My girlfriend has been renting videos recently, I’ve watched a few but none were too interesting. The one I liked the most was the documentary March of the Penguins. The penguins themselves are interesting as hell, so just not getting in the way of the footage is all that it took to make a great documentary.
I suppose it isn’t as easy as I make it out to be, especially given the harsh conditions they would have had to film in but the point I’m trying to make is that the penguins themselves are the stars. Very interesting, dem penguins and now I want a pet penguin even more.
Yesterday, we went to the movies as it’d been a while. We watched Michael Clayton, which was interesting enough that I didn’t feel a screaming need to leave the theater and do something else, which is how I feel about most movies. So I guess that’s a passing grade for both of these films, with the usual caveat that my suspension of disbelief has been broken for years and I’m not a great movie critic given how little I tend to like most movies.
We bought our puppy Harry first, and lavished him with more toys and gifts than we bought for ourselves and as can be expected, all that did is spoil him and convince him that the world revolves around him.
So when we bought a kitten, Fiona, he decided what was hers was now his and what was his she had frankly better not touch. So he began eating her food (you should have seen the poor cat eating the dog food after he polished off her dish) till we bought a cat house to put it out of his reach and he began to take anything she played with away from her and hide it in his house.
In this video you can see that he’ll take anything she plays with away from her and try to hide it in one of his play spots.
I’d only meant to quickly drop my girlfriend off at a friend’s house in Heredia but the trip took a decidedly nasty turn for the worse when my brakes (all of the bastards!) decided to desert me on Costa Rica’s busiest street during rush hour. That wasn’t too bad as I managed to avoid a slow motion collision by zig-zagging through the cars stopped at the intersection and using hand signals (looked a lot like the signal in Team America for the undercover operative being in danger) to persuade a bus that was making a turn in front of me to hang out for a bit in the intersection. The bus served as a nice shield to run the light and pull over and I called information to get a tow truck.
The traffic was bad so I was told it would take a while to get there and that they’d call me. Costa Rica doesn’t employ the luxury of a system of addresses and “directions” are used in their stead. So I was telling the driver that I was about 200 meters away from Pizza Hut on the other side of the street but he must have needed to do a verification fly-by since he passed me right up. I called the tow-truck company and they gave me the driver’s cellphone. I called him and he told me how he didn’t see “anybody” (mind you, this is rush hour) at the indicated location. I told him that I was quite there and I did, in fact, need a tow and he told me he’d give it another fly-by, though it’d take time due to the “tremendous” traffic he was engaged in across the city (just minutes after driving by). He said to make sure to stand out by the road at the indicated location so I stood there for an eternity and he pulled up right in front of me in traffic, then kept on going without looking on the side of the road at the store I told him I was in front of.
I called him as he slowly crawled away in traffic and told him I was right behind him and waved. He looked back and promptly told me he saw “nobody” and kept going, promising to give it another try. Not entirely convinced I wanted a ride with such a comprehensively-challenged individual, I began to look for options and called information again for a tow truck and they immediately sent me to the automated voice reading me the same phone number of the tow truck company I’d been wrestling with several times before I managed to get the operator to halt and give me a couple of options.
I called a few of the companies I was recommended over the next hours who all failed to show up, never daring to leave the side of the road to go to the bathroom. Waiting on foot by the side of the road was boring despite the number of odd folk who passed by (like the Japanese back-packer asking for directions in hillarious Spanish for a ridiculously far place to be headed to on foot). And waiting in the cold in a T-shirt got old fast with the whole having to go to the bathroom quite urgently thing so I just kept calling information and canvassing the Costa Rica’s tow trucks (maybe they are all just smarter than the rest of the country and avoid rush hour altogether) before one promptly showed up in 15 minutes as promised and we loaded up the car and drove off while I imagined a veritable swarm of tow trucks descending upon the vacated location I’d been waiting at.
I finally got home over 6 hours after I left more than a bit frustrated with my car. I even lost my temper momentarily and called it a harsh word that hurt its feelings. I don’t care and I don’t know what the hell is wrong with the car but I’ve decided to only find out long enough to fix and sell it. See, I have this rule about not trusting cars that try to kill me, especially when they try to do it at very low rush-hour speeds. That shows spite since they clearly want the death to be as painful as possible (the automobile’s equivalent of death by spoon).
We signed up to a video store membership (first time for me in years, but there’s no Netflix here) and I finally saw Borat. I’m a fan of Sacha Baron Cohen and was familiar with his Borat character from his Ali G show and expected the film to be a series of similar gags. As I’d expected, I’d seen all the funny parts in the various promotions for the film I saw as Borat did the rounds on TV but was pleasantly surprised to see that this film had a stronger plot than his previous Ali G film and that it worked a lot better.
I didn’t find myself laughing too much, since I’d seen it all before but it was fun and I hope the film’s popularity doesn’t ruin the Borat character for future work.
Pet stores to me are like a candy store to a kid. And like a lot of kids a lot of my money goes toward the friendly pet store owners, who must love me like their own children given how much I spend with them.
Anywho, today I went to the pet store and bought (among all the other junk):
- A new collar and engraved name tag for our dog Harry. No other collar had fit him well since he’s so small but this simple black nylon collar fit him perfectly and he’s not getting his paw stuck in it when he scratches his neck. The collar also has our phone numbers on it, which is important since he runs out the wrought iron garage gate whenever we open the door to see if he can befriend any strangers. He’s so friendly with strangers that we worry about him being stolen or lost and the engraved dog tag with our phone numbers is a small comfort.
- A cat house for our kitten Fiona. It’s an adorable house with two levels, the inside is carpeted and there is a nice cushioned balcony on the second level where her food bowl will now reside, thusly solving the problem of Harry eating her food, leaving her to eat his dog food. Harry has already made it abundantly clear that he’s moving into the first floor, which is fine since she likes being with him (she sleeps wherever he does) but the second story is nice, since there’s a built-in cat toy that is the first toy she has played with without Harry taking it from her and destroying. Our cat’s almost as excited as I am about her cat house!
- Last but not least, I bought a special fish hatchery with a built in fish nursery. I’ve now used every fish hatchery design I’ve seen. They are usually simple products that come in a few varieties, one is a net that basically just serves as a nursery, as if you put an adult fish in it will eat the fry. There are also plastic hatchery/nursery products that float in your tank separating the fry from your adult fish, they come with an internal separator(s) to separate the fry from the mother and the best designs comprise a V-shaped separator with a slot in the middle and the fry fall down through the V into the lower portion of the chamber. There are others with a grid-like separator but in my experience the fry swim up through those and get eaten more often.
The one I bought today has two separate chambers, and uses a standard air pump to draw water from one into the other, so the new fry are sucked into a separate compartment that can be easily separated to remove the fry. I’ve only tested it briefly but it looks pretty good.
I need to make a visa trip mid-December and it looks like I’ll be going to Panama (just looking for something nearby and Nicaragua isn’t as interesting to me. I’m not too excited about the whole thing, as I have to leave by the 15th or so and will have friends in Panama around the new years so I may even go by bus to make it more interesting.
My girlfriend is waiting on her passport so she can go with me but I’m going to get residency in Costa Rica just so I don’t have to make these stupid visa trips.
It was just two waves of motion I felt and were probably only tremors but they were strong enough to spill water in two of my aquariums and make my dog bark.
They were easily the strongest I’ve felt here in Costa Rica so far and I hear car alarms in the distance.
When I got my 50-gallon aquarium in November, I put all my fish in and left my mid-sized tank unplugged and sitting in a corner. Today I wanted to get it ready for some guppies that I want to breed and I cleaned it and set it up in my office when I noticed a baby guppy swimming around. I unplugged the filter and stopped putting food in the tank almost two weeks ago and the lil’ bugger is still alive.
I quickly setup a filter and gave him a big meal (steak and eggs).
Thanksgiving isn’t a big deal for me, I’ve lived most of my life outside the USA and am not big on holidays for the most part anyway (they seem like more work than fun), but one thing I do like about Thanksgiving is the food.
I’ve been bragging about Thanksgiving food to my girlfriend and told her it’s the “best American food there is”. I didn’t think we’d have a Thanksgiving feast in Costa Rica but my friend Tri called me and told me that at our friend’s bar they were doing a Thanksgiving dinner.
We went and it was, as usual, great. My girlfriend loved the green bean casserole, which is a very atypical dish for Costa Rica and it was the first time she ate turkey. Anyway, the food at my friend Steve’s bar (called The Timeout Tavern in Escazú, near the country club) is always top notch. It’s the best American food in San Jose, Costa Rica and if you are ever in town you need to come by a few days till you happen onto one of his fantastic daily specials.
Mexican band Maná came to Costa Rica yesterday for their Amar es Combatir tour and played in the Ricardo Saprissa Stadium in Tibás. I had only recently been introduced to their music, and liked a couple of their songs like Bendita tu Luz and Labios Compartidos but my girlfriend likes them and there aren’t as many concert opportunities in Costa Rica as in most countries so we went.
We bought VIP tickets and while that granted us instant entry to the concert it also meant that we were uncovered in the rain, as the show was held in Saprissa’s soccer stadium and the seats close to the stage were out on the soccer field. The rain wasn’t too bad but I wish we hadn’t arrived early as the concert started late.
Mana started off with some songs I didn’t know, and even the ones I did know aren’t exactly concert songs but I had fun because they made good use of visual effects to underline the meaning behind their music ranging from political to environmental and they had a very positive sincerity to them. Nevertheless I wasn’t completely into their concert and spent some of the time looking up from the field at the packed stands and imagining that I was playing football in Saprissa stadium.
Leaving was a huge pain in the ass, as a sea of about 20,000 people instantly filled the neighboring streets so we stopped in a weird Chinese restaurant and waited for the crowd to disperse before heading home.