Here’s a list of some of the highlights of 2011 for us, in no particular order.

1. Had a new healthy baby girl, Aysia, who was born at home in our bath tub in Costa Rica.
2. Enjoyed visits from my mom, sister’s family, Jen’s parents, and her uncle and cousin.
3. Watched a guy kiss a king cobra on the mouth, then put the snake’s head in his mouth.
4. Moved from Grecia, Costa Rica to Escazu, Costa Rica, to Penang, Malaysia.
5. Enjoyed a fun week in Kauai, Hawaii with my mom, sister, niece, aunt & uncle, cousins, and more.
6. Got robbed in Puerto Viejo, Costa Rica. Lost 2 Macbook Pros, 3 iPads, camera, binoculars, backpacks, and more. Got one computer back thanks to PreyProject.com.
7. Threw a party in Utah and enjoyed visiting with dozens of family and friends on our way to Malaysia.
8. Drove my car (99 Rav4) through several rivers in Guanacaste, Costa Rica, and almost got stuck.
9. Enrolled the kids in art classes, Chinese class, community choir, day camps, and other fun activities.
10. Donated Emily’s birthday and our Christmas to charity (Emily’s idea).
11. Went to a weekly playgroup in Escazu and made many friends.
12. Played with monkeys at a rescue center who crawled all over us.
13. Tim Ferriss, author of the 4-Hour Workweek, wrote about me on his blog.
14. Watched how the indigenous Bribri indians in Costa Rica made chocolate, then we ate some.
15. Got chased and almost attacked by monkeys in national parks in both Costa Rica and Malaysia.
16. Bought my first real estate investment property. Thanks Shaun!
17. Took family yoga and horseback riding classes in Costa Rica.
18. Enjoyed soaking in several hot springs around Costa Rica, always with friends.
19. Lived for 8 months in this beautiful and artsy house in Escazu, Costa Rica.
20. My eight year old daughter learned to love reading, and has become very fast at it.
21. Toured several organic farms and learned about the farming business.
22. Saw two opossum mating noisily on our deck one night.
23. Spent 6 days without Internet in a Costa Rican rainforest with our friends, the Kings.
24. Physically left the Mormon church. (We left emotionally/mentally in July, 2010, but continued attending until March 2011.)
25. Ate delicious Indian food (roti) for breakfast almost every morning in Penang, Malaysia and usually paid less than $6 to feed our whole family.
26. Changed my blog title from Fulness of Life to Pearce on Earth and changed the design.
27. Went to a fish spa and got our feet nibbled on by doctor fish.
28. Got used to driving on the left hand side of the road.
29. Read several interesting books on my iPad and learned a lot from them.
30. Visited Kek Lok Si temple, the largest Buddhist temple complex in Southeast Asia.
31. Saw the most beautiful orchids at the Orchid Festival in Penang Botanic Gardens.
32. Ate the most delicious, unique, and cheapest food we’ve ever had in our lives in Penang, Malaysia.
33. Watched the dragon boat races at a dam in Penang.
34. Went to a jazz festival evening concert at a tropical spice garden in Penang.
35. Continued to grow my online businesses working less than 5 hours per week on average.
36. Hung out with friends at least 2-3 times every week.
37. Explored a huge 7-story shopping mall in Penang.
38. All my kids (except the baby) now know how to ride a bike.
39. Played Mario Kart wii enough that I got bored of it, but not enough to beat my kids. (It came with our Penang house, and they played it a lot.)
40. Went to a Chinese medicine man for a very strange herbal massage treatment.
41. Watched a Lion and Dragon dance parade in Georgetown, Penang.
42. Watched amazing Indian dance performances — such energy!

What did you do in 2011? Any plans for 2012?

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Pool at Hotel Bambito

After crossing the border from Costa Rica into Panama, we drove straight to Volcán, the town we enjoyed the most on our last visit to Panama, and also one of the closest to the Costa Rican border. We stayed the night in Hotel Bambito, the only place in town with a swimming pool. Our girls love to swim. Marie would do it all day if we let her. It was a really pretty indoor pool surrounded by glass windows so you still felt like you were outside. We were glad it was indoor because it was pretty cold outside – too cold for swimming anyway. They also had a hot tub, sauna, and ping pong table, all of which we enjoyed.

Meals with Friends

The next day, we met up with some friends for lunch and dinner. Both suggested the same restaurant, at Dos Rios hotel, so we ate there twice, and enjoyed the food both times. It was great to see our friends again, to catch up on what’s happened in the year and a half since we were last in Volcán.

Driving to Las Olas Resort

Jen at Las Olas

The next day, we thought we’d get a little closer to the border and go find a hotel by the beach somewhere. Our friends recommended Las Olas Resort, and gave us directions. But unfortunately, we missed the signs, and got very bad directions from several locals, which ended up taking us 1.5 hours in the wrong direction! We were all pretty frustrated at ourselves – well, Jen and I were. The girls somehow handled the extra 3 hours in the car with a very good attitude, just having fun playing together. When we got to the hotel, we found out it would be about $50 more per night than we thought because the prices on-line didn’t say it was an extra $20 per person for more than 2 in a room. I asked for a discount, it being the low season, but they wouldn’t budge. :(

Emily Learned to Swim!

Turtles at Las Olas

So, we went swimming that night, and also played a little at the beach and watched the sun set. The pools there were pretty shallow, which was great for the kids. In fact, because Emily could almost touch her toes in just about every part of the pool, she got brave enough to try swimming on her own from one end of the pool to the other, and did it! Our little girl has taught herself to swim! (Which is good because for some reason, she gets terrified whenever I try to teach her myself).

We had dinner at the resort and the girls enjoyed feeding the lettuce to the turtles in the pond and watching the parrots and macaws in the cage by the entrance.

Back to Costa Rica

The next day, we headed back to Costa Rica and immediately felt a little safer and noticed how much more green and dense the foliage was. We really like it here. :) We drove all the way to Dominical to find a hotel to stay at. Although we did stop at the beach just long enough for Marie to lose her shoe in the waves…

Pool at Hotel Ambiente

The hotel we planned on going to turned out to be be closed, so we drove around to several others, and ended up at one that was a little pricier than what we wanted (because we had to get 2 rooms instead of one, but they gave us a big discount). But it was so beautiful and we were ready to treat ourselves to a nice night after all that driving, so we took it. We stayed at Villa Ambiente, and it really was ambient (although we did have to drive through a river to get there). The architecture, furniture and decor were lovely, and the ocean view from the pool was spectacular!

We swam a little until it started to rain, then had dinner at a fun pizza restaurant in town, followed by some delicious ice cream at Ruby’s Homemade Ice Cream, owned by a sweet family from New York (Ruby is their baby). We enjoyed visiting with them, and they even showed Emily how to make waffle cones when she kept probing them for details.

To Buy a Hotel or Not to Buy

Courtyard at Villa Ambiente

Being a business man and having a mind that wants to know how things work, I enjoy talking to business owners to see how they run their operations. In addition to the ice cream shop owners, I also talked to the receptionist at Villa Ambiente (who was the only one there except the gardener) to see how things were run. I found out that it was owned by a man from Switzerland, and run by this woman and a gardener. The hotel is also for sale for 1.7 million dollars! Whew! Way out of my price range (for now), but it sure got me thinking about what it might be like to own a hotel, and how profitable a venture it might be.

In fact, I spent all week researching about buying commercial real estate in Costa Rica, how to run an effective hotel, and created a complex spreadsheet to help me analyze how profitable a hotel might be given many different variables. It’s been fun to learn about, even if I don’t end up purchasing a hotel. But I think it could certainly be a better place to diversify my savings than sticking money in stocks and mutual funds all in US dollars. At least with a hotel I’d have a little more control over the ROI. Something to think about.

Fresh Farming

Visiting the sheep

The next day we headed home, and on our way back stopped at a farm called Finca Ipe for some fresh cinnamon and honey. They even showed us the boxes where the bees make their honey and we got to stick our fingers in and taste the honey right out of the hive! Delicious! Fortunately, these were bees that didn’t sting. We got to see their other animals, too, like sheep, goats, rabbits, and chickens. The kids really loved it!

Overall, we had a great trip and it was fun to be together, see old friends, meet new people, and have new experiences together. For our next visa run, we are planning to visit our family back in Utah for a week or two, and then maybe take our kids to Disney World in Florida. We’ll probably be out of the country a bit longer for this next trip because September/October are the rainiest part of the rainy season here in Costa Rica, which I’ve heard are often just best to avoid altogether.

Thanks for reading! Enjoy the video and pictures below.

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But there is so much else that happened this week, I’m going to leave the house hunting out of this post, and I’ll cover that next time. To learn about this week, read on!

Making Little Friends

Marie, Allison, and Emily

On Tuesday, we had a fun play date with a girl in the ward Emily’s age (6) named Alison (pronounced “Ah-lee-sóhn”). They had a great time playing together in the park.

We talked to her mom about a lot of things. She also took us to a school where we learned about how that process would work if we wanted to enroll the girls in school. She also showed us some land where her family is building a new house. Then we had a batido (fruit shake), met some more of their family, went shopping for kids clothes (but didn’t buy any), and played some more in the park, along with Alison’s cousin. We had a really fun time with them and it was nice that the girls had a chance to play with someone their age.

Do Our Emotions Cause or Prevent Disease?

Me with Jean-Jacques and Serene

Wednesday morning, we met a really neat couple at B&B Grecia, where we’re staying: Jean-Jacques and Cyrinne, from Montreal, Canada. They have been in Costa Rica for several weeks working on a book about the connection between our physical health and our emotions. Jean-Jacques has already written ten books on similar subjects, from preventing and healing cancer and other illnesses, to the dangers and marketing hype of vaccinations. Unfortunately, they are all in French. But he does have a website with a little more information, that is Google-translated into English. He also pointed me to www.learninggnm.com.

For me, this is a fascinating subject. I think we all believe to some degree, that when we are depressed, anxious, or fearful, we are more likely to get sick, and less likely to heal. But his research (and that of other doctors) goes so far as to discover connections between specific types of events we are fearful about, and specific illnesses – even specific emotions/fears that cause disease in specific organs! Very interesting stuff.

Fun with the Mundane

Marie getting her hair done

That afternoon, Jen and the girls got haircuts. We had lunch at a local café, and that evening we got the girls some new shoes, since the shoes they brought with them are falling apart. (We’re walking a lot more than usual, these days).

Thursday, we went to the Grecia library. It’s a very small library, and their children’s section contains maybe 200 books? Judge for yourself by the picture below. Regardless, we had a lot of fun reading to the girls, doing puzzles, and practicing Spanish by playing with sock puppets.

There was a little boy there named Brian, who was all alone (I guess his mom was around somewhere). He really took a liking to Jen, who lovingly read him several stories in Spanish.

My Spanish is improving quite a bit. I can understand a lot of what some people say, and can often get my point across. My vocabulary is still very limited, and I’m horrible at conjugation, but I’m making progress. At least I’m no longer fearful to start up conversations. Just practicing and asking questions has helped a lot.

Jennifer Got a Bite?

Unfortunately, Jennifer hasn’t been feeling very well this week. After dinner one night, she found a lot of red dots in her upper thigh which itched. They were similar to mosquito bites, but different. We think it was probably a wasp of some kind, because she’s had some strange reactions to it, like itching all over (even on her tongue), sore muscles in many places, and a slightly swollen neck. It’s starting to get better, but it’s been a fairly uncomfortable week for her.

We’re really excited about our new house. Stay tuned for more info about it, and pictures in a future post. In the mean time, enjoy this video:

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Walking in Grecia

I just wanted to keep everyone up to date on what we’ve been doing the past four days since we arrived in Costa Rica. We’re in the perfect location for exploring the town. We’re in walking distance of everything, and we have been walking a lot!

It actually gets fairly hot during the day here, and we’re not used to this much walking, so we have been coming back to the hotel and resting for an hour or two in the afternoon. The girls will color or swing on the hammock, and Jen and I will read together, talk, or take a nap. Morning and evening temperatures are perfect.

Finding a place to live

I’ve been doing a lot of searching on-line this week trying to find a place to rent. It can be difficult to find good rental prices on the Internet, but in order to get a good deal here, you sometimes have to “know someone” who knows someone else that has a good deal. Fortunately, we’ve been meeting some people. And we’ve also gone out to look at a couple, which were both very nice, one of which may work for us.

Man selling snowcones

While the town is convenient, we don’t like the noise and the smells so much (or the view), so we’re hoping to find a place more in the hills somewhere a little bit outside of the town. Most of these areas have regular buses that take you into town and back.

On Tuesday, we’re scheduled to go out with a realtor to look at some more homes in some other areas. It’s amazing what you can get for the price here. For example, there’s a 3 bedroom, 1 bath cabin with a gorgeous view in a friendly neighborhood about 15 minutes from town, for about $600-700/month. You can see more pictures below.

Grecia rental garden - $1100

The other one we looked at was $1100/month, and it had an even better view which was visible from almost every room in the house with floor-to-almost-ceiling windows. It also had over an acre of beautiful gardens with flowers to wander around in. But their idea of “fully-furnished” wasn’t the same as ours. There weren’t enough beds for all four of us, there was no oven, no dressers, and you have to go outside to get to the basement. It looks like it still needed a bit of work in other places as well. So, not quite worth the price, for us. (This was one I found on Craigslist).

Marie really wants to find a house with a swimming pool. I believe there are some in our price range, but we’ll have to see.

Exploring the town

Grecia farmer's market

We haven’t done much sight-seeing this week. We’ve mostly just walked around town, exploring shops, eating at restaurants, and talking to people. We went to the Grecia farmer’s market on Friday, which was huge! Rows and rows of great prices on fresh produce as well as other items like shoes and toys.

Bus to Naranjo

We also took a bus up to Naranjo on Saturday, just to see what it was like. It was about a 30 minute bus ride from Grecia through beautiful green hills and small towns. The girls had a fun time playing in Naranjo central park on the “stage”. We also met a cute little girl Emily’s age who was there with her grandfather, Rudolfo, and her cute little white dog. We tried to encourage the girls to talk to her but they were pretty shy.

Girls on Naranjo "stage"

Finally, Marie got brave and asked her, “Como se llama?” (What’s your name?). The girl was too shy to reply, but we enjoyed talking with Rudolfo about different areas in Costa Rica, his family, and the little store he owns, which he ended up taking us to so Marie could go potty, since there aren’t any public restrooms. He was very nice and showed us where the bus stop was to get back to Grecia.

Church in Grecia

Today (Sunday), we got to go to church (LDS). Now that was a blast! We met some really nice people, many of whom spoke English because they’d either lived in the states, or served missions, etc. It was so fun to talk with them, and they were very friendly and helpful. It’s a small branch of about 30-40 members, and they meet just around the corner from B&B Grecia – about a 2 minute walk. How convenient!

Church was also an excellent way for me to improve my Spanish. It was like a 3-hour study session, with conversation practice afterward. The Branch President was trying to teach me some slang (“bad Spanish”) so I don’t sound so much like a textbook. And during the lessons, my new friend Jaime Alexandro (Alex) helped me understand what was going on so I could participate a little, which I did (in Spanish). We also met the sister missionaries, one of whom is from South Jordan, Utah, in the same ward as Jen’s uncle and aunt!

Sorry, I don’t have another video yet. Hopefully this week I’ll have more. But you can enjoy these pictures below.

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The past couple weeks, I’ve found myself with quite a bit of extra time on my hands. Somehow, I’ve usually been able to finish up work-related tasks in under an hour a day, and less than that on tracking finances or doing household tasks. Now that we don’t have a house or so much “stuff” to worry about, I’m magically finding myself left with lots of time to fill! This is a good problem to have, I think.

As much as I’ve heard how it’s good advice to have “down time” to just relax and do nothing, I still find that a challenge. I try to play pool, or sit around and relax, which is nice here and there. But sooner or later, I feel like I’ve just got to be up and doing something “productive”.

I continue to make lists of things I want to accomplish during the day, or the week, and work to accomplish them, but the lists are less stringent than they use to be. I only list a few tasks, and I try to make them things that are truly important to me – not just mundane stuff that needs to be done anyway. This week, my list has included things like “Play Mario Kart with my kids”, “Study Spanish”, and “Make videos of our Panama trip”. But the two things I’ve probably spent the most time on the past few weeks have been composing music, and typing my old journals.

Composing Music

I have enjoyed playing the piano and singing since I was young, and wrote a number of pieces in high school, but just haven’t had (made) the time since. Well, now I’m making the time! I’ve written a couple hymn arrangements for piano, and am working on a vocal arrangement of “Away in a Manger” for Christmas time. It’s been loads of fun, and I really enjoy sharing this part of me. I hope these arrangements will lift others’ spirits as well.

To hear a recording of me playing my arrangements, click the links below.

How Great the Humble Birth

I Am a Child of God

Note: These were recorded in Garageband through a MIDI interface, so the piano sound isn’t as nice as a real piano, and it misinterpreted how hard/soft I hit some of the keys. Anyway, I made some sheet music for them, too. If you want it, let me know, and I can send you a pdf you can print.

Typing Old Journals

I’ve also been typing my old journals into Google Docs (which is the only word processor I use these days). I started writing in a journal when I was 12 years old and now I’ve typed almost to the end of my 15th year. I’m now 29, so I have a ways to go (I wrote a lot), but I started typing my journals in 2003, so I can just read once I hit that point.

It’s been really interesting to look back at who I was and how I thought, as well as the ways that I’ve grown, and the lessons I’ve learned and sometimes forgotten.

One thing I noticed about my younger self (we’re talking Jr. High and High School days) was that I was surrounded by so many more people. I wrote a lot about how I’d care about someone who was having a hard time, and would pray for them throughout the day, how I’d visit friends who were sick, how I’d sing with friends, serve with friends, and play with friends. I was filled with a lot of love for others, and felt a lot of love from others. It was a great time, and I’m surprised to see how much of that I’ve lost!

Now, working from home as I do, I can go for several days without seeing anyone but my wife and kids. Even when I did work in an office, being a computer programmer, I was usually alone. Likewise, most of the activities I do now, I do alone. For years, I chose to put a lot of outside activities on hold to have more time to build my business. And I’ve realized that all of this loneliness has taken its toll on me socially and in relationships.

I haven’t been one to make much time to be with friends. I usually go to events or parties if someone invites me, but there have only been a handful of times when I’ve initiated these types of events. I’m not sure why, but the consequence has been that I don’t feel as close to people outside my family as I used to. That’s okay in some ways, because my family relationships are the most important to me. But I realize friendship is an important part of my life I’ve been neglecting lately, and I’d like to take more time to build friendships in the years ahead, and go out and serve a little more. And, especially because we’re home schooling, I want to make sure I provide this opportunity to my kids as well.

So, a big apology to any of my friends out there who have felt forgotten over the years. And a big thanks for all you’ve meant to me in my life. It’s amazing how many great experiences I’ve had, and how much help I’ve received from friends – that I had forgotten. I’m so glad I wrote them down in my journal!

A Balanced Life

I now have a lot more spare time than I used to, which is wonderful. But I think if I really put my mind to it, I could have made the time to compose music or review my journals, at any time during the past 15 years. It may have taken longer, but I still could have done it. It’s just not where I put my focus. But really, if I had tried to raise a family, go to school, work at a job, build a business, hang out with friends, compose music, and more, all at the same time, nothing would have ever gotten done well, and I would have been stressed out – not fulfilled. Actually, I did all of that for a while and it was pretty crazy.

Sometimes I think it’s necessary to reduce or eliminate certain activities from your life, so you can focus on what’s most important to you at the time. I guess I cut out some social activities and some music in order to build my business. Now I’m focusing more on those, and less on the business (because I have so much help that it almost runs itself). Maybe a “balanced” life doesn’t mean doing everything all at once. Maybe it’s more about doing what’s most important and fulfilling to you, right now, while temporarily saying “no” to other things.

Well, I’m going to go work on that hymn arrangement now.

How do you spend your spare time?

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