Typical Street Action Click to Enlarge	Running of the Cows

May 21

It rained another 6 hours last night. I had to plug earphones into the computer to watch my movie on my laptop. You see, the house I'm in has only a tin roof, nothing else, so the rain makes quite a bit of noise.  I decided the Yamaha keyboard I bought is fine. I looked at the other ones available and they're no better. So what if it cost $190 for a $90 keyboard. When I plug in my headphones, the sounds are good.  When my house is finished, I'll bring down a real one. I stayed up too late last night-- 10 pm -- playing the keyboard last night - learning Fly Me to the Moon.  10 pm is too late because the birds and light wake me up at 5 am. I went over to Joe's earlier in the afternoon, and got another lesson in jazz. He the man -- jazz man, that is. He's the drummer who used to play with all the big names in New York. He had a stroke a while back; now he lives here with his wife, Leslie. He doesn't play much with his left hand, but I tell you, he sounds better with that one hand than most drummers who use two. A bunch of professional musicians drive 2 to 3 hours to come play with him. I guess I sleep in because he wakes up at 4 a.m. every day.

My house looks good, but they haven't started the roof yet because Jaime hasn't gotten them the wood to build a temporary roof so they can sand and stain the wood while it's raining. But they've been doing other things. Now they're getting ready to stucco all the inside walls, and they've dug up a septic tank. I gave everyone their baseball caps (Red Sox and Yankees), and they were very happy. The one guy (who first asked for it) took it, looked at it, and asked "From the United States?" I answered, "Claro!" He pointed to all the dates on the NY World Series cap, and asked if that's when they won the world series. I said I think so, but told him I don't know that much about baseball. None of them wore the hats yesterday. I think they're saving them as their "Sunday" hats.

 

May 22

The wood for the temporary roof arrived late yesterday, so when I got to the house this morning, the workers had already built a nice tin roof where the patio is going to be. They're going to start preparing the roof rafters tomorrow. The temporary tin roof also gives me an idea how the patio is going to be, and it's going to be nice. Other than that, nothing much happened today except I met a retired American couple who had a huge, beautiful house built just above the Butterfly Dance development where my house is. Both the husband and wife now teach yoga in San Ramon three times a week. Their yoga style is Bikram. I'm going to try and make a class next week even though I've always been scared that Bikram may be too much work for me. If you don't know, Bikram is the style where you sweat in an environment of 95 degrees for an hour an a half. (But they only do it at 85 degrees.) They also told me of a guy they know who has built a 4,000 ft airstrip about 20 minutes from here, and has subdivided it into 2 acre lots. I definitely want to check that out.

 

Here's the temporary roof and another cow   (remember, you can click on the pics)

The real patio roof will be above the blocks	Now they can sand and stain the wood even if it rains	The Septic Tank
Windows under the Ceiling in the Living Room		It's been raining a lot

 

Go to Page 5 of Building a House in Costa Rica

thanks,

Paul Ogier