I was hoping to make more than one entry this week, but it has been quite a week, and not necessarily in a good way.

For those of you who know about current events in Costa Rica, you will know that just a few weeks ago, for about a two week period, we had power rationing with 4 hour + rolling blackouts.

It was the end of the dry season, and some of the reservoirs were at record low levels. Thus, ICE had to conswerve the water in the reservoirs, because they are used both for power generation and for water and they were really low this year, and ICE has been neglected over the past 3 presidential administrations so no new projects were in the works, except the ones that were having environmental issues.

As a side note, Costa Rica really needs to explore geothermal energy. A friend of mine has called CR the "Saudi Arabia of geothermal energy," yet this resource remains mostly untapped.

These projects would cost about the same as the hydroelectric projects and take about as long to build, yet, they would not have the environmental impact of the huydroelectric plants that ICE seems to be fixated on.

In any event, about a week or so it started raining finally, so the rationing was cancelled after about 2 weeks. It certainly felt nice to have things "back to normal."

Well, things went along fine all last week, but then, between the time I went to bed Sunday night at 4 AM and the time I got up on Monday, I discovered that my internet and cable were down -- literally.

I called the cable company first thing Monday, and they promised to send somone out, but no one came. So I called several times on Tuesday, but still no one came, but they promised to come first thing Wed. morning.

When I turned my cel phone on at 7:17 AM or so, I discovered I had a message waiting, and it was from the cable people. When they said they were coming "first thing in the morning," apparantly they had meant it this time.

I called the dispatcher, and she told me they would be out to my house "in 15 minutes."

When they didn't show after half an hour, I began to paic. I then remembered how the cable company originally had my address wrong when I first had it installed, and how the techs barely made it out then.

Now I really was in a panic, thinking maybe my service visit was going to get bumped to the end of the day due to this stupid mistake. So, I called them, and, sure enough, they had given the techs the wrong address AGAIN. They hadn't made the correction from the previous visit.

So I gave them my correct address information again, and they said they would be right over, which they were in about 15-20 mins.

In talking to the techs, I found out that they had, indeed, went on a wild goose chase to the wrong address as I had feared, but, fortunately for me, the company had radioed them the correct address before they moved on to the next customer.

Finally, by 8:30 I had TV and internet again. What a relief. I could now get back to all of my backed up internet work.

The rest of this week has been a game of catch up and errand running. I had to go to the supermarket, the bank, Pricemart, the microbioticas, the post office -- everywhere it seemed. I was out of money, out of food [almost], had to pay the rent and utilities, all in the remaining days of this week.

Today has been the only relatively "normal" day this week, but I still had a ton of email backed up from yesterday since I was out and about most of the day.

Wew, what a week this has been.

And, on top of that came the guilty verdict in the ongoing Villalobos soap opera/trial. That would be too much to go into today, I am not writing a book today, you know.

This has been a very interesting, exciting, and hectic week here in paradise. It certainly helps that I know some Spanish or I would really have been in trouble with the cable company fiasco.

I'm going to try to wind down a little now and enjoy at least some of a weekend.

I will update my blogs again Monday or Tuesday, so until then, Pura Vida.

May 11, 2007

Welcome to my new, revised blog.

From now on, I will be making posts to this blog several times a week, and daily if necessary. I am going to have a new focus for this blog. It will contain news and views as before, but also personal life stories and chronicles.

I have lived here for 12 years, and it recently occurred to me that what I take for granted every day might be news to you. So I am going to try to have a more chatty, personal dialogue, as if I am writing each of you a personal letter, which in a way I am.

Well, the power outage crisis seems to be over for now. The lights have been on now for a full week without interruptions, and the government is at least putting a band aide on the problem. I certainly hope they will look at the best long range solution, which is to harness the abundant geothermal energy this country has, but so far I have heard nothing about that.

Instead, ICE still seems to be stuck on the idea of hydroelectric, which is better than burning fossil fuels, for sure, but it damages the environment by flooding vast tracts of land, and when it is extremely dry, especially at the end of the rainy season as happened this year, the reservoirs can be very low indeed.

Geothermal energy doesn't have these pitfalls, and with all the volcanoes around, it is a natural source of all the energy this country could need, if ICE and the government would only think ahead and move into the future instead of dwelling on the past.

Anyway, enough about that. Other than that, this week has brought with it the same helping of bad news you see everywhere else in the world. It's quite a shame, really, that news doesn't dwell more on the positive instead of on the negative, but "that's showbiz." They have to have those sensational headlines and film clips to get readers and listeners.

Like that story from earlier this week about that drunken couple who rammed two cars in an Escazu plaza, after getting totally plastered in a bar in the plaza. They were having such a good time that they even shared the juice with their dog, and got it drunk.

Then, they stumbled out of the bar and got in their car, where they promptly started to move towards having sex in the car in broad daylight.

When the security guard saw it, he stopped them. The couple decided to leave with the woman driving, and she promptly rammed 2 cars in her drunken attempt to get out of the parking space.

The security guard told her to stop and wait for police, but she didn't comply, so he had to shoot out her tires.

Finally, police arrived to assess the damage and issue tickets.

I guess that's the news story that sticks out most in my mind this week, that and the fact that the TSE has finally decided that it will hold the referendum on CAFTA on Sept. 23.

I guess that's about all the news that stands out in my mind this week. Next week I will be making more entries, so I suppose more will stick out.

By the way, we are at a good point in the revision of our online guidebook, "So Ya Wanna Move to Costa Rica" right now. All pages have content now, and there is a lot of useful stuff there, but you need to check back often, as there are lots of things that need updating. In fact, unlike a print guidebook, this one will never be finnished and will always be fresh.

We have LOTS of useful resources you won't want to miss, so go on over there if you haven't already.

The url is: http://www.soyawannamove.com

Well, I'm done for today. As Walter Cronkite used to say, "That's the way it is, Friday, May 11, 2007."

See ya next week.

John