Oh, all right. FINE.

Have a post with some substance to it, see if I care.

I've never been actually, personally tagged for a meme before, so Erin is to blame. (Also, I've finally added her to my sidebar, so stop by and say Hi if you're so inclined.)

(Also, she posted this last Friday, but I only just read it today. [Just for the record, the fact that I've posted this immediately upon being tagged in no way constitutes a commitment to respond as quickly to any future tagging that may occur.])

I've seen this meme elsewhere, but have no idea where it originated, nor do I have any inclination to research it. So there's not much more to say about that.

Oh, except that I seem to have applied a creative interpretation of the phrase "One book."

And, too, I've worked very hard to include little thumbnail pictures of the book covers, but they're not showing up at all in the preview pane, so let's just hope they show up in the post. If not, please blame Amazon.

Right. On with it:

• One book that changed your life
  Conversations With God, Books 1, 2 and 3
  
  
  
• One book that you've read more than once
  The Hitchhikers' Trilogy by Douglas Adams
  
  
  Also, the All Creatures Great and Small series by James Herriot
  
  
  Also, most anything by Barbara Kingsolver
  
  
  
• One book you’d want on a deserted island
  The Earth's Children series by Jean M. Auel, for several reasons. First, they're loooong. Second, they're good. And third, you have the handy bonus of painstakingly documented nature survival skills, an undeniable plus for the deserted island dweller.
  
  
  
• One book that made you laugh
  Eats, Shoots & Leaves. That would be the bestselling reference book about punctuation. Yes, really. (And thanks, Mom.)
  
  
  
• One book that made you cry
  Oh, for heaven's sake. Pretty much any novel that puts its mind to it.
  
  
• One book you wish you'd written
  I never thought of it in those terms, but I guess Herb 'n Lorna would be a nice one to have written. Quirky. Funny. Lovable characters.
  
  
  
• One book you wish had never been written
  Uh, sorry. Can't help you there.
  
  
• One book you’re currently reading
  I am, nearly always, a one-book-at-a-timer, so there's only one answer to this question at any given time. Living in a Spanish speaking country and strongly preferring to do my reading in English, I stock up on novels at bazaars, and also at my friend Rita's house, since she has cottages for rent and keeps a take-one/leave-one bookshelf. So, although my supply of books is neither broad nor steady, I usually do OK.
  
  Currently riding around in my backpack is Goodnight, Nebraska. It's pretty good, but in the current chapter, seven rednecks have just set out to go hunting together. There's plenty of alcohol and each of the men has either been wronged by one or more of the others, or thinks he has. So I'm a little worried about what may happen next.
  
  
  
• One book you’ve been meaning to read
  Per the above, anything I can get my hands on that is: a) In English and b) Better than The Legend Makers by Catherine Lanigan. This does not narrow the playing field to any significant degree.
  
  

In my head...

...is it really where you want to be?

Today, for instance.

If I had a [insert monetary unit of choice] for every time this image has popped into my head today, accompanied by the phrase, which I did not make up, "neon benutslinged," well I'd have more than a few monetary units and let's just leave it at that.

(Five days into NaBloPoMo. Seven quality posts in a row. Admit it. You knew it wasn't going to last forever.)

A (Re)Touching Story

When Alex was at his aunt's house recently, he found this snapshot of him and his mother.

I think I've seen a total of maybe seven or eight photos of Alex as a kid, including this one. Once he hit college (and, somewhere along the line, got his own camera), more pictures were taken, but Costa Ricans on the whole don't tend to have a lot of photos of themselves and their families, especially from 20 or 30 years back. You'll see the occasional framed studio shot, or maybe a few passport-sized photos tucked into an album, but snapshots aren't that common.

So Alex borrowed it from his aunt, brought it home and scanned it. This morning he gave it to me to play with, and when I was done with it, I took it in to Quick Photo and got prints for him and Yolanda. By the end of the day, it had been added to their album.

Took me some pictures yesterday

Julia invites the waitress to come swimming with us after lunch, explaining that she can borrow a bathing suit from Robin or Alex.


Alex finds this endearing.


But really, it's all about Robin. Just ask her.


The grownups order coffee.


Robin is jollied out of a momentary snit.


Julia is harder to jolly.


We head over to the municipal swimming pool to find a couple hundred black-beshirted adolescents, lined up around the block for a concert that will take place six hours later.


Julia climbs a pole


Alex and the girls test out the water. It's freezing.


I'm in the mood for closeups today.


Julia gets a hand.


The girls bravely venture forth.


Julia inflates her water wings.


Alex contemplates.


Julia contemplates.


Robin contemplates.


Julia takes a picture.


Jennifer takes a picture.


And another.


Julia wants one of her feet.


We put the camera on the ground.


Julia is tired of the water wings.


She plays with the towel instead.


There's another foot that would make a good picture all on its own.


Alex and Robin sit by the pool.


We get dressed to leave.


The sneakers are cute.


A final closeup.

Does Billy Joel know about this?

Actually, he probably does.

I've heard Piano Man in Spanish plenty of times, but since I know the song in English, I guess I never paid that much attention to the lyrics in Spanish.

The Spanish version does paint a similar picture as the original version. There's a bar. There's a guy at the piano. There's quiet desperation. The microphone smells like a beer.


What I noticed for the first time when we went out last night, though, is that in the Spanish version, the piano man himself is the one pining after his youth and lost opportunities.

That's all well and good. But really. Was there really no other way to render "Sing us a song, you're the piano man" than "Play it again, you old loser"?

Anybody want to buy a bridge?

Four years ago, someone contacted Alex asking for a survey of some property he had purchased. We told him what we would need in order to proceed, including a local contact who was familiar with the property. Alex went ahead and made him a sketch of how the property could be subdivided for resale, assuming the existing survey was accurate.

The more we found out, the more it sounded like he had made a bad investment: the surveyor who had drawn up the plan used for the sale had done so on paper and never actually gone into the field (which is illegal)*. The previous owner had been absent for 30 years and the property was almost certainly now owned by squatters. The topo maps of Costa Rica, based on aerial photography from some 10 or 15 years ago, even showed features such as fields and buildings that would not exist on abandoned land.

We explained to the guy that things weren't looking too good, and he kept pushing to go ahead and get something done as soon as possible, offering the same price we had quoted for the field work if we could just do the work on paper like the previous surveyor had. When we kept replying that we needed a local contact who was familiar with the property, he eventually stopped writing.

Two years later, we were contacted by someone needing a survey and, after a couple of E-mails with him, we discovered he had bought a lot from the first guy. In fact, when we visited the web site where the new guy had found his property, we found Alex's sketch of how the land could have been divided up if it in fact existed in its theoretical form. This guy had bought lot #7. We told him what we knew and wished him luck.

And now the same thing has happened again. Yesterday we discovered that someone who contacted us a couple of weeks ago to survey some property she bought, also bought it from this guy. I found his website again and he's still using Alex's theoretical diagram to sell $20,000 lots of thin air.

Promise me you'll never buy land in a foreign country without actually traveling to the country and looking at what you're getting. Pretty please?

-----

* Illegal though it may be, that guy went on to become the elected president of the College of Engineers and Architects. Warms the heart, doesn't it?

I like words, but they're not always necessary

Last week I saw an English-speaking woman approach a Spanish-speaking child with two items of clothing. She held one in each hand and moved them alternately up and down. The child picked one.

A few days ago I was talking to the owner of the gym, who sometimes works in personal security. He said he recently saw a former Costa Rican President and First Lady at a restaurant, apparently unescorted. From across the room, he caught the man's eye, then hunched his shoulders and arms forward while holding his hands close together just below waist level. He then turned both hands palm-up and raised his eyebrows. Meaning? "Dude, where are your bodyguards?" The former President made a dismissive face.

Season's Greetings

Rainy season, that is.

October is, typically, Costa Rica's rainiest month. Last year was an extreme example and I was expecting something similar this year, but in fact we've had less rain than usual.

Now we're into November and, if they're not already, the seasons should be changing soon. But I think they already are. Yesterday we left the house to drive down into town. It wasn't raining. On the two-mile stretch of road that runs down the mountain we drove into a rainstorm, out of it, into it again and, at the foot of the hill, out of it again.


Oh, and the other kind of Season's Greetings too.

I know these things get earlier every year, but without either Thanksgiving or Halloween to put even a theoretical brake on it, Costa Rica is officially into the Christmas season. I've only seen one private home with lights on it so far (but it was covered, let me tell you) but the malls are in full swing, two-story Christmas trees and all.

This roadside stand went up at least two weeks ago:

Gimme a break, I'm dyeing here

There's this one little drawback to dyeing fabric. You always have to say the whole phrase, dyeing fabric. Otherwise you get conversations like this:

Robin: What's that book about, Mommy?
Me: It's about dyeing fabric.
Robin: Oh. Are you going to dye tomorrow?
Me: Well, yes.

Anyway, there was a craft fair yesterday. Rita was sharing a table with a friend of hers, and invited me to bring some things as well. I had intended to make up some small quilts but, unsurprisingly, that didn't happen. On Friday it occurred to me that, while I didn't have time to make a bunch of quilts, I could take my hand-dyed fabric. I had quite a bit already made, and 12 yards still on the bolt that I could dye in time for the fair, so that's what I did.

I scoured (prewashed) the fabric on Sunday. Monday morning after the gym, I came home and started getting out my supplies, calculating quantities of dye and chemicals, setting out buckets, mixing the fixative, etc. (As you can see, the dyeing process relies heavily on cat litter buckets and Skippy peanut butter jars.)


(Anyone want to guess, at this point, where a certain member of my family felt was an appropriate place to put his dirty dishes from lunch?)

He did redeem himself by taking some pictures of me when asked though:



He even got creative, going outside and taking this one through the kitchen window:


Hmm. Looks like we need to buy more fruit.

I tried a new two-tone technique that, while I was doing it, looked like it wasn't going to turn out well at all. Fortunately, the rinsed and dried fabrics were just fine. Not, perhaps, entirely to my own taste, but nothing actually wrong with them. Rita brought the side rail from Alanna's crib to the fair, and that turned out to be the perfect way to display the fabric because I could drape it down in front of the table for much better visibility than a folded stack would have given. See?


Interestingly, the single ugliest fabric--a mixture of purple and green (and not in a good way)--was almost invariably the one that people picked up to fondle when they stopped by the table.

Unfortunately, the fair itself was a bit of a bust. We had a nice enough time, but the event was stunningly underattended. We were there from 9:00-3:30 and Rita, her daughter Terry and I each made one single sale: Rita and I to other exhibitors and Terry to a friend of the family. The folks we were sharing the table with sold a bit more, but they were the authors of a book that had been profiled in the local English-language newspaper that very week, and most people who bought the book said they'd seen it in the paper.

Oh well. We made a couple of contacts that, in the end, could be more valuable than the sales anyway. Let's hope.