Welcome back to another slice of my life here on the Ecuadorian Costa….

Roughly 11yrs ago, I re-defined a dream, turning it instead, into a future goal.

Around 6yrs ago, I bought some outside furniture & set it up on the recently completed patio area of my UK house, completing “phase 2” on the path towards the goal. Relaxing on said furniture, I visualised what I wanted to see when I opened my eyes.

A year ago today I broke ground on “phase 5”.

2 weeks ago, laying on that very same outdoor sofa, but now finally located in the space I designed for it, I opened my eyes to a new reality. A reality born of a hope, a dream, a wish & turned into an irrefutable  fact by little more than focus & effort, underpinned by the love & support of those around me.

As Sarah Connor said; “There’s no fate but what we make for ourselves”.

So that pretty much says everything it needs to & Im not sure how much more I can add to those few simple sentences that summarise the last 20% of my life, but of course I will try 😉

It was seldom ‘easy’ & many a time I questioned just how badly I wanted this. In truth I didn’t know. There is an obvious limit to how much reality can actually match the imagined, but in principle, most things are achievable if you want them bad enough. Bitching about what coulda/shoulda been probably means it wasn’t wanted bad enough, or perhaps more likely, it’s simply getting used to the way things are & those things not being bad enough to force a change.

I only had a rough idea of what I felt a future could/should be, but a damn good idea of what I didn’t want it to be & that more than anything, kept me going when I questioned why I was doing this.

Like Morgan ‘Red’ Freeman said’ “ If you aint busy livin, you busy dying”

 

You’re Moving Out Today

My rental contract expired 15^th July, which conveniently was a Sunday, but Id spent the week packing up & taking over a few boxes as I “went to work”, so there wasn’t a busting lot left to do. The big ticket items though were the box of steaks in the freezer & of course, the cats. After much debate & discussion, Carolina & Enrique opted to let Gordo come with me & they would keep Michu. My lil one – she doesn’t actually have a name, she doesn’t need one as I never call her, but for ease of explanation on this occasion, her working title is “Yena”. My mother uses this & it was a pet reference of mine when she was born with outsize ears & brindle colouring – Baby Hyena – Hi Yena – Yena.

I wanted them to have as much time to settle in before the guys turned up for work Monday morning, so I opted to move Friday night. It was only afterwards I discovered it was also the 13^th…

I was prepared & they were both looking at me with “we know you are up to something” expressions. Yena possesses the natural inquisitiveness cats are renowned for & climbed straight into the first prepared box, so I just closed in the lids & got to work with the tape. Realising all was not as much fun as she expected, she defaults to Tasmanian devil mode & then suddenly just stops. I finish off the tape & look up as she saunters past me. She’d gotten out of the little hole they give you for your fingers. This was going to be tougher than I thought.

Amazingly she didn’t run away once Id re-cat-proofed the box, tho I did put a lil dish of sardines in there to help sweeten (fishen?) the deal. Yes she fought, but more because she’d had enough of the box than being afraid for her welfare. So pretty quickly she was back in the box. Gordo however had been watching this all unfold with rising levels of alarm. As soon as I looked in his direction, natural coward that he is, he was off like a shot, waddling as fast as his lil legs could propel him. After 20mins of failing to even trap him in a room with doors, I called it quits. Yena was wailing & I was beginning to worry for her. So grabbing my keys,  I took the steaks out of the freezer & into an ice box over my shoulder & a writhing cardboard box in my arms, all the while cooing soothing, nonsensical gibberish at the forlorn feline in the box. Gordo was on his own for the night, if he can summon the guts to go near ‘his box’, he’l find there’s a plate of sardines in there. 🙂

The music studio is the only room with a door, so that’s where we spent the night. Yes it meant a not too comfy night on the sofa while she got used to the sensory overload, but by the morning she was happily taking a stroll in the garden with me as I showed her around the estate.

On Sunday Carolina & Enrique were able help me with Gordo – turns out a pillow case is perfect for the job & he was soon reunited with his friend. He is settling in, still sleeps on my bed at night, but he has now become an outdoor cat & has slimmed down to nicely athletic. He comes & goes when he pleases & that’s just how it should be.

Lastly on cats, it seems Yena had something of a leaving party before we departed the beach & like many a young gal on prom night, now has at least two memories of the night growing inside her. I think she has about a month to go, but Im hardly James Herriot, so Im expecting to uncover a mewling mass of writhing bodies every time I lift a cushion or blanket. Updates to follow.

 

Mindo No More

The impending kittens aren’t the only reason I wont be going to Israel in September. Ive left the door open should situations change, but for now, Einat & I don’t have a solution for remaining together, so have consciously uncoupled. Of course I wish her every happiness, but cant deny I secretly hope anyone that follows in my footsteps, pales by comparison & Im back to being the best decision she ever made. 😉

 

Living the Dream

Before I moved in, I had a priority check list based around what I considered essentials for living. I already had a functioning w/c & some lighting, so after that came a shower. Everything else was do-without-able. Of course this wasn’t to say I intended to rough it, just that absolutely nothing was actually finished, so I only focused on what I felt I really needed – no need to bust a gut if it was only a “nice to have”. We had all been very busy in the run up to D-Day, but as explained last time, I still had some issues that were preventing me from putting the ceilings up, so all the guys were concentrated on the outside. On the upside, this means I now have a pool ready to be tiled, a garage, outside steps, a fully fenced & planted perimeter,  roughly landscaped primary areas, a front wall & gate pillars. Of course we have still managed to make some advancements internally since everything in the ceilings is now good to go. This means I now have a fully functional, fully tiled bathroom with ceiling & sensor lighting. It doesn’t have paint, it doesn’t have floor tiles & its got a few planks tied together to make a vanity unit, but I can do all I need to in there & do it well. You may have picked up over time that showers are important to me. Indeed they are. So imagine how much pressure you put yourself under when you are building one yourself, for yourself. You couldn’t live with yourself if you couldn’t make your own a decent experience  could you? Well, it is with some smug satisfaction that I can state, its already better than expected, with just the standard head fitted & the pump turned down to ¾. Usually spread over 2 sessions, I probably spend half an hour a day in there, reveling in steamy, pulsating bliss. As an added Brucie Bonus, after having pleasured me, the water flows out & irrigates my hedging 😉

Due to the varying levels of “suitability for living” vs “need for using”, Ive found myself spread over all 3 floors. The music room is the only one with a door, so all my gear is in there & then of course the cats…Ive set up an outside kitchen with fridge, coffee machine, microwave & a sink in the space that will be outside dining. Ive coupled this with the coffee deck furniture as we’ve had showers of late & don’t want to keep bringing in cushions, so this is where I relax & receive guests. I use my bathroom, but rotate the bedrooms subject to what else is being done in any given one. Id also quite like to wait until Ive finished The Master Suite before I take up full residence. Its not ideal, but it improves daily & wont last forever.  The pay off though is exponential. A friend asked me if I missed the beach – I miss staring out to sea, sure, but that’s it. 90% of the time the only thing I hear here that I haven’t generated myself is wildlife. The nightly jungle chorus is just the right level that doesn’t intrude. Even during the day, you know when someone is coming to see you because you can hear the car for 5mins before they arrive. Coffee on the deck at dawn, watching the crazy throb of the colibris, humming their way around the orange blossoms in search of their own breakfast is mesmerizing. I bought a small, shiny wind-chime the other week & yesterday a hummingbird spent almost a minute hovering around it, presumably looking at its own reflexion. Awesome! Im not sure I should tempt fate here, but the insect presence, particularly of the biting variety, seems very low – maybe that will change when we get into summer…..There have been a few spiders. One time, (but not at band-camp), I went in to use the basement loo. Its sensor lighting, so I was unbuttoning as I walked. The light coming on as I got to the nitty-gritty, I open my eyes in relief & look up. Its not a huge spider, but it aint tiny, so even though I am most definitely tensing, I summon the calm to relax & continue. It is at that point, the timer expires on the sensor & the light goes out.

The stream wavers, but I hold my ground along with my breath. I struggle for too long on the thorny problem of moving to activate the sensor, against not moving to avoid disturbing the spider. I wiggled my ears feverishly. Ironically, dropping my head in defeat when the ear wiggling failed, was enough to ping the lights back on. The spider was no longer where it was when the lights went off. Now I would really like to believe the spider lovers who will tell me that IT had taken advantage of the dark to ‘escape’ from me, but I scanned the rest of that room like a peregrine falcon. Nothing. I re-buttoned & backed the hell up out of there. Fortunately, mostly through personal discipline, I am not troubled by “the thought of” where they might be or when they might attack, I deal with f2f, on an individual contact to contact basis. I have by no means cured myself, but its getting easier.

 

Wildlife encounters aside, Im not really able to use much of the rest of the house as I eventually intend to, but Im still starting to get a feel for what its going to be like…Im excited! Even without most of it being finished yet & certainly no décor or furniture, its already giving out a relaxed, ‘we want you to enjoy living here’ vybe. I would imagine some people may question why I didn’t wait until Id finished more. Well, quite simply I didn’t want to wait, no, couldn’t wait any longer once I had my starter for 10 ticked off. As unfinished as it is, its already a better house to live in than the beach was, which yes, has a lot to do with the shower ;0). For most everything else, I see them through a kind of rose coloured spectacle or an in-built VR that allows me to see it as it WILL be.

Ive set up my old UK TV in the music room, along with the music & pc kit. Of course its going to have to go back into a box in a month or so, but for now it provides a welcome break from ‘work’. To make the most of it, required connectivity to the outside world, that frustratingly isnt going to be cable fibre. It isnt even copper cable, I have a biscuit tin sized dish bolted to the side of my house, occasionally picking up waves from a repeating tower miles away. My package includes bandwidth up to 2mb. I enjoyed 100mb in UK, so its just a case of adjusting my expectation…& of course the time allotted to do it. Musically though it sounds sweeeeet. Im basically in a concrete bunker that thinks its a bass bin, so when I come down the stairs into the basement, the thudding getting increasingly louder, I am transported back to a time of yesteryear where descending into a basement pumping out badass basslines was the deja-loop of my life for a wonderful while

Fast Food for Thought

Food has become a bit of a chore. I go out for breakfast mostly & always for lunch, at which time I often get the other option on the menu for dinner that night as it saves me the hassle of running in to town after work. Ive found a decent Chinese, though nothing like a UK version. Ive got a great pizza place & a couple of nicer eat-in restaurants, just to vary the intake & hopefully cover any gaps in the food chain. I cant wait to be master of my own kitchen & have a fully stocked fridge once again.

In a house across the valley, siblings or possibly one overly ambitious child, is attempting to learn the violin whilst also doing their level best with a recorder. They are trying to learn by rote & they simply forget the order of the notes. ‘Neither’ of them sounds like they are ‘feeling’ what they are doing, so in my idle evening moments, I imagine them as weeping children huddled over their instruments with a wicked governess, jabbing at errant fingers with her pointy baton. As I said, its quiet here & the imagination runs riot when the sun goes down. I confess to having very nearly soiled my sheets around 3 in the morning when a pair of horses cascaded through my woods, crashing rotten wood underfoot & smashing branches out of their way. Like a scene from a spoof movie, I went from out cold horizontal in bed, to fully upright & all guns-a-blazin in a single, fluid movement.

I leapt from the bed, but slowed as I approached the balcony edge. I wasn’t sure I even wanted to see what had made that noise. Ive watched ‘Lost’, so visions of trees being splayed as “the unknown” beats a steady path to your door, played out heavily in my mind. From the noise, it seemed to have passed me by, so let’s let bygones, be bygones & actually be gone. I edged forward & peered over the balcony into an inky blackness, barely lit by a sliver of moon. Movement caught my eye off to the left & then the unmistakeable whinny of a pair of horses took me back down to defcon 5 & allowed relief to seep back into my adrenalin fuelled body. Before I put up the fence, they are free to wander wherever, so had come through mine on the way to my neighbours. I assumed they were eating all his freshly planted flowers, but as his rear garden is now an open space, they were frolicking & generally tearin up the place. It seemed like one turned & said something to the other, then they were both off out into the night, crashing back through mine on the way. The jungle equivalent of living in a road favoured by teenage joy-riders, out to test their ill-gotten wheels.

 

My bedroom is now complete with ceiling, lights & render. The fan is fitted above the ceiling, but Im waiting until the a/c has been fitted first as we will need to drop a ceiling panel when we do that. First floor landing ceiling & lights, just awaiting render. Bed 2 ceiling, lights & render, with fan & a/c the same as my room. Bed 3 has ceiling & lights & is being rendered. When bed 4 is at that stage, I can get all the a/c fitted in a single visit. The fitter is a guy I met when I first came here, so Im glad we can finally do something together 🙂 After much legwork, Ive now been able to source the remaining lights I needed, so they are going up as fast as I can put them there to stay ahead of the ceilings. In between running up n down to various far away locations picking up all the stuff we need. This ladies & gentlemen, is why I treat it as a job & take weekends off 🙂

Ive not taken many photos this month, or at least not many that really show whats been happening. So after having tried & failed to show some Uk friends around on a video call, I sent them a few short videos. The over riding comment seems to be that with video you get a much better sense of proportion & the relationship of one thing to another. With this in mind, Ive included a few videos to “show you around”. I like the idea of doing a proper video when its all finally finished, but for now, this is low res, hand-cam footage, worthy of a Blair Witch, but I think you will get the general idea. They are all safe for work & there is no sound, but a few seconds blackout in the basement when I pick up the torch. They are hosted externally on Vimeo – the following links should be embedded video, but Im not sure how much testing I can do before I post – there may be an edit 😉

Welcome:

Showing the approach road, front walling, garage & entrance porch

Ground Floor:

Showing kitchen, outside dining, lounge, cinema, w/c & laundry

First Floor:

Showing landing, master suite, beds 2 & 3

First Floor & Roof Terraces

Basement:

Showing lobby, Beds 4 & 5, music studio & outside to yoga shala & gym

Garden & Pool

 

The Cat is Out of the bag

So having watched the videos, & you now know ‘Yena’ had four lil kittens. We were sitting on the sofa watching a film, when she crawls under the blanket & starts to purr on an industrial level. She’s just laying there looking all pleased with herself & rumbling like a diesel genny. This is not normal behaviour for her, so eventually the penny began to drop for me. After a while she got up off the sofa, but her back legs gave way after only a few steps. I knew it was “time” & time was not on my side. She needed her “nest”! Several weeks ago I re-purposed her transfer box into a nesting box, but she refused to even sniff it & has ignored it since. At that moment, a light bulb went off in my head as I stared at the now obvious box exposed out in the middle of the room under bright light. I picked it up & moved it under my bench desk. As I re-positioned the towel inside, she crawled in past my arm & slumped against the side, still purring like a maniac. Then she turned & looked at me, if such a thing could be said, her expression changed from bliss to WTF?! Her first contraction took her by surprise & the wail that followed was heartbreaking. After several smaller cramps, she staggered back out of the box, clearly no longer crystal on what was happening or where she was. She slumps down again as another contraction hits. She is biting the air in spasms & clawing at nothing & everything. I don’t know why, but I reached out & took her paw, which she curled around my hand & retracted her claws, pulling hard against it as another wave hit. By this time we had what could possibly be a nose “presenting”, but in any event, time had run out & they were coming. I couldn’t allow her to give birth on the dirty concrete floor – & yes, I also thought what that might mean for me in terms of clean up – so still holding her paw, I put my other palm underneath her & put her back in the box. Barely a minute later there was this tiny bundle of black & white, mewling its way into the world as ‘mum’ instinctively cleaned up. Barely 5mins later with hardly any fuss, out comes an orangey/red mess, which I assume is part of the process & direct mum to get to work on clean up because it looks like it gonna run all over the towel. Well blow me if it isn’t a another kitten, but this time its ginger. Definitely smaller than the first, but now head up & scrabbling for ‘breakfast’. I guess we now know who the father was! Another 2 strawberry blondes followed over the next half hour or so & by 10pm that night she was laying crescent shaped with the sound of four hungry mouths guzzling, barely audible over her contented/proud purring. They are 12 days old in the video, so nearly opening their eyes & it wont be long until they are out of the box, which is why I made them a pen. When they can get out of that, then they are big enough to be on their own.

Last year on my birthday I was pouring the concrete foundations, this year I was a little more relaxed. I put in a couple of hours hanging lights first thing, but then Roey & the girls came over with cakes around 11am. Its lovely just hanging out on that deck, especially with good company, but Elba took things to a new level with a bit of random, extreme yoga. Then it was lunch & after barely a couple more hours in the afternoon we were back out for dinner & drinks…though it was a school night, so still in bed before midnight . I didn’t feel too guilty, I think Ive earned a day off here or there J So thank you for all your birthday wishes, though for those of you doing so on facebook, it’s a dead account. Or at least the Chinese hacked it a few years ago & I cant get in it even if I wanted to. This also means I cant turn off the notifications….so I know you’ve wished, I just cant thank L

Don Simon

I was coming upstairs from being in the garden one evening when someone rings the bell. Its a woman that lives down on the main road, along with her daughter. I see this woman most days, often give her a lift into town & as she has asked for the job, she will probably be my cleaner. They asked if they could come in & they stated they had a favour to ask me. The sirens & red flags all fought for air space in my head, this should be interesting! The mother began, her daughter was getting married – phew, so no “will you marry my daughter”, no “my daughter is pregnant, you will marry my daughter”, so far so good. Ah, getting married = wedding =$’s. As politely as I could, I stopped her in mid flow to advise that I am not funding anything, nor am I loaning anything. Just in case I threw in I wasn’t able to host anything either. Surely that couldn’t leave much?? What they asked me, is will I be a part of the wedding. I don’t recall the actual term, but its essentially the godfather to the godfather of the bride. I probably lost in translation the sob story that lead to this vacancy, but they assure me it is an honour. Most humbling for me, they say it will be their honour to have me do this. Ive yet to find out the rest of the details, but they’ve taken copies of my cedula – you will recall from earlier posts that you need a copy of your cedula to break wind – for inclusion in all the official documentation. Im happy to do it & Im touched that they have asked me & it very much feels like a milestone on the way to being part of the comuna 🙂 So as of 27^th October, I will officially be able to sign my name, Don Simon 😀

On the subject of names, thank you all for your wonderful suggestions for a house name. In the time honoured tradition of Roy Walker, its close, its just not quite right. Following in the spirit of “say what you see”, Im going to wait & see if anything comes to me organically. You may have noticed from the video that I have built the pool bridge – rest assured there is already a pipe installed underneath to create the waterfall – so currently that’s just got its nose in front. I sorry we cant return any of your suggestions, but all other entries will receive their runner up prizes in the post.

So that just about wraps things up this time. A much shorter read, but lets see how we go with “show don’t tell” & review going forward 😉

Until next time when I will bring you more from the jungle & quite possibly some paint on a wall…

Take care,

Si x