Wednesday, January 22nd, 2014

Last night I spent a couple hours on www.ChessMagnetSchool.com and got promoted to Earl then Guardian then Herald and then Jouster and my rating thus far is 1181.  That sounds way too low to me!

I went to bed at 11pm, got up once during the night, woke up about 5, didn’t get back to sleep until about 5:30, woke up at 7 and got up at 7:15 feeling pretty good.

I emailed Reina inviting her to join me for the Super Bowl but she responded she was sorry but she has to work all day, every day.  I don’t know yet what she is doing – maybe one of those cell phone girls.

I had my usual breakfast at Pasabocas Krocantes.  That’s too complicated a name; I think from now on I’m just going to call it the PacMan restaurant.

While I was waiting for and then eating my breakfast there was a young black man in an Angry Birds cap sitting by himself not doing anything.  About 10am he came over and I don’t know what he said but I asked him if he played chess and he said “a little”.  He wasn’t very good; I won all 6 games we played but I did give him some tips.  I asked him if he was waiting for some man and he said “no”.  I asked him if he was waiting for some woman and he said “no”.  He said he’s there for work.  Later the lady from the PacMan restaurant came over and talked to him so I think he was there hoping to work for them – probably deliveries from what I heard her say.  His name was Juan.

Around noon a man named Oscar stopped by.    He’s an older man I met once before (back on July 19^th), I even have his cell phone number although he’s never called me to play chess.

About 1pm I had an empanada and a Coke (4 mil) from the PacMan restaurant, just enough hopefully to tide me over until about 4pm.

Augusto never did show up.

The high today is only supposed to be 78 and it does feel nice and cool.  From about 1:50 to 2pm it rained a little; the first rain I remember in quite some time.

My plan today is to leave the apartment this afternoon about 4pm, have dinner at LM and then take a bus to the stadium where we are supposed to meet at 6pm for the 6:30 start.  I’ll probably need to take a jacket because we will be playing in an open air, although covered, area. 

I checked online to see if my Cedula number was on the immigration list for pickup.  This time I noticed there’s more than 1 page.  I checked all 22 pages and I am still not on the list.  It was last updated this Monday, January 20^th so I guess I should check more often than just once a week.

I finally saw the man across the street leaning out the window smoking a cigarette and their SUV is parked in the driveway where they always put it when they are working in their basement so I guess their 4-6 week vacation is over and they are back to work.

2:35 and it started raining again, this time heavily.  It stopped after about 20 minutes.  At 3:03 it started raining again for another 20 minutes.

I’ll probably also need to wear the rare long sleeved short tonight.