Ready for some mundane Monday meanderings?

You’ve come to the right place!

Engage! I’ve been waiting for you!

It’s Monday, early morning — almost 6, Costa Rica (Mountain Time in the US). I’ll be walking with Cindy and three of her dogs this morning (the two chihuahuas and Harper).

On Wednesday I’ll be taking a bus to Grecia

…early to get my INR checked at Clinica Sanchez. Jon (and maybe Francisco) will pick me up from there and we’ll go get breakfast somewhere. YAY! I’m very much looking to that.

I need my Costa Rica Family fix at least once a month, more often if we can arrange it.   Jon texted last week to let me know he was pretty free this week (a small miracle), so we settled on midweek, my usual morning to go in.

I’ll do my best to remember to take pictures.  My brain doesn’t aim me in that direction, ever. I have to write it on my hand or something to remember to do it, or to ask the person I’ll be with to remember to remind me to take pix…

I didn’t walk yesterday with Cindy

… (as usual on Sunday and Wednesday) but I did walk in the apartment (6500 steps) and clean/dust it thoroughly afterward, so did get my steps in!

Other than that, I was pretty much a slug yesterday. Listened to additional Spanish lessons on the flatscreen. I’m finding some very helpful free lessons on YouTube.

Went to Grecia on Friday

…to get the rent from the ATM and then had a Subway sandwich. Also picked up some more wet cat food and creamy treats for Charli.

Tomorrow (Sept. 15th) is Costa Rica’s Dia de la independencia

I will skip the Grecia city center festivities this year. But Cindy and I did come across a school practicing their dances and band numbers outside their escuela on Thursday on our way home from having Harper spayed, so I got a small taste of it.

It is truly a glorious spectacle to see

all of the schools from across Costa Rica

coming together to celebrate the day.

Here are a few photos from last year’s event, taken very early before a huge crowd gathered:

Francisco and Jon 11 Septiembre 2025

If you’d like to see additional images from last year’s event and a full report on it, click here.

Back from Walking with Cindy

There were a lot of walkers on our route today so the dogs had plenty of opportunity to bark and wag.  Three little barkers can be deafening, especially when other neighborhood dogs join in. NOT the most serene of experiences, but fun (and great exercise) anyway!

I sprayed Harper’s tummy with two kinds of medicines before heading back home. She wiggles and squirms too much to make that an easy task for Cindy alone! She’s a real wiggle worm.

Cleaned and scrubbed the bird baths this morning

I do this every two days to make sure no mosquitoes get a chance to set up shop in them. Dengue fever has spread here to San Isidro, and standing water is their breeding ground, so I make sure that no water stands unchanged for long.

I add cold water everyday in between scrubbings. Haven’t seen any larvae in the water. Lots of species visit them to drink and bathe, so the water gets stirred and lowered all the time, making establishing a breeding ground for the mosquitoes mighty problematic, fortunately!

Mellow Guitar Music is Playing

…on my flatscreen right now. I had it on all night, too.  Very relaxing.  But for a half hour or so I also tried “Learn Spanish While You Sleep” but I knew 99.9% of the phrases already, so I gave that up after a while. It’s getting to the point now where I need intermediate and beyond lessons, and it isn’t always easy to find those readily on YouTube in formats that truly intrigue me and retain my attention.  I like short Spanish stories best, ones that are shown or spoken first in Spanish, then translated so I can see how much of them I understood well. Those seem to be doing the most good at this stage in my language development.  They challenge the brain without overwhelming it.

As you saw in an earlier blog post

Autumn McKenzie found videotaped versions of my HUSBAND HUNTING ON THE ENTERPRISE comedy routine in her Kelley archives and made a compilation for me to share with y’all from two different presentations of it.

The first part (the shortest part, videotaped in Oakland CA with Carolyn Kelley in the audience and DeForest Kelley standing backstage) is a little blurry but easiest to understand, I think.

The second part (videotaped in Baltimore Maryland: I’m wearing the denim jacket) was one that I didn’t even know existed!

I was astounded to see it!

The second part was presented inside a room filled with people who had just eaten a multi-course evening meal. And because of this anomaly, I thought I was bombing big time, because no one was laughing the way they had in Oakland and in Denver.

I was devastated by the lack of response!

But I hadn’t bombed; they were just too stuffed to respond audibly!

Fortunately, I found this out later the next morning when numerous couples (strangers to me) came, introduced themselves, and said they’d never heard a funnier Star Trek stand up comedy routine than the one I’d presented the night before!

I responded to the first couple, “Oh, I’m so glad to hear this!  No one laughed, so I thought I had bombed.  I kicked myself for half of the night over it!”

“Oh, no!”  the woman reassured. “We were just too full to laugh!”

Another couple, standing behind them, nodded when they heard our exchange, too.

And then additional people came over during the day to tell me that they, too, had enjoyed the heck out of the routine. So, I felt a whole lot better!  Whew!!!

I mention this because that’s why you hear laughter in the first part of the compiled routine and what seems like a profound dearth of responses during the second part.

From this I learned a valuable lesson:

DO NOT OFFER STANDUP

TO STUFFED AUDIENCES

UNLESS YOU WANT TO

FEEL LIKE A COMPLETE FAILURE!