charliedoggett.net
HAPPY, HAPPY – – – to you and your family, friends, and communities this Christmas! While some of you enjoy a White Christmas, I will be enjoying the beaches and rainforests of Manuel Antonio National Park and the private Wildlife Refuge of Si Como No Resort there. – – – HAPPY, HAPPY! 🙂
¡Pura Vida!
National Geographic has been producing a series of 5 minute videos, first about wildlife in the states, now on much of Costa Rica’s wildlife called “Untamed Costa Rica” for use on their TV Channel and available online at: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/untamed/
Wow! I just watched the first in the series about the negative relationship between the Olive Ridley Turtle and the Jaguar in northern Guanacaste at the Santa Rosa National Park here. I’ve bookmarked the website and will watch episode 2 soon which is about hummingbirds.
If you love nature but are short on time, a 5 minute nature fix may be just what you need! Give it a try!
Or come visit one of our hundreds of parks and reserves for a live nature fix here! Costa Rica is truly THE PLACE for Nature Lovers!
And here’s a 2 minute intro to the young dudes making these videos. They started first in the USA as shown in this intro:
And the Tico Times Newspaper article introducing Untamed Costa Rica to me is at:
http://www.ticotimes.net/2018/12/01/national-geographic-highlights-costa-rica-in-untamed-series
¡Pura Vida!
And oh yes, this month Costa Rica Celebrates 70 Years Without an Army! 🙂
Earlier I showed a photo of one side that was being painted as a mural, but had no idea it would become like this and it appears to be nearly finished. Click an image to see it larger and/or start a manual slide show:
Atenas is a small rural town where people expect to park on the street, but as it has grown and gained a lot of rich foreigners with multiple cars, parking lots are becoming necessary, though people everywhere are slow to adapt. This colorful place to park should help those not wanting to change and pay to park. It is colorful like our beautiful little town. See also the “old town” in the video below in the right column, titled “Atenas: Best Weather in the World.” A cool place to live!
¡Pura Vida!
Photo is of a Caribe sunrise, Hotel Banana Azul,
Puerto Viejo, Costa Rica.
¡Pura Vida!
My prayers go to the Bush Family in their loss . . .
. . . a truly great & humble man!
George H. W. Bush
Humility is not thinking less of yourself,
it’s thinking of yourself less.
~C. S. Lewis
REPORT ON MY BIOPSY: After removing the 10 stitches from my arm (where all that cancer was confirmed removed) and the two stitches from my face for the biopsy, Dr. Gamboa gave me the facial biopsy report:
In brief, it says I have another carcinoma cancer on my face which is a smaller and slower growing type than the one on my arm. No problem waiting until January to remove the rest of it (the biopsy took most of it). Because of the delicate and thinner skin location next to my eye, we will be doing a more complicated and more efficient (more expensive) “Mohs Surgery” with two doctors doing it with a pathologist standing by to make sure they get all of the cancer as he examines each layer as removed (continuous biopsy). It will not be in his office this time but in a clinic, hospital-like, operating room, but still out-patient. He is checking on availability of other doctor and the clinic for the week of 21 January – after my Boca Tapada trip. Remember — the doctors work around my trips! 🙂 Important! That is where I sleep in a tree house 5 nights!
Dr. Gamboa also “PRESCRIBED” wearing a wide-brim hat instead of the ball caps I’ve been wearing and of course sunscreen every day when out. I sure love sunny Costa Rica, just 673 miles north of the equator, but with the value of the sun also comes with some potential dangers for someone like me who loves the outdoors. I have already become more careful, even though the doc says these current growths and cancers were probably caused by sun I got as a child or teen, more sun now can make it worse, so I must be cautious.
¡Still Pura Vida! 🙂
This street I cross almost every day in Atenas ended at one street and across the vacant lots you could see it continued on the other side of that block. I wondered why they didn’t just continue the street or connect the two ends. Then one day more than a year ago they started.
First they graded the land on either side of the creek running down the middle of the block. Then they brought in a bunch of huge concrete culverts, placing two rows of them down the stream. Then covered those with gravel and dirt and more on top of everything until they finally black-topped a street where there was none. I figured they were finished.
No, they then added sidewalks on both sides of the street which is unheard of in Atenas. Still not enough! They built these beautiful stone walls above where the culverts were placed to make it look like a bridge. Finally (I think), they added ornaments, a 150th Anniversary Logo and a Municipal Council sign on the stone walls and someone else painted a mural on the wall protecting a house with a little sign saying “The Monkey Space.” I looked it up and found their Facebook Page as a gathering place for young adults wanting to volunteer in the community. Totally cool and another wonderful little spot in Atenas! What a cool town I live in!
Click images below to enlarge or start a manual slideshow:
I had a package to pick up at Aeropost Alajuela Saturday morning, so I went early before they opened and had pancakes and sausage with coffee at the shiny new (remodeled) McDonalds Restaurant across from Central Park Alajuela. They’ve always had an upstairs with a balcony overlooking the park, just new and nicer now! Sorry I didn’t photograph their new modern furniture and white tile floors and walls, but nice.
Yes, the photo above was shot through large hole screen wire which is necessary to keep the park’s pigeons off your table and food! And remember, with perfect weather here, we need no air conditioning or heat, thus it is an open air restaurant like almost all here. It is very pleasant to me to eat a breakfast outside (as I always do at home) and here I enjoy watching Our Lady of the Pillar Cathedral also called Alajuela Cathedral and watching people in the park. It helps make my 45 minute free bus ride to Alajuela worth the time, plus I picked up my newest travel photo book on Rancho Humo. And read the Washington Post on the bus!
I was back home before 11 and had a quiet rest-of-the-day at home adding photos of Africa to my gallery and website. I introduced those new web pages yesterday. I enjoy life here!
¡Pura Vida!
I am beginning a new stories section of my website titled Travel. It will eventually have many stories of my many trips around the world (outside Costa Rica) with some illustrative photos along with links to the newest section of my Photo Gallery titled Pre-Costa Rica Travels. where I am slowly creating a gallery on each trip over the years or at least the recent years, one at a time as I slowly move such photos from the Travel Section of my old Pbase gallery. PHOTO ABOVE: Masai Shepherd in Kenya
Writing the stories and moving the photos are both very slow and time-consuming jobs, but time is what an ol’ retiree has isn’t it? 🙂
For multiple reasons, I decided to start with Africa in both the Travel Stories and the Photo Gallery sections. The photos are mostly moved but all of the stories have not been written yet. I have a good start, especially with most of my Gambia stories already told here. Here’s what you can expect to find now:
You find Travel on the main menu above with dropdown menus for stories started here and additional menu links on each country’s home page for related stories in other pages of the site. For example: my Gambia Missionary experiences and mission trips are on the HIS SPIRIT menu first and thus linked to there from this Travel Gambia Home Page or Kenya Home Page, etc. The software allows for drop down menus for only items initiated on that page, thus regular links to other pages like the missionary stories.
And since my photo galleries are actually on SmugMug.com, they cannot be on any of my site drop down menus but must be linked to from each country’s Home Page or found by going to the big gallery first from the above menu. I hope that is not confusing. Just use the country’s home page to find everything about that country. 🙂
I have only barely started on all the stories I want to tell, but for the main Travel section described above I have started these pages with more stories coming on each in the future:
My travel photos made before moving to Costa Rica are in a special sub-gallery title Pre-Costa Rica TRAVELS. Like my Costa Rica Trips gallery they are arranged chronologically by dates of each trip with most recent at top. At this moment, I have only travels to Africa included. Click above to see all or here is the list of my Africa Travel Galleries which will later be mixed in with other travels depending on the dates:
“The darkest thing about Africa
has always been our ignorance of it.”
~George Kimble
All photos by Charlie Doggett.
Questions? Contact me!
When Lee Holloway introduced me to and gave me a copy of the 1931 historical adventures storybook Yankee Ships in Pirate Waters by Rupert Sargent Holland back in the early 1970’s while at The Brotherhood Commission, I had no idea how far it would lead in my future research of an 1800’s ship with my name.
For a long time I have had the research website on The Ship Charles Doggett (the definitive website on the ship) and along the way discovered the relationships of the ship to Nashville and a friend there who is a descendant of the ship’s captain, William Driver. Driver is buried in Nashville. (Click above link for more info.) Also while there I learned of the U.S. Flag first being called “Old Glory” while flying on the Brig Charles Doggett with the actual flag at The Smithsonian Institute National Museum in Washington, DC. My web page above tells exciting stories of the flag, especially during the Civil War in a Confederate State Capital.
Then later I learned that it was this ship that rescued the survivors of “Mutiny on the Bounty.” Wow! The stories go on and are many and exciting as presented in this one 48-page Chapter 7 of the 1931 book Yankee Ships in Pirate Waters by Rupert Sargent Holland.
As I have always intended to do, I finally scanned or used a print shop in Atenas to scan the pages of the stories for me. I now include those pages here. The chapter on The Charles Doggett is titled “Children of the Sun” and was introduced with this summary: “How the men of the ‘Charles Doggett’ angered a witch-doctor, fought Fiji cannibals, and saved a sister-ship from yellow pirates in the gulf of Tongking.” You can read the stories online here now at Chapter 7: Children of the Sun. A fun read! And just one more bit of valuable information on this website. 🙂
Continue reading at Chapter 7: Children of the Sun.
¡Pura Vida!
It is difficult to figure out everything they are doing or why they went 2 weeks doing nothing, but now they seem to be lowering the central portion where the band shell or gazebo will go -quite a bit lower – possibly for a good foundation. And now I can see that the square-block park was not as level all the way across as I thought. Possibly they will level it. Now they are removing dump trucks full of dirt from the center.
See my original post on Remodeling Central Park (architect drawings)
Or go to Government Park Remodel Page (architect drawings)
¡Pura Vida Atenas!
Yep! I missed a couple of days posting anything. Always busy with daily chores and necessary trips to town and I have also been busy adding content to this website. I’ll tell you about that in the next couple of days’ posts. Exciting Stories!
The other day I came across this youth group painting an environmental message on the sidewalk at one of the busiest corners in Atenas Central in front of a furniture store, across the street from Mercado Central and across another street from our University Extension campus.
They are painting messages on several well-traveled sidewalk corners in town too create ecological awareness (conciencias de ecologica) or awareness of global warming (conciencias de calentamiento global) for the people of Atenas. The youth of today are the leaders of tomorrow and their actions speak well for our future.
“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”
—Margaret Mead
People from around the world study ecology at Costa Rica’s Earth University people who are changing the world for good (link is to English Language site)
Also a visitor’s English-Language Report on Costa Rica’s Earth University
¡Pura Vida!