Glueboards are wonderful things

When we lived in Southern California, we caught scorpions, small snakes and of course a wide assortment of insects and spiders on glueboards, also known as "sticky traps". They don't involve pesticides, so you can put them anywhere. In addition to catching creepy-crawlies, you are monitoring the pest population, so you'll know what's around before it's become a major problem. Then just throw 'em in the trash. This glueboard in the laundry room caught a large spider, with just the body about an inch long:

We also realized that one or more cats were getting into the laundry room at night through the metal security door that has bars at the top. I just installed a screen to keep them out. No kitties were harmed.

How about that rain?

Man, it rains here. There was a saying I heard a long while back:  "It was raining like a cow peeing on a flat rock". It probably stuck in my head because it sounds dumb, but here.. it would be a herd of cows peeing on something. I wanted to find out how much water was falling per day. I know it's a lot, but how much?

Rain sheet off the roof.
Well,  It rained over an inch today. Over 106 inches this year.  Damn, that's almost NINE FEET OF WATER. If it wasn't for the incredibly quick run-off, we'd all be treading water, that's for sure. Compare that to Southern California, where it rains 10 inches a year on average. Rain was a special occasion there, celebrated with extra car accidents.

The down-spout from the neighbor's roof.
That's a really great site I'm linking to.. Boquete Weather. They have a really great explanation of weather in Panama. That's the info I used to explain to Peace Corps trainees years ago about tropical climate and weather.

Speaking of great links, here's the best compilation I've seen for Chiriqui. Kudos to Chiriqui Chatter, which is a class act. Here's their link page: which pretty much has it all.  I've got it bookmarked.

Progress

I've got my temporary residency now, at least a carnet that says that the paperwork is in process, so I'm not a tourist anymore. It's cost about $500, which is really cheap as far as these things go. It definitely helps to (1) be married to a Panamanian and (2) have a couple of lawyers in the family who of course, didn't charge. The Lovely Wife did all the talking, I just signed and posed for photos when needed. It took several trips to Migracion in David, which we expected, lots of those stamps (timbres) that you can only buy at Banco Nacional, and photocopies of everything, notarized, of course. It takes patience, but it can done with minimal stress if you're willing.

Since I got a card in hand once the residency paperwork was turned in, I was expecting the same for the work permit. Different Ministerio, mostly the same photocopies with timbres, but no work permit for a month or two.  I can't work for someone else.. I could work for myself, though. Decisions, decisions.

In other progress, there's a heck of a road project going on next to our house. Well, there's one house between us and the road actually. It's the new road between David, the capital of Chiriqui, and Boquete, the capital of.. coffee, tourism and the gateway to the highest point in Panama, Volcan Baru.

They're moving right along:

Lots of machinery, new bridges

Explosions that rattle the windows

Look out for those light poles! They build the road, then move them.

It's all good. Everyone will get wherever they're going quicker, safer and happier.

Signs of Something or Another..

I was looking for a "sign" the other day, and found several around the neightborhood.
You can click any of the photos to make 'em BIGGER.

Apparently, all signs along the Panamerican Highway and the road between David and Boquete are now illegal. It must be very satisfying to be the guy who slaps those big stickers right over the sign. If the sticker is bigger than the sign, the whole sign gets covered by a piece of sticker. The big, multi-story signs advertising major businesses get a piece of sticker wrapped around the post. Not a bad idea.

Other folks have their folksy signs.

"Don't throw garbage, pigs". Way to win friends and influence people. Too bad they misspelled Basura.

Balboa Beer "Conectado al sabor" has a lock on painting all the convenience stores in this area. Movistar, with the weird pukey green has all the bus-shelters. 

IDAAN is the water agency. They make sure to shut off the water at night, and often during the day on the weekends. Thanks for saving us money, guys. The water bill is only $5.00 a month, so if you could somehow save up some of that 20 inches of rain we get a week and keep the water on longer, we'd gladly pay $10.00.

Well, that explains the big BOOMS that rattle our windows once in a while. No complaints- the new David to Boquete road that goes near our house is making great progress just in the short time we've lived here. More on that in the next day or two.

Who knew that they still sold Royal Crown Cola? And who would have thought that some advertising artist would draw a woman with piercings and a tattoo in the 1950's pinup style to promote RC? I ponder that every time I walk into that store.

As the sign says "Good taste never changes!"  

House Cleaning Lizards

Going to the humid tropics may seem like visiting another world if you're from the USA. I've got a couple of stories about an invasive species to illustrate this, but first there's a climate review... which you can skip if you want. Just pick up again after the world map.

While every spot on the earth receives the same number of hours of light per year, the further north or south you travel from the equator...the more extreme the distribution of those hours becomes. So, in Alaska, you have some days with nearly 24 hours of light and others with nearly 24 hours of dark, and of course you have winter and summer. Most of the US has obvious seasons as a result of the unequal distribution of solar hours over the year.

The tropics, the area of the earth between the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn, is notable for its more even distribution of solar hours over the year. Here in Panama, for example, it gets dark between 5:54 PM and 6:42 PM every day this year. Close to 12 hours of dark and 12 of light per day (actually between 11:36 and 12:38 in 2011), so there is no appreciable variation in temperature during the year. What is referred to here as winter (invierno) and summer (verano) is really wet season and dry season. Those two seasons don't correspond to our seasons of the same name and are instead due to the shifting of prevailing winds.

Don't worry if you don't remember the details, just remember that cold weather, Mother Nature's very own best pest control method, is not happening in the tropics. The exception occurs if you go way up in altitude (up in the mountains), which is similar to moving north or south, away from the equator.

World Map Showing the Tropics In Red

In the 1980s a "new" lizard, The Common House Gecko, set about living up to its name in Panama. It moved into houses big and small, city and country, and earned another name- lagartija limpia casa, house cleaning lizard. A native of southeast Asia and north Africa, it's gone cosmopolitan from the high rises of Singapore to Pacific Islands to Israel, Brazil, Central America and southern US. Have you seen them?

Here in Panama, its introduction was recent enough that people remember pre-gecko times. There used to be spiders and other creepy arthropods in abundance. Now there's a lot less of them, because.. there's little nocturnal house cleaners. If you're sitting around the cantina in the country having a few beers, you'll see several geckos on the wall and ceiling around the lights. When a moth or other insect shows up, attracted to the light, out darts the gecko, and opens a mouth that seems bigger than its head, and cleans house. It's kind of fun to watch, but some people think the gecko is a pest itself. My wife always says "ay no, they're transparent".

What I wrote up to this point was written while we were staying at my step-son's house in Panama City. There, the geckos were outside, though we could hear their call at night, which is amazingly loud for a creature between 3 and 6 inches long. It sounds like a demonic cackle laugh. Since then, we've moved to Chiriqui Province in the wild west, just short of the border with Costa Rica. It's the campo, the neighbors all have chickens, there's cattle down the street, and for some reason the water is shut off every night. And the damn geckos are in the house.

They are all over. They leave their distinctive little poops in the kitchen. They frolick on the walls in the bedroom. They cackle demonicly at night and wake me up. They lay little white eggs on the window sills. They get stuck on the glueboards (AKA sticky traps) we have out to kill insects. This morning I slid open a window and pinned one against the frame. He looked at me with his tiny black slitted eyes in his little orange translucent head. Good, I thought.

This invasive species is really getting on my nerves. They're not even that great at cleaning the house- we've got all sorts of insects also. It's the rainy season, and it never gets cold in the tropics, which after all is Mother Nature's best pest control method.

Chiriqui Links

There aren't a lot of websites about Chiriqui, but I've found a few. They're all in English except as noted. Here we go:

Boquete Panama Guide    Classy and updated often.

Boquete Weather  Guess what this one's about? Actually has lots of cool stuff like this map of Volcan Baru:

Boquete-Bajareque-Times  Will their classified ads ever change?

Chiriqui Chatter  Seems to be updated often and gets comments.

En Dolega  Spanish, nice photos of community groups. Check out this tree that was cut in the park for safety reasons:

Richard Detrich's Blog  This guy's interesting, and his site's worth checking out.

Asociacion Ambientalista de Chiriqui  Spanish. If you want to know who's blocking the Panamericana and why, here's their manifestos.

Boquete Blogger  This is basically a commercial site, and that's what I'll be listing more of in a following website list. In the meantime, I'll be looking for more, and if anyone ever reads this blog, I hope they'll tell me their favorite Chiriqui websites.

Pirate movies

The Lovely Wife bought a pirate copy of the Green Lantern today outside the Pio Pio for a dollar. It's in English with Spanish subtitles. The funniest part of the whole movie was when I saw a guy walk in front of the camera in the theater where it was filmed.