Pictures of the Day, September 13-23, 2010

Hi Everyone! It's been raining like mad here, and I've been spending a lot of time on and in the roof. I've still taken the Pictures of the Day, but I didn't have time to post them... until now!

September 13th: Our cat Chubby has been systematically destroying these slippers that Angela has. He'll regularly attack them and try to drag them off to the garage. He mainly goes for the eyes, the little creep.

Also, the other day he actually got into Angela's purse and took out her wallet with his mouth. What's going on with our sweet little cat?

September 14th: My coworker Marcia's shoes. I know that I also took a picture of Monica's shoes earlier, but it's not because I have a foot fetish. It's just because my coworkers wear shoes that looks like leopard skins or whipped cream. When you've got 365 pictures to take, then they seem like a good subject!

September 14th: This is a horse trailer that I saw in Palmares, and although I'll say it's "Picture of the Day," I didn't put it up on the SeeVida group because of the breasts. But still, it's a pretty funny picture. Nothing says "I'm classy" like airbrushing a naked woman with big boobs onto your horse trailer, and then parking it on your lawn in downtown Palmares.

September 15th: It was Independence Day, so we had a barbecue.

September 16th: Cows are cool. I took a walk around Berlin and came across a couple of them.

September 17th: Remember Childcraft? They have a set of those books at the lending library at work.

September 18th: A butterfly on the bathroom wall at the school where I teach. It's weird having a camera in the bathroom... it's like that episode of Fraser where they were weirded out by food in the bathroom.

September 19th: Even though they're stainless steel scissors ("Rostfrei"!), they still got rusty. Costa Rica will blow your mind and break your heart.

September 20th: This is the first part in my "I Hate Tin Roofs" series. This bucket and mug were catching the stream of water dripping into my office.

September 21st: The next picture in my "I Hate Tin Roofs" series. This is a sort of polyurethane sealant. I basically tried to cover as much of our house as possible with this crap.

September 22nd: Some nice clouds on the way to my Wednesday class in Guanacaste.

September 23rd: Next in the "I Hate Tin Roofs" series. I had to put all the crap in my office into big plastic bags since water was coming down the walls and also streaming from the middle of the ceiling. Ugh.

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Pictures of the Day, September 3-12, 2010

Hi Everyone!
Here are some Pictures of the Day from the last week or so:

September 3rd: This is a water tank near our house.
Angela and I went for a walk on the road into Berlin to check out some of the new landslides. (Note: This is a very poignant example of how there's nothing to do in Berlin).

September 4th: Independence Day is coming up soon, so there are decorations all over (including ones that take up a major chunk of my white board when I teach).

Living in another country can either promote or kill your own personal patriotism, and for me, I think it's done the latter. Sort of like religions that have heavens that are mutually exclusive to other beliefs, it's hard to get pumped about any country, when you realize that all countries have good and bad things.

Plus, Costa Rica is also home to the "red, white, and blue."

September 5th: Our fenceposts have finally started sprouting! Ha ha!
Compare it to this picture.

September 6th: The pay phone at work. I had this in mind for a while as a "backup" plan for a day when I'd not found a good Picture of the Day.

I like this phone. The last time we went to the US, there weren't any pay phones anywhere, and it was a pain in my ass to try to call home. Finally, our cool waiter at the Irish restaurant at the Dallas airport loaned me his cell phone.

Damn cell phones.

September 7th: A street lamp near work.

September 8th: The bridge over the Tempisque River in Guanacaste. It was donated to Costa Rica by the government of Taiwan, and was called the "Costa Rica-Taiwan Friendship Bridge." Then, of course, Costa Rica dropped Taiwan because China offered to build the country a new National Stadium, and sweetened the deal with some shitty new police patrol cars.

So now the bridge is referred to as the "Stab in the Back" bridge.

September 9th: Actually, now that I see this picture, I realize that I don't know what these things are. Surely, they go into the ocean, but beyond that, I'm not sure what they're called. I taught my Wednesday class at the resort again, and I had Thursday free to check out the beautiful beaches.

September 10th: The market in Palmares. We were waiting on some tires, so we walked around town a bit.

September 11th: This is a sort of sculpture made out of mufflers. The sculpture is a man with a bazooka riding a motorcycle. It's on the roof of an auto repair shop in Quebradas, which is one of the few places on Earth I genuinely dislike. It's a small town in the hills between Berlin and Palmares, and I have to drive through there every day to get to work. The narrow road is always filled with cars, kids, chickens, dogs, people walking or sitting in the street... you name it.

In any case, I'd meant for a while to get a picture of this bazooka guy, but it's in an area on a sort of incline, and it's a very difficult place to stop (and eventually get going again), but I finally did it. In the leftovers you can see the sign for the auto shop, and know that I'm not just making this all up.

September 12th: It was a pretty slow day here in Berlin. It rained quite a bit, and we mainly hung out inside. Even Chubby didn't want to go out, but he did the next best thing: he slept on the top ledge of the high garage window. That's about 9 feet off the ground, and he's gotta somehow get up there from inside the garage. That cat has some pretty crazy skills that we just don't even know about.

I've also been uploading a lot of pictures from 2008. So far they're mostly from around Costa Rica, but I'm hoping to get more up soon, including ones of our trip to Colorado and Mexico.

So, that's it for now. Thanks for reading!

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It's Alwase Nice To Remember The Good Ol' Days

My sister Di told me about this, which she re-discovered recently:

She wrote it in her "Babysitters' Club Little Sister Diary" when she was about 8 and I was about 11. It's pretty funny!

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Pictures of the Day: August 25 - September 2, 2010

Hi Everyone! Here are the Pictures of the Day from the last few days. Hopefully there's something interesting for you in there:

August 25: "We're all equal in our big, happy world... except you, Pablo. We hate your scarf. You're out."
This was in a classroom where I teach in the evening. It's a grade school during the day.

August 26: I've seen this sign quite a few times on the way out of San Jose, but it's always been too dark (and possibly unsafe) to take a picture, so I made it a point to go a bit early and get this picture before my class on Thursday.
In any case, that seems like a very appropriate visual image for a rehabilitation school.

August 27: Some cheflera (schefflera, in English, I believe) that Angela was planting in our yard. Looks good photographed. I still think it's incredible you can just put a little stick of this in the ground and you'll have a bush within a year!

August 28: When we got back home from work, the power was out again, and it was getting dark. Plus, it had been raining all day and the condensation from the morning's showers was still on the windows.
Basically, a good time to take a nap.

August 29: Some flowers at Lucy's house. She invited us over to play Scrabble and drink coffee. Good times!

August 30: A pair of earrings that my grandma gave to Angela.

August 31: If you went to Timnath Elementary School in the late 80s and early 90s, this may look familiar to you. Or it may not. I remember being taught how to multiply this way. I was trying to explain it to some coworkers, so I went back into the past, drew up the grid, and multiplied some numbers. This is 312 times 725 which, as we all know, is 226,200. I can't believe three things:
1. That this technique for multiplying numbers actually exits and works
2. That I remembered the technique
3. That they actually TAUGHT this technique to us in 5th or 6th grade

September 1: The faucets in my hotel in Guanacaste. I started teaching an English class on Wednesday nights in a resort up there (Guanacaste is the northwest province in Costa Rica, where the most tourists go, but where I had only passed through previously). It was very nice, and I'm looking forward to continuing the class for the next seven weeks!

September 2: A windmill on the side of the road in Guanacaste. It was the first time I'd really spent any significant time or driven around much in that province, and I can see why it's the big tourist place in the country. It was pretty nice, and quite a bit different from where I live.

So, that's it for now. Thanks for reading!

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Pictures of the Day, August 19-24, 2010

I've been putting these up on flickr (and a few on Facebook), but here are my favorite pictures I've taken the last few days:

August 19th: An office building near where I teach a class in San Jose. It was raining, so I had to take the picture from my car (Because of traffic, I either get to class around an hour early or about 5 minutes late... I prefer early, so I just hang out in my car and wait till 5, like some kinda creep).

August 20th: A praying lady at a church in Cañas, in Guanacaste. I like this picture a lot. I had to go to Cañas with Lucy and Oskar to do some placement test interviews, but we got there early and had some time to kill, so we decided to check out the church.

August 21st: Angela made this funny dinner/breakfast for me, consisting of rice and beans, a salad, and a little egg chicken figurine. She called "arroz con pollito." I love my wife!

August 22nd: Today was a big day for my "to-do inside" list. Mostly, it involved hanging stuff with the drill, including some smoke alarms.

August 23rd: Today was a day for the outside "to-do" list, including moving lots of rocks and re-doing a border around the house sidewalks.

August 24th: A very, very small little frog that Angela found on our back patio. I've included a few pictures with it next to a peanut, a universal reference and comparative measurement for "something small."
Wow, looking at this, it doesn't look real. It is! It's just a ridiculously small frog!

So, that's it for now. Thanks for reading, and have a great day!

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The Verdict Is In

A moment ago Angela called me into her office to see a picture (evidently she's finished her lesson plan and has been playing with some pictures... either that, or she's been smoking something really weird). She asked me, "Is this picture dorky?" and showed me this:

I think we can knock down that crappy statue of David in Italy, because we finally found a suitable replacement.

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Picture of the Day Catch-Up, August 9-18, 2010

I realized that although I've been uploading these pictures to flickr, I've not been putting them on this blog for the last couple of days, so here they are:

August 9th: Kind of lame for a Picture of the Day, but there are lots of flowers around these days.

August 10th: This is a bug that Angela found on the side of the house, so she called me over to see it. She said that this is sometimes called "mula del diablo," or the "devil's mule," but then again, I'm pretty sure she's pointed out about three other, completely different bugs that she also said were called "mula del diablo."
In any case, it was about 6 or 7 inches long, and pretty cool looking.

August 11th: This is our "Cucho candle," which we decided to light to think about Cucho, who died almost a month ago. We still miss him. He was a great cat.

August 12th: And now for something completely different...
On Thursdays I've been going to San Jose to teach in the evenings. The first week I went there I noticed a fast food restaurant called "Don Döner," or "Mister Döner." As you can imagine, my curiosity was piqued... could it actually be the same delicious döner kebab as found in Turkish restaurants in Germany??
As it turns out, almost. It was quite tasty, but still not as good as in Germany. And probably Turkey, for that matter!

Still, very tasty... so tasty that I ate about 80% of it before I remembered to take a picture!

August 13th: Our car had a problem with its brake lights. They wouldn't turn off, no matter what we did. I had to disconnect the cable that led from the fuse box, but that was only temporary. In the end, a guy from down the road came over and was able to fix the problem. He had to dismantle about half of the car in the immediate vicinity of the steering wheel, but it worked, and he only charged us about 10 dollars. We got lucky on that one.

August 14th: This is a poster we have hanging up at work. It's for the United Nation's refugee organization. I decided to take a picture of it because of the phrase "I hope I find some water soon," which was ironic because the water went out at school that day.

August 15th: An apple cake that I made for Mother's Day (it's August 15th in Costa Rica). I got the recipe from our Belgian friend Sofie, and it turned out very tasty!

August 16th: It's been raining a lot lately, but in the last week or so it's gotten strange. It'll storm crazily for a short period, and then shape up for a while. In this case, it had rained a lot in the morning, and then it basically got clear in the afternoon.

Still, we could see part of the coast (in the horizon here, you can see the Gulf of Nicoya and the peninsula where Guanacaste is), but there were these super-puffy white clouds just sitting there, slowly moving up the hills.

August 17th: "Dónde jugarán los niños?" Ha ha! This is just a swing at the school where I work. They finally replaced the wood seats, but now it looks like the chain could use a bit of attention.

August 18th: I actually read most of this on the 17th, but it kept me awake into the wee hours of the 18th, as well. It was a good book, and if you've read "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo," you're sure to like this (and to notice some pretty obvious plot similarities). Fortunately, both books are quite enjoyable and well-written.

So, that's it for now. As usual, there are some leftovers, including pictures from Mother's Day at Angela's folks'. Thanks for reading, and have a great day!

365: Picture a Day Project    365 Leftovers    All My Pictures    Sitzbook

To Help You Get Through The Rest Of The Week

This is an old but good video:


Cassius - Cassius 99 1999 bY ZapMan69

It should be enough to get you safely through the rest of the week.

365: Picture a Day Project    365 Leftovers    All My Pictures    Sitzbook

I Thought, "Well, Sure, I Guess I Could Try Palí Again... It Can't Be THAT Bad"

A girl tried robbing stuff from Palí (the cheap, crappy grocery store chain) today while I was waiting in line. The guard stopped her, but she got all pissed and started saying she was pregnant (maybe one DAY pregnant, since she was as skinny as my leg). Anyhow, the guard made her empty her purse, and she had 4 bottles of shampoo and 3 sticks of deodorant.

I kinda hate Palí.

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Some More New Old Pictures!

I finally had more time to upload some of my older pictures. In this case, they're from 2007. For most people, they might not be that interesting. Still, depending on who you are or what you're into --Bucket showers, anyone?...Hey, I don't know-- then you might find something you like.

First and foremost, I've uploaded pictures from our wedding. My friend and professional photographer Brad took most of these, although at the start of the set there are some that I took while my family was visiting.

There are also more pictures from my mom's visit (a not-so-stealthy operation to come down and make sure that her future daughter-in-law wasn't a complete pyscho).

Also, there is a set from Nicaragua. I went there with my friend and former coworker Samuel. We visited his family in the far northern part of that country.

I evidently had to renew my visa another time in 2007, as well, so there is also a set of pictures from Panama.

And finally, the biggest set is of pictures of everyday life around Costa Rica.

Please feel free to check them out, leave comments, or download the pictures as you please. The links above are for the sets on their respective flickr pages, but you can also access them through fluidr by clicking on this link, in case you prefer a black background and a slightly slower-loading page.

Thanks for reading, and have a great day!

365: Picture a Day Project    365 Leftovers    All My Pictures    Sitzbook

This Is My Jam

This isn't a recent song or video, but it's still cool:

Good song, a video with lots of superfluous elements, all-around cool... what's not to like?

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Say My Name, Say My Name

According to this article, if my folks had followed Iraqi naming customs when I was born, I would have been named "Ryan Clarence Clarence al-Sitzman al-Fort Collins."

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Pictures of the Day: August 4-8, 2010

Hi! I've got some Pictures of the Day from the last couple of (really rainy) days:

August 4th: And another one bites the dust. This tree was dangerously close to the side of the lot, and we were thinking it was just about to slide down and take a significant chunk of land with it. So, my brother-in-law Arnoldo cut it down for us.

August 5th: This is a beaded bird thingy that I have in my office. One of my students gave it to me a few years ago when I was teaching fourth grade... actually, now that I think about it, I think she sold it to me as some sort of fundraiser thing.

In any case, I'm having a difficult time with one of my current classes (the group is nice, but the logistics are a pain in the butt). Looking at this bird thing reminded me of two things:
1. You've got to recognize that most students are good on their own, even if things get frustrating when they're grouped.
2. They're still MUCH more tolerable than fourth graders!

August 6th: Some books on my "to read" shelf. Actually, all of my bookshelves are "to read" shelves, since once I finish reading a book, I try to schlep it up to Colorado as quickly as possible to avoid it getting mold.

August 7th: It's the rainy season. Kind of dull.
This is at work, where the rain was speedily sliding and dripping down the chain link fence. It actually looked kind of pretty, until I remembered that it'd look like that until November or so...

August 8th: There are quite a few things Costa Rica gets wrong, but plastic bags are one thing it gets right. They're strong and almost fashionable with their white and colored stripes.

Don't worry, though: I won't get all "American Beauty" on you and proclaim that it's the most beautiful thing I've ever photographed.

So, that's it for now. Thanks for reading, and have a good one!

365: Picture a Day Project    365 Leftovers    All My Pictures    Sitzbook

Mind-Blowing Video

This is a video that my brother recommended to me. It's amazing:

BIG BANG BIG BOOM - the new wall-painted animation by BLU from blu on Vimeo.

If you don't have 10 minutes to watch it now, you should either make 10 minutes, or come back when you do. It's really that incredible.

365: Picture a Day Project    365 Leftovers    All My Pictures    Sitzbook