Jon Walker's Costa Rican adventure

According to his FB and music Tumblr, he and his wife have moved to Costa Rica for six months and are "doing some writing, reading and thinking." (And also learning Spanish.) They are, I am not making this up, apparently living in a cabin formerly owned by an eccentric Italian nudist.

Updates will be on junglewalkers.tumblr.com should any of you be interested. The "journal" excerpt up right now appears to be from Cassie's journal, not his, and I'm expecting both of them will be updating in the future.

Information on Costa Rica: Wikipedia ; Offical Tourism Site .

Short version: It's one of the few, if not the only, stable democracies / countries in Central America. The Army was abolished (!) in 1949 and there's a 94% literacy rate. Education and health care are good. They're working towards becoming a carbon neutral nation. Tourism is (obviously) a major industry and ecotourism is particularly big, also key are pharmaceuticals, financial outsourcing, and software development; the three biggest cash crops are coffee, bananas and pineapples.

Basically, JWalk has chosen his escape wisely. The weather is tropical and should be delightful as the "dry" (non-hurricane) season is from December to April.

I am still kind of boggling a little bit, because he upped and moved to Costa Rica, but I have to admit I'm looking forward to reading about his (their) experiences there.

YOUR MOVE, RYAN ROSS.

noted for the record, ryan ross edition

this really is very much a "file under: check back here now and again" kind of thing, HOWEVER, sometime in the last couple of months JWalk tweeted at Ryan something along the lines of "tried to email you and it bounced, is yr address still ryan@petsalamander.net" (and I burst into helpless laughter on the street and said something like not any more it's not! but also kind of reckoned that the whole thing was JWalk's attempt at, idk, teasing, or a joke, or, idk, something, the ways of JWalk are sometimes inscrutable) and then ryan rossy answered him with something like "got hacked and lost some stuff send it again" and then restated the address.

(mind you, this was after Pete tweeted "the password is password" and Ryan's very next tweet was one where he was cranky about someone . . . changing his password. part of me says: coincidence. part of me says: probably not, because in bandom the most ridiculous explanation is ALWAYS the right one.)

and I made a thoughtful noise. because . . . logic suggests that that is ryan playing along, or some sort of code, or idk, whatever, you get the idea. Not real, is my point here.

but, out of morbid curiosity, i checked to see what petsalamander.net might be, figuring some poor exotic pet blog was baffled by a sudden flood of traffic / email / baffling ILU RYAN ROSS comments, and found 1) it existed 2) the only thing on it was ( this )

And I made another thoughtful noise, because of Alex Greenwald and his obsession with the letter A, and I though Alex = Axolotl? and wondered if, maybe, it was related to whatever they have been working on . . . hmmmmmm.

Now and again I check back in, just to see if there have been any changes. Right now the page is coming back with a database connection error message. I'll check in again after the holidays and see if anything further has developed.

also, here is a better picture of an Axolotl.