Category Archives: Month One

Agua y las Adventuras de Katie!

I promised a little rant on water. I have no idea if this is a universal thing. Eric thinks I’m picky and crazy, but I know the truth. Water tastes different everywhere. I was raised in Asheville, which is known for its pure water. Microbreweries are all over the city because the water tastes so good. One of the founders of Asheville Brewing Company said here “We get first crack at some absolutely pristine water coming down from Black Mountain. The water is not too hard, not too soft and has low levels of minerals. It’s perfect water for beer.”

So  when my family would vacation each year to Hilton Head Island or visit family in Savannah, I HATED the “beach water.”  I didn’t even like to brush my teeth with it.  It just tasted dirty.  I couldn’t stand to drink it and would go the whole week drinking just juice and soda in order to avoid it.  “Julie, do you want some ice in your drink?”  NO, thank you!

The water in Panama City is perfectly safe to drink.  SAFE to drink, meaning that you can drink it without getting ill.  Whether you want to drink it, being an Asheville water snob like me, however, is an entirely different story.  I’ve been driving Eric crazy since I got sick last week and started getting dehydrated because I simply could not bring myself to drink this stuff all day long.  The aftertaste was like sanddollar flavored gatorade.  You can’t live with that all day!  It’s awful.  I admit that I’m no outdoorsy, do-whatever-it-takes kinda girl, so I found giant bottles of Dasani downstairs, and everyone’s a lot happier now.

Am I the only person like this?  Ashevillians?  Help me out.  Were we not spoiled growing up there?  Is it like that anywhere else?  Does anyone from a beach recognize that they grew up with crappy water?  My dad’s from Savannah and fully admits that their water is terrible.

Now for the exciting part of the post:  Katie’s adventures around the city!  My dear friend and former roommate Katie arrived last Sunday night.  I had asked that the caretaker of our apartment, Oscar, pick her up since he speaks English and is a careful driver, and he agreed.  I called him a few hours before she got in to confirm, and he assured us that he was tracking her flight.  Turns out, he sent a friend of his who spoke no English to pick her up and didn’t think to tell me this.  It would’ve been fine, except had I known that Oscar wasn’t going to go, I would’ve asked our friend and cab driver from last year’s trip, Jorge, to pick her up!  He doesn’t speak English, but I know and trust him and would’ve loved to see him.  Oh well.  She got here.

Sadly, I’ve been sick all week still, so I haven’t been able to join her on any of her adventures.  I’m okay, I just have some…ahem…reasons that prevent me from being able to leave the house for long.  Still.  Ugh.  But Katie is an adventurer and has found her way around.  She took a bus tour of the city, a ferry to a nearby island to relax on the beach, explored the old city, took Eric to the Canal yesterday, and went on a tour of a lake along the Canal today.  She’s had a great time, judging from her stories and photos, and a great sport about me not being any fun.

We have been getting takeout from the little restaurant downstairs a lot this week and have made friends with the owner, a lady named Neli.  Two nights ago, Katie and I went in while Eric went to the grocery store, and Neli introduced us to a Canadian twenty-something who was eating there.  He was heading out to some of the islands, then off to do some surfing, and Neli wanted to set him up with her daughter.  She said he was cute and she wanted beautiful grandchildren!  So I found myself in the position of translator between the two as this guy and I tried to negotiate a photo of the daughter out of Neli.  Oddly, Neli’s phone “was out of battery,” even though she had it plugged in, and for all her searching, she just couldn’t find a picture of her.  We’re still not sure what happened there, but surfer guy went off without a date, and Katie and I left pretty amused.  Eric showed up in the middle with groceries and locked out of the apartment wondering what was taking so long.  Anyway, I’ve enjoyed talking with Neli, eating her amazing cooking, and having a bit of a friend.

I’ll post pictures of the food and of Katie’s adventures when I can get them from her.

For now, a few random tidbits.  I finally caught a photo of the guy who I said sounded like he was doing a Call to Worship.  Here he is in his pickup truck:

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Next, in case I didn’t mention this earlier, the mystery bugs in our bedroom turned out to be termites.  Lovely.  We move out next week and I can’t wait.  I’m not going to announce our next apartment until we’re in because I don’t want it to go all Panama on us and fall through.

CB is not doing well at all.  He’s not eating.  I’ll spare you the details, but if you can spare a prayer that he isn’t/doesn’t suffer, we’d appreciate it.  It really sucks not being with him.  We skyped with him/Eric’s parents this morning, so at least we got to see him.  He definitely does not look like he feels good.  I’m feeling really guilty that we’re not there with him.  The timing is horrible.  The two unrelated cancers are just ridiculous.  We are so grateful to Susan and Ed for caring for him so well.  He’s a lucky dog.

As for Addie, she is being tortured at my parents’ house, as you can see:

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Too bad she’s not allowed on the couch, huh?

Lastly, I found a map comparing the size of Panama to the size of North Carolina.  Cool, huh?

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Spanish lessons, new fruit, fireworks, and Katy Perry

Well, I’ve been MIA for a week in part because I’ve had a fever and have been pretty much useless.  Sorry to leave you in suspense about CB.  His test came back the way we had hoped.  He has the better of the two types of lymphoma, so we may still have the opportunity to bring him down here.  We are going to let him have a few more treatments in the States, and in the meantime we have to decide exactly what path to take.  Full force chemo for the rest of his life is just not the way we want to go, as it’s pretty brutal.  We’ll be continuing to make decisions about how to best care for him in the coming weeks.  Thank you for your thoughts and prayers and for not sending sad emails.  I love you guys.

So, I was about 30 minutes into my first 4 hour Spanish lesson when I realized I probably had a fever, and let me tell you, 4 hours is a LONG time to sit on a couch and work on grammar.

I think I said last week that a woman was going to be coming to our apartment to teach our Spanish lessons every day for 6 hours/day.  4 for me, 2 for Eric, after he works a full workday.  The woman’s name is Marianela, and she is great.  Or at least she was that one day.  I was sick Tuesday-Thursday and her daughter had to go to the hospital on Friday, so I’ve only seen her the once.  We didn’t actually just do grammar drills the whole time.  We actually just talked for maybe the first three hours, but the emphasis was on past tense.  And in order to talk for three hours straight, you have to get to know someone pretty quickly…or rather, allow them to get to know you.  She started out asking me about my work, and being a lawyer, I easily went on about that for quite some time.  She asked about how Eric and I met, about how my life is different now that I’m married than it was when I was single, about my religious beliefs…she got a lot out of me.  And she talked too…joined in on the religion conversation, which was interesting, given that I wasn’t raised in an overwhelmingly Catholic country.

Eric was up next, and he wasn’t feeling great either.  He sounded good though, whenever I walked through the room, and Marianela told me he was “muy lista” – very smart.  He also felt a lot better once he finished up, which is great b/c I was afraid he had a fever too.  We would’ve been in bad shape if both of us had been sick this week.

So…not many activities to report on, but here’s what I have.

I took a LONG walk last week sometime and walked right under El Tornillo – a big tower nicknamed “The Screw” because of its shape.  I mentioned it in an earlier post about our scouting trip down here last year.  It’s pretty incredible.

El Tornillo ("The Screw")

El Tornillo (“The Screw”)

We also tried a new fruit today – una granadilla.  A dragon flower.  Here’s what it looks like, inside and out.

A Dragon Flower

A Dragon Flower

The inside of a dragon flower

The inside of a dragon flower

Here goes nothing....

Here goes nothing….

And you can see by the photo at the very top of this post that he thought it wasn’t too bad.  The jelly stuff is really sweet, but the seeds are big and taste a little weird.  So far the Dragon fruit still wins.  Of course, the expensive one.

Random note on food:  Eric keeps getting these frozen meals like empanadas and stuff like that.  Riba Smith (the name of the grocery store) brand.  The directions always say to preheat the oven to 350 degrees…wait for it…Celsius.  What?  That’s not a thing!  We have a temperamental oven anyway, so we just put it in at 350 F and wait and wait and wait.

I feel like you’re all thinking we’re stupid about this and that it’s probably just a misprint and of course they mean fahrenheit.  But when all of them say it?  Someone should fix it.  The other issue is that they don’t tell you that they want you to defrost it first.  Tricky.  It ALWAYS says that in the US.  Apparently we’ve grown accustomed to being told everything.  The pizza we got the other day didn’t even tell us to remove the plastic covering before putting it in the oven.  We almost didn’t know what to do.  Heavens.  🙂

Maybe I’ve mentioned that we hear fireworks every few nights?   I’ve never seen them before though, and Eric said they were really small when he saw them.  The other night though, there was a really amazing fireworks show and we watched the whole thing right from our living room window.  This doesn’t show how amazing the fireworks were, but it at least (sorta) shows how close they were.

Fireworks from our living room window.

Fireworks from our living room window.

Now, since I brought up Fireworks and it’s Super Bowl Sunday, I have to comment on the halftime show.  Did you ask for this?  No.  But something has to be said, and quickly, because that was bizarre.

Okay, here’s how I see it.

  • The lion that Katy came in on?  SUPER cool.  Especially because I didn’t see the guys in black making his feet move for a minute, so I couldn’t figure out what was going on.  Awesome.
  • The fire outfit she was wearing and the crazy fake hair tight ponytail thing?  Awful.  Cinna would hate it.  Katniss would never(deen) be caught dead in it.  [If you get those references, I applaud you, although I admit the Everdeen part was a stretch.]
  • Chessboard thing that looked like it was moving up and down and tilting and all that?  Very cool.
  • Dancing surfboards, beachballs, singing sharks?  NO!  Katy.  No more acid trips while planning your shows.  I gotta say though, Katy and all of her backup dancer girls looked healthier than you usually see.  They were skinny, for sure, but looked like they might actually use their legs for supporting their body weight for more than just the catwalk.  Well done.
  • Shocked that Lenny Kravitz was willing to step in for about 5 seconds of “I Kissed a Girl and I Liked It,” but whatever.
  • Missy Elliott?!?!?!  Amaaazing!  Partially b/c I had no idea she was going to be a part of it.  But “Work it” was excellent.  It also happened to be a big part of the soundtrack of my freshman year of UNC, so maybe that’s nostalgia talking.
  • Shooting Star exit?  Really really really lame.

There you have it.

And…best part of the week?  My friend and our first visitor, Katie, will be here in the next couple of hours.  Our English speaking taxi driver friend is picking her up for us at the airport, and when I called to confirm that he was going to get her, he said that he and his wife were tracking her flight.  Very sweet.

I have a rant about water too, but I’ll save that for another day.  I know it’s killing you, but I really am going to leave you hanging on that one.

And HAPPY 5th BIRTHDAY TO LAINE NELSON!!!!!!!  Our sweet niece is 5 today, and for a girl who can name NFL players as well as her Fantasy Football playing daddy, Super Bowl Sunday is the perfect day for her to turn 5.  We love you Lainer!

 

I don’t want to talk about it. And ferrets.

I’ve been avoiding talking about this because I just don’t want to talk about it.  I’ll make it quick.  CB, our beloved doggie, in case you’ve missed pretty much the whole blog, has managed to get himself into an even worse place, health-wise, than he was before.  If you didn’t read the blog before we got to Panama, he was diagnosed with bladder cancer back in late October, early November.  He’s only 8, and he acts just like his same goofy self, so it’s been really hard to believe.  We had a hard time deciding whether we were still going to come to Panama…blah, blah, blah…I can’t tell the whole story again b/c I just can’t.

Anyway, he’s been going to chemo back in Raleigh, thanks to my wonderful in-laws, and the hope was that he would come here after six weeks or so.  Two weeks ago, he was supposed to have chemo, but his platelet count was low, so they put it off for a week.  They checked his lymph nodes too, as apparently they do just because, and there was no problem there.  The next week, his white blood cell count was high, so they decided they should run some tests.

As it turns out, his bladder looked normal.  But he has lymphoma now.  It’s bad.  Lymph nodes all over his body were enlarged (I guess…I don’t know all the medical terms…Beth, our vet and dear friend, is probably shaking her sweet head at my description) all of a sudden.  Just in one week, this suddenly popped up.  Eric’s always described CB as big, dumb and lovable, and ever since the weird presentation of his bladder cancer he’s said that he’s so dumb, he can’t even do cancer right.  Now we know that’s true.

Anyway, they did a test to see which of two kinds it is.  If it’s the “good” kind, he could have weeks to months left.  If it’s the bad kind, he could have only two weeks, which I guess now means only a week.  We spent all day on Monday crying and agonizing over what to do.  Do we go home to say goodbye?  Do we just let the last time we saw him be the last time?  If he has the “good” kind, do we try to bring him here?  Do we keep trying to treat him, meaning really harsh chemo for the rest of his short life?  Do we stop treatment and just try to keep him comfortable?

Okay, that’s all I can write.  I love my sweet boy, and I just wanted to ask for prayers.  I don’t even know exactly what for.  Not only is this the worst thing ever because we’re losing our baby who seem so healthy…and still acts like a puppy, but we’re a million miles away from him and can’t hold him.  We can’t let him up on the couch or take him for walks or give him treats.  We can’t watch him run around or be the ones to take him to the vet.  We can’t let him know how much we love him or hug him goodbye even.  It’s just the worst.

Eric’s also leaving on February 4th-12th to go to the Czech Republic for work.  We have no idea what will happen with CB during that time, but I hate the idea of him being away while this is going on.  However I’m very grateful that Katie will be here.

Anyway, while I really would rather y’all didn’t email or call or text anything about this because it’ll all make me cry and make it all harder, I would really really appreciate your prayers.  I know you’re all thinking about us, and we appreciate it more than you know.  Thanks for keeping up with the blog.  We’re grateful that so many of you care enough to find out what we are up to.

And now for the explanation of the photo on today’s post.  I’ve been meaning to tell y’all about the store across the street.  I’m pretty sure they just sell ferrets.

So you may or may not know that in Spanish speaking countries, the stores are mostly named after what they sell.  Like a bakery is called a panadería (pan = bread), a shoe store is a zapatería (zapato = shoe), a bookstore is a librería (libro = book), etc.  The store across the street has a big sign that says ferretería.  You do the math.