Thursday, January 8th, 2015

After my only trip to the bathroom I checked my watch and it was 5:35.  Since I didn’t set the alarm on my cell phone I stayed awake until 6am when I woke Teresa and she told me she wanted to get up at 7am.  I got up, found my cell phone and set the alarm for 7.  When it went off I said 5 more minutes and I woke up at 8:45 and Teresa wasn’t in bed any longer. 

I got up and the first thing she told me is that the lighter doesn’t work that she uses to light the stovetop burners.  When she showed me, it actually worked for a second.  She was able to use the spark to light a burner so I was able to have my usual scrambled eggs with arepa and coffee.

I checked the Immigration website but there is no change.

My BitDefender software expired and now I have to figure out how to renew it.  Always something.

We left the finca at 11am and got past the killer dogs undetected.

On the way down the hill she stopped for awhile and talked to Don Carlos.  I saw his three young children, 1 boy and 2 girls.  One girl looked almost black and had the frizzy hair that used to be associated with the negros.  I saw his beautiful horse was saddled and ready to go and I noticed it had a bridle made of rope without a bit.

We caught a direct bus to Envigado and Teresa talked to the driver and he dropped us off much closer to the Exito than usual.

We bought the Honeywell (PLU 18580) washing machine that was advertised for 1,199,900 for 1,292,800 ($527.22).  (Later I confirmed with Teresa that the extra 92,900 was for an extended warranty of 2 years beyond the one year that is included.)  Luckily, the dollar is very strong against the Colombian Peso – over 2400 COP per USD.  I asked her if we would be able to use some of my 40,000 points in the purchase but she probably didn’t understand and meant that we would get points – I now have 60,945.  She told me that they can send the washing machine to the Caldas Exito so we will only have to pay the 32 mil for its delivery.

Since I know I have a $600 daily limit on cash withdrawals, I was curious to see if that included debit purchases.  I stopped at an ATM machine and was successful in withdrawing 400mil. 

We walked a couple blocks away where Teresa got a 45 minute massage for 20mil and I read some from my Nook and took a nap.

We had a nice lunch at La Bahia for 18mil (about $3.75 each).

We went back to Exito where we bought a few things for 83,520.

We took a taxi to the highway and soon were on a direct bus back to the finca with our 3 small bags of groceries.

Just as we got past the neighbor’s house the killer dogs noticed us and a little late came out onto the trail and headed for us.  Teresa was carrying the pepper spray and I had the Dog Repeller.  I turned around, pointed it at them and hit the button.  They immediately turned around and headed back the other way.

After dinner we watched Awake and after that I started Phone Booth and I was very surprised she didn’t like it so we watched Airplane.

I took my sleeping pill at 9:50 and we went to bed at 11pm.

T-shirt of the day: Learn to say no.