Jack the Donkey

I was very honoured last year to be asked to do a memorial painting of Jack, the much loved pet of the Bowman family in Ontario, Canada. Here is the final painting:

It is acrylic on canvas panel, 18”x24”. Photo reference: Jack’s owner Kim Bowman. I received final approval yesterday, have signed it and will be applying two coats of varnish. When I am confident the varnish is completely dry, Jack will be leaving Costa Rica on his way to the Bowman family.

So how did Kim find me? I follow Farmer Tim on Facebook. He is a dairy farmer in southern Ontario and shares the daily life of a farmer and promotes the Canadian dairy industry.

Once a year, Farmer Tim dedicates a post to his followers thanking them for their support. If you have a business, product, charity, etc., this is your chance to advertise for free on his Facebook page. His posts reach over a million people each month. So I took advantage of this offer and posted the link to my art website which is here. Thank you, Farmer Tim.

Kim saw my link and contacted me, asking if I would paint Jack and of course I said yes. Her reference photo was at an interesting angle. As the painting progressed, I felt I was getting to know Jack and I wanted to smooch his soft velvety nose!

Thanks so much, Kim, for trusting me with your Jack.

Click on image to enlarge.

QR Codes, Boosters, and the Covid 19 Situation in Costa Rica

The Tico Times has a recent article on how to go about getting your QR code in Costa Rica. We have our QR codes and we had them printed onto plasticized cards about the size of a credit card, using this company in our town of Grecia:

It was so easy - we sent our information via e-mail to Imprenta Grecia and picked the cards up a few days later. Cost: C5,000 per card (about $10 CAD). With the card, it makes showing that one is fully vaccinated very easy. Then, if we go to a restaurant or any other place which requires proof of vaccination, all we have to do is flash our card and allow them to scan our cards.

We also received our booster shots last Friday. How did we know when and where we needed to go for these? Facebook! I belong to quite a few Costa Rican Facebook pages and these are invaluable sources of information. Members freely share information and this link for vaccination shots was posted. By looking for our town - Grecia (page 7) - we learned where the boosters would be given and at what times. Salón Parroquial is right across from the Catholic church.

People also shared the wait times they experienced and based on this we opted to wait until the second week before attempting to get the boosters. This proved to be a good idea as our wait outside the building was no more then ten minutes. Once we were inside, there were chairs to sit in. Everything was very well organized. Staff take your carné de vacunación (vaccination card) and eventually your name gets called.  I think we sat inside for no more then 45 minutes before receiving our boosters.

In my blog post on December 12 (and as I have done in some earlier posts), I provided a table of numbers from Worldometer with calculations comparing the evolving situation of Covid 19 in Costa Rica with that in Canada and the United States. However, unlike the earlier posts, I did not include any link to where one could go to obtain more comprehensive graphic information unique to Costa Rica. The link had been to a special web page of the La Nacion newspaper, but it appeared that the page was no longer being kept up to date.

It turns out that up to date graphic information the same as or similar to that previously provided by La Nacion can be obtained by going to the web site of the Costa Rican Ministry of Health ("Ministerio de Salud" in Spanish).

Another way to get graphic information not only for Costa Rica but also for many other countries is to Google the phrase "covid 19 graph". At present, a page headed "Coronavirus disease" should then appear. Under the sub-heading "Statistics", a chart showing the evolution of covid cases in a selected country should also appear. The selected country can be changed to any other country which may be desired. For example, the charts for Costa Rica, the United States and Canada are presently as follows:

The information provided by Canada is not as up to date as that provided by Costa Rica and the United States. Nevertheless, like the United States, the number of new cases in Canada appears to be surging whereas the number of new cases in Costa Rica has been steadily dropping towards zero. This may change if the Omicron variant of Covid-19 takes hold in Costa Rica as it has in the United States and Canada. On December 19, the Ministry of Health confirmed detection of the first case in Costa Rica (an 8 year old boy).

As reported by the Tico Times on December 20 the boy and his family had recently travelled to the United States.

Click on images to enlarge.