Ring, ring, why don't you give me call?

Two years and one day after moving to Costa Rica, and (drumroll, please!) we have a landline! Erin can now call her friends without me nagging about the cost of the cell phone bill. She's the main reason I wanted this line, and now it's finally installed. It's almost hard to believe.

I'd been working on contacting the right people to get my line installed for so long, and I finally made some headway shortly before I left for summer vacation.

In June, the construction company came out to make the final connection for our phone and discovered something odd and problematic—though our neighbors have phone service, no cable existed for our house. We arranged for the cable to be run (which entailed digging up small patches of neighbors' yards) while I was in the States, and on August 11 the electrician would return to enter the house and make the hook-up.

Unfortunately, the construction fellows decided not to begin digging until August, when I had already returned. So I watched as a guy with a shovel carved a hole into my grass, then groaned when he told me my neighbors to the left did not want the little piece of their yard dug up, despite them realizing that we sit with no landline.

The good news? The land to be disturbed is "common property" in the front of the house and so the electrician was able to do what he needed, regardless of the neighbors' wishes. He and a girl—I thought she was his sweetheart only to learn she is his daughter—visited my house on and off for a week, working here and there. One day, close to noon, I returned home from the store to find her napping in my driveway as he sat across from her reading the newspaper. Surprise!

Finally, on August 18 the phone rang. The electrician was calling me from my own kitchen with his cell phone, standing with a sheepish grin on his face.

¡Pura vida!