Isn't she cute?

Labels: dog, photo

Yup. Rained today. Again.
So it was a slow and moist day around the Sandcruiser pad. On the plus side, rainy weather here makes for beautiful sunsets, which is nice.

Last night, on the other hand, was a blast! Ken and Kira were nice
enough to host a little gathering in celebration of Bb's birthday. We
enjoyed spending time with friends, great weather, and cooking up a
storm (as usual!)- the fare included bbq chicken, baked & stuffed
chicken, delicious cole slaw, green salad w/homemade cinammon dressing
(sounds funny, tastes great!), tuna steaks, bbq pineapple, fresh mango
avocado salsa and some delicious snacks and starters. It wasn't the
biggest broo-ha-ha that we've thrown for Bb's birthday, but it was
probably the most civilized. I guess we're getting older.

Labels: food, tamarindo, weather

If you would like to start seeing sub-aquatic and surfing pictures here, all you gotta do is help us buy a Nifty waterproof case for our digital camera. Hey, it's worth asking, right?
While on the topic of asking for money... we've included a button at the bottom of the page that offers readers an opportunity to donate some money towards upkeeping the site. If it isn't worth it to you, don't donate, no worries, no pressure. If you feel inclined, Great!, every little bit helps.

Didn't have the energy to do the "big" update on Sandcruiser that I'm planning. I've got a bucketload of pictures from Kate's visit and our trip to Rincon... enough that I'm a little overwhelmed as to starting to do the update. Ugh. I did do a minor update to our Travelers page. Nothing too fancy, but it was so horridly out of date that I had to do something.
Here's a picture of Steve being lazy after our horseback ride in Rincon- note the rare (for us) opportunity to actually nap wrapped up in a wool blanket. Lovely.

Labels: Costa Rica, day trip, vacation

High Tide was at 9:27 am today. We didn't go surfing. We had coffee, mango, apple and toast on our patio instead and enjoyed the first sunny morning in Tamarindo that we've had in quite some time. Bb is off doing jewelry while Steve is doing email and (mostly) putzing about on the web, enjoying the fact that we can dialup from home, which is a relatively new phenomenon for us- we only just finally had our phone installed two weeks ago, after waiting a mere three months. Three months is actually a very quick response time for the phone company here in Tamarindo. Some pals of ours just got their phone and they've been waiting nearly a year.

Labels: food, jewelry, weather

Who Knew?
Gambian Rats are now helping rid the world of some of the 100 million land mines that are out there. Pretty nifty.
Speaking of rats, it appears that under the Bush administration the US will not sign a comprehensive ban on land mines. Costa Rica, in comparison, has "never produced, imported, stockpiled, or used antipersonnel mines" according to the International Campaign To Ban Landmines website. In fact, this article states that we've been landmine free since December of 2002. Which is nice, especially if you like having legs, which we do.

Here is another link regarding banning land mines.

Labels: news

We've thought they were cool from the first advertisement. Clearly they aren't the vehicle of choice in Tamarindo, our roads aren't quite ready for something so practical. But we were a little surprised to see this Crash Testing Information online. Half of our family rides around in a vehicle based on the ford light-truck body. Scary stuff.

So it turns out that Steve threw away absolutely all common sense and has promised Bb a PUPPY for her birthday. Said pup is still way too little to take it away from its Mom, but we go over for visits every now and then. Darn cute little critter (and the puppy ain't bad either)! No name so far, we are welcoming submissions.

Just got back from a great two day trip up to Rincon de la Vieja. Wow! Its been a while since we've tromped off to explore something new to us, and since it has been raining cats and dogs here we thought we would go hunt down some hot springs where it wouldn't matter if it was raining or not.
As the fickle fates of weather would have it- we barely got rained on up there at all, which was fine for us. Of course, we didn't find any hot springs either, which was a bummer. Check back later and we'll fill you in on the whole trip.

Labels: Costa Rica, travel, vacation, weather

Our close friend Kate came down to visit. She's been here for nearly 10 days and about all we've had to show her so far is lots and lots of rain. We are pretty bummed out about the torrential downpour's timing, but she has been a real trouper, not a word of complaint.

Labels: photo, tamarindo, vacation, weather

We've been gorging ourselves on passionfruit recently (its in season). Not only is it really delicious and funky-cool fun to eat, but nutritious too- according to the Personal Health Zone.

Labels: food

Since it is still pouring rain here in Tamarindo, we've been enjoying our new internet connection plenty. One of the various stupid (but entertaining) things we've found online is this site The Kingdom of Loathing pretty high geek factor, but Steve has already wasted an hour playing and plans to waste more as soon as the game lets him.

Since it has been a year since we've updated our site, we've decided to take this opportunity to make updating a little easier for ourselves. Not sure how this is going to work, but feeling like it can't be any worse than just leaving the site alone completely!

We are still trying to figure out how to get our pictures up and looking good, but for the time being we are just going to plug on ahead and see what we can accomplish.

Starting with today. Rain. That is about all we have to say about today. It started raining at about 6am. Hasn't stopped for more than an hour since. Been like this since last Monday. The roads are quickly transforming into pothole-studded pudding while the onshore winds blow out what would otherwise be some nice storm-generated swell. Mostly we've been sitting around at home grousing about the lousy weather.

And poor Kate! She came to visit for nearly two weeks and so far has gotten about five hours of sunny weather. While we've all enjoyed some game playing and book reading, this is really getting old. Hopefully tomorrow we'll go somewhere interesting and do something wonderful to help make her vacation a little less... boring.

Labels: photo, sunset, tamarindo, weather