Hola y all that jazz

Hey guys. Sorry I haven't blogged in 300,000 years. I know, you're probably upset with me. We probably can't be friends anymore. It's sad, but I guess I'll have to move on...

Okay, so Costa Rica. I've been here for a few days, and will be here for a few days more. First things first: my torso hath been attacked. There must have been a spider in my bed or something because the first morning I woke up in Canaza, I discovered I had become the proud new owner of about 100 angry, red, itching bug bites all about my sides. Just my sides. Not my legs or my arms, or even my belly or my back, really, but when I look in the mirror, all I can think of is a horrid, warty toad. And they haven't faded in the least. Charlito even asked me today, "Why your picas (bug bites) not get better?" and the only answer I could give was a feeble, "I don't know, child, I just don't know." Though I guess I can't expect too much--Costa Rica has never been kind to me in the looks department. I now have a bee-oo-ti-ful sunburn and with my short black hair going all curly in the humidity, I've come to think of myself as looking like some crazy escapee from clown prison.

Not that the babies mind. Charlie and Naomi are great. Naomi is a massive fat toasted marshmallow baby who doesn't do much except sit around and be pleasant and agreeable (though I have to say, she's nowhere near where Charlie was in the looks department, but then again, nobody is). Charlie is a cherubic almost-four-year-old with the capacity for movement of a hummingbird whose diet consists soley of sugar water and crack cocaine. His favorite thing is to start banging on my door at 5 a.m. with the ever-enticing question: Do you want to play? We nearly went through all the sidewalk chalk I brought down on the first day I was here, tracing each other and drawing dinosaurs. Oh yeah, Charlie's gotten into dinosaurs. Neato.

On an unrelated note, I've finished Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows after slowly reading the story over the course of 7 hours of plane trips, 1/2 day hosteling, 8 hours in the death bus from hell, and several consecutive hours locked in my air-conditioned cave garage whilst Charlie screamed over and over again from just outside my door, "MORGAN, WATCHOO DOING?!" I really enjoyed it, and found myself rather satisfied with the resolution of the story on the whole. This comes as a nice Potter-related surprise after the recent release of the fifth movie, Harry Potter and the Mutilated Plot Points.

Now I'm sitting in Anna and Tom's house (crawling with geckos-a-plenty) in town in my underwear and a shirt I made myself solely from calamine lotion. Tom's in the States, Anna is in Canaza with Johan and Maggie, and I'm alone manning the bike station today and tomorrow, which is great--their room here is air-conditioned, they have hundreds of bootlegged movies AND internet access, and are moments away from a number of bars where I can get plastered at reasonable prices. I've also been spending a lot of time driving around Silvia's Yamaha scooter-Vespa thing.

Other than that, it's just been the regular day-to-day pura vida and its associated onset of isolated jungle madness. More to come...