When people think of Costa Rica, or any place for that matter, they have this picture in their head, I would like to address whether the things in this picture are true or false. Fair warning: some of these are random facts that are completely useless.

1. Not everyone goes surfing. Don’t get me wrong, people do surf, but I think that the percentage of locals who surf is quite small compared to what most of us would have guessed. We were talking to one of our neighbours and he hates the ocean, he is actually scared of it. Coming from Canada this sounds like such an odd idea, like, if you live only half an hour from the beach, why wouldn’t you go? But the ocean isn’t a novelty here, the country is bordered by two oceans, for people who grew up here, it’s not really special to be able to swim in an ocean where the water is room temperature. At least, I don’t think so, I didn’t grow up here so I don’t know.
2. It is not always hot and sunny. There isn’t summer and winter, there is a wet season and a dry season. In the dry season it is hot and sunny which is what you think Costa Rica is like. The dry season is the nicest time of the year and is when people come on vacation; consequently, this is why we have that hot, sunny picture in our heads. The other half of the year is the wet season, during which time it rains. Hard. Every day. All afternoon. There are bugs everywhere, things are molding, nothing is ever dry (including your bed, which you have to get into anyway, even though it’s damp) and your yard turns into mud. It is still good, but not quite as romanticized.
3. We have electricity. For some reason, people think that Costa Rica is much less developed than the rest of the world. They actually think this of most of Central and South America, it is a common stereotype. The thing is, it might be true, I’m not going to say it isn’t. But I will say that Costa Rica does, in general, have electricity and internet.
4. Bees are not scary. Unless you are deathly allergic to bees, they are not scary. You know what is scary? Ants. There are hundreds of different kinds of ants and they bite. Some species just make you itchy when they bite, some hurt, and some really hurt. There is a species called Bullet Ants, thusly named because, when they bite you, apparently it feels like being shot.
5. Ants are not scary. The ants are crazy and they are everywhere, when you first get here they seem endless, but then you learn not to leave food out and to wear boots when you are outside. Some bugs are scary, mostly because they look scary, not because they will hurt you. Snakes are scary. When you see snakes in zoos they are really cool, when you see a super poisonous, deadly snake in a zoo it is freakishly cool. when you see a super poisonous, deadly snake in your bedroom it is a little less cool.

These are the first five things that I could think of as I was writing but there are definitely others. If you have any other facts you would like verified or questions you would like answered, please feel free to ask. I will write a second edition when I have enough questions to do so.

Hannah

Hi, this is Hannah, and today I am going to tell you about chickens in the jungle.

When we wanted to get chickens I did a lot of reading on multiple different websites about how to care for chickens and how to build a house for them and that sort of thing. Everyone says that before you buy chickens you need to figure out what breed you want, some are for eggs, some are for meat, some are for both and some are for show. Yes, there are show chickens, there are competitions and you can get prizes… for your chickens. You need to know your neighbourhood rules, are you allowed to have roosters? Are you allowed to have chickens at all? And people in, say, Canada probably don’t have chickens for sale in just any pet store so you then have to find a supplier and order your chicks.

(If you have, want, need stuff for or have questions about chickens go to My Pet Chicken or Backyard Chickens)

After doing all this research, we went to the pet store and said we wanted some baby chicks, the owner asked us how many we wanted so we said six. She then proceeded to put six chicks into a box for us, including the one little black chick that they had among all of the yellow ones.

The upside to this is that it’s easy; you get your chicks and you go home, there is no risk of losing some in transit and you don’t have to wait for them to arrive. The nice thing about ordering your chicks from a commercial breeder is that you know what breed they are, what gender they are and whether they are for meat or eggs, you get to carefully choose the exact product that you receive. We, knowing next to nothing about chickens, got six, brought them home, cared for them, built them an awesome house, named them and even cuddled them. But we had no idea what gender they were and were only hoping that they would lay eggs.

We named the black chick Agatha, and the five white ones Butter, Nugget, Princess, Freedom and Hufflepuff. Once they grew up they all looked so similar that it got very hard to tell them apart.

After talking to some of our neighbours we realized that we had meat birds and that they would get too fat and have health problems. To which mom said, “If we keep them active so they don’t get too fat then maybe they will still get old enough to lay eggs.”
We later realized that we only had two hens, Nugget and Princess. Which meant that we had a rooster named Agatha but that’s alright.

It actually became problematic when Princess died about a week ago. I don’t actually know what happened to her but I do know that meat birds, if they get too fat, are likely to have heart attacks and other lethal health problems. You can’t eat birds that have died of disease so we buried Princess and had one of our neighbours process the rest for us.

Agatha was always smaller than the other ones so we kept him and got four new hens. We purchased these ones as hens, not as chicks. He is bigger than any of our new hens though. They did not lay any eggs the first day we had them but in the four days since then they have laid ten. They seem to be earning their keep.

We were very sad to have to say goodbye to our first batch of chickens, though it wasn’t quite as bad as we had feared, and now we have healthy, happy chickens that are laying eggs and free-ranging around the yard. And the the best part is that we can tell them all apart.

Soup

Prince Agatha

Kiko

Dori

Hamster

I would like to say (since I am much more interested in coding than Ezra is) that sadly there isn’t really anything to write about. I want to learn Java, one of the basic programming languages. Android is based out of Java as is Minecraft.

I can’t just write about coding the same way I do about Minecraft commands. For Minecraft, I can write a command in a post, let you copy and paste it into your game and suddenly you have something amazing. Commands are little pieces of code that take only one line to make something cool happen, and anyone who has the game can make it happen.

With coding, it takes several lines of code to do anything at all and only people with the right software can make it work, and you have to understand exactly what everything does to make it work. You can’t just copy and paste a line of code into something else and make it work.

I can’t really tell you what I can do with Java because it doesn’t relate to anything else. It won’t matter to you until I can make a video game or something cool that actually makes sense.

I will make sure I let you know when I can do anything cool but until then,thank you for reading everything we write and please let me know if there is something you’re interested in and would like to hear more about.

Hannah

I am Hannah and sadly, I was not the person who invented this. Someone, I don’t know who, but someone made the most amazing invention ever: the Sprinkle Grinder

Me and my friend actually made one and they are amazing. Especially if you have a bunch of people coming over for dinner, you put out desert and you put out you sprinkle shaker, everyone loves it.

These things are super easy to make: You find an empty pepper grinder, rinse it out, make sure it is completely dry (otherwise the sprinkle stick to the inside, you can use a blow drier to dry the inside of the lid where you can’t get with a towel), cut a pretty piece of paper to the right size and use it as a wall paper so you can’t see the sprinkles, pour your sprinkles in, set the grind size to large and serve with dessert.

Or, since you put the wallpaper on the inside anyways, don’t tell someone what is inside and watch them pour sprinkles onto their dinner instead of pepper.

But the best part is, not a lot of people have thought of doing this so when you show people, they think you’re a genius.

Hope you have fun playing with your dessert.

Hannah