Sunday, October 28, 2018

I was awakened at 4:30 by passersby talking loudly, whistling and laughing.  They were probably drunk.

I finally fell back asleep after 6am and then was awakened at 8am by men trimming trees right outside our bedroom window.  Sigh!

Teresa mentioned that Juanita is married to the woman who cleaned our apartment yesterday.  Interesting!

Teresa and I had some disagreement about when we’re making the final move or when we’re moving all the beds and sleeping in the new apt for the first time.  She seems to want to move all the beds tomorrow.  She told me movers are coming at 8am and I’m supposed to get up early enough to shower, have breakfast and disassemble 3 beds?  I don’t think so.  For the hour (11am-noon) before my Bears game I wanted to take my gym bag full of stuff to the new apt and return with my empty suitcase.

I ended up disassembling the guest bed and ran out of time to do anything else.

The ladies left at 11:30 and I stayed to watch my Bears game.  I drank a bottle of root beer and ate ¼ # of salted-in-the-shell peanuts and watched my Bears have their way with the New York Jets 24-10.  The Detroit lions had already lost to the Seattle Seahawks. 

After the game I changed clothes and walked over to Carbon de Leña where I had chicken shish-kebab and a mango juice for 15,500.  I then watched some of the undefeated LA Rams vs Green Bay Packers game.

Chuck arrived at 6:15 and when I walked outside I took a photo of a small frog/toad hanging on to a wicket of our fence.

We took a taxi to Parque Lleras and grabbed an outside table conveniently located in front of a large TV at Patrick’s Irish Sports Pub.  I saw the last few minutes of the Packers lose to the Rams.  Then Patrick came and removed the TV.  He said the main event tonight is the 5^th game of the World Series so we had to go inside to watch Sunday Night Football.  Chuck was cheering on the New Orleans Saints to win and I was cheering on the Minnesota Vikings to lose and sitting at the table behind us was a young man from Minnetonka, Minnesota cheering for the Vikings to win.

Chuck and I shared a pepporoni pizza during halftime and we enjoyed watching the Saints prevail 30-20.  My Chicago Bears are now in 1^st place by ½ a game over the Minnesota Vikings.

The game was over by just after 10pm and we caught a taxi back to Parque Envigado.  On the way back I noticed a new Starbucks has opened on Calle 10A.

Back at the apt Teresa had returned my suitcase and I spent some time filling it up again before going to bed.

Joke of the day

Cookies by Douglas Adams (author: "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy")

This actually did happen to a real person, and the real person was me. I had gone to catch a train. This was April 1976, in Cambridge, U.K. I was a bit early for the train. I'd gotten the time of the train wrong.

I went to get myself a newspaper to do the crossword puzzle, a cup of coffee and a packet of cookies. I went and sat at a table.

I want you to picture the scene. It's very important you get this very clear in your mind.

Here's the table, newspaper, cup of coffee, packet of cookies. There's a guy sitting opposite me, perfectly ordinary-looking guy wearing a business suit, carrying a briefcase.

It didn't look like he was going to do anything weird. What he did was this: he suddenly leaned across, picked up the packet of cookies, tore it open, took one out, and ate it.

Now this, I have to say, is the sort of thing the British are very bad at dealing with. There's nothing in our background, upbringing, or education that teaches you how to deal with someone who in broad daylight has just stolen your cookies.

You know what would happen if this had been South Central Los Angeles. There would have very quickly been gunfire, helicopters coming in, CNN, you know. . . But in the end, I did what any red-blooded Englishman would do: I ignored it. And I stared at the newspaper, took a sip of coffee, tried to do a clue in the newspaper, couldn't do anything, and thought what am I going to do?

In the end I thought I'll just have to go for it, and I tried very hard not to notice the fact that the packet was already mysteriously opened. I took out a cookie for myself. I thought that settled him. But it hadn't, because a moment or two later he did it again. He took another cookie.

Having not mentioned it the first time, it was somehow even harder to raise the subject the second time around. "Excuse me, I couldn't help but notice . . ." I mean, it doesn't really work.

We went through the whole packet like this. When I say the whole packet, I mean there were only about eight cookies, but it felt like a lifetime. He took one, I took one, he took one, I took one. Finally, when we got to the end, he stood up and walked away.

Well, we exchanged meaningful looks, then he walked away, and I breathed a sigh of relief and sat back. A moment or two later the train was coming in, so I tossed back the rest of my coffee, stood up, picked up the newspaper, and underneath the newspaper were my cookies.

The thing I like the most about this story is the realization that somewhere in England there has been wandering around for the last quarter-century a perfectly ordinary guy who's had the same exact story, only he doesn't have the punch line.

(Excerpted from "The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time" by Douglas Adams)