Tuesday, December 17, 2024

Last night I went to bed at 11pm, got up once during the night, finally waking/getting up at 6:07 before my 6:30 alarm.

I resigned a game against Troyclough lowering my rating to 1573.

I arrived at Unicentro mall 10 minutes before their 8am opening. Jose joined me a few minutes later. We both had French toast and coffee. We adjourned to the food court where I started with the Black pieces. I don’t mean this as an excuse but lately I haven’t felt like I’ve been “in the zone” chess wise. Remember I had a rating up to 1630 and now I’m down to 1573. I seemed to be “in the zone” when I was working on the difficult “mates in 2” in my large book. Anyway, I asked Jose to play d4 and e4 and his first 2 moves and I played the Czech Pirc opening. He made a tactical mistake on his 7^th move and I was attacking his king the rest of the game, he blundered a rook on the 46^th move but being in a little time trouble I missed it, finally he resigned on the 82^nd move.

From his 6^th move to 7^th move my advantage went from 0.17 (even) to -2.80 (Black has a decisive advantage).

I had White in the second game and I asked him to reply 1…Nf6 to my 1.d4. I played 2.Bg5 and got to practice an interesting line of The Trompowsky Attack. (The computer later said that after the 8^th move, “White is Better”.) He blundered on the 20^th move losing a piece and resigned on the 52^nd move.

I don’t often win both games against Jose so I was very happy. Maybe the few daily puzzles I’m doing on Chess.com are helping after all.

We must have been playing quicker than usual as it was only 1pm. We said our goodbyes as we won’t be playing again until next year and I ordered a Didi to take me to Viva Envigado.

I checked Only Roastbeef but it looks to be closed permanently. I went to Pergamino where there were a few seats available and I had my usual bowl of granola, yogurt, and acai berries with a small latte.

I had brought at least 2,000,000 pesos in 100s with me and I withdrew another 2,000,000 from a Davivienda ATM; it was a nice mix of bills. I paid our apt rental, my health insurance, the gym, and both our cellphones. I had a latte in Urbania while texting the receipts via Whatsapp for the apt and my health insurance.

A new clothing store opened across from Urbania and I shared a photo of it with Teresa later.

I received an email from the US Embassy that today they’ll be handing off her passport to Fed-Ex and gave me the tracking information.

About 3pm Teresa called me and asked me to go to a stand outside Exito and buy 2 Nutella de Bunuelos for her and meet her at Wilson’s bar.

I paid the epm utility bill and after overcoming a little communication problem I managed to buy them for 16mil. I found Teresa with MT at Wilson’s bar.

A Colombiana sitting at the next table with a laptop overheard my broken Spanish and we had a short conversation in English. Her English was very good. I told her a joke in English than the only one I know in Spanish.

At 4:15 Teresa and I returned to the apt by Didi.

I wasn’t monitoring the time but it must have been about 5:45 when the TV went blank. It’s red light wasn’t on so I knew it hadn’t completely lost power. A minute later a screen came on like it was searching for our Wi-Fi network. The lights started getting a little funky, like half power, the bedroom lights didn’t work at all and the bathroom light was also half power. The building across the street seemed fine. I had Teresa call the porteria and a portero explained that power was out in our area. It finally came back on at 7:15, the TV was back to normal and all was good again.

I finished reading Lee Child’s The Affair (Jack Reacher #4) on my Kindle.

 

JUST FUNNY