There is a "me" in Costa Rica

We quickly set in pretty swimmingly (literally every day and many days multiple times daily) when we first arrived. Willa was in a local camp here, CREAR, which runs during the mid-year school break, and she began her school the following Monday in mid-July. We sorted through our long term rental situation, and Marla and I each then took a couple weeks of Spanish classes, more in fact for Marla who is still continuing. Our language school Intercultura provides world class education with a deliberate focus on Costa Rican history and culture. Completing each class it has become progressively easier to have a richer experience here in Sámara. I took a couple cooking classes, which is an offering at school's kitchen each week, and I learned how to make yuca tortas and picadillo.

There are the occasional shrieks in the morning like when a crab was in the house the other day. We have worked on an ant encroachment into the house a couple times. Dislodging about a dozen wasps nests arounds the eaves took some efforts by our landlord the other week. While taking out our green waste the other day, which included some head to tail fish bodies Willa and I drew the attention of a racoon; the bandit started trailing about 10 feet behind us; thankfully, tossing the food waste into the horse field beside our house, the usual target, sent the racoon racing to get to the fishy remains first. Occasionally, a golf ball sized beetle will slam itself into the sliding door at night. We may have been reading and the slam jolts us back to the surface of our immediate surroundings.

This blog post for one was paused recently while I was writing poolside comfortably in the afternoon shade. Marla was reading and Willa watching a great new show, Tumble Leaf. There I was enjoying a nice quiet moment, and a yellow tailed wasp (they're the more aggressive lot compared with their all black brethren), and it started giving me a full body scan like a disgruntled TSA agent. I stood up, and the scan persisted seemingly even closer than before. Well, I was having none of it, and inside I went. One thing I most certainly do not want to experience here is how badly my body will react to a yellow wasp sting.

At our new house things went a bit south with the pool after an algae bloom kicked up. Ten days and many visits from the guys tending to the pool later it's back to looking crystal clear. Separately, it took a handful of visits from the landlord to work out all the kinks of the new house squeaks here, clogged drain there, missed times to connect on issues, and so forth. Everyone has been extremely helpful and able to do much with every contact we have had.

Dropping Willa off at school the other day I observed the metal shop immediately adjacent kicking out welding sparks. I became concerned because kids just like us adults have a very difficult time looking away from the allure of the blue glow. Much like yesterday's total eclipse starring right at it is an opthamologist's nightmare. After suggesting a couple ideas to the school a few friends and I are working on creating a "screen" to shield the kids' eyes. This was a necessary distraction from getting to my sabbatical business. We're far along now and will hopefully wrap it up in the next couple days.

All this is to say that I somewhat anticipated sabbatical to be a bit more readily apparent with vast swaths of free time to work on me projects. There are a few areas of study that I need to make a plan for, and then carve out and execute on that time squarely among the needs presented in renting a house abroad, parenting an energetic fournado, and all the daily life maintenance needs. That said my long wait for Game of Thrones season 6 is over. I signed up for HBO Now yesterday and binged through the first six episodes. I'm ready for Sunday's epic finale.

edX initial impressions

For the past several weeks I have been participating in the 6.00x Intro to Comp Sci and Programming class provided by MIT through the collaborative edX effort. It has been really great. Their syllabus states the course requires approximately 12 hours of effort, and unfortunately, it's not too far afield. The structure is very clean, and nicely everywhere I'm encountering difficulties the discussion forums are often well populated with feedback on similar if not exactly the same issues. The learning curve has been steep both getting into Python for the first time and recalling math that I haven't used in 3-10 years.

This course is not the only reason there are a paucity of posts for 2012, but it's a current contributing factor. My hope is that with some added skills I'll be able to begin prototyping some ideas we've been kicking around the house.

With some regularity, we, meaning my company and I, have been discussing diction. Good words are not hard to come by, although, using them appropriately can be a challenge. Bequeath for example is not merely to pass along possessions, rather it only applies in posthumous circumstances. Entitled carries many different meanings; however, there is some debate that a thing is actually entitled -- whereas it is in fact titled. A former colleague was recently sharing how my generation has a vocabulary somewhere in the range of 12-18K words on average, whereas those before us are north of 20K and potentially as high as 30K. Bearing that in mind, I asked how one could go about testing one's diction, and she suggested simply reading. The New Yorker is always good for a challenge as can the Economist.

Today being Independence Day, there are a lot of articles circulating about the Declaration of Independence. It's been a while since I have read it, and perusing it (an often misused word in and of itself), I was pleased to see such words as usurpations, inestimable, and consanguinity. Where would one go to test their diction for breadth?