Yikes!!!!!

OK - so every once is a while, things happen to remind you that you are in the jungle.  Monkeys and birds are pleasant reminders - this one not so much.

Last evening the Lisle noticed the lamp on the front desk was off - the timer was out of sync or something.  So, he unplugged it and discovered.

 Fortunately it was dead - seems to have stuck its head in the grounding socket

 While I would love to be corrected, I am pretty certain it is a coral snake - no idea how it got in, but appeared to be coming out from behind the extension plugs - no idea how long it had been there, but was pretty dried out.

Yes I was wearing work gloves to do this even though it was pretty obviously dead - - No I am not brave!

Strange Things

Some things are just too freaky - makes you wonder if the end really is near!

Costa Rica gets rain - lots of it - - where our house is we get about 20 feet of rain a year (compared to Toronto which gets less than 3 feet of precipitation).  And storms can be harsh, torrential.

But this week there were two tornadoes outside San Jose - one on Tuesday and one on Thursday - unheard of!

Then, our friends sent these photos - two snakes seeking a nest of birds just above the house - CREEPY.

It's All About Balance

And apparently I don't have any!

There is nothing I like more than the sky at sunset - the gathering clouds, the brightness and the dark - and never the same.  These are from tonight - 30 minutes ago.

I snapped the last photo from the end of the pool deck - balanced on the 4 inch wide wall that goes along the stairs to the pool room - no sooner did the shutter go, and so did my balance - wobble, wobble - oh god I am not staying here! Backwards off the wall down 5 ft into the ginger plant and rolled down the hill over the cuneta and through the Mani - all the time thinking only - please don't let there be snakes!

My toe is a bit scrapped, the camera is fine, my reading glasses are somewhere in the vegetation, and the Ginger plant is much worse for the wear (they are resilient so we will see what tomorrow and some rain does). 

Called it a day for photography, and now am sitting watching the most spectacular vermillion and grey with bits of pink in the growing darkness!

Season of the Snake

OK, they must be playing with me know!

Yesterday I was driving out to visit Dwight and Wendy about 3:30.  Going down the hill just before the turn up to Bruce and Barbs  -  what is that branch on the road - - OH! not a branch, it is moving right across the road in front of me - 3 feet long, the size of my wrist - brown sort of diamond pattern on the back - definitely a Fer de Lance (we at least I have convinced myself of that)  only good thing - it was headed away from the house!!

YIKES!

So, sitting doing some work - it wasn't exactly a quiet morning since the garden crew was present.  Suddenly the one worker appears up the steps to the pump room whistling loudly for the other who is weed whacking.  The machine stops - the guy comes flying past, grabs the shovel, leaps over the hedge and down the back slope.

Knowing something is happening, I slip into shoe and go down the road where they are chopping up a snake with the shovel - Serpent malo?  I ask - si si si is the response - -pequeno pero malo.  It was curled up under the Mani the guy was trimming along the edge of the cuneta.  It was about a foot long and thin (about half the size of your baby finger)  obvious triangular head and brown markings all down the back and a pale underside - - Fer de Lance?  would appear so - they dug a hole and buried it before I could go back and get the camera - not that a chopped up snake is good viewing material!