By The House Doctor

All I want to do is turn you on, and you let me down. I want this relationship to be over, but alas, you’re the only fans I can get. Overpriced Chinese garbage. We just have to learn how to work together.

Welcome to Fans 101 my fellow Quepolandiacs, the first way to keep these fans lasting is preventative maintenance. The most commonly trashed fan here is the oscillating floor stand type. One day it’s working, the next, just a humming sound and eventually, if unchecked, the lovely aroma of frying electrical innards. By this point, you just may have to pronounce the patient dead on the scene.

Remember when servicing electrical appliances, be sure they are unplugged, I know, I know. You knew that right! So let’s begin.

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Filed under: A Free Consultation, House Doctor on February 26th, 2011
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By Donna Porter

Ginger.  The word, in and of itself, has an essence of beauty and intrigue.  It can stir your senses with images of the exotic, or bring feelings of delight to one’s lips by its soft pronunciation of syllables or to ones taste buds by its savory, tangy flavor.   But, here in the tropics, Ginger brings pleasure to the eyes as well.  It is the name commonly bestowed upon hundreds of plants that belong to the family Zingiberaceae, which include approximately 52 genera and 1,300 species.

Zingiber officinale is the culinary and medicinal ginger whose aromatic, rhizomatous root is world renown. It has been in cultivation in India and China for millennia, and therefore its exact origins are unclear.  Unlike many of its Zingiberaceae relatives, its claim to fame is its swollen, antler-looking roots, and not a colorful, showy flower or handsome foliage.

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Filed under: Donna Porter, It's a Wonderful World of Plants on February 26th, 2011
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By Michael Arnold

I am always fascinated how life has a way of guiding you in a particular direction, often without asking you first.

I didn’t start out to become an acupuncturist. My first passion was biology and the study of what makes living things tick. It always amazed me how much is going on inside our body right now that we are completely unaware of. Even something simple like breathing involves millions of chemical reactions and has taken millions of years to evolve.

It was with this in mind that I embarked on a degree in Neuroscience at aged 19. There is so much we don’t understand about how the brain and mind works. Scientists can’t even agree on what it means to be “conscious”. I wanted to get involved in research that was attempting to answer some of these big mysteries.

However fate had a different idea for me. While at university I started to suffer from insomnia. Someone suggested I try acupuncture and I thought I might as well give it a try.

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Filed under: Holis Wellness Center on February 26th, 2011
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By Matt Casseday

Someone recently asked me to describe the strangest thing that had ever happened to me during my 20 plus years of living in Costa Rica. My first memory was of an incident that occurred in downtown San Jose in the early 1990s. I had spent the night in a pension in Barrio Mexico. The following morning I walked the kilometer or so toward the small, congested center of downtown San Jose. The most direct route took me through a bedraggled district of cheap all-night bars populated by loud and broken-down street people, but as I was walking among a multitude of pedestrians all en route to downtown, the scene—which was right out of Hogarth’s Gin Lane—seemed harmless. At 6 feet 1 inch, I had no problem seeing over the heads of the people walking in front of me, and ahead I saw a small, boisterous woman, standing in the street and clutching a sort of bedroll. The first thing I noticed was that she was missing an arm. The second thing I noticed was that she was staring right at me. Her wild eyes locked onto me as I approached and did not waver. I glanced away and glanced back and the look in her eyes suggested that I might have been a walking composite of every man who had ever wronged her on her life’s tortured path, As I passed where she stood, I saw a sudden motion from the corner of my eye, then was struck hard on the side of my head by the thing she had been clutching. If it was a bedroll it must have been of the cement lined variety. I reeled and grabbed the shoulder of the person in front of me to keep from falling as she continued whacking me with all the force her one arm would allow. She was saying something as she swung, but I did not understand. Within a couple seconds I was out of her reach, absorbed by the flow of the pedestrians. I heard laughter coming from across the street as I regained my senses and continued toward the city.
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Filed under: Crazy From the Heat, Matt Casseday on February 25th, 2011
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By Shelly Workman

As I pondered over the close of an old year and in quest for capturing the most in the year to come, I decided to revisit some Yoga books that have encouraged my journey and inspired me along the way.  Even after studying Yoga for over 14 years, I still love going into the basics and principles of Yoga to reflect and reconnect.  Most of what I have learned about myself and how I move through my days and in relationship, I have learned on my Yoga mat.  This ancient art when practiced with dedication becomes a figurative expression of what is literally going on in my life, so I can see more clearly and decide how I want to be.  One thing that I know for sure is, if I need to see the joy in my life, it becomes more obvious after my Yoga practice.  If  I have muscular tension or a lot of stress, I go to the mat and it is literally transformed.  If I need space or even an attitude adjustment, I show up fully to breath and workout hard to detox my mind, body and spirit.  Yoga has become such a resource to me to live and live well.  For this reason, I am inspired to share with you more about Yoga.  I will leave you with a quote from and amazing Yogi that has taught me so much and then I will hope to see you in the studio.  Namate.

¨Yoga is about achieving a balanced mind-neither being swayed by too much ambition nor dragged down by failure.  Yoga teaches you not to over value achievement, to take in stride setbacks and to reassess, and push ahead with life. The practice of Yoga can help you to find peace in having achieved your best.¨  Shivapremananda

Shelley teaches Fusion Yoga for all levels at Holis Spa, Tuesdays and Thursdays at 7:30am and again at 9:00am and Yoga for Surfers every Wed at 9:30am.  To reserve your spot call 2-777-09-39 or www.spaholis.com.

Filed under: Holis Wellness Center, Yoga on February 25th, 2011
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Localiza y subraya las preposiciones que aparecen en el siguiente texto:

La lectura tiene una gran importancia en el proceso de desarrollo y maduración de los niños. Desde hace unos años se está notando un creciente interés de los padres por la lectura de sus hijos, quizá porque saben —se les dice así desde los medios de comunicación— la relación que existe entre lectura y rendimiento escolar.

Desde estas páginas quisiera hacerles conscientes de que el potencial formativo de la lectura va más allá del éxito en los estudios; la lectura proporciona cultura, desarrolla el sentido estético, actúa sobre la formación de la personalidad, es fuente de recreación y de gozo.

La lectura constituye un vehículo para el aprendizaje, para el desarrollo de la inteligencia, para la adquisición de cultura y para la educación de la voluntad.

Los significados de las preposiciones son muy variados: movimiento hacia un término, modo o manera, finalidad, lugar, posición, compañía, causa, instrumento, oposición, posesión, origen, tiempo, materia, dirección, causa, instrumento, carencia, orden…

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Filed under: Academia D'Amore, Tico Talk on February 25th, 2011
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By Jack Ewing

Petroglyph

Quite a few years ago someone wrote a short article for a local magazine in which they stated that at the beginning of the twentieth century the area around Dominical was covered with forests and inhabited by indigenous people who lived at peace with each other and in harmony with nature. The person who wrote those words obviously hadn’t studied any of the available evidence about indigenous people in this part of Costa Rica and was writing straight from their imagination. The part about the area being covered with forest is true, but at the beginning of the last century, there were no Indians here at all, and hadn’t been any for at least four hundred years. The last Indians to inhabit this region, far from living in peace with their fellow man were head hunters, who practiced slavery and human sacrifice. Whether or not they lived in harmony with nature is a matter of debate, but they were fairly advanced agriculturalists and must have done a lot of deforestation in order to grow the corn that was the basis of their diet. Nevertheless, they probably didn’t do as much damage to their environment as modern humans.

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Filed under: Jack Ewing, Nature and Local History Stories on February 22nd, 2011
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