Fifth Time In Costa Rica, 18

I haven´t done a lot today, either, but primarily because I´ve been focussing on a new drawing that I will be trading with the owners of the bed and breakfast for a fat bag of the local coffee to take home with me. I know, it´s like giving it away, but they´re friends and it is sort of a gift. When it is finished I will try to include a photo for you to see it, the drawing, I mean. I´m sure you´ve all seen coffee before. Yesterday, I sent the hotel Villa Verde a nice little thank you note for the quiet night we all enjoyed, and today I got an equally kind reply with a promise that they would keep things quiet from now on. Neat, eh? I never thought I´d end up doing this kind of thing while on vacation, but you know, it was worth it, though the stress has kind of affected my sleep. More intense dreams last night. A big argument with my mother about music, and a series of visits to other planets, where their systems of writing include complex numerical codes, as well as having some very interesting and lovely hand soap. (no, I don´t take illegal drugs at bed time. Not even when I wake up in the morning! I don´t take legal ones either.) I´ve also been having a lot of enjoyable conversations with other guests here, lately. With three Italian guys, well one of them anyway, from near Milan. They just left this morning. Also with a couple from Colorado. They´re Mormons, a sect that I find decidedly weird, but, hey, I´m sure that a lot of you find it pretty weird when I mention that I have an invisible friend named Jesus. Disclosing this bit of information to my atheist psychiatrist even won me a bogus mental health diagnosis. So, who am I to judge. They seem like really nice people, anyway, and quite enjoyable to talk to and, at the end of the day, that´s what really matters, to me, anyway. By the way, Gentle Reader, I just accidentally hit´´publish´´, so, if you´re reading this right now, then kindly wait till it´s finished and I will shortly resend you the full text. Back to the Mormon couple, I don´t know whether they´re Trump supporters or not, and I promise to make every possible effort not to find out. Don´t need some things to ruin my holiday, nor anyone else´s. I also enjoyed visiting with four middle aged Chinese American women from Los Angeles who are here to get away from their husbands and kids for a few days. Really nice people, and they also helped cure my homesickness for Vancouver, as we have a lot of people in my city of Asian heritage. The weather´s been pretty decent today, still windy but not as bad as yesterday and sunny and pleasantly warm. As the theme of the drawing for the family here is a morpho butterfly with a couple of hummingbirds, I thought it was really cool that today on one of my walks, I got a really good look at a morpho flying past me, and I simply twirled around for a better vew. This young local guy kind of smiled when he saw me do this and I replied in Spanish, ¨paro para los morfos¨, or, I stop for morphos. I sat for a couple of hours in the panadería Jiménez where I did some more work on the drawing. They had the soccer game on between Costa Rica and Scotland, for the upcoming World Cup. Costa Rica won 1-0, not that I care, but interestingly enough, this time I don´t seem to find the soccer games annoying when I´m here. On the other hand, the volume wasn´t turned up too loud either, which was kind of nice. I really don´t care one way or the other, as long as it doesn´t seem to be being pushed in my face. I´m like that about kids in public, as well. No problem as long as their parents keep them in line, but when mommy and daddy are more interested in checking their Facebook status while their little mouth breathers are wreaking havoc, well, that´s where I draw the line. I´m like that about dogs too. If it´s a nice dog, I like it. If he´s vicious or aggressive, not so much. Depends on the kid, depends on the dog. Now that the road has been paved it is much easier to walk and drive on it, but it is still very narrow, making it difficult to walk when there is traffic. What´s worse is the many huge tourist buses, which I call elefantes de llantas, or, elephants on wheels. I really don´t know why they don´t build proper sidewalks here. There is room, but I imagine that the usual excuse is no money. (Sound familiar?) Mind you, if the Costa Rican government would simply raise taxes just a little bit, they might just have enough for proper infrastructure maintenance and even extra left over for more social programs. Or maybe they´re just waiting to see how many people get run over first, before they decide to do anything about the lack of sidewalks here. It´s kind of typical, isn´t it, and this happens all over the world, this sad disregard by governments of their own citizenry. I really think that the first, and most important, step to developing an economy that actually works for everybody, begins by taking the attitude that the people are the economy and the economy is the people. We really have to do some fast backpeddling on the huge damage that has already been done in our world thanks to the theories of Milton Friedman, if we want to see our economies fully humanized, otherwise, the divide s just going to keep on growing. I´ll shut up now. Big hug to all of you, also a wink and a wave.