Sunday, December 27th, 2015

I got up twice during the night, the alarm went off at 7am, Teresa, as usual, begged for a few more minutes sleep and we finally got up at 7:38.

We left the finca at 8:20 and got past the killer dogs undetected.  After a 5 minute wait we were on a bus to Caldas.  We walked through the park and stopped at Aymará for breakfast.  I had my usual, waffle with strawberries, vanilla ice cream, whipped cream, and a cup of coffee.  Teresa had a chicken pastry, cheese pastry, almojabana (corn bread?) and hot chocolate.  The total was 22,900 pesos (about $8).

We walked next door to the hardware store where we made the final payment of 56,500 for the exercise machine.

We found that neither of us had brought the cell phone so I guess that’s why we didn’t stop at the grocery store to buy some needed things.  Teresa told me tomorrow we’ll either go to pick up my Cedula in Belen or go to the grocery store in Envigado.

We walked several blocks to visit her girlfriend Mona but her house was locked up and she didn’t answer when Teresa called out for her.

We walked a couple more blocks to the bus stop where once again we walked up a couple floors where Teresa picked up the electric bill of 120,419. 

I bought a bottle of Coke for today’s game and we took a Fredonia bus back to the finca for 3mil.  

It was partly cloudy with a nice breeze and by taking our time I got up the hill without breaking a sweat.  The killer dogs came out and I gave the black dog my last dog biscuit; today the boxweiler lost out.

The red “x” that was over my internet icon yesterday is gone today.

I had the usual problem trying to get into Slingbox using Mozilla Firefox.  I tried Internet Explorer but had some problems there also.  I tried Google Chrome and got a very good connection.  I lost it just after the end of the 2^nd quarter and again just before halftime.  

The Chicago Bears were ahead of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers 13-7 at halftime.  I missed all the Bears scores except the 1^st field goal.

I disconnected from the Slingbox at halftime and I’ll stir the tanks again before logging in again for the 2^nd half.

I couldn’t get a connection using any of my browsers so I finally switched to my iPad and, despite a couple of necessary reconnects, I saw the remainder of the game.  The Chicago Bears beat the Tampa Bay Buccaneers 26-21.

Readers Digest had a scary article titled “The Big One”.  Some excerpts: Most people in the United States know just one fault line by name: the San Andreas, which runs nearly the length of California.  Just north of the San Andreas … lies another fault line.  Known as the Cascadia subduction zone, it runs for 700 miles off the coast of the Pacific Northwest, beginning near Cape Mendocino, California, continuing along Oregon and Washington, and terminating around Vancouver Island, Canada. 

When the next very big earthquake hits, the northwest edge of the continent, from California to Canada and the continental shelf to the Cascades, will drop by as much as six feet and rebound 30 to 100 feet to the west.  Some of that shift will take place beneath the ocean, displacing a colossal quantity of seawater.  The water will surge upward into a huge hill, then promptly collapse.  One side will … rush east, in a 700 mile liquid wall that will reach the Northwest coast, on average, 15 minutes after the earthquake begins.  By the time the shaking has ceased and the tsunami has receded, the region will be unrecognizable.  Kenneth Murphy, who directs FEMA’s region X, says “Our operating assumption is that everything west of Interstate 5 will be toast.”

In the Pacific Northwest, the area of impact will cover some 140,000 square miles, including Seattle, Tacoma, Portland, Eugene, Salem, Olympia, and some seven million people.  When the next full-margin rupture happens, that region will suffer the worst natural disaster in the history of North America.  FEMA projects that nearly 13,000 will die in the Cascadia earthquake and tsunami.  Another 27,000 will be injured, and the agency expects it will need to provide shelter for a million displaced people and food and water for another 2.5 million.

…The odds of the Cascaid earthquake’s happening in the next 50 years are roughly one in three.  The odds of the very big one are roughly one in 10.

I took 2 sleeping pills at 11pm and went to bed at 11:30.

T-shirt of the day: What breaks your heart?