Dear Diary

This thread is so interesting, even though I don't visit for days at a time, there is always something to learn, that is inspiring or touching.

Kara, thanks for the Car Talk instructions on positioning the rear view mirrors. After several delays, I'll be driving from Connecticut to Florida, so I'll have a good opportunity to test it.

Gautam, CONGRATULATIONS on your official citizenship. Those of us meeting in Florida in early April are still hoping you will be able to join us. Pleeeeaaaassssse!

Kitchen Pete, I had to look up Viz and Finbarr on Google. It's great!! I love irreverent humor.

Husker, what a sad time you are going through with your friend. I'm sure you realize how important this time will be to you in the future.

Mapleleaf, like you, I was able to come to terms with my mother when she came to stay with us a couple of months before her death. We had always had a very strained relationship, but we were able to focus on all the positives while she was with us. It made a tremendous difference to both of us.

When she sank into a very deep coma, I started telling her how much she had meant to me and what a differnce she had made in my brothers' lives. Tears started rolling down her cheeks, even though there was no other indication that she had any awareness. Being able to set aside old hurts and resentments was vital for both of us.

Dear Diary. ==== when I woke up this morning I didn't know if it was Thursday, Friday or Saturday. Confused ? Nah. Coz now I'm retired I don't have to get the rush hour sardine tin into History City. I can have a slow start, breakfast on mugs of tea and cigarettes. Open the BBC web site, decide what day it is and read the news. I refuse to switch the TV on till 6pm. and watch the news. Day time TV is a coffin.
I am confused now coz I just posted this in the greetings thread.
Still >>>>> C'est la vie.

oak, But isn't retirement grand? c.i.

C.I. === grand indeed, now if i had the energy and i won 1st prize on the lottery, i could achieve miracles

Save your money; the odds are too great! Better to save your pounds, and enjoy and night out once in awhile. c.i.

Dear Diary
Dear Diary...I just got back from my first root canal in Cali and it was a trip. I mean first of all I'm no veteren of the procedure and was plenty anxious to begin with. The dentist came highly reccomended to me by friends I trust so I took my place in his chair and did my best to adopt a positive attitude. First thing, he squirts a numbing liquid over on the lower left in preparation for injecting the anesthetic. Mouth open and all cooperative like I casually remind him that the tooth in question is over on the lower right. "Ah, ha ha" he says and squirts again on the other side. So there we are waiting for the anesthetic to take effect and he starts bantering about how he can barely use his left arm having fallen down the stairs a month ago fracturing it. He lamented greatly not being able to play golf, his favorite pastime. Then he says "Wait I'll show you", ducks out for a minute and comes back with four big x-rays of his broken arm which he sticks up on the light panel used for reviewing x-rays of patients' teeth. Then he proceeds to show and explain all the details of the x-rays as though we were discussing some comlex problem with my tooth. At this point I'm putting two and two together and wondering if he has the physical strength to do what he needs to regarding my root canal. I was also wondering if someone was going to throw open the door and yell "Candid Camera!" By now I'm numb so he starts drilling away. Meanwhile his assistent launches into a long storey about some inane domestic situation and he keeps looking up with keen interest to respond but with out pausing in the drilling process. Somehow the drilling is completed without accident and he asks her for number eighteen and twenty one files. Now I have had one other root canal but I don't remember this part. These things are like the tip cleaners used to clean a welding torch. He just sticks it down in the hole he's made and starts filing away, really vigorously. I just kept thinking of all the Colombians I see who still have teeth and waited helplessly to see what's next. Finally he finnished reaming out the holes and started to plug them when the phone rang. There was a phone right behind the dentists chair! It was a friend from Miami so he told the assistent to take over and finish plugging the hole while he took the call. So she did and then sort of dissapeared. I waited aprehenively wondering if this circus had come to an end. Finally, no sign of her I decided it was ok for me to get up and...you know, go...So I did and waved to him and he waved back still prattling on the phone and out I went.

Course it only cost $68.96

Dear Diary,
I'm excited to read Pitter...hope to read more postings. Maybe even start a thread about Columbia.

Yesterday B. and I drove the 1 hr and 40 min to the grandson's home. These are the fun loving years; he's around 17 months-old. I am a round 245 Lbs, but he and I still ran around the house. That's right. I chase him or he chases me, the oldest game in the book. Much later he crawled up onto my lap and tried to go to sleep. He has a ritual of inserting his hand/arm over your shirt line and down about eight inches on your chest. He graps and squeezes your loose skin. His daddy is a bit feed up with it, but to me, it's endearing.

Dear Dairy --- Tis Saturday again and lo, dauhgter has gone away for the weekend. So the TV wont get switched on unless I watch the news. Wife will potter on her PC and I will potter on mine and play some music and graze on unhealthy snacks. Joy oh joy.

Dear Diary, I got up late this morning. Didn't go for my regular coffee, and got onto A2K to look over the forum I started on NC Congressman Coble. The fact that many are becoming aware of the dangers of what our government can do to reduce our freedoms is worth the emotional upheaval. c.i.

Dear Diary
Dear Diary...For better or worse Mapleleaf has encouraged me so here's another recent page from my journal. One of the themes was published on another string so apologize for the repetition:

Yesterday was spent running around doing pre-marriage errands. The big one was the visit with the padre at the Catholic church that will marry us. In addition to questioning us seperately then together and then our two witnesses (her brother-in-law and a friend of mine from the US who barely speaks any Spanish) the padre had to determine whether or not to grant permission to us in the case of difference of religion. My fiance had asked me before hand to please lie and say I believed in God as telling the padre I'm atheist would surely complicate things. So when he came to the question on his list, "what is your religion?" I offered the least complicated response I could think of. "believer" I said. "Believer?" he asked, "Si" said I. He dutifully wrote down "creyente" and let it go at that. Sufficiently vague to satisfy a variety of interpretations a la horoscope and I Ching answers. He also gave a lot of slack to my American witness friend using the language confusion to overcome inconvenient discrepencies. When he asked how long Jack had known my fiance Jack said about four months. The padre then said "so you've known her for a year?" and Jack said "yes". Thus we passed the tests and the wedding is on.

Later in the day we had to go to the south end of the city and returning, our taxi drove through "El Centro" the rough downtown area of the city. There seemed to be a lot of barricades and traffic was clogged then we saw members of DAS (the secret police) with guns drawn in front of a doorway. In another block we realized that DAS, the police and the Army Third Brigade were carrying out a huge sweep looking for FARC or other terrorists who might be planning bomb attacks. The news reports said later they'd detained over a thousand suspects (none of them big fish though). Well I guess it's good to know the men in blue (and grey and kaki and camo) are watching over us. Fortunately for us and the driver no bullets flew till we were out of the area.

In the news here is whats-his-name the author of the "Worlds Most Dangerous Places". Seems he was detained/kidnapped (and released a week later) along the Panama-Colombia border along with a couple of adventure seeking kids by the Auto Defensas (arch enemies of the FARC). That guy is going to make real hay (and more money from future books) out of that little adventure which he obviously got into on purpose. In an interview he admitted that after hearing rifle fire he and his entourage walked in that direction!

Dear Diary,

Went to the hospital this afternoon with Katja to visit Maria. She gave birth to Bruno Matteo on Wednesday. How strange to imagine Maria and Jens as parents. Well, as Jens said - it was announced some time ago. Bruno is very cute - of course. Sleeps all the time so she has to wake him to feed him before her breasts explode. That's what she said... It will be interesting to see them in everyday life. They will be very good parents, I am sure.

Dear Diary,

This Monday started very good. I won two tickets for a Freddie Mercury Tribute musical on Thursday. My friend Uschi will come along.

Normal day at work. My boss is on vacation but came by the office with his Japanese girlfriend. Very nice young lady!

And now I can't wait for the evening. Katja and Brian are coming for dinner and BigDice is downstairs in the kitchen. He bought fresh tuna and all kinds of fancy stuff. Yumm!

Dear Diary
There's a '50 or '51 split window Desoto Panel Truck down the street for sale if any one's interested. Looks cavernous. Body's cherry but don't know if it runs. I'm sure it's for sale cheap as prices go by age here unless it's something like a Mustang.

Bought a board today down on avenida tercera and schlepped it home on foot. Three meters long and less than two bucks but I have a lot of sanding to do. Gonna put up speaker shelves on the walls. Later bought a nice flowering bromiliad at the vivero at La 14 Calima. Don't know the species. It grows in earth though rather than in a cavity in a tree limb. The taxi tried to give me a tour on the way home. Either that or he really was stupid and didn't know the way. Anyhow when he headed down a dead end street I said forget it, let me out here. The taxi-meters measure time so he'd have run the bill up pretty good by heading us down a few dead ends and turning around. Of course after I got out I had a pretty good hike with my thirty-five pound bag of potting soil, planter and bromiliad...but it was the principal damn it. While at La 14 I snuck a couple of snapshots of a bed for sale there. After marriage I'll be in the market for a bigger bed. The standard here is 140cm wide. x 190cm long. I'd like the bigger size, 160cm wide and there's not much selection. So the idea is you show a photo to one of the furniture makers here abouts and they make it for you for a third to a half less than store bought. In ceder too. Resists the wood eating insects here. My cheating got me nowhere though. When I got the pictures back the ones of the bed were badly out of focus. In my nervous guilt I'd moved the camera. If I go back again they'll surely catch on and have security strip the film from my camera or at least boot me out or maybe, me being gringo do nothing but scowl.

Pitter, I do believe you are going to be an interesting one to follow...

Pitter, I'm sure if you act like a dumb gringo, you can get away with it. However, be forewared; they may also throw you in jail for a bribe. c.i.

The sequal to that is I did go back and there were no sales people around so I got my pictures. Later in the week I'll go see Raul who has already made some nice furniture for an American friend here.

As to jail I've already narrowly escaped being thrown in the clink once but that's another long storey.

I'm listening with both eyes wide open pitter.

Chatoyant here it is but I wasn't kidding when I said it's another LONG storey! For my brush with the law just skip to the end.

Several years ago I put out a quiery on the Lonely Planet travel forum asking if anyone knew of a birdwatching group in Cali, Colombia. I had plenty of contacts in St.Louis who could tell me anything I wanted to know about Peru, Venezuala or Ecuador but absolutely nothing about Colombia. Rudi wrote back and gave me the name of a local birding group (learned the verb "pajarear"). I saw that Rudi's e-mail address contained the word orchids so I wrote back and we began an enthusiastic dialog about Colombia: life, women, orchids, poison arrow frogs birding and travel. I told him I planned to visit Colombia soon and he said the next time I go to Cali I should come up and see him in his mountain village of Trujillo. Said it's two hours by bus from Cali and tell the driver to let me off at the house of the "gringo", all the drivers know where he lives. Said I was welcome to stay at his house (just pay for my food) and we could go on some long walks in the mountains. I'd visited Cali a number of times and had a couple of ladyfriends there but certainly had never headed out to the countryside alone. A young ladyfriend said that she'd happily accompany me so I made plans to go but it turned out she had to work and couldn't. Well don't be a wimp I thought so I made my first trip to the huge Cali bus terminal and after being pointed in the wrong direcction many times finally found the little ticket office for Trujillo, and hopped aboard the apropriate minibus. It was quite a thrill. My first time alone on a bus in Colombia headed I knew not where but two hours later we climbed up out of the valley and the driver let me off "donde el gringo" right in front of Rudi's house.and he and Blanca were standing in the doorway waiting for me.

Rudi is from Holland. Five years ago at the age of fourty-five he was traveling through Colombia on holiday (Europeans aren't fearfull of travel here like Americans). He found himself in Riofrio and asked where he might find female companionship for the evening. He was told to go up to Trujillo where there was a disco in town. He did and there he met Blanca but instead of spending the night with her he fell in love and spent a month. He also fell in love with the pleasantly cool climate and lush green mountains, not at all like the hot cities of Cali and Tulua down in the valley. Mid-life crisis I suppose but he returned to Holland quit his boring job with Social Security, sold his house and all his belongings and moved without lock, stock or barrel to Trujillo to live with Blanca and her 13 year old daughter.

We became fast friends having lots of interests in common. I stayed a couple of days and we made some short walks out of the village while he explained to me the coffee and platano (plantain) farms. I picked up vanilla seeds for the first time and saw a couple of mot-mots, funny looking birds that chew the plumes off their tail feathers as far as the can reach leaving only about an inch of plumed feather at the end. When perched they switch their tail from side to side like a pendulum. It was a great visit. I returned to Colombia several months later and this time we hired a driver with a "Willys" to take us accross the cordillera to the even smaller village of Naranjal on the border with Choco state. It's on the western slope and after this village there is nothing but jungle and rivers for miles and miles to the west untill you reach the the Pacific coast. After inquiring with the police as to where there was and wasn't guerrilla/paramilitary activity we used the hotel ($3 including private bath) in Naranjal as our base and spent three wonderfull days hiking mountain trails through misty forests used by hunters and coca workers. I birded to my hearts content while Rudi searched and listened for poison arrow frogs. We even came accross a family of howler monkeys, seven in all.

When I met Rudi their relationship had recently become strained. His taste for temporary companionship continued and Blanca had found him out. I doubt you can find a more jealous and dangerous woman than a scorned Colombian ex-prostitute. Later they separated and he even bought her a house. I know only my friends version but according to him Blanca started a series of rumors in town that he was seeing underage girls and was involved in child pornography. He's a tight fisted Dutchman and hates to spend money so ignored this and put off getting a lawyer though locals warned him he'd better. Around this time I was back in Colombia haveing recently acquired my retirement visa. That had to be registered though with the Departamento Administrivo de Seguridad or DAS (who are also the secret police). Rudi and I spent the afternoon in their office in Tulua getting me fingerprinted and all the other rigamarole that would make me legal. It was a hot little office with several plain clothes guys standing around with uzis slung over theur shoulders. The next day I returned to Cali and the day after that I called Rudi who said at that very moment the DAS were in his house searching for evidence. They hauled him off to jail that afternoon and his case is still pending. Several months later I had to return to the DAS office in Tulua because of a discrepency in my cedula (national id card) and the uzi toting agent in front told me "Senor, that day you came with your friend a few months ago? We knew then we were going to arrest him and we almost arrested you too as an accomplice". In Colombia they just haul anyone in who might remotely have anything to do with the case. (I didn't by the way) but just being his friend and a foreigner was almost enough for them. We realized later that a top guy had spent a lot of time outside the little office talking on a cell phone probobly to a higher up about whether to arrest us both since we were already conveniently in the office or wait to arrest Rudi the next day. Anyhow after hauling in anyone they can think of they let the court sort it out. You're guilty untill proven inoccent. And that gentle readers was my brush with the law. One last tidbit. poor Rudi, a few months before going to jail he and another Dutch friend were kidnapped by the ELN guerrilla while looking for frogs down in the jungle near Popayan. The driver who took them in had sold them. There was some confusion about their nationality and the guerrilla thought they were French. Word got out and the French Embassy in Bogota thinking it had two citizens kidnapped clamored for their release. Since the ELN are welcomed in France where they go to carrry out peace talks Rudi and his friend were indeed released to the Red Cross after only two weeks of being schlepped around the mountains. Just as well I missed that trip.

Wow Pitter. Very interesting story! I'm glad you "missed that trip" also. Your writing is so good. I'll be looking for more.

I suppose I should post a Dear Diary entry, but my life has been pretty boring lately. Maybe I should go to Colombia and look for some adventure!

Dear Diary,

Greetings from Johannesburg !! While I am glad to escape the deary weather of London, I am finding it to be a bit HOT right now here. There is no pleasing some people and look, what has happened to me after getting my british nationality, I start my entry with the weather But the sun is shining, the skies are clear blue, and there is cricket in the air. I guess, right now I am a content man !

But my flight was indeed flight from hell. To start with, got stuck in a traffic jam while going to the airport, and almost missed the last check in. After all check in and stuff, found out that the flight was delayed indefinately, as the plane which was supposed to fly us to Joburg, got reallocated to some other route, and they were trying to find another plane for us. Now, I don't know how long it takes to find a big Jumbo 747-400, but it did take them a couple of hours. It really must have been hidden very well I guess. (did BA take lessons from Saddam I wonder ??) I was dreading an overnight flight as unfortunately I have this habit of snoring (not very loudly though) after I have a had a couple of drinks, and while waiting in the lounge, I had more than a couple. After all, what better way to pass time than sip, no make that gulp, no make that drown, 15 yr old single malts, *especially* when they are free - after all, some compensation needs to be given for loosing a plane right ? But I was lucky, there was no one seated next to me, so I could snore to my hearts content, provided I get to sleep that is.

You know these flat beds which BA proudly advertises (at a touch of a button, yr seat becomes a fully flat 6' bed for a good night sleep) ?? Well, I seriously think that the guy who designed these beds must have worked in the coffin making industry once upon a time. I mean I am fairly small (not there u dirty minds) but turning over while lying down on that fully flat bed, was an excercise in futility. I seriously feel for some of the bigger guyz on the plane

And then I trun up at the hotel, to find out that they have listed me as a no show and cancelled my reservation. Now this was surprising as they sent a car to pick me up at the airport. So my reservation for the car was confirmed, but my reservation for the room was cancelled. I think they wanted me to sleep in the lobby, some sort of artisitic display, which given the current breed in "modern art" was not very surprising. But I screamed and shouted and threw my (not so substantial) weight around, and managed to get a room upgrade. Shouting does pay.

So right now, I am just abt to finish work, and the hit the city with some of my close friends, where more booze will be imbibed.

I love this life....

Wish you were here