February 28 2009:  Cabinas Gato, Uvita

Geiner finished my truck up, all ready now for inspection, and today my year's inspection expires, so starting tomorrow I will be slightly illegal until I get to Perez to get the inspection, either tomorrow afternoon or more likely Tuesday.  I made a nice salad, fried chicken, and mashed potatoes for the crew this evening and on my way back to the hotel around seven, a brilliant full moon was rising over the mountains to the east, illuminating puffy silvery clouds, looking like a scene out of some fantasy movie.  Here at the hotel I am left without much motivation to kick in gear and get to work, but perhaps I will draw a bit.  My worst nightmare, a 5:45 wake up call, is scheduled for tomorrow, and Copete meets me on site to do some further surveying of the bridge location.  We are nearly finished with the cable, the first stretch fully buried.  By Wednesday we will be finished.  But I think we will call it Tuesday and head off for other jobs.  Reminds me, I have have to buy softener salt and get it on the bus to Quepos . . .

February has been a good month.  January was a good month.  December was a good month.  And both October and November were also good months.  What can March possibly bring?

February 27 2009:  Crow's Nest, Jimmy

Awakened this morning to find my air conditioner non-functional, and no amount of resetting the breakers brought it back.  When I pressed the gate button to open the electric lock downstairs, instead of the customary click down there, this morning the air conditioner's beeping and green light came on, so I appear to have a short in the junction box where they are both attached.  I prefer to look at it as my only complaint from the earthquake.  Pruter took his family to high ground.  I haven't heard of anyone else sheltering in higher ground.  The Crow's Nest is the highest spot in town except for the telecom towers, and I figure it would take a forty foot wave just to soak my feet and make the tile slippery, though it would not do much good washing around downstairs inside of CafeNet.  I would hope that Katiana would make it upstairs in time.  Lest we not forget, the original Puerto Jimenez, located in Gringolandia, or more correctly known as Pueblo Viejo, is a place name on nineteeth century nautical charts as Santo Domingo, and is the original site of what is now Puerto Jimenez, wiped out by a tsunami.  You look at the geometry of the gulf and Jimmy's location on the inside of the hook, as sheltered as a place can be, and it's hard to imagine a tsunami making it in. 

Otherwise, am thwarted again from the liberty to spread juicy gossip from sudden surprising emails and developments on a range of personal fronts by the better part of valor, presently using the nom de guerre, discretion.  But the world's axis has shifted.  I feel like I am supposed to be the marginal wild one, the untamable force of nature, the wild child and am instead being cast in the role of the stalwart and stage.  The khan man explores his inner Solomon and finds the experience interesting and curious.  Work is another thing that I should probably not get into, but there is much to be pleased with.  The electrification nears completion, cable burial beginning tomorrow.  I have the softener and the salt sourced and am scheduled for a Wednesday installation.  I have a spring box job in Cartago scheduled for as soon as I can get there and am planning to deploy with Lalo and Wicho to take care of that, deploying from Uvita as soon as we finish.  The bridge engineering contract is a fine coup, and I am pleased with preliminary analysis and drawings and feelers for Carranza to help me with three dimensional rendering and I have  a laser level borrowed to stake the final sites on Monday to be able to put the final dimensions and trajectory and locations together.  My car has been in the shop all today and will be released tomorrow before noon, ready for inspection, which expires for me tomorrow.

Juanita's and CafeNet are eerily productive.  We have had a virus spate this past week but it has been good for Kati, I think so that she does not get too complacent, and anyway I am bringing in Pedro Boza to give us a detailed shakedown on systems and security on Tue-Wed, and I'm about to buy the inverter and have the batteries to bring CafeNet into a grid-tie, am thinking about doing it so that it will be an uninterruptible power supply to replace the UPS units that I buy for the computers at $70 a whack once every year and a half or so per computer. . .

Things are going well in paradise, but it all resides on a base of hard work, and I have to make a great and steady push to sustain that momentum, particularly now that I have a slew of solar requests for system upgrades here on the Osa as well as inquiries every day by ticos from the yellow pages and every other day by gringos inquiring from web inquiries.  That advertising really does work.

February 26 2009:  Crow's Nest, Jimmy

Returned to an immaculate space, everything cleaned to perfection.  Ericka, this time, first time with the task, and she rocks.  Dan was long faced about heading down to see about his truck but may have had his spirits lifted to discover it wasn't as bad as he was expecting.  He did not roll it.  Into a first few hours of analysis the bridge design is taking form.  Am thinking a 2.5 times safety margin on anchorage and a bridge weight of 21,000 presuming decking is 2x6 tropical hard wood even though I expect to recommend steel.  Have settled on a lattice steel decking undercarriage

February 25 2009:  Job Site, upper Hatillo

February 23 2009:  Cabinas Gato, Uvita

Today had hiccups but pedestrian ones, and we hit our stride and charted the remaining challenges.  Pana says by Sunday.  I'd like to see it come in by Saturday.  But it's a lot of hard work.  I have three laborers lined up for tomorrow along with my crew of four.  As we rolled into Uvita yesterday, there was a guy hoisting snappers for sale by the road.  I bought one, nearly four kilos, and we fileted it at the house and I have poached, have basted, have sauteed filet chunks in olive oil with lots of diced onions and garlic and cultantro, splashed with lime.  I set out to filet the fish, but Wicho hovered over my shoulder and seemed to want to take over.  I tried to forestall him, but he wrested the knife from me.  It was a splendid dinner with fresh rice and beans, the housewarming.

Tonight I parboiled chicken, five breasts for dinner and ten drumsticks for tomorrow's pack lunch and marinated them and then topped them on the grill with a barbecue sause, store bought, mixed with culantro, tabasco, fresh shredded cocunut, and lime juice.  It was wonderful.  As usual, Lalo was unimpressed and did not take more than a couple bites and stuck to Erick's rice. 

Discussed details about the bridge on site; the pedestal has been signed off on by ICE, and I understand they have decided to let the transformer temp housing become semi-permanent.  Alex's crew is making continual progress with walls and footings and earthworks.  It has great water supply.  Soon it will be powered up.  It is all very cool.

February 21 2009:  Crow's Nest, Jimmy

An accumulation of FB photos that I could not help put pinch.

The lengthy hiatus from daily blog entries forces upon me a series of revelations and reflections.  Firstly, any interruption makes a resumption more difficult, perhaps through existential inertia.  I can argue that the accumulation of things to report upon makes the task more daunting, but this is not accurate.  I have never done it to really report things or preserve a record of my activities, though admittedly this blog has proven very helpful to me when I have needed to retrace steps to learn where I was or when I did a certain thing, always reminding me of the bizarre journal style of the doomed protagonist in End of the Affair.  Secondly, the rise of Facebook in my quotidian navel gazing has displaced some of the energy compartmentalized for this sort of activity.  Admittedly, the ikhanosphere is different, more isolated, a place where nobody replies nor comments, so there is no external filter through which to process my actions and tailor the communication of my thoughts.  I like the nod toward conceptual purity.  And thirdly, in counterpart to the second observation, it is nevertheless a part of the public sphere and even if my words are not scanned by Pablo-watchers for clues into how I might be thinking or what I might be doing, I know that it is there for anyone that elects to do so.  And as a result, I am constrained from saying the things that I am really thinking about and forced out of interpersonal decency to restrain from mentioning any names or revealing actual opinions as they relate to others.

[REDACTED]

. . . away from simmering powder-kegs, insulated by the intervention of a little bit of geography, freed from the miasma that drifts like the bubonic plague through the streets of Puerto Jimenez, tipping its hat at the innocent, cloaking the guilty with an electric pungent sweat in their reluctant embrace of perfidy and despair.

February 20 2009:  Crow's Nest, Jimmy

Hot off the press:  www.gardenhacienda.com

February 17 2009:  Crow's Nest, Jimmy

hot off the press:  www.matapalotortuga.com

And then there was one. 

Dropped Dad at the air strip this morning and returned to the buzz saw of life's daily grind here overlooking the dusty streets of paradise.  The mail mill has been a productive turnstile, words out, dollars in, and so the vicious cycle breathes in and out, expanding like the universe, pushing out at the walls, lifting the ceiling, far from breaking.  Gretchen rolled into town a couple hours ago, and I got her squared away, and I am on the verge of photographing the setups of the bar and the kitchen to complete the Juanita's ad.  Yesterday I did ads for all four businesses for the Osa Peninsula Travel Guide, the only thing missing being a couple shots of Juanita's, which the staff botched when they tried them last night, so I am handling that at the moment.

There is a sadness in Papa Khan's departure, as in the other departures and it leaves me with a sigh on my breath, a wistful solitude, a sense of being on my own again and without any commitments or schedules or any inclinations toward regret at the hours that I spend behind my computer screen.  I have big tasks remaining for today and tomorrow and plan to drive out and cook supper for my friends out at Casa Roca Dura in Matapalo tomorrow, hopefully tuna, perhaps a tenderloin for surf and turf, perhaps if no tuna, only jumblies, I'll take a kilo of crustaceans and a couple kilos of tenderloin and have a sprawling surf and turf with caprese salad and baked potatoes.

For now more development work as I am seeing the light at the end of the tunnel on www.matapalotortuga.com.

February 11 2009:  Cabinas Gato, Uvita

February 10 2009:  Perez Zeledon

February 9 2009:  Tucan Hotel, Uvita

It is strangely raining, and I am awaiting a wake-up call as soon as the coffee is on at the bunkhouse.  We all rolled in together this afternoon, and when I got back from shopping and Copete was gone with his son Diego to Jaco, Lalo had beans on.  I retired to a shower and emails at the Tucan and returned around dark.  He had parboiled the ribs, and I made a salad, rice, and grilled both the ribs and tomorrow's meat for lunch and we all ate a Pablo meal, and it was good.  Maybe a bonzai run to Chepe tomorrow, all Hatillo systems go.  Tonight spruced up www.soldeosa.com/gardenhacienda, www.soldeosa.com/casatortuga, and www.soldeosa.com/surfside as well as finished the listings on www.vrbo.com for GH and SB.  Am still servicing the debt to the public on www.matapalotortuga.com and www.gardenhacienda.com, but this too shall quickly resolve.  The clipping pace is invigorating and renewing, like a shower in the forest, a night on the mountain, like a nymph in the shed.

February 7, 2009:  Crow's Nest, Jimmy

A freak storm has knocked the television signal out.  Perhaps more later.  Dad says he wants to play cards.  The rain is pummeling the town, and we are pulling for the Saints as the signal flashes in and out, the Crow's Nest door open and the AC resting, the night brisk and air clean smelling. 

. . . the Saints won by fourteen points, and I was able to win again in gin rummy, and the rain passed but the coolness remains.  Tomorrow dawns busily with all the circuits engaged.

February 6, 2009:  Surfside Bungalows, Matapalo

February 5, 2009:  Crow's Nest, Jimmy