What dreams are made of

This is the climbing vine in the light shaft at the back of the apartment. It's really digging the rainy season, and has grown a lot in the past couple of weeks. It's beginning to poke in the laundry room and bedroom windows, which is cool (except that that's how those ants got in that time).



Most homes in Costa Rica - city homes anyway - are contiguous with the next house. Houses are frequently built right up to the property line on each side, with any outdoor space either between the house and the street, or in a patio behind the house (or both). This apartment is built that way, so there are no windows on the side (or back) walls, but in fact the houses to each side don't have second floors, so there's nothing on the other side of any of the walls.

That's nice, of course, since it means less noise (and less worrying about making noise).

It also means that the apartment is exposed to more of the weather than most houses are. The landlady has struggled with leaks in the kitchen and living room (which are on the same outside wall), and is working, again, to fix them this week.

The water comes in at the roofline and runs down next to, or possibly through, the breaker box (I know, right?) and, as we discovered when repairing the stove, along the conduit within the walls as well.

A lot of it seems to remain within the cinder block wall and behind what is apparently weatherproof paint, because instead of soaking through the paint and running down the wall, a lot of times the paint blisters out, but keeps the water behind it. It has split open in a couple of places, but not many.


Heh.

So, last night I dreamed that there was this vine that had grown into my house, burrowing like a mole just under the surface of the walls, peeking through in places. It had spread through several rooms, kind of following the electrical wiring, and was starting to interfere with the computer, and I was telling someone that, while it would be impossible to pull it all out, all we needed to do was cut out a section at the point of entry, and all the vines inside the walls would shrivel up and stop growing.

Now that I think about it, it could have been downright creepy, but fortunately it was more of a repair issue than a Vine That Took Over The World kind of thing.