Thursday, December 23, 2010

Rainforest Adventures

I got my wish! Feeling much better now. However, I was in so much pain that (1) I researched GI pain to verify that, yes, plain ol' gas and diarrhea can make you feel like you are going to die, and (2) I wondered what I was going to do if I needed to go to the hospital in the middle of the night when (a) I did not know where the hospital was, and (b) I did not know who to call to find out. Yep. Pain was that bad.

I did learn in all my researching that acetaminophen is the painkiller of choice for GI pain. However, the symptoms of acetaminophen toxicity are, beautifully, the same symptoms you would take it for. You can, though, take all the acetaminophen-combination drugs, too, like hydrocodone. Unfortunately, I (1) did not have any, and (2) was not going to put anything into my system unless I was guaranteed relief. I mean, what if it made it worse??

Anyway, I was well enough to go on our rainforest tour. We went to the Manuel Antonio National Park. It was, of course, beautiful, and our guide knew just where to look to show us the animals. He had a telescope, too, so we could see them "up close." The sloth was my favorite. Very cute.

The capuchins were cute until one of them snatched Olivine's carrots. Kat was sitting with her back to one of the monkeys, trying to shield them from seeing her open the packet of carrots. I turned to her just in time to see one of the monkeys dart forward, leap into Kat's lap, snatch the packet of carrots, and run back to his perch. Took maybe 2 seconds tops, certainly not enough time for me to get out a warning shout. Kat was a tad surprised and from then on, the capuchins were my enemies. No one takes carrots from Olivine! The damn monkeys didn't even like the carrots, either. They each tried one and then threw them on the ground. Stupid monkeys. The raccoons were aggressive about stealing bags, too, but they were easier to scare away. And really, raccoons?! I don't need raccoons in my rainforest. Got those at home. :-)

But the best news of all -- I got to go ziplining today!! It was awesome. I almost threw up after the first line simply because of all the adrenaline, but, as you know if you've read my previous post, I don't remember how to throw up, so I didn't. We took 12 ziplines total to get down the mountain, and it felt fantastic. So fantastic, in fact, that I thought I'd have a lot to write about it, but I am finding I do not. It was fantastic. Just ... fantastic. Liam liked it so much he told me he's going to move to Costa Rica after he graduates and work at the zipline place.

A couple of our guides had some fun with us. One of them hollered, "Hold on!" and then twisted the platform. The platforms are hung from the trees by thick cables; they're not nailed down. So when he grabbed the cable and pushed with his feet, the whole platform twisted -  not a lot, but certainly enough to surprise us. The same guide gave me a friendly tap on the shoulder as I took off on the last line - just enough to set me spinning slowly around all the way down the line.

Tomorrow: a yacht out to Tortuga Island.

Tuesday, December 21, 2010

The Amazing Zipline Excursion - Not

*** Warning: Contains references to vomit and diarrhea. Read at your own risk. *** 

I was planning to write today about our amazing zipline adventure through the canopy. Ziplining through the rain forest is something I have wanted to do for about 10 years, ever since my friends Karla and Paul told me about their trip to Costa Rica. The trip was planned for today.

Sam, the smallish, but not smallest, iguana
And I had to stay at the Compound enduring burning stomach pain while almost everyone else went. I lay awake most of the night trying to convince myself that throwing up would really make me feel so much better. However, I have not vomited in 24 years, and I am apparently (and quite happily) out of practice. I failed in the convincing, so I tried to make it go through the other way. I have never wished for diarrhea like I did last night. Please, please, please . . .

Unfortunately, it appears that my GI system had turned off. Nothing was going anywhere. I endured the racing heartbeat followed by the super-slow, irregular, pounding heartbeat, the sweating, the chills, the nausea, hoping, hoping, hoping that I would feel better by morning.

I didn't, and while I'm starting to feel better, I'm still not back to normal. However, I am going to hike through the rain forest tomorrow no matter what. I may need to rest every 2 minutes, but I am not letting another day go by with me just sitting. Granted, I am sitting among beauty and watching iguanas, which is pretty damn cool, even with an upset stomach.

It looks like I will get to zipline on Thursday or Friday. Cross your fingers for me!

Monday, December 20, 2010

Ears in Costa Rica

We are in Costa Rica! Haven't seen a whole lot yet, but what we have seen is beautiful.

I am here today, though, not to write about Costa Rica -- that will come tomorrow -- but rather to tell you about the hell that was my ears. I have a head cold. I'm sure I've flown with a head cold before, but this time made me swear I never will again. When we were making our descent into Houston, it felt like someone was stabbing an ice pick into the sinus above my right eye. That was only slightly worse than the pain in my ears radiating down my neck and into my teeth. On a scale of 0-10, this pain was an 8, easily. Keep in mind, too, that I would probably never rate anything a 10 because a 10 is the worst pain you can imagine. I have a very vivid imagination. So essentially this pain was an 8 out of 9. I almost cried, but it hurt too much to cry. The worst part, too, was that there was absolutely nothing I could do, nowhere to go, no one who could make it better. I was stuck on that stupid plane with my stupid ears, and that stupid ice pick stabbing over and over into my forehead.

Now I'm having a really hard time hearing conversations. However, all the sounds going on inside my head -- chewing, swallowing, random ear crackles, etc -- are magnified 100,456 times.

BUT, I am in Costa Rica! And I do not need my ears to appreciate the beauty. Unless, that is, there are animal sounds I should be hearing.

Tuesday, December 14, 2010

Books I've Read

I'm supposed to be studying. So instead I am posting this on my blog.


How many of these books have you read? The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books listed here.

I wonder how they came up with this list? I've read 70, started 7, and watched movies for 2. This does not mean I remember them, though, just that I read them.

Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte 
4 Harry Potter series – JK ROWLING
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee 
The Bible
7 The Tin Drum - Gunter Grass
8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman 
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott  
 12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy 
13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks 
18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch – George Eliot 
21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell 
22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy 
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh 
27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky 
28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck 
29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy 
32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens  
33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis 
34 Emma – Jane Austen 
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen 
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis  
37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Berniere 
39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne
41 Animal Farm – George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown 
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez 
44 A Prayer for Owen Meany – John Irving 
45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins 
46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy 
48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood 
49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding
50 Atonement – Ian McEwan 
51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel
52 Dune – Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen 
55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon 
57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez 
61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov 
63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt 
64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas 
66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac 
67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy 
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville  
71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens 
72 Dracula – Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson 
75 Ulysses – James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome 
78 Germinal – Emile Zola 
79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession – AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens 
82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro 
85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert  
86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle 
90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton 
91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad 
92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks 
94 Watership Down – Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute 
97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare 
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl 
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo