No, we did not get swallowed up by lava though we may have had the palooza pummeled out of us in these last several weeks! So much has been going on and I’ve been overwhelmed by the thought of having to write it all down! But today we have been blessed with several things that make this entry possible: a day at home by ourselves, nowhere to go, no projects to complete, and a cold and rainy day that has inspired us to stay inside all day in our jammies. So…here we go! Welcome back!
Lavapalooza
There is not much I can say about Lavapalooza that the thousands of photos do not already convey (click on the Lavapalooza Pix link on the right to view everyone’s photos). Oh my goddess, what a blast! Fun, freaky, and friendly folks, jammin’ music, good food, and just generally good times:
· We cooked, feasted, danced, hammocked, and caused general mayhem in the newly completed outdoor rancho. I believe the most stalwart of partyers welcomed the dawn.
· Campers created a little tent city on our property for a couple of nights under the trees and in grassy hollows (semi)sheltered from the wind and rain.
· Everyone got good use of our fancy, new outdoor composting toilets.
· We blazed bonfires and roasted marshmallows in the fire-ring.
· We learned that barbed-wire is the new duct-tape (or at least the Tico version of it) after our friends bottomed out their rental car on our road during a beer run.
· Grass It Up rocked the house, the countryside, and the entire town with the jammingest original tunes and sauciest covers of Jimi Hendrix, Phish, Kenny Rogers, and Snoop Dog (to name a few), becoming immediate Guanacaste legends and securing their place in Arenal history.
· A few comments from festival revelers: “My grandchildren will be talking about this!” . . .”This is the best time I’ve ever had in Costa Rica!” . . . “I’m buying my tickets for next year as soon as I get home!”
It’s going to be bigger and badder next year, so get yer butt down here! Thanks to everyone again for making this an event to remember and one to aspire to in the years to come.
Trip to Cali
We didn’t have much time to recover from all the love of Lavapalooza before Wilder and I were off to California. We flew into LAX for a change, where my mom picked us up for a weeklong visit in Santa Maria (where Chris would meet us Easter weekend). The catalyst for this trip was our friend Noriko who was visiting the U.S. from Japan. She lived with us as an exchange student for a month when I was 16 and she was 15, and we hadn’t seen her in 20 years. She came to the States with her endearing mother, Yumi, and her three cute and crazy daughters, Kae (9), Moe (5), and Sae (1). They arrived in Santa Maria the day after Wilder and I did, and we all made ourselves at home at my folks house for the week, which we spent recalling our teenage selves and all the silly things we did and said to cross the language and cultural barriers in our youth, going on marathon shopping excursions, exchanging lots of gifts; eating lots of food, and watching our kids play and get to know each other. It was a special time and my wish is to visit them in Japan before another 20 years pass by.
We spent the next week in the Bay Area, every moment filled as usual, catching up with a few folks and missing a few others in the process. We visited the Guerneville house, which is doing great (love the tenants!), saw some old neighbors, had a great play date at the park with a bunch of good friends, and had a barbecue with a whole contingent of fabulous comrades from San Francisco to Ohio! It was so great to see everyone and know that everyone is doing so well (despite our absence) ;)
Kids!!!
While we were away, there was quite a momentous happening . . .on April 3, Jenny had her babies! Sparkle and Spin entered the world while Wilder and I were in Santa Maria, but Chris was here to capture the entire event on video, of course. The kids are both females, black and white, one has long ears and one has short ears. Trite but true -- they can only be described as cute! Que lindas! And, aside from the initial aversion to breastfeeding, Jenny is a great mom. Apparently, at first she kept kicking the babes away when they went for the teats, but the novice mama’s instincts finally kicked into gear and she gives freely of her milk now to the little tots. But not to us. Our gardener as well as our neighbors and former goat farmers have milked her a couple of times, but only with great effort and much distress to her and her babies. She fights and kicks and butts like a madwoman to keep from being milked. I don’t blame her -- imagine! When I saw how much she resisted the process and realized that the only way to milk her was to tie up her horns, head, and her hind legs, I said forget it. I don’t really need goat’s milk, cheese, or soap bad enough to put her and myself through such a daily ordeal. It’d be different if she was like the goat my neighbor says he used to have, who would lift an accommodating leg for the procedure. But considering Jenny’s temperament, I’m just glad the babies have milk. I’ll stick to rice, soy and nut milks, thanks!
Home at Last
After our trip to California, we were excited to return home to some “normalcy”: just to be home to relax and enjoy, to not prepare for any big events or have any construction going on. There would be a few minor things to deal with, but no biggie, right? We already knew that our car was still sitting dead on the side of the road in front of our house, so we had no hopes there. And we’d already heard from the friend who was care taking our house that there were problems with the power (“no electricity upstairs,” “power going on and off downstairs). . . . But we were largely unprepared for the reality of the power situation – orange extension cords running up and down the stairs, power weak in some places, nonexistent in others – like outside in our rancho where the outdoor fridge and freezer had been unplugged for, oh, I don’t know, a week? Nothing says welcome home like curdled sour cream, rancid meat, and a rotting goat placenta. Yes, Chris had put Jenny’s placenta in the freezer to keep it safe from the coyotes, but for how long?! Until we decided to plant it under a tree? More likely it would have been in there for two years, much like my placenta after Wilder’s birth -- our intentions being to bless the earth and honor his birth with its burial. Instead, it got sold along with the rest of the contents of our garage freezer when we moved. Sorry, neighbors! . . .
But I digress. So, no power. No power also meant that the outdoor pump from our well to our water tank wasn’t working and, of course, over the course of the week the tank had gone dry, so no power also meant no water – NO WATER! Forget that no power meant no hot water, but NO WATER? Now, I can live by candlelight for days (thanks to our gas range), but no drinking water, no showers, no hand washing, no dishes, no laundry (how often do I lament the inability to perform domestic duties?) – NO WAY. That was not going to work out for very long. Thankfully, the paradisiacal summer weather made visions of skinny dipping in Lake Stanley a plausibility, so at least we would be clean if it came to that. (Except for our feet since the bottom and shores of Lake Stanely consist of a mucky mud that you cannot tread upon, however lightly, without being sucked in up to your ankles.)
So now we have no car, no electricity, and no water. But that’s not all! As Chris gets on the phone to dial up ICE (the cartel that controls all power and phone), he realizes that both his and my cell phones have been cut off! Let’s see . . . no car, no electricity, no water, no phone. (Our friends who are scheduled to visit next month may be researching ticket refunds by now.) Alright, I said I wanted to move here to simplify our lives, but at this point I’m thinking that the universe is taking me a bit too seriously. Careful what you wish for! What I’m really thinking is “Why the f*^$& did I leave California?” I imagine our family and friends all happily and obliviously flipping on a light, playing some music, sitting down at the computer, reading in bed without the aid of a headlamp, soaking under a hot shower, driving their shiny, functional cars along a smooth roadway, chatting with friends or calling for take-out . . . And I try to transition from sharing in all this relative luxury to existing in my current nightmare, er, dealing with these temporary inconveniences with aplomb, but I am having a hard time because – if you don’t already know – I’m PREGNANT and simply not up to dealing with the smallest of bothers much less such life-affecting annoyances. I want to take a shower, bathe my child, walk through the house without a flashlight, and call my mommy and daddy!
Ultimately we figure out that while we were in the States the phone bill didn’t get paid. So, in less than two hours home after a 12-hour day of travel the day before and 2 hours on the road that morning, Chris takes the ATV to the bank, pays the phone bill, gets the phones turned back on, and comes home. It doesn’t occur to us that this may have been the same problem with the power, because we have “some” power – ICE has not bothered to let us maintain a trickle of electricity before. They are not known for such purposeful benevolence. But it turns out that the electric bill also did not get paid. This doesn’t explain why we still have a little bit of electricity, but Chris decides to tackle them too. By the time we figure this out, it’s 20 minutes to 5. Chris hops back on the ATV and makes it to ICE before they close, just to have them tell him that he has to wait until the next day to do anything about it.
The next day, Chris returns to ICE and ICE comes out and tells us that we need a new meter box at the road . .blah, blah, blah. Ultimately, everything gets turned back on and is in running order. Just in time for ICE to start their rolling blackouts! So we have power for a few hours before ICE turns it off again! But this time, we’re in good company – all of Guanacaste is without electricity as well. . . .Many of you are not unfamiliar with rolling blackouts. But at least in California, they let you know where and when the power will be going out. Not the case here. And it happens more often than not right at dusk, when light becomes paramount. We had a lovely time, however, dining, bathing, and reading bedtime stories by candlelight.
As for the car . . . we have been staying home, riding the ATV, or using a rental car for the last couple of weeks. But a happy ending is in sight – we just took a trip to San Jose and put down a deposit on a 1995 Toyota 4Runner. It is beefy and macho and made for our road. We are very excited about it and hope it fulfills all our expectations (which really won’t be that hard since the Trooper has lowered them so much). . . In the meantime, our mechanic, bless his heart, is still diligently working away at the Trooper, swearing that the only thing wrong with it is a faulty fuel injector. Whatever the prognosis and ultimate outcome, the Trooper will hopefully not be with us much longer. Chris thinks we can sell it, but at this point, I’d be willing to give it away or pay someone to take it -- I believe good karma dictates such action.
Oh Yeah . . .
So, if you were paying attention, you saw me mention in that last little ditty that I’m pregnant! Pays to read the fine print, doesn’t it? Yes, that’s right, we now have another experience to add to our adventures down here in Costa Rica. I’m 4 months along, due in mid-October, and feeling fabulous. We’ve found a wonderful midwife down here. She’s Austrian born and has lived all over the world – Rome, Africa, Afghanistan – and now makes her home in Heredia (just outside of San Jose) in a beautiful, purple and green house of eclectic comfort, funk and worldly chic, which could have been plucked straight out of North Berkeley. When we arrived, she stood at the top of her jungle-surrounded driveway in fuchsia tie-dye, with a large smile, glasses, shoulder-length white-blonde hair, and bangles hanging from her ears. We were welcomed into “the womb” (her office) where we sat on low, African elephant-print cushions and Wilder played with her various stuffed animal mamas and their stuffed animal babies. She’s birthed 400 babies in the last 16 years here in Costa Rica. She is strong, confident, comforting, caring, approaches birth holistically (emotional, spiritual and physical), uses homeopathy and flower essences before, during and after birth, and does home and clinic births, often working with an American OB. For us, she has just the right balance of trust in the beautiful, natural process of birth and a consciousness of all possibilities. She provides all prenatal care (for which we must travel 4 hours to her home every 4 to 6 weeks), birthing preparation, birth assistance, and 2 weeks of post-natal care. We feel very blessed and are excited to birth this baby down here with her! We’ll be moving to Heredia in mid-September and staying there potentially through mid-November, a few weeks after the baby is born. Our intention is to have a water birth, either at “home” there or at a clinic in the city. So far it has been wonderful to be pregnant down here – the fresh air and foods and mellow pace of things is quite nurturing and nice.
Wilder is very excited to be a big brother. He calls it “my baby” and is constantly kissing and loving my belly. He’s learning a lot about the birth process and being a big brother, reading books, drawing pictures, and asking a lot of questions. Our midwife asked him the other day if he was going to help her catch the baby and, though he's a little concerned about the blood involved, he said, "Yes!" It’s going to be a wonderful experience for all of us.
In Closing . . .
That’s pretty much it for now. By the end of the week we hope to be driving a fully functioning vehicle and officially terminating our need for a horse. We'll keep you posted!
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