Party	P R H O A B M S
14-Jan	8	H out, J in	Hatillo:   Villas Manu	www.manucr.com	Transit, airport, Villas Manu	P R H O A B M S
15-Jan	8		Hatillo:   Villas Manu	www.manucr.com	surfing lessons practice Dominical	P R J O A B M S
16-Jan	8		Hatillo:   Villas Manu	www.manucr.com	Serpentarium / Cascada El Diamante	P R J O A B M S
17-Jan	8		Near airport	in progress	Transit, return rental car	P R J O A B M S
18-Jan	4	A B M S out	in process / open	in progress	Airport, Dad flies Jimenez, Transit	P R J O
19-Jan	4		Pto Jimenez - Crow's Nest	www.soldeosa.com	The Adventure continues	P R J O
20-Jan	4		up in the air	www.osapenrealty.com	up in the air	P R J O
21-Jan	4		up in the air	www.osawaterworks.com	up in the air	P R J O
22-Jan	4		up in the air	www.osapower.com	up in the air	P R J O
23-Jan	4		up in the air	www.frictionzeroconcepts.com	up in the air	P R J O
24-Jan	3	O out	up in the air	www.juanitasmexican.com	up in the air	P R J
25-Jan			up in the air	www.playalapa.com	up in the air	P R J
26-Jan			up in the air	www.matapalorental.com	up in the air	P R J
27-Jan			up in the air	www.tourosa.com	up in the air	P R J
28-Jan			up in the air	www.orpheustartist.com	up in the air	P R J
29-Jan			up in the air	www.cabinaslosmineros.com	up in the air	P R J
30-Jan			up in the air	www.ikhanman.com	up in the air	P R J
31-Jan			up in the air	www.dosbrazosabiertos.com	up in the air	P R J
1-Feb		R out	up in the air	www.corcovaadoguide.com	up in the air	P J
2-Feb			up in the air	www.centralamericanroadtrip.com	up in the air	P J
14-Feb		J out	up in the air		Alone again, naturally	P
						P Paul R Russ H Heidi O Orpheus A Aladdin B Ben M Max S Sonya J Jerry

December 23, 2009:  Crow's Nest, Jimmy

On this particular date, a full day's passage without some sort of intervention required for a frantic traveler with some mix-up on the reservations is like a gentle caress, and today's uneventful passage was like the time-stop flow of a mango ripening on the tree.  By this late hour the day is so suffused with sticky sweetness that it wants to fall from its lofty perch to splat upon the ground and may yet do so.

Travel planning for the big costa rica hoe down starting the third is thrilling and unnerving.  Today I rented a car.  And I booked the first house and laid out an adventuresome itinerary and am nudged onward by prices that seem digestible, surprisingly in some cases.  The www.vrbo.com options are incredible, what a great way to plan a trip.  Let's see if I can pick winners. 

I have to get Ruby all tuned up and checked up, with this upcoming load, but it is more practical to rent a Bego and have the two cars than to rent a Montero and have just one.  And the rest of it is mostly logistics, food, and some juice:  beach, rafting, fishing, something every once in awhile.  Okay, I have worked out a tentative itinerary:

DATE	PAX	FLUX	SLEEP LOCATION	POTENTIAL ACTIVITY	ATTENDANCE
1-Jan	1		Pto Jimenez - Crow's Nest	Preparations	P
2-Jan	1		Heredia hotel	Transit	P
3-Jan	3	R H in	Atenas:  Casa de Megumi	Hydro eval; pick up at airport	P R H
4-Jan	7	O A B M in	Atenas:  Casa de Megumi	pick up rental car; real estate closing; airport	P R H O A B M
5-Jan	7		Pto Jimenez - Crow's Nest	Transit	P R H O A B M
6-Jan	7		Pto Jimenez - Crow's Nest	Catchup, Internet, Beach afternoon preci-osa	P R H O A B M
7-Jan	7		Carate:  Playa Lapa	Drive Carate, beach, lounge	P R H O A B M
8-Jan	7		Carate / Crow's Nest	Corcovado / Waterfall / Beach / Lounge	P R H O A B M
9-Jan	8	S in	Turrialba?	Transit	P R H O A B M S
10-Jan	8		Turrialba?	RAFTING?	P R H O A B M S
11-Jan	8		Puerto Viejo	Transit, chill	P R H O A B M S
12-Jan	8		Puerto Viejo	Beach Town Party	P R H O A B M S
13-Jan	8		Puerto Viejo	Beach Town Party	P R H O A B M S
14-Jan	8	H out, J in	in process / open	in process / open	P R H O A B M S
15-Jan	8		in process / open	in process / open	P R J O A B M
16-Jan	8		in process / open	in process / open	P R J O A B M
17-Jan	8		Near airport	Transit, return rental car	P R J O A B M
18-Jan	4	A B M S out	in process / open	Airport, Dad flies Jimenez, Transit	P R J O
19-Jan	4		Pto Jimenez - Crow's Nest	The Adventure continues	P R J O
20-Jan	4		up in the air	up in the air	P R J O
21-Jan	4		up in the air	up in the air	P R J O
22-Jan	4		up in the air	up in the air	P R J O
23-Jan	4		up in the air	up in the air	P R J O
24-Jan	3	O out	up in the air	up in the air	P R J
25-Jan			up in the air	up in the air	P R J
26-Jan			up in the air	up in the air	P R J
27-Jan			up in the air	up in the air	P R J
28-Jan			up in the air	up in the air	P R J
29-Jan			up in the air	up in the air	P R J
30-Jan			up in the air	up in the air	P R J
31-Jan			up in the air	up in the air	P R J
1-Feb		R out	up in the air	up in the air	P J
2-Feb			up in the air	up in the air	P J
14-Feb		J out	up in the air	Alone again, naturally	P
					P Paul R Russ H Heidi O Orpheus A Aladdin B Ben M Max S Sonya J Jerry

December 22, 2009:  Crow's Nest, Jimmy

The closer I get to Christmas the farther from God I feel. 

It's purely coincidental and perhaps undergirds one of the universal cliches of the holidays, that they are stress mines.  Yet, I am not stressed, and the minefield of southerly-bound vibes intruding upon my Christmas cheer is defensibly injust, actually kafkaesque.

The government wants me to pay the $4000 medical bill incurred by one of my employees who is having a difficult pregnancy and was held in hospital for tests.  I was fifteen days late last month on my monthly social security payments.  I have had this employee on social security for five years and paid every cent all along the way and just happened to be fifteen days overdue on that month's payment when she had a medical emergency.  So, naturally, I am financially responsible for all the medical bills incurred.  How's that for a Merry Christmas?

Oh, it is easy to get a righteous dander up over preposterous inequities, and I get some bragging rights out of a descent into Kafka's world.  But in the bigger picture it points to internal shortcomings of my operation, challenges in the parlance of the motivational talking head set. 

I wonder if I might not be battling the Peter's Principle.  I wonder if I might not need to take back a bunch of this stuff on me and pare the job down to a routine and regular tasks for my staff.  But then it would be me swamped, rather than dear Katiana.  I have too many things going on.  Too many pieces of data flying by in little encrypted packages, a storm of little grains of presumptive relevance and value.  It's nearly too much for me, and I suppose that I ask an awful lot of her to try to help me keep all that stuff straight and at my finger tips as needed.

The season brings out the nuance within the trade, and I marvel at the mechanistic pleasure and ironic sense of satisfaction in playing the little savant-wizard of travel assistance.  These days have been absolutely socked with continuous reservations emails, many of them complicated calls for guidance on circuitous packages filled with activities and travel and small needs.  I never imagined I would wind up on the other end of a travel agency inquiry.  How the fallen have mighty!

December 21, 2009:  Dunn Inn, Josey

A nice relaxed cool day in San Jose, bought some dishes and kitchen equipment for Juanita's, went and learned about grey water treatment from an equipment supplier where I get my pumps, followed along with the slightly relenting glut of reservations inquiries and accounts pending, and delighted in the unseasonably cool weather.  The sun did not break through the clouds all day, and the sky has seemed to brim rain all day long, and the Josefinos are scratching their heads, expecting an unseasonable rain that has still not come.  Climate change is the norm, not the exception.

Half day tomorrow of more shopping, then headed the Ruby Racer back to paradise for a turn in the shop and a final wind down in seasonal cheer and the anticipation of the January deluge.

December 20, 2009:  Dunn Inn, Josey

The CNN here is different from the CNN I get through Sky in the Crow's Nest.  Instead of the Hong Kong desk, I am getting Anderson Cooper here, and tonight a two hour special, Planet in Peril, really well done, a story in every continent (except Antarctica) and simply stunning photography.  The shift in global preoccupation from Kyoto to Copenhagen has been enormous, transcendental.  I am skeptical that changes will make a difference in a climatic transition that I personally think has surely already tipped and is not reversible, the paradigm shift is overdue and welcome.  Talk about a brave new world . . .

Words are threads in the fabric from which civilization is woven.

That is the synthesis of my trip today across the Cerro de la Muerte.  It was freezing cold, rainy, arctic.  And my truck starter would not fire in Perez, so the whole drive was under that little nagging awareness of a mechanical shortcoming.  At Chespiritos I backed it up an incline, and it turned over immediately after parking, but after returning with a coffee, I had to jump start it.  Then parked on a ramp at Il Pomodoro in San Pedro it did start and now it sits in the parking lot of the Dunn.

I'm going to do my town running tomorrow by taxi and composite here and not take the truck out until I head back to the peninsula. 

December 19, 2009:  Crow's Nest

I love it when they show clips of cricket matches on CNN's World Sport, and baseball like thing either gets hit or gets passed a padded up dude dressed for a Sunday social waving a paddle around, and all the people suddenly throw their hands up and the crowd erupts in cheers.  It is totally mesmerizing, this eruption of emotion over seemingly meaningless confluences of circumstances.  I am similarly amused at the spectrum of outrage coming from the poles on both the United States domestic health care reform initiative currently swatted around by that nation's legislative body and the global feeding frenzy recently concluded in Copenhagen.  The two look just the like to me.  In both cases, an agreement is struck in which none of the the extremists on either side of either argument were satisfied.  So, Howard Dean, former chairman of the National Democratic Party, comes out in open opposition to his party's negotiated platform.  And in Copenhagen we witnessed both China and the United States caroming along toward shared responsibility and leadership.  Neither agreement promulgates unachievable or unrealistic goals.  Neither agreement evokes radical change to economic purse-strings.  In each case, an agreement is toward a greater good without an unsustainable ground shift in the status quo.  To me--and I may be wrong--this is the way fruitful progress happens.

My world leveled out and made ringing sense a little over a year ago when I helped to elect Barack Obama to the presidency of the United States.  But a strange thing happened on the way to the voting booth last year, at least for me.  Formerly a political commentary junkie, I have since that time barely been able to make it through any editorial on any side of any issue.  In the all-opinion-all-the-time news currents available in contemporary media, I feel a desensitization to it all, no linkage whatsoever to any school of thought or group with a purpose.  Many of the things that environmentalists spout I am totally down with.  Yet, I most certainly do not subscribe to any tacit membership in that group. 

For a whole year now I have wondered if maybe I just lost something, and I began to realize as Obama's numbers began to fall in his nambsy-pambsy approach to pressing issues from Afghanistan to health care, punctuated by the sidelines of beer summits between cops and professors and the metallic distaste of too frequent appearances and speeches, that much of what he is maligned for may precisely prove to be at the core of what enables him to transform a nation that one year ago was in vital need of transformation.

I see the glass as half full.

December 17, 2009:  Crow's Nest

I landed the fourth rat this morning, with the chopped off tail and am certain that he is the last of the mysterious rat family that surfaced at Playa Lapa.  I am bearish on Avatar and worry that the mighty director James Cameron has placed technology over the fire-place importance of story.  I think it is about time that we heard a story of the insurgents hacking the drone video feed and feels like it nearly humanizes all parties in this ugly little conflict that is a bit like the Yojimbo classic, except that probably in the end no one man will be left standing.  The town is contracted galactic, big but small.  I know not a tenth part of all the real goings on, perhaps less. . . and I am not particularly curious about greater familiarity.  I met an old lover on the street tonight.  I felt so glad to see her, she just smiled.  And in the continuuum of existance some of us are larger and some of us are smaller and some quite the same.  Som have reverted to our drugs of old, some have found new surplants and are winging a whole new signal flare.  And some of us revert to the old old standards of food and drink.  The season's have changed, and summer is here.  It feels like a branding iron, a heavy one, and their is smoke rising from the pit and a bunch of half drunk cowboys trying to act sober and dignified, all of it confusing me immeasurably and it is like the fall of Troy, a date certain, against which relativism smacks like overripe tomatoes upon the foreheads of querulous adversaries.

December 16, 2009:  Crow's Nest

Now I see as though through a glass darkly the rising timber of the season in the pitched felicity of the street noises, the fading memory of the now timid rains slinking off to wherever they go in the summertime, and in the flashing lights of a spectrum of colors that blink on and off all over Juanita's wanting nothing more than an unsuspecting epileptic to walk in and take it all in.

Today I completed the Ninfas electrification bid, a solicited proposal that is worth $60,000 awarded and $1000 declined, so I get something out of it one way or the other.  It leaves me with only the Verdemar grey water proposal lingering on my immediate do-list, and I am on the verge of being able to kick back monitor the progressive passing the days of Christmas.  I guess we are winding our way down through the fourth day--the calling birds day--heading into the five golden rings day tomorrow.  Well, I guess not, I guess the twelve days actually begin on Christmas.  The silly things you should already know that you can always learn on wikipedia . . .

BREAKING NEWS!  I have now paid my December rent and all CafeNet and Osa Water Works Christmas bonuses as well as one bonus from Juanita's, with the remainder capitalized for cash payment tomorrow.  On the heels of wrapping the Hatillo electrification proposal I almost feel like I am on a roll.  Tomorrow the power and water will be off from seven a.m. until four p.m., meaning a kind of urbane misery unless I head out to Carate and weather the deprivation with solar power and satellite internet.  It kills two birds with one stone, what with the vanilla and peanut butter loving Carate rats likely lying dead in the maze of traps left for them yesterday morning.  Two days ought to be enough of for them to make their fatal choices.

Yes, so that is it then.  Might as well stay up and work late-ish today and perhaps not even come back tomorrow, take food and spend the night.  How bad an idea can that be?

December 14, 2009:  Tucan Hotel, Uvita

Twenty four percent.  24%.  240 per mil.  Twenty-four one hundredths.  Two point four tenths.  0.24.

That is the percentage of my life lived in Costa Rica.  I have live in Arkansas a full 25% of my life.  A quarter here, a quarter there, and half somewhere else.

On the eve of the penultimate payday of this calendar year, we wind down toward the end of a decade.   In 18 days, just under three weeks, we will never have the oughts to kick around anymore.  In eight years a nostalgia will set in as the aging x-gen set open the curtains upon an impinging existential angst to remember with sappy drippy reflections on how good things used to be way back when. 

And what a decade it has been!  The fodder for editorial comment is so rich and dense that without plucking and peeling a grape a day, the fruit just multiplies until the herculean task of dissection and compartmentalization gets unwieldy, like matter at the nucleus of a star gone nova.

Here in the Crow's Nest, the mind races and whorls around too many thorny edges of quotidian obligations to be able to indulge the luxury of navel-gazing.  Today, I worked from eight a.m. until four thirty p.m. with only a fifteen minute break for lunch by the new cook's helper and in that entire workday never did anything other than answer the revolving door of reservations requests.  We ka-chinged around $3500 in credit card receipts today and made another $4500 or so in offers, and it has left me dazed, with two overdue engineering proposals for Hatillo and Manuel Antonio swimming around in my brain and not yet on paper, a litany of intentions lined up and unfulfilled for Juanita's, computer programming needs unfulfilled for administration and systems in CafeNet, and a an impending descent upon the corvine nest of paradise by my children, cousin, and their respective posses on tap for early January to float me away on the fluffy tides of a secret abiding satisfaction, irrespective of the relative merits of worth and value and other relativisms.. 

My house has a hundred rooms and many windows but very few doors, and those keep changing places.  I wander from place to place inside adjusting tapestries and wiping smudges off the glass plates covering obscure works of art, mostly amateur, but by the time I make the rounds I have to start at the beginning again, and I try to look out the windows at the evening news online or into the faces of people on vacation or into the specter of my dreams and cannot bare the luminous intensity of the diversion and return to the pacing about the giant house and never seem to get it quite all tidied up.

The saving grace, I suppose, is that empires are not in danger of crumbling under even my sternest gaze. 

December 11, 2009:  Tucan Hotel, Uvita

An end to wise men.

There was a time, surely, when the world, indeed the universe, was within the comprehensive grasp of a single individual.  Granted, the individual would have been very special:  Leonardo da Vinci, Archimedes, Galileo, Sir Isaac Newton, Einstein, but within the context of human intellect, it was within the grasp of such men to have a handhold on an understanding of their worlds, so eerily the same yet different from our own.  Perhaps it is a fatuous illusion, surely so.  But today such a notion is laughable.  The geography of today's life exists on topologies only recently contrived if not discovered.  And the pace of progress is exponential in all the fields so that it is monumental to stay on top of one's own field alone--if one has a field--while the totality of existence spirals that much more completely out of grasp with each passing second.

Jack of all trades, I like to sometimes be honest, master of none.

Universes are strangely personal, and it seems vital to relate well to them and play ball.  My own is settling toward a new plateau in this past year of vast geopolitical changes.  In the permutation of the landscape a personal landing pad seems surely hovering down there somewhere through the lingering fog.  Whatever the truth of it, the ultimate truth of anything, and its relative merit, it is all entertaining, entirely worth the price of admission.

December 08 2009:  Hotel Verdemar, Manuel Antonio

December 06 2009:  Crow's Nest Jimmy

December 05 2009:  Crow's Nest Jimmy

December 04 2009:  Crow's Nest Jimmy

I am a strand of piano wire tightly strung.  I am the gusts of wind that course between the Hato Rey towers in downtown San Juan.  I am the first bighead carp in Lake Superior and the last Polar Bear to leave the shores of the Great Slave Lake.  I am oxygen carried in arterial streams of blood and reduced iron molecules coursing back toward the heart empty-handed.  I am at once both the sun and its most fractional component and simultaneously neither and possibly both.  I am welling sap in a sugar maple, the stray fiver in a Salvation Army bucket, the antenna off a seventies-vintage Buick broken off and empressed into service as a crack pipe.  I am the grey in the metropolis, the burnt part of sienna, the head of the maiden and the rattle, rattle rattle, here come the cattle, Phi Mu, of death.  I am the smoke that rises from a cooking fire, the polychlorinated biphenyls that allow your home to access high voltage power lines.  I am the equals sign of an arithmetic relation, a geometric fractal, a LaPlace transform, an ordinary differential equation, and the null hypothesis, all in the same sweeping breath but not necessarily at the same time.  I am the didact and interloper, the aspiring hermit, the insufferable bombast and mousy egotist.  I am two equations and three unknowns.  I am everything in the world I can possibly imagine.

December 03 2009:  Crow's Nest Jimmy

Pregnant girl slips, bangs head on rock, is knocked unconscious, drowns in stream.  Today's news from Matapalo is stunning in its delicate savagery.  There were no witnesses outside of the forest.  Death rides a horse fed on the oats of all normally trivial decisions.  A different set of footwear, and she would never have known how perilously close she came.  Bad back Bob took the deep-six bow on Tuesday, heart attack it is rumored.  I have waved to him nearly daily at his table in Carolina where he came daily to have a couple toddies around five every day.  I noticed today that his table and seat were eerily empty while plenty of tables were busy, and I thought when I looked away that I caught him waving and looked back but only a trace of the image lingered and then dissolved into the hurly burly of Main Street as the parrots squawked away in their overhead passage toward their mangrove roosts.

November rushed like a spirited chute of water laminar between two bluffs, the canyon hungry to feed its fishes, and December was like a knick point where the water rushed more quickly, as if in a giant coursing flume.  In the distance there is the standing wave of Christmas, turbulent in its giddy chaos, and I imagine my canoe rising up the standing wave to rest momentarily atop the wave insisting that I do at least one 360 pirouette before turning the bow back down into the mad rush of life.  In November I kept paddling from the moment I got here from the road trip all the way through to the present, chasing the buck at every corner, after it.  And it worked; I eked it out, made it happen, paid my bills, kept in the black. 

Three days into December, my inbox is like a revolving turnstile that never quite comes to rest because of the flux of correspondence, happy travelers out there scouting soft pillows for contested dates as they flee their invariably frosty climes to patronize paradise and sweat here with the rest of us.  And the litany of credit card charges and ka-ching of the register have pushed the money metrics back over into the realm of casual self-sufficiency.  I suspect I may even pay off all my Christmas bonuses and some supplemental non-essential r and d investment I am making and emerge standing relatively steady.

But it has not been without its hiccups.  Yesterday was singularly shocking in its sudden setbacks:  1)  my cook on his way out the door decided not to honor his ten day notice and simply did not return to complete the training of the new cook as he had promised;  2)  thousands of inbox emails disappeared yesterday while I was using my computer, everything between noon yesterday and May 2007 suddenly disappeared and have not shown back up, an unwelcome mystery;  and 3)  Wicho's hand slipped with the power drill and he broke the faceplate glass of the solar heater under fabrication, sending $150 in materials into an oblivion of entropy.

Yet I was also invited to tender a bid to fly to El Salvador to provide hydroelectric consulting and was the day before hired to prepare a bid for a large electrification project that I have been dancing around for most of this year.  And despite the mishap with the glass, the hot water heater is a glass half full rather than half empty and is now on display in its new home in the back yard, due to be connected tomorrow.  The upside of my cook's departure is its forcing me back into the kitchen for plate costing and food procurement.  There are as many gears and levers in a commercial kitchen as there are in a Swiss made chronometer, and I am optimistic about entering the season well positioned in the restaurant and bar business, with new pricing, a solid staff, top shelf ambiance, and a new period of ascension as one of town's bright spots and favored eateries and watering holes.