There are good ways and bad ways to start the day.
To be roused from slumber by the aroma of freshly brewed coffee being delivered by your beautiful wife: Good way to start the day.

Bolting up from your pillow to the sound of a loud crash/thud from downstairs: Not so good.
Walking downstairs to see a pile of moldy, sodden drywall at the foot of the stairs, and a gaping hole in the ceiling with water steadily emptying from it: Bad. Trust me on this one.

The only thing that made it not-quite-awful was that it was not-quite-surprising. Last week we noticed a pretty serious drip coming from the ceiling. Since then we've been waiting for a break in the deluge to get outside, on the roof, to figure out from where the darn leak is coming. But the rain has been nothing if not persistent. The odd thing is that the roof that fell in is on the 1st floor. There isn't any roof directly above it at all. Which is somewhat worrisome as it makes us think that the water is getting in on the 2nd floor, then seeping between the concrete wall and the stucco, to arrive at the first floor. Somewhere down the line we can look forward to either more damage or some mold issues. Yippee.

Labels: tamarindo, weather

You may have noticed that we've added some ads and such to Sandcruiser (so far: Amazon and Google ads). We have mixed feelings about this move as on the one hand we've always tried to keep things ad-free, on the other hand we dispense a lot of information, some of it relevant and/or interesting and wouldn't mind having the site pay for itself.

If the ads bother you, you can eliminate them very easily. There is probably a way to do this in Opera, Safari, IE and whatever other browser you may choose, but I know how to do it in Firefox, so that is the info I'm going to provide. If others care to offer comments on the other browsers, I'll be sure to include them.

In Firefox there is a neat feature called "Add-ons". Essentially, you can add functions to the program by adding in little sub-programs. You do this by going to [Tools] and selecting [Add-ons].

On the resulting menu, click on the little window near the top with the magnifying glass and type "Ad block" then click the magnifying glass. It should find Ad Block Plus. Click that. Follow the directions to install it. You may have to restart Firefox at some point.

Once you've done that, go back to [Tools], [Add-ons], [Extensions] to see that you indeed have adblock installed.

Then direct your browser to Sandcruiser and check it out... it should look exactly the same as it did before :)

Hover over the part of Sandcruiser you don't want to see ever again. Hopefully that is the ads and not the content/photos/real estate info/jewelry info/etc.
Hover over, and RIGHT click on about the center of the advertisement. Then select "Adblock iFrame". It should pop up a window that says "Add new Filter" and there should be a long bit of html in the window. You can click OK and it should block that ad... but you may want to be a little smarter than that and instead edit the content there. On our site, for example, the amazon ad starts out with "http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=stevebroylesc-20" and goes on and on. Well, if you want to stop all the amazon ads on our site, just insert a * after the stuff above. Or cut n paste the following http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=stevebroylesc-20* into your window. Then click ok.

That should effectively block all amazon ads from your browser!!

You can do the same for the google ads on our site and any other site. You may have to tinker a little, but once you get it figured out, you'll be blocking ads on sites all over the place. I block the heck out of them!

On the other hand, if you don't mind the ads, go ahead and take a look at 'em. Click 'em even. Every time you do we run the chance of making a little money with which to keep this site running. Who knows? Maybe some day we'll make enough that we can quit our day jobs and start traveling full time again. But that seems darn unlikely!

Labels: blog

Another crazy couple is traveling. Like us, they are making it up as they go along. Unlike us, they are doing it by catamaran, and aiming for around the world. The site is a good irreverent read, I strongly recommend it.

They are somewhere near Tahiti right now.

Labels: expedition, sailing, travel

As of now, there are 14 major rivers in Guanacaste that have flooded their banks. That's an awful lot of rivers for a province that is only 10,140 km2 (3,915 square miles- about half the size of the San Francisco Bay Area).

Spanish speakers can read more at La Nacion. But the short version is: Gustav soaked us down, Hanna is overwhelming us a little. We should be thankful we aren't suffering the way that they are in Haiti, Cuba, Jamaica, etc... but we sure are getting a lot of rain!

Labels: news, weather

While we don't suffer hurricanes, storms like Gustav drop a lot of rain on us. We've had unusually heavy precipitation for the last three or four days. It is pretty at times, but as the ground gets soggier, things start flooding, and it gets to be not-that-fun.

We are looking forward to some more sunshine soon, in the mean time we've got some movies and plan to spend the weekend indoors.

Labels: Costa Rica, rain, tamarindo, weather