Tuesday, July 30th, 2013

I went to bed at 10:45, woke up twice at 2:20 and 4:15, and got up at 6:45 feeling pretty good.

Breakfast was a bowl of cereal with cold milk from the corner store.

Well, I’m repeating the Writing portion of RS and now my scores are improving step by step: 56%, 61%, 72%, 72%.  Uh-oh, have I reached a plateau?  Enough punishment for one day.  I’ll try again tomorrow.

Reina emailed me as to when I wanted her to come to the apartment to buy food for Angel.  I reminded her that one of the conditions of my being able to renew my lease was that she could not come to my apartment again.  We agreed to meet at Laureles Mall at 11am on Friday.  I should have my checking account replenished by then as it will be the 2^nd of the month.

I took a nap from about 10-11am. 

I met Jhon at his office at noon and we went for the 7mil ($3.68) lunch at Likkes.  The cute black girl was there to take our order.  Jhon was telling me the advantages of having a fat girlfriend.  “If you fall down you have somebody to grab to hold you up.  If you fall off the bed you have something to hold onto.”  I’m not sure if he’s serious although, like a lot of Colombian men, he talks about how he loves big-bottomed women.  Not in my taste, although I could never claim Beatriz has a small butt.   (Reina had a very nice little butt, but …)

At Laureles Mall I started erasing answers that I had written in pencil in my chess course.  Just before 2pm I got a large Pepsi from Frisby.  The guy who speaks almost perfect English served me.  As he was filling my cup, basically waiting for the foam to settle, I told him about how I like Root Beer as it does not have any caffeine.  Of course he had never heard of it.  I haven’t seen it here in Colombia at all.  Then I told him in Russia, if you fill the cup to the very top it means you love them.  Of course, he told me not to get the wrong idea.  He then repeated what I told him in Spanish for the ladies there and they all had a good laugh.

Just after I got back to my table Dario arrived.  We played the usual 2 games.  The first with black again I got myself into a very cramped position and he just slowly overwhelmed me with his offense.  I have to try to keep the game more wide open.  In the second game, I had black, and right away he got me out of my favorite opening.  I had been studying what the objective based on what he had done and I managed to get pretty quickly to the endgame with nothing but 6 pawns for him and 7 for me and 2 of his pawns were doubled.  I knew what I wanted to do to win the endgame but somehow I didn’t play it right and he locked up the pawns and we finally agreed to a draw.

He invited me to his apartment on Thursday at 1:30 and we might have a simultaneous against his chess club, who should be all beginners.

Before I left LM I stopped at Bunuelo Express and asked the woman working there how much would it be for 2 small packets of butter and she gave them to me for free.  I warned her I would be back again so I’m pretty sure at some point they will start charging me for it but that’s okay.  Now I have butter for my waffle and in the future for popcorn.

Dinner was a waffle – best one I’ve made yet.  I put a little less milk in so the batter would be thicker, cooked it for exactly 5 minutes and then put the butter on top before I even took it out of the waffle maker.  Yum!

A few kids are playing outside, not even in the street, exactly below me in the driveway.  Not sure what the attraction is exactly here but it’s still nice to have little ones around.

I plan to watch Extreme Weight Loss from 7-9pm on ABC via USTVNOW.