Sunday, August 4th, 2013

Last night I got to the corner store about 7:10 and who did I see there but Jhon with one of his students – Diego.  Jhon is NOT a futbol fan.  I asked them if they didn’t mind if I joined them at their table so I grabbed a mango juice for 1mil (50 cents) and sat down with them.  At that moment a man at the next table said “you mean I’m not the only gringo here?”  I introduced myself – his name is Bob, he’s about 62 years old (but looks much older) and he’s from Atlanta.  He insinuated that I might not yet be 60 years old.  LOL.  He’s been in Colombia about 6 months but only the last month in Medellin.  He wants to stay here on a Pensionado Visa but he’s having some problems with immigration because he came here on a tourist visa and he’s overstayed his limit.  Right now he’s staying in an inexpensive hostel, Sophia’s, just up the street from the corner store.  

They finally turned on the game right at start time – 7:40 – but there were a lot of seats still available; maybe not tables but at least chairs.  

Bob and I talked for about 3 hours (7:15-10:15) with Jhon eventually joining us after Diego left.  Bob told me about a store around the corner filled with Coca Cola memorabilia where you can get a good meaty sandwich for only 3 mil.  When we were discussing football (not futbol) he said that Colombians are big NFL fans.  We’ll see about that!  He mentioned he saw the Super Bowl at Patrick’s Irish Pub.  It turns out he was sitting between me and the ex-Chicagoan in the White Sox hat.  He also told me about a website called www.MedellinLiving.com.

Atletico Nacional finally tied Santa Fe 1-1 in the last 2 minutes of the game.

But about halfway through the game there was a cute young lady, maybe in her 20s, that moved to the other side of her table – to get a better look at us?  As I was putting my bottle on the counter to leave she was facing me in the back of the store and had a warm smile on her face – but I couldn’t be sure she was smiling at me.  I think she was smoking with another lady earlier in which case I wouldn’t be interested in her anyway.  (I do have my standards!  Lol)

I went to bed at 11:15, woke up once about 2:10 to use the bathroom (I did have 4 bottles of mango juice last night) and finally got up at 6:20.

This morning about 7am I took Angel outside and he did his thing.  I’m glad that he is quick about it because he has a tendency to wander too much – including into the street.  Luckily he’s conditioned to come right away when I make a kissing sound with my lips.  I’ve been doing that since we got him.

I left him along for about 90 minutes while I went for breakfast at the hotel.  I got there about 7:30 and they were just finishing setting up the buffet table.  That attractive woman was working today but until just before I left I was her only customer.  I got my eggs special ordered – scrambled with tomato – in a little skillet like Bunuelo Express uses.

At the hotel I found a couple of brochures advertising “tours” for the Festival of Flowers”.  They both appear to be for the Silleteros Parade.  Here is Google’s explanation of Silleteros: “In the colonial period, when some almost impassable mountain paths didn’t allow the use of beast of burden –such as oxen, donkeys or mules silleteros made possible the exchange of products and the mobilization of travelers between very distant places. Their ability consisted of bearing loads of up to 75 kilos on their back over considerable distances. Some travel chronicles from the late 19th century describe disciplined caravans of a hundred silleteros walking the mountain paths.”  BTW, 75 kilos is about 165 pounds!

One brochure has a “box plan” for 90mil and a “full plan” for 115mil and the other brochure is 75mil.

This is what I found when I investigated how to include accent marks in Google Translate:

“It is important that you include accent marks to get an accurate translation in Google Translate. Accent marks are a critical part of writing in Spanish, French and other languages where the meaning of the word can be completely different without an accent mark. Avoid making mistakes such as using the Spanish word papa (potato) when you mean papá (dad) by inserting the correct accent marks. Google Translate has an accent mark tool to simplify inserting this piece of punctuation.

How to use “Google Translate”: go to www.Google.com select Translate, then:

1.  Select a language from the drop-down box labeled "From" for the language that you want translated. Select a language from the drop-down box labeled "To."

2.  Click inside the text box on the left and type the sentence until you reach a letter that requires an accent mark.

3.  Click the "Virtual Keyboard" icon on the text box. A keyboard will display on the screen inside of the browser.

4.  Select the accent mark key on the virtual keyboard and then type the appropriate letter on your physical keyboard, or click the letter on the virtual keyboard. Repeat this as needed for each accent mark.

5.  Click the blue "Translate" button and the translation will appear in a gray box.

I also found this:

Inserting accented characters in OpenOffice.org

August 5, 2008 by Corinne McKay

OpenOffice.org is a fantastic office suite for most translators. It’s free, it’s stable, it’s localized into many languages that the proprietary companies will never touch …there’s a lot to love. For a long time, the only feature of OO.o that I’ve found problematic (other than the fact that its macros are not compatible with Microsoft Office macros, and that’s not really OpenOffice’s fault) is the difficulty of inserting special characters such as accented letters. By default, OpenOffice requires you to go to Insert>Special Character and then insert the character of your choice if you want to type something that’s not on the keyboard.
To give Microsoft Office credit where credit is due, it has very simple keyboard shortcuts for inserting an accented letter. Even if you don’t translate into a language that makes copious use of accented letters, the keyboard shortcuts are still useful. For example although I translate exclusively into English I e-mail clients in French a good deal of the time, and although I’ve created an OpenOffice keyboard shortcut to pop up the Insert>Special Character dialog box, it still takes a lot of time and keystrokes to insert those letters when I’m typing in French.
There are a couple of workarounds for this issue. You can install a US International Keyboard layout and use it as needed. If you’re lazy, (I’m ashamed to admit how often I do this) you can save some time by copying the most commonly used accented letter (in French this would be é) and pasting it when you need it. Or (drum roll) you could check out this web page by Bill Hibbert, which includes an OpenOffice macro that will enable you to assign shortcuts to all sorts of special characters that use marks such as acute accent, circumflex accent, tilde, umlaut, inverted question mark, etc. Once you install this macro, you would for example type e’ and then a keyboard shortcut you assign, and the é would appear.
From reading this extremely helpful web page I am guessing that Bill Hibbert is not a translator? Why? Because this page is in a section of his website entitled “Boring Tech Stuff,” and I’m guessing that most translators who use OpenOffice will find Bill’s page nothing short of fascinating… Thanks, Bill!

Source: http://thoughtsontranslation.com/2008/08/05/inserting-accented-characters-in-openofficeorg/

Open Office is something I used often the last few years when I was tutoring Mathematics.  I could create lesson plans using math equations that looked more like the textbook

Instead of the cumbersome Word document x = (-b +/- SQRT(b²-4ac))/2a.

I downloaded Open Office 4.0.0 and now I have to investigate further to see if it will be useful in typing in Spanish.

As you can see, Angel loves his Winnie the Pooh: 

And no, he did not learn that from me!

About 11:30 Beatriz stopped by.  Since she had her “tool box” in hand so I’m sure she was going to a client’s for a manicure and/or pedicure.  She said she would stop by at 7pm.  Angel found and was playing with this beetle.  If I was in America I would say it’s a Tree Hopper:

At noon I put Angel in the pet carrier and took him to Mall of Laureles.  I had the Hamburger Combo #3 again and then I let Angel play in the pet area for a while.  There weren’t any other pets there at that time.

I stopped at the pet store and they have a A/N (Atletico Nacional, remember?) shirts (but not in his size) for about 15mil.

I was leaving Mall of Laureles and a young lady had her boyfriends face in her hands and she said “you are so fucking cute”.  I told her to be careful because some people understand English.  Lol.

Dinner was just a bowl of cereal with milk I picked up on my way home.