Category: Nature

My profession is to always find God in nature.

– Henry David Thoreau

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Friday of Healthcare Tour

Old Man Tree in Breakfast Room

A stop by CPI Spanish Immersion School in Heredia for one short lesson.

Visited the smaller public hospital in San Ramon.
Public hospitals aren’t as fancy and pretty as private,
but very clean and functional inside.

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Paul & Gloria’s view with a Poro Tree blooming. Now is time for Poro.
Lunch at home of Paul & Gloria Yeatman with guest speakers.

Visiting the San Ramon Feria or Farmers’ Market Friday afternoon.
Paul & Gloria emphasize this as a part of healthcare!

We also visited a small neighborhood clinic, farmacia, bank, community center, Red Cross which does all the emergency ambulances, a museum, and talked about insurance, the CAJA government healthcare, homecare provided by CAJA, and even a presentation by a volunteer organization encouraging us to volunteer. Whew! A full day! But very helpful. They were showing us what it is really like for medical care in a local community, in this case San Ramon. I will do a separate post on San Ramon and give my comparison to Atenas. This ended the Healthcare Tour at dinner time in San Ramon. I spent the night there and tried to post these photos but the little La Posada Hotel had very slow internet, so I saved them for today, Saturday and will purposefully do two posts. The next one with a few shots of San Ramon sans-healthcare!

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Black-cowled Oriole

Black-cowled Oriole
Inside my house on a screen
Black-cowled Oriole
Inside my house as seen from outside before I opened the screen.
He flew away, probably fearful of houses now.

During the day when at home I leave the garden door without a screen open and the sliding glass doors and screens to the terrace open, thus easy for wildlife to sometimes explore inside.  🙂

When this happens I open all the other screens and then try to open the one he is on. As is often the case, when I started sliding this one (from the outside) he flew the other way out another window and up into a tree! I leave nothing fully open at night. Had a bat once and trying to avoid that if I can. 
From Charlie! Retired in Costa Rica!

See my Costa Rica Birds Photo Gallery with 156 species I’ve photographed in Costa Rica so far! And with about 900 species of birds here, I have a ways to go!   🙂

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Layering My Private Jungle

Year-around blooming flowers for my terrace rocking chair view.
And behind my terrace planters are three layers of plants in my yard
and another in the neighbor’s. Soon we will be separated by a jungle!  🙂
One of the round pots I moved from inside because of a lack of sun there.
The other had ornamental grass which I will replace with something green.
Like my garden, the yard and terrace are always a work in progress!
And my poinsettias are still blooming to the right at terrace entrance!

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Hiding the Dog Fence

My landlords who live on the hill above me have a cute little dog that kept getting lost out in the neighborhood and was in danger of being run-over. So, fence time! And about the same time they got a second small dog to keep the first one company and maybe added motivation to stay home. Well, the dog fence was right out my kitchen window across the driveway and I was dreading it. But Jean-Luc is so thoughtful that he immediately had the gardener plant morning glory vines along the fence and now it is beautiful!

It will soon be a flowering hedge

From my kitchen window

Nice!
And by the way, Costa Rica continues to become more eco-friendly as urged in this article: 
5 Tips for Helping the Planet from Costa Rica    (Hint: They help in other countries too!)
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Changing Garden

 I did what I thought was pretty radical pruning of the overgrown giant Porter Weeds and some of the Overgrown Red Ginger. But my “TuttiFruti,” which had been my most colorful plant, was apparently dying. So the gardeners cut it to the ground which I would have had trouble doing, though we had been pruning it some. They also sprayed for a leaf-eating insect. If it does not come back healthy, we will pull it and plant something different on my border. But we will probably have nothing blooming along the border when Reagan visits in just 4 weeks. Sorry Reagan! Though plants fool you here and some grow really fast!

The colorful border (inset photo) was dying, maybe insects for which he sprayed, but it is cut to ground now,
hoping for a beautiful renewal or revival. If not, I’ll get a different border. But waiting is hard!  🙂

Even without the border and the heavy pruning, the garden looks okay.
The Red Ginger and Purple Petunias will always bloom, even when cut.
And also the Plumbago, though it blooms on new growth, so cutting it back diminishes blooms briefly.
And though not seen above, I am getting new blooms on my Heliconias as seen in below photos. 

The tall plant in the back of garden photo above is where
this large Heliconia sports 4 blooms right now!
This is the biggest of the four.
This smaller Heliconia by my kitchen window also has several blooms.
The other plants like it have red and orange blooms but are dormant now.
I cut back the two big Porterweeds the hummingbirds love, BUT
I still have one smaller plant blooming and attracting hummers!
Though the hummingbirds are mainly in the Yellow Bell Trees now.
And very few butterflies are around this time of year.
May-July was the most butterflies last year.
The TriqueTraque or Orange Trumpet Vine has not done well, but now that I started feeding it fertilizer I’m seeing it grow a little and getting a few flowers, so there is still hope that it will cover that big massive concrete wall in time! That’s my goal!




The Maraca blooms at the
base of a very tall plant.

Also once my Planta Maraca or Shampoo Ginger gets established, I expect to regularly have more blooms, which is more exotic to me than the heliconias! And every time we trim the Blumbago it shoots out new growth with lots of blooms, so everything will have its ups and downs but as I wanted, something is blooming year-aroung, all the time! And it is fun to watch it change, though I have learned (what I really already knew), that maintaining a garden this big and a yard with lots of flowers is a lot of work, even with a hired gardener a couple of times a month! And for any reader living here, my most constant and prolific bloomers have been the Red Ginger and Purple Petunias. And I still don’t have all the Spanish names for these flowers and that sometimes that changes depending on who I talk to or which website I check!  🙂

PURA VIDA!
EDITORIAL CORRECTION: Yesterdays post was of an unusual bug in my bathroom, I tried to call it a stick or matchstick insect, but Kevin & Charles both correctly noticed that it is/was a spider: 

It’s a spider – 8 legs
Insects have 6 legs                        THANKS KEVIN!

AND LATER: A note from Charles Parker with the same 8-leg, 6-leg story! Did I know that? 🙂
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¡Buenos Noches!

Sunset from my Terrace. Yes, similar to an earlier post, but newer and the one I have ordered a 48X12 canvas print of.
It will likely hang in my office/guest room. I’m running out of space to hang photos.  🙂

Mountains are the beginning and the end of all natural scenery.


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Christmas in San Jose Photos

Big Cities like to do everything bigger and better and San Jose, the capital and largest city in Costa Rica is no exception. See a few photos of Christmas decor and events by Tico Times:

http://www.ticotimes.net/2015/12/25/photos-christmas-2015

Tico Times photos – this of the lighting of tree at Children’s Hospital

AND MY DAY AFTER CHRISTMAS?

I’m hoping to stay home all day with no interruptions to the many things I want to do and some rest! 

WITH CHRISTMAS COMES THE WIND!
It actually started some a couple of weeks ago, but it is here full force now! I’m having to keep the sliding door screen closed and my garden door with no screen closed because so many leaves, flowers, bugs and dust blow in! This will be the norm through February or March with it getting more dusty the longer we go without rain. And if Turrialba erupts again, we will get ash or gray-black dust! That is just part of living in paradise!  🙂

And the crazy thing is that it is during this windy, sometimes dusty period that we have the most tourists and snowbirds trying to get away from cold weather up north. I think I’ve decided I like the rainy season (Jul-Oct) or “green season” better and it’s two shoulder periods (May-Jun & Oct-Nov) which have very little rain but are greener and more pleasant. So for the next 3 months or so we put up with wind, dust and snow birds! Then tranquility begins again!  🙂

And for my Canadian friends: