Fostering a Cat

Here is Oro (Spanish for "gold"). I gave him that temporary name because his eyes are golden hued and he has golden tail and facial hair. I say "temporary" because he is up for adoption and his new "forever" guardians can rename him if they wish.

Oro, so relaxed now.

 

He showed up in our neighborhood a few weeks ago, either lost or abandoned. We ignored him, hoping he would find his way home. Of course, he never left. Our neighbor Rose Mary saw him eating bread crumbs from their bird feeder so he must have been very hungry. She started to feed him and then we took over that task. We are going to have him neutered very soon and hope to find him a good home.

His wonderful personality has emerged now that he has regular food and feels safe. He is very affectionate and cuddly. We think he is young, perhaps a year old. Oro was obviously an outdoor cat and he still feels more secure being outside then in the house - although he has started to explore around inside our house. In our tropical climate, he is perfectly fine being outdoors as long as he has shelter from the rain. This also means we don't need to have an indoor litter box.

After our old cat, Genny, passed on (I have written about her here on this blog) we made the firm decision not to have any more pets. We are serious about this which is why Oro is up for adoption.

Oro loves my hammock and will jump right in it with me. He's also gone solo. Here he is dreaming of his new home:

 

Oro, Costa Rican Cat from Diana Miskell Turlock on Vimeo

 

Atenas Wed-In Photos

We have now received our professional photographs from the Great Atenas Wed-In. The photos were taken by Melissa Michaud at Bebicitos Fotos.

She did a great job - taking photos of 72 plus wedding couples on a sunny, hot and windy day in the central park of Atenas, Costa Rica.

Here are our photos:

 

 

The Great Atenas Wed-In

On Sunday, February 14, 2016, over 71 couples remarried in the central park of Atenas, Costa Rica. Lance and myself were one of those couples. Why? This link explains it all. There is a great deal of information on this site, so scroll all the way down to get the entire story.

It was a beautiful day - breezy, sunny and quite warm. We met up with our friends Diane and John, who were also remarrying.

Lance and myself, before the ceremonies.

The ceremony went surprisingly quickly and smoothly, considering how many couples were getting remarried. This was all due to the skilled organization of Rafael Valverde and associates at Outlier Legal Services, Pat and John Wegner, and David and Norma Jean Manheimer (witnesses).

The service was very nice, starting with a welcome statement and consecration by Rafael, followed by an exchange of vows (exchanged in unison by all couples), individual couple's declaration of intent, pronouncement of husband and wife, and then our attorney presented all the newly married couples to the public.

Each couple received a keepsake marriage certificate. The authentic certificates will be available at the Registro Nacional in due course.

For our wedding luncheon, we went to POPS Ice Cream, across from the central park!

Professional photographs were taken by Melissa Michaud, Bebecitos Fotos and will be available next week at which time I will post our photos in this blog.

Here are some more links to the Atenas Wed-In:

Tico Times

A.M. Costa Rica

 

Scruffy and Barney

We are house, dog and cat sitting for a week at our neighbors. Every morning, we take Scruffy the dog and Barney the cat for their morning constitutional walks here in Vista Atenas, Atenas, Costa Rica.

Here is a video I made of one of our morning walks.

 

Scruffy and Barney from Diana Miskell Turlock on Vimeo.

 

Eyes on Costa Rica - Update/January 31, 2016

Since my last blog entry on this topic, visits to my blog have continued from near and far. Recently, a threshold count of over 20,000 visits was reached. As shown with the panel appended to the map below, the 20,000th visit came early in the morning (our time) on January 24, 2016 from Dubai in the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

As I have previously indicated with respect to an earlier one of these maps, the red dots show the approximate location of individual places from where visits have occurred. The number of places now exceeds 2700. However, when the locations are close to each other, one location can be masked out by others. Apparently, the resolution is about 40 km x 40 km (25 miles x 25 miles)

When several visits are recorded from the same place, I have no way of telling whether all the visits are from the same person. For example, the panel for the UAE shows 10 visits from Dubai. Over time, this could be 10 visits from the same person, 1 visit from each of 10 different people, or anywhere in between.

The dot sitting in the middle of the ocean and highlighted in yellow just below the horn of Africa, is the location on the map where visits from "unidentified" locations are recorded. This includes visits from “Anonymous Proxies”, “Satellite Providers”, “Unknown Countries”, "U.S. Armed Forces Europe", "U.S. Armed Forces Pacific", etc. - all recorded on the map on top of one another. Not unsurprisingly, the map location is 0° longitude, 0° latitude in the middle of nowhere.

Visits from two new countries/quasi countries have emerged since my last blog entry on this topic. The total is now 107. The latest are Macedonia and Guadelupe, the latter of which is an island overseas region of France in the Caribbean.

 

Reason Number Gazillion

That would be "Reason Number Gazillion Why I Like Costa Rica So Much".

This morning I decided to walk from our house to Maxi Pali (a grocery store), a distance of roughly two kilometers and thankfully all downhill. I needed to buy a few items, the weather was superb for walking (cool with breezes), and I would benefit from the exercise.

I walked down to ruta 3 (the old oxcart road to the pacific coast, now paved of course) and turned right. I had put about 300 meters under my shoes when one of our red Atenas taxis drove past and beeped. This is not unusual, because we use the taxis all the time and know many of the drivers. I waved and walked on.

This taxi stopped ahead of me and I realized he was waiting for me. The driver was Carlos Luis Hidalgo, a lovely gentleman with beautiful manners. One time I met him and his wife in a store and he interrupted his shopping time to drive me home - he offered, I had not asked.

He indicated I should sit in the front passenger seat and the reason became clear when he stopped further up the road to pick up the passengers who had called him. Carlos dropped me off in front of Maxi Pali and indicated I should call him when I was ready to go home. He wouldn't accept any money - told me to put my purse away.

I called Carlos for my trip home - his telephone number is 60-90-81-24. On the way home, we discussed the weather - how cold it has been at night recently, the beautiful blue sky today, and I learned the word for arrow (from the road markings) - "flecha" - and the words for reverse are "marcha atras" (there should be an accent over the "a" but I can't get the Spanish keyboard to come up). "Reverse" came up when he was backing up to our gate.

These are just simple daily occurrences but demonstrate the richness of life here in our little town of Atenas.

Museo National de Costa Rica

Recently we rode the Atenas bus to San Jose to visit the National Museum of Costa Rica. We had not been here before and decided we wanted to see the exhibit entitled Mega Fauna - Fossils of Costa Rica. This exhibit runs from December 3, 2015, to April, 2016.

 

The museum is located between Central and Second Avenues, west from the Plaza of Democracy, which is also where the main entrance is. Hours are from 8:30am to 4:30pm, closed on Mondays. Admission is 1,500 colones for nationals, and free for children under 12, students, and those over age 65 with cedulas (us!). Foreigners will pay $8.00.

Sphere display outside museum.

What a lovely surprise this museum is. We should have been to see it long before now. It is located in the Bellavista Fortress, built in 1917, and originally a military barracks. Bullet holes from the 1948 civil war can still be seen.

Bullet holes.

 

After checking in at the front desk and stowing bags, etc., in lockers, you enter into a butterfly garden. I always find these fun and so interesting.

Butterfly on my arm.

 

Follow the winding ramp up several levels to the rest of the museum. I won't go into all the details, but you will learn about Costa Rican history, pre-Columbian history, see the recreation of a typical colonial home and so on. We ended up spending several hours wandering around. On our visit, an outdoor lunch buffet had been set up. I don't know the cost as we ran out of time and skipped lunch.

Very large teeth!

The various patterned tiled floors caught my attention ...

.... and kind of made me woozy.

Display of Costa Rican spheres.

Old wooden oxcart, part of a trapiche display (sugar cane mill).

 

The liquid sugar cane was poured into these moulds to make dulce (sweet sugar).

View of San José

Another view of San José.

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Some beautiful buildings across from the museum.