My only absolute “must do task” for today is to finalize my tax prep with AARP in Puyallup. That should be finished around 1:30 because it’s a simple form and I have everything on a spreadsheet.
BUT!
When I get back, I still have some stuff in my den closet and a couple other places that I have to decide what to do with, including photo albums of my trip to Alaska in 2004, a three-ring binder of hundreds of slides of Deaken, plus other misc stuff. I’ll probably go through it all and cull everything back to a few examples of each subject and then dispose of the rest. I’ve already culled my medical records binder so it’s more concise, so that can go into the moving box pretty soon. I should translate the most vital info in it into Spanish (surgeries I’ve had, blood clotting issues, kidney function results) so I can give a cover sheet to whichever doctor I settle with down there in Pura Vida.
I took all my books out of the moving boxes so now I only have three filled boxes (20″ x 20″ x 18″) and figure another three (max) will be all I’ll need to fly my remaining essentials down. I hope to sell all or most of the books at my reading/signing events over the next few months.
SAN RAMON COSTA RICA IS A NEW POSSIBLE LOCATION
I’m looking at an additional potential location: San Ramon, Costa Rica. Its weather is more to my liking and it’s a small town (8,000 people) with a great hospital and medical clinics, so it has everything I need there. And it’s just 45 minutes from the San Jose airport and not much farther than that to the Immigration Office and US Embassy in San Jose, so I will be able to catch a taxi, Uber or public bus to those places when I need to make appearances to get my immigration and residence pensionado applications underway.
I already have a contact there who will help me land a casita that will allow a cat in advance of my arrival. She’s a real estate agent so she can help me find a permanent place of my own (if I elect to go that route) when Jackie sells this place in Tacoma on a future date two to three years hence. (We’ll be splitting the income from the sale, since we’ve co-owned it all this time.)
San Ramon is centrally located to get to anywhere else I may want to go in CR. Lake Arenal is less than three hours away. (The temperatures at Arenal are more than I want to deal with, averaging 85 to 95 degrees daily year ’round. San Ramon’s temps are 68 degrees to 81 degrees. That’s within my comfort zone, so I won’t need air conditioning, which is good because electricity is costly in CR so the less of it I use, the better — and the better for the environment.)
GOATS, FISH
I need to get more proactive on finding homes for my two goats, aquarium and fish. I’ll work on that this week, too.
SENDING TREASURES TO LONG-TIME FRIENDS
While going through my journals, I found a lot of photos, notes and cards that will be treasures for the next people who own them. I’m mailing them out to said folks this week.
VINTAGE DINNERWARE
No one has expressed interest in buying my vintage dinnerware sets, so I will post them one last time with a MAKE OFFER price and see if anyone will bite. If not, I’ll put them all in plastic bins and see if I can donate them to an antique store in Tacoma. I need to find them homes so I can free up the space they’re occupying right now to display other garage sale items; they take up an entire large folding table right now.
Blue Willow!
MAKE OFFER!
Guess that’s all the news that fit to print for today!
