One favorite photo from each month of 2018 – And I had trouble picking just one! Thus the header photo above is an extra one from October and the only one here from Esquinas Rainforest Lodge, Piedras Blancas National Park, my #1 lodge this year.
January 2018 – My Discovery of Calle Nueva in my own neighborhood!
April 2018 – A group from First Baptist Nashville on my front porch. They came a volunteers working in the Hogar de Vida Children’s Home for a week. I’m not allowed to show children faces, thus picked this photo.
Wow! This was too hard to do! My very best photos were probably all in 3 or 4 months, so I will try something different next year, like maybe my top 5 or so favorite photos. I think I will also try to rank the hotels/lodges/parks I visited this year.
Ranking My Top 7 Lodges in 2018
I rank for all aspects of the lodge for a birder and/or nature lover, not necessarily in this order: number of birds and other wildlife seen, quality of guides, quality of overall service, restfulness of room, quality meals, overall ecology consciousness and sometimes the extra services, depending on the place and situation. My 2018 Top 7 lodges and hotels in order of my preference or enjoyment:
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.
On Safari in Masai Mara Reserve, Kenya, November 19, 2005
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:
TRAVEL STORIES
Driving from Nairobi, Kenya to Musoma, Tanzania, November 7, 2005
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:
Masai people in the Great Rift Valley near Masai Mara, Kenya
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:
I have been playing around with writing Haiku about Costa Rica Nature for nearly 3 years now and this is my little collection of poems, each printed on one of my photos. I’m not a poet, but it was fun to do and I may continue trying from time to time. I write the American 2-3-2 syllables style of Haiku but like the original Japanese Haiku they only describe nature.
Check out the free electronic preview of all pages of my latest Costa Rica photo book at: http://www.blurb.com/b/9079446-rancho-humo or click the book cover image below. Use “full screen mode” to best see these photo pages. I think my books & photos are getting a little better. 🙂
Front Cover of Book – click for preview
Back Cover of Book – click to see larger
And my exciting exploration of Costa Rica continues!
A large number of expats living in Atenas depend upon a local Facebook Group called Atenas Costa Rica Info and the administrator recently asked for photo submissions to be used as the header on the group page – photos made of or in Atenas. I submitted about 10 and 2 of mine placed in the top 10 as voted on by local users of the group. The above sunset photo placed 3rd and the below dancers placed 5th in the contest.
And the winner is . . .
And the winning photo was of this Oro Tree in the front yard of one of the local expats, Walter Wengrowich. It is beautiful and a good choice, representative of Atenas! I’m glad he won and owns such a beautiful tree!
“Photography is the story I fail to put into words.”
— Destin Sparks
Even though WordPress websites have photo galleries and I could put all my photos on the website – my original plan – so far they do not have the flexibilities and quality options that I have with my SmugMug.com photo gallery which recently purchased and incorporated Flickr where I also still have a small class-related gallery. https://www.flickr.com/photos/charliedoggett/ I will eventually close it, even though free.
Currently I Have 2 Large Online Photo Galleries
Now back in my first 12 years of retirement in Tennessee I chose to use the online photo gallery called Pbase, which the Nashville Photography Club used. Images I sold in galleries and arts & crafts fairs are there in 5 categories plus all my travel photos by trip, and others. It is a great database type program with lots of sub-sub-gallery possibilities, etc. but not quite as user-friendly or as visually attractive as SmugMug which I chose as my new photo gallery after moving to Costa Rica and comparing several online galleries, thus came Charlie Doggett’s COSTA RICA, which has had only Costa Rica photos thus far.
Move Both Galleries With Website & Blog or Not?
This year when I decided to move my website AND blog to WordPress (from Joomla & Blogger), I really wanted to move all my photo galleries here too – the luxury of everything in one place! And WordPress has that option! But I quickly learned that the more photos I put on this site, the slower it runs! And that is with me reducing the size of most photos since the web does not need large files, but then they are not good for you to download and print if you want. While I upload full-size photos to SmugMug & Pbase that are not only good for you to download and use but they are big enough (except some zoomed in birds) for you to use the SmugMug “BUY” Button and order prints, wall art, etc.
Thus I changed my mind and decided to not move my photos to the new website. Though I will continue to use photos on the site & blog (web-sized), since photography is central to almost anything I do or write about.
One Gallery As a Linked Part of the Website
So on the top MENU of this site is the 3rd item GALLERY, which is a link to my SmugMug Gallery that I want to become my only gallery. And what about the hundreds of photos still on Pbase? Well I started with some of the Family History photos as inefficient little galleries within this website’s articles, adding to the slowdown. Then I decided to move all of those to the SmugMug gallery which is created to handle a volume of pix. That means I have now started my first non-Costa Rica gallery inside my Costa Rica gallery! 🙂
Only the first two sub-galleries are moved now from Pbase and they are both a part of the web pages Family History that includes much more like cemeteries and stories from WWII, etc. While the other two sub-galleries will eventually have their own web pages and likewise include a lot of other information! So lot’s of work still to do here. Keeps me out of trouble! 🙂
More Non-Costa Rica Galleries Coming!
One of my “Best Sellers” in Arts & Crafts Fairs in TN
Then I anticipate at least two more non-Costa Rica sub-galleries on SmugMug:
These too will be related to and linked from pages on this personal website. Eventually it will seem like my whole life is reported somewhere on this website. I cannot explain why I have a passion to do this, but somehow I am driven to complete it all long before I die. It is like my passion for nature, travel, photography, stories, my family history and reporting on it all here!
Here’s the LINK to the photo book of my trip two weeks ago: Caribe Tuanis Click title to REVIEW the book electronically in my bookstore, all pages for free! Best seen at Full Screen!
Jumping at Bribri Watsi Waterfall
The title is my fusion of two Costa Rica slang words and is not grammatically correct Spanish! One Tico tried to get me to add “El” like “The” in English. No. “Caribe” is CR slang or short for Caribbean which I think is used in English some also and the slang word “Tuanis” is like the American slang of earlier years “Cool.” So my English translation of the title would be “Caribbean Cool.”
Three-toed Sloth this year – Rare face shot
Since my last year’s book on the Caribbean was all birds and nature, I wanted to do something different this year, featuring teens jumping off a waterfall and surfers riding the waves plus Bribri Indigenous People, and of course the Rastas of all Caribbean Culture. Enjoy!
