This strange looking creature was attached to our chair one morning. It looks like it just found some leaves and made it into a hat, they are actually it’s wings. It later met it’s end like most bugs not very long life spans here in the forest. The other part of nature came and carted it off. Things happen fast.
June usually makes the beginning of Summer for most people. Summer is like 24/7 here and I am not complaining one bit. I know a lot of folks that are still faced with scraping their windshield in the morning from the frost and wearing heavy winter garments. Not my idea of summer.
As the Summer Solstice approaches everyone waits for the longest day of the year. We will have 12 hours and 41 minutes of sun light here on June 21, just like most of the days we have here. After a while you do get used to the fact that there is only going to be 12 hours of light each day and you plan your day around that.
This past month of May we had about 17 inches of rain fall. Sounds like a lot, but I had to water a lot this month with it being so dry and hot. The “soil” here does not retain much moisture so to keep all of the plants alive that I have been planting in our back garden I had to water in the morning and afternoon. Hopefully that will end soon as the plants become established.
Another topic is how many crimes were reported over the past month. As you can see it has gone down, especially since all of the tourist have vanished. It is amazing that people don’t come here when the weather is the best. They wait until they think the rains have gone only to find that it’s raining! This month the ocean was the calmest I have seen it so far living here, bright sunny days, hot and empty beaches. The surfers don’t like this kind of weather for sure, no waves to catch.
It was just about 2 years ago when we bought our house. I just remember when we first saw it how barren everything was, after all, they had just finished building it and just began to plant. So anyway after just two year of rain things have changed here a lot.
This it what it looked like in June 2009.
This is what it looks like now, totally different. It’s amazing that by adding a little water the landscape can change so much in such a short time.
Growing up as a kid in Illinois, I found these all the time in the woods behind our house. That was many years ago. So today as I started to hang laundry I noticed this stick hanging off the clothes line (yes the clothes line is used ICE telephone cable, it’s called recycling). I could not resist and grabbed the camera to show you this strange looking creature. Granted the ones in Illinois did not look anything like this guy.
24/7 Discovery Channel here in the rain forest.
Well it seems like the mom and baby have made this area their neighborhood. This would be the third time we have seen them crossing from one side of the road to the other using the wire as a means to stay above reach of the dogs who run lose around here. Our dogs don’t, we have them fenced in or on leash when we head out somewhere. It is a shame how many of these animals are attacked by lose dogs, once on the ground they are defenseless.
There are some morning when you wake up there is no electricity and feel powerless. The main irritating factor is you can not make coffee, the juice of champions. So instead of getting up tight about it there was only one thing left to do. Take the dogs for a walk on the beach. This morning was really quiet, no sounds other than the normal birds that announce the coming of dawn. Once we reached the beach you could see why, no waves! OK maybe a 6 incher but nothing like we normally have between 2 and 3 feet. Could not even hear the water, very strange.
Upon returning to the house we were still without power so I thought I would take the time and wander around and take some pictures since the sun rise had such soft light. 
Living in the rain forest does present more challenges than normal life in the USA. One thing are the insects that inhabit this part of the world. A while ago I found that our garden was disappearing. The leaves were being striped by the leaf cutters and being hauled away underground to grow their fungus. After talking with a local expert on the subject, he mentioned that by using a chemical called mirex, that these creatures would stop everything and carry it into the nest. I finally found a place that sold this chemical in Bribri this morning and soon began to spread it around the tunnel opening of the nest. This is the main entrance for the ants that carry the leaves, it has to be higher for them to fit the leaves. So anyway, I sprinkled a package of this around this opening and it’s just like he said, they dropped everything to carry this into their nest.
