Easter Sunday, 2017

Happy Easter Sunday, everyone. I pulled some prawns out of the freezer to thaw this morning, thinking that we would have them for dinner. I quickly put them back in the freezer when our neighbor Rose Mary came to our gate with a present of lots of cooked ham slices. Big thick slabs of honey ham ... so that's our dinner for tonight, along with roasted Greek potatoes and a vegetable. Thank you, Rose Mary!

Sadly, the only Easter present I had for Rose Mary was a bag of Lorsban, which is used here to destroy the vast underground ant colonies that cause so much damage. It's mixed with water (I think) in a pump type container with a wand that is inserted into the ground, and pumping action forces the chemical into the nests. We both use Byron as our gardener and he had used some of Rose Mary's supply on our ant nests so we wanted to replace it for her.

 

We had a lot of garden trash (basura del jardín) piled up waiting for removal, but we hadn't found anyone to do the job for us. This is what was at our front gate, the bags contain leaves, etc.:

 

And these bags were piled around the mango tree (the huge pile of dirt under the mango are ant hills):

 

A fellow on a moto stopped by this morning and eyeballed the mess and asked if we wanted it removed. We negotiated a price and this is how it was done:

 

He needed 5,000 colones up front to pay for gas for the truck that would be arriving, so we gave him that. We wondered if he or a truck would ever return and he was just collecting money in a novel way. But I had faith and, sure enough, in a couple of hours a truck showed up with him, another worker and a boss man. Unfortunately, the truck was not a top loader but a back loader so it made it difficult to shove everything in. If it had been a top loader, they could have compressed everything down. It was hot, dirty work. The boss man gave the orders and chatted with us. We had another round of negotiations:

 

Ignore "chilli jam" at the top - I think that was for some recipe or other. See the "cebolla morado"? That means "purple onion". Well, boss man noticed that part of our hedge had been stripped bare by leaf cutter ants and he told us to slice up a purple onion and scatter the pieces under the hedge. He said this would help deter the leaf cutters. I'll give it a try, can't hurt and no chemicals involved.

Anyway, they seemed happy to have the work, we were happy to have it done, and a round of handshakes and one kiss on the cheek finished the job.