Wednesday, May 20th, 2015

I didn’t sleep very well, getting up once at 2:45.  Laura woke us up at 4am and Teresa told me she wanted to go tomorrow so I relaxed and tried to get back to sleep.  At 5am she wakes me up and informs me that it’s supposed to rain tomorrow so she wants to go today; so get up.  I got up, had a quick small bowl of granola, dressed and we were out by 5:35, a few minutes behind Laura.  We got past the killer dogs undetected until I saw one of the large black dogs in a field on the other side of the barbed wire fence where I sometimes see Don Carlos’ horse.  For grins I raised my arms and screamed at him and he didn’t know where to go to get away from me.  

A minute later we passed Guillermo who was coming up the hill.

After a five minute wait we got on a bus that surprisingly was empty.  Teresa talked to the driver, I paid him 3 mil and we got off at the police check station by the crossroad to Caldas.  Teresa talked to an officer and I understood he told her we should catch a bus on the other road towards Caldas.  I saw Teresa shaking her head and the officer nodding his head so there was some disagreement there.  After 5 minutes we were on a crowded Barbara bus to El Poblado.  We took a taxi from there to Torre Medicas/CediMed across the street from Torre Intermedica.

We took an elevator up to an office and after a 5 minute wait she went in for her blood draw.

Back downstairs I noticed a Servibanca ATM machine so I wanted to try to see if it would have instructions in English and what maximum withdrawal it would allow.  It did have English instructions and I chose the 780mil option and surprisingly it gave it all to me in 20mil bills.  That’s a large stack of money but the small bills come in handy with taxis, buses, and small stores.

We walked across the street to Torre Intermedica where I waited in line for about 15 minutes to use their public washroom and then we went next door to a small restaurant, Boulevard Café, where Teresa had some scrambled eggs and a pastry with chicken inside and a hot chocolate and I had an apple spice muffin (again) with coffee for 15,500.  She also ordered 6 more chicken pastries to go and I added a package of Extra gum that they were selling for a total of 22,500.

We took a taxi to Aguacatala station and quickly were on a bus back to the finca.

The killer dogs came at us as we passed the neighbor’s house but all I had to do is raise my arms and scream and the black dog backed off.  We were back at the finca by 9:30am.

We took a nap from 9:45 to just before noon.

I received an email that I have “documents” waiting for me at MBE.  I sure hope that’s my Citibank credit card because I haven’t been able to access that account at all.

At 1:50 it started raining, 15 minutes later it had stopped.  At 2:30 it started thundering again just as Laura came back.  At 2:35 it started raining again.

I finished Hugh Sebag-Montefiore’s 457 page book Enigma: The Battle for the Code.  That Enigma coding machine was a very complicated machine.  I couldn’t even understand how it worked let alone how to break one.  Some interesting facts I took from the book:

Ian Fleming, author of the James Bond book series, suggested the British Navy stage a disabled german submarine with British sailors onboard to be rescued by a german ship.  Then the British Sailors would take over the capturing ship, retrieve their code books and sink both ships.

Submarine U-505, captured just 2 days before D-Day, has been on display in Chicago’s Museum of Science & Industry since 1954.  Per the internet The cipher materials captured on U-505 included the special "coordinate" code, the regular and officer Enigma settings for June 1944, the current short weather codebook, the short signal codebook, and bigram tables due to come into effect in July and August respectively.

Several other submarines and their crews were captured in the Atlantic.  My father, who served in the navy, was on a ship in the task force that captured one of them.  (I remember he served on destroyer escort USS Janssen, but that might not be the ship he was on at the time.  I recall him mentioning that one of the germans spoke good English and had dollars in his pockets so he was suspected to have been a spy to be dropped off in the US.)

I downloaded the 435 page book Riptide by Donald Preston.

Teresa got a call; something about her hemoglobin and I understand we have to go back to the clinic early tomorrow for another blood test.

Teresa and I watched Take Shelter (7.4) on Netflix.

I took my sleeping pills at 10pm and we went to bed.

T-shirt of the day: I can and I will.  Watch me.