For the last few weeks we've been noticing dry, wilted plants on the roadside, covered by dust. The same dust has been blasting pedestrians and coating various items in our lives. We expect that in March, but not in August. Well... the last few days seem to have corrected the unusual weather- we've had gentle to not-so-gentle storms nearly every afternoon since Sunday. Never a big fan of rainy days, even I can see that we needed the precipitation.


I've got bread in the oven and a book awaiting my attention. It isn't so bad.

Last night's storm made for a particularly ominous-looking sunset. The sort of thing that makes you enjoy having a dry place to get out of the weather.

Labels: bread, house, photo, sunset, tamarindo, weather

Jocelyn has taken to making wine spritzers these days, and somewhere along the way I tried a sweet vermouth and soda. Delicious. Light. Strong flavor but not so much alcohol.

The recipe couldn't be simpler: in a collins glass full of cracked ice, pour 3 ounces of Sweet Vermouth (Martini & Rossi Rosso, for example), then fill with soda and squeeze a wedge of lime on it. You could garnish it up with a cherry and a lime/lemon slice if you want to make it pretty.

The bitter herbal flavor really comes through. If you prefer sweet tall drinks, you could mix 7up or Ginger Ale instead. I don't much care for sweet.

This isn't probably a good choice if you're looking to catch much of a buzz- vermouth is 16% alcohol, 3 oz of the stuff has about 25% lower alcohol content than a short-pour of rum/vodka/whisky.

Labels: food, sunset

	It was such a lovely evening last night that I decided to snap some photos of the yard. I had completely forgotten that the moon was about to rise, the photos I got do it no justice, but I've shared what I did get.

Labels: garden, photo, sunset, tamarindo

Caly and I stopped off at the beach for a (partly)business meeting at sunset. Gotta love doing business with a rum and coke, beautiful sunset, on the beach. It gets worse than this.

The sunset was lovely, but not particularly notable for Tamarindo. What was notable was the crowd. Late February isn't usually a top tourist season, but the beach was on the verge of too-crowded last night. I was pleasantly surprised. Sorta. I've got a love-hate relationship with tourists. On the one hand, they are the life-blood of Tamarindo's economy and therefore a good thing to have around. On the other hand, tourists everywhere tend to be annoying. Loud, confused, they drive like morons, and frequently overlook the fact that everyone else is not necessarily on vacation. I lump myself into this description when I'm in some new and fascinating location- it isn't that the people are bad, it is just that tourism seems to incapacitate some vital part of our brains, rendering normal folks into completely different people.

All things considered, the economic benefits outweigh the inconveniences.

Labels: beach, photo, sunset, tamarindo

So a friend came by at about 2:30 in the afternoon and said, "Hey, let's go camping."

I said, "Sure. When?"

"Right now!"

"Oh. Okay! Why not?"

We actually got ready and left closer to 4:00. It is cooler out by then. We grabbed miminal gear, the dogs, and drove 10 minutes out of town, stopping for basic provisions, then pitched tents, built a small fire, and kicked back enjoying a spectacular view, fresh breeze (strong breeze, hence very small fire) and very little human-made noise. It was wonderful and relaxing.


The wind was strong enough, and/or the tents were pitched in a not-sheltered-enough location that I woke up several times from the tent smacking me in the head. But other than that, it was tranquil and fabulous.

Labels: camping, Costa Rica, photo, sunset, tamarindo

Pretty sunset tonight

Labels: Costa Rica, photo, sunset, tamarindo

We woke up to another wonderful sunrise this morning, the clouds were molten metal colors and the sky a cool dark blue. The birds, as if appreciating the show) were going nuts in the trees outside our window and the curtains across that window were catching the light.

Despite the fact that nearly every single time we wake up before dawn we say "Wow, this is the most beautiful time of day here" and despite the fact that it is quiet and almost chilly (if you are accustomed to 85-95 degrees, 72 degrees is almost chilly!) it is still a challenge for us to get used to getting out of our comfortable bed at 5 in the morning. Certainly it is a lot easier if we have an early dinner and aren't out with friends until wee hours.

This weekend we had a little extra treat. Literally little. Our gardener is a great guy who drives four hours every now and then to go visit his mother in Monteverde to help her keep her house in order. He had mentioned to me a while ago that he was helping her repair her quail cage and I mentioned that it would be fun to have quail eggs. Apparently he remembered, and brought us a small bag full of the cutest little eggs. Not only are they cute, but darn tasty too! Though it does take four or five to get much in the way of breakfast.

As it turns out, quail are a great solution for home farmers as compared to chickens. Not only are they smaller (less space required) but a healthy little quail hen will produce up to 250 eggs per year and quail only need about 2 lbs of feed to make a pound of eggs, vs. chickens who need more like 3 lbs of feed for a pound of eggs. I'm all about efficiency. Best of all- quail don't crow. Nothing ruins a beautiful morning like some neighbor's crowing rooster, as far as I'm concerned.

Speaking of birds, on the drive back from Playa Grande today I stopped to watch a flock of cattle egrets soaring over a drying field of grass with verdant hills in the background. It was spectacular. Like with our fabulous sunrise, it is easy to forget about the natural beauty that we enjoy every day here in Tamarindo. With the economic slowdown that seems to be affecting just about everyone and everything in the world these days, I'm trying to remember to slow down a little bit myself and enjoy the sights/smells/sounds that don't cost me anything at all.

Backtracking a little here, I skipped over my trip to Grande for a nice bird segue but now I'm going to Tarantino it just a little and go back.

I drove out to Playa Grande to look at a house for some clients. I don't make it out to Grande much, despite it being a short drive and a beautiful area. The house that I went to see is really lovely; a great combination of old-style Tico building mixed with some modern touches. It used to be a little two bedroom weekend house, but is now a 4 bedroom 3.5 bath home with a spacious outdoor living area and nice indoor living room as well. The pool and yard are done very nicely with tropical plants and an inviting deck for lounging around the beautiful pool. It is nice to see a switch from the new construction in Tamarindo. Not that the new stuff isn't beautiful, it is, but often the older homes evoke a more authentic feel (for me) and I enjoy that. Asking price on this place is $595,000. The seller is moving back to his country of origin after enjoying several years here, so I would imagine that he is willing to negotiate. By all means, contact me if you want more information, my email at work is steve (at) bbcostarica com.

My trip to Grande was cut short a little by another client who arrived an hour early at my office. Fortunately my business partner got there quickly to help keep things moving along smoothly. We toured some cute condos with a nice view then called it a day.

I wrapped up enjoying another scenic rest (this property also for sale), chatting about this and that with a good friend, then headed home to enjoy a quiet evening... looking forward to tomorrow's sunrise. All in all, a very pleasant Sunday.

Labels: photo, real estate, sunset, tamarindo

Steve's parents are here and we are having a great time. Everyone in the house seems to have caught a little bit of a flu- Jocelyn hit hardest, but we are still enjoying each other's company and enjoying some un-seasonally cool weather. Air temps this week have been in the high 70s instead of mid-hi-80s. It is nice. Cloudy skies have also made for excellent sunsets.

I'm still battling my Landcruiser transmission- mostly neglecting it, at this point, as working under a car with a heavy beast of a tranny is hard. Doing it with flu symptoms is too hard for me to do right now.

Labels: landcruiser, sunset, tamarindo, visitor, weather

After a long and muggy day of fixing the wheel situation on my Cruisers, I was torn between wanting to get in a surf and wanting to hold down the couch. In the end, I rationalized with myself that I would at least go to the beach and paddle out, for a minute or two. It I was tired/uninspired, I'd let myself be a couch potato.

Two hours later, with a huge smile on my face and the lingering memory of a technicolor sunset, I drove home a new man- relaxed, happy, and feeling wonderful.

Paradoxically, I almost always feel that great feeling when I go surfing, and yet I still only make it out about half as often as I could go.

In light of all the minor annoyances that we endure living in Tamarindo, I've got to try harder to enjoy the luxury of paddling out in chest to head-high waves, hanging with three of four buddies (and a few tourists, but just a few) and riding a really fun wave in a beautiful setting.

Labels: Costa Rica, sunset, surf

For any of you TV watchers out there, if you happened to be tuned in to ABC's October Road last night, you saw one of Jocelyn's most popular necklaces on the lovely Laura Prepon who plays Hannah Daniels on the show. Very exciting times. We hope to instill in Laura and her stylist a very high level of devotion to my designs.

Speaking of devotion to my jewelry, if you find yourself near a Nordstrom and needing one of my necklaces like a TV star, you're in luck. jocelynbroyles is now being carried by select Nordstrom department stores across the US.

But enough about me. Oh, wait, the sole pupose of this blog is to tell you about us. Alright then. Steve continues to do well with his business and just moved BBA into a larger space, giving both Bs their very own offices. The As still share the space out front, but it's a bigger, nicer, better-painted space. They also now have a lovely conference room and inner lobby for literature, dogs, un-raised signage, that sort of thing.

And low and behold, the 20th (yes, I meant 20th) century has come to BBA as well, with the installation of a phone system. For those of you who have visited or live here, you understand the all-encompassing range of issues that a system implies: coordination with perhaps more than one governmentally-run utility company; more than one phone; more than one phone line; electricity. Getting all these things together in the same building, with people who know how to install (much less use) the system, while the electricity is on and the phone lines working to test the system, is no easy feat. But BBA pulled through with flying colors and now has a phone system that almost works. You can't actually leave voice mail at the moment if no one answers, but that's really just picking nits, isn't it?

We've mostly been working as of late -- you don't get phone systems, and famous people don't wear your jewelry, and Nordstrom doesn't buy it, if you just sit around looking at the ocean view from a friend's patio, playing with your dog, selling your Sandy for parts or relocating scorpions with young on their backs. But that's just what we did, and look what we accomplished in the meantime!

Did I mention famous people, phone systems and Nordstrom yet?

Labels: jewelry, landcruiser, photo, real estate, sunset, tamarindo

Even though we are slackers on the photograph front these days.... absolutely failing to share the beauty of both Tamarindo, Costa Rica and also The Bay Area, California... well, at least our friends take a minute to post images. That's something. And a good thing at that, because unless you are looking at jewelry or Tamarindo Real Estate, we have a terrible track record of not putting up any photos at all these days. Pitiful, really. But we intend to get better, honestly, we do. Of course, good intentions and a quarter will buy you 25 cents worth of candy, right?
Raining hard here today, by the way, absolutely pouring. Of course our Landcruiser is waiting for new bolts so that I can finish installing the radiator. One of the joys of doing your own auto repair in Tamarindo is that occasionally you have the pleasure of discovering that somewhere along the way somebody else has replaced the factory bolts with shorter ones... which didn't matter when they re-used the worn-down-to-wafer-thin bushings, but once you replace the bushings with radiator-saving new rubber... well, you end up with bolts that are too short. So you can either mount the radiator sans-bushings (and look forward to resplitting the top tank in the not-too-distant future) or you can wait a day or two until you get new bolts *sent* from an hour away (because the hardware store only sells SAE bolts, no metric).
In brief: get very wet on bicycle or drive Landcruiser hoping not to break very expensive radiator when you hit a water-filled crater in the road.
But Costa Rican land costs less than coastal California and we don't have rush hour traffic and the surf is 80+ degrees and I get to see parrots and monkeys just about every day. Gotta keep things in perspective.

Labels: Costa Rica, jewelry, photo, real estate, sunset, tamarindo

Just because we didn't write about it for a week or so, doesn't mean it wasn't fun. Right?
We had a great sunset beer and pizza with our close pal Christi. Then we headed to a great little party with new friends and soon-to-be neighbor Joseph, who is about to open a restaurant down the street from us. It'll be nice to have TWO places within walking distance where we can buy dinner. Even more exciting is that we may even have a place to get morning coffee!! Not that we can't pour boiling water over grounds ourselves, but there is something about buying a coffee drink on a lazy morning that is hard to beat at home.
Speaking of lazy, we stopped on the way back from Avellanas and shoo'ed some piglets out of the road. Not very lazy, piglets. They were pretty darn active- jumping around and making all manner of crazy little sounds. Calypso was entranced but we opted out of letting her chase them- who knows what a mother pig would do to a puppy?

Steve surfed some, but the waves were small, mushy, and inconsistent. Other than that it was a good time. Bb even came one morning to shoot pictures but the sets were so unimpressive that she didn't bother to swim out and thus we had mediocre pics of mediocre surf. We'll share one anyway, just so that we can honestly say we've included at least one picture of surfing.

The highpoint of Steve's rather long professional week was a horseback tour of a spectacular finca north of here. If you've got $6 million and the desire to own nearly 1500 acres of land abutting the beach, with views of Witch's Rock, drop me a line and I'll set you right up.

Labels: beach, food, sunset, surf

Fortunately for us, the dog is getting big enough to start actually asking to do fun things- like take a walk to the beach at sunset. Ok, she wasn't quite that articulate, but she did want to get out of the house, and it was near sunset, and we extrapolated from there...
...and headed down to watch what turned out to be a truly beautiful sunset. The rain we've been getting makes mud and some mildew, it's true, but the clouds make for technicolor evening presentations that shame all of the fancy shmancy stuff that the big studios put out.
It is like having our very own ultrabigscreen theater, just 200 yards away. Lovely.

Labels: beach, photo, sunset

After finally getting some things squared away with a grossly overdue debtor, we had the displeasure of spending a couple hours in the bank taking care of various things that we've put off, knowing it would take a few hours at the bank...
As a reward to ourselves, we took a long stroll on the beach this evening and just enjoyed living in paradise. As the sun went down, we zipped home to take poor Caly out to the beach too. She had spent most of a hot afternoon in her crate, presumably awaiting our return. She played fetch long after we couldn't see the stick anymore, then the three of us headed home. Bb whipped up a delicious Southwest style salad with fresh tuna and sweet corn (Yum!) while Steve got all wrapped up in reviewing a new business card design from our friend Dyna (thanks D!!).

Labels: beach, food, sunset

We've been talking about heading down to Nosara for quite some time to explore the possibilities for Bb's jewelry, so Tuesday we finally decided to make the drive. Funny how around here things seem so much further away- it only took us about 2.5 hours to drive down, and for the most part the road was in good shape. Yet for some reason we've put this off for months.
The weather was beatiful the whole way down, high patchy clouds kept it cool and recent rains made the whole world look fresh and new. Sandy has been having some alternator/battery problems, so this was a great opportunity for Steve to fiddle with some different things and trouble shoot. By the time we hit Nosara he had finally gotten the system working well, which was great!
Nosara itself hasn't changed much in the last two years (some of the same places are still under construction). We were relieved to discover that the 'rampant growth' of which we've heard was somewhat exaggerated. We were also happy to realize that we are both awfully glad that we settled in Tamarindo instead of Nosara. Not to say that it isn't a beautiful place, it is! Not to say people shouldn't visit, they should! But living there seems, to us, a very boring proposition. The town just isn't much of a town. And that road.... dear heavens! We were following in the track of a grader that had clearly passed within 1 day, yet the road surface was still bumpy enough that Steve finally got out and aired down to about 20 psi in an attempt to keep our teeth from rattled right out of our heads.
After eating a great lunch at a cute little deli, we did a wave check (large, but mushy) and poked around a little bit, then headed back home. The drive back was slightly rainy and generally very pleasant. As we hit one of our favorite areas near Tamarindo (long views of rolling hills and fields) we were treated to that beautiful golden light that makes everything look hazy and slow and like childhood memories of summertime. Just beautiful.

Labels: 4x4, beach, Costa Rica, day trip, jewelry, landcruiser, sunset

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