"It's the most wonderful time of the year!" as Andy Williams eternally croons. Just past the solstice, we are celebrating "summertime" blue sky mornings and lower humidity. In these days before Christmas, there is a buzz in the air and fortunately they are not mosquitos.
local recycling events were suspended leaving us with a mountain of recycling to pile up in the garage. When the piles became gargantuan, we had to make a special trip to a recycling depot in Golfito (an hour+ drive.) Last Tuesday, there was a recycling event at the public school by the beach. It is the first one in over 2 years and we were grateful that it was just a 30 minute drive.ame in green shade cloth. I dusted off my collection of El-wire from my Burning Man adventures. Et vo
In the week before Christmas some of our farmer friends harvest their porkiest pig to be prepared for ground pit BBQing. It is time for families to gather on a Saturday to enjoy the Christmas tradition of making tamales. It's been 4 years since the Mora family introduced us to their family tradition. We love tamales but the process is intensive. I have embarked on many foodie projects lately but had no motivation to"tamale" until this week.
I was inspired to commit to this project after we received a cornucopia of food items in exchange for dropping off a literal truckload of recycling. There is an organization that provides education and incentives for Ticos to recycle plastics/metals/glass and tetrapaks. (I describe some of the challenges for garbage collection in our area here.) In exchange for bringing in recycling, you are given a selection of fruit and vegetables.
Since the beginning of the pandemic, the local recycling events were suspended leaving us with a mountain of recycling to pile up in the garage. When the piles became gargantuan, we had to make a special trip to a recycling depot in Golfito (an hour+ drive.) Last Tuesday, there was a recycling event at the public school by the beach. It is the first one in almost 2 years and we were grateful that it was just a 30 minute drive.
This year, the goodies bag contained all the fixings for tamales. The masa flour, green beans, onions, carrots, even strips of banana leaves for wrapping. With the distant memory of the Mora family tamale making and the indispensable and inexhaustible aid of YouTube, I embarked on a solo flight.
With internet and YouTube, the quality of our DIY projects are greatly enhanced. Now that we have super fast internet, we watch hours of YouTube for entertainment, information and research. Michael can watch live sports on his laptop and the TV while I watch Netflix on my iPad or listen to podcasts on my phone! Thank you to D-Apos, our new internet service provider. We dumped Claro last year after discovering the hidden clause in our contract that download speeds are throttled to a trickle when we exceed the monthly GB limit. It had become so intolerable that we could only watch 3 minutes of content and then had to wait 5 minutes while it buffered. We ditched our Huawei wireless modem too (so the Chinese can't spy on us anymore. Haha!) BTW Huawei predominates in Costa Rica. Several years ago Verizon was the backbone of the Costa Rican internet until Huawei offered to build a lovely sports stadium in San José. Then, it was Adios to Verizon.
Many of our gardening projects are launched with information from YouTube. From maintaining cacao trees to the fermentation process to roasting and grinding the beans into chocolate paste, we would be floundering without all the helpful videos. Next project is building a climbing frame for the dragonfruit plant. It's the generosity and enthusiasm of YT creators who share their knowledge that continues to be an invaluable gift.
コメント