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Saturday, June 14, 2014

I'll leave the rest to your imagination

I'll leave the rest to your imagination

I meet a lot of people most of whom I never know anything about, most of whom I will never see again. And the reality is that I don't want to know. They leave me with pieces of their stories and their lives and leave with “and I'll leave the rest to your imagination”

Honeymoon couple

Once upon a time there was a honeymoon couple staying at the hotel. She was in her 20s he was in his 30s or more. Checking in she had her eyes glued to her cell phone the only thing she asked while speaking staring at the screen was the WiFi password. She never looked at him, or touched him. When they entered the room he complained because it had two beds, a queen and a single and they had asked for a room with one bed because they were on their honeymoon. Personally I enjoyed messing up two beds on my honeymoon but we moved them. They spent their days outside in the hammock chairs while he read a book and she stared at her phone. I never heard them speak to each other, never kissed, never touched. Three days later he came and said they needed to change rooms to a room with better Wifi, if they could please have that room with two beds. That was all I knew but I think we can leave the rest to your imagination.

A week ago there was a French man in a room upstairs. We get a lot of French tourists now the thing about the French is that they don't speak English, or Spanish. Most European countries speak at least English in addition to their language, the Germans as a rule speak to me in equally excellent English or Spanish. The Italians don't speak Spanish but think that yelling loudly in Italian is just the same as Spanish and understand enough Spanish to get by. But the French they really don't understand or speak any language outside their own. This makes communication difficult. Quite difficult. Conversations with French tourists are usually carried out in a mixture of Franish with a little Franglish , I know about 20 words in French including hotel, restaurant, room, bed, air conditioning, dinner, lunch, breakfast, price, tax, please, thank you, with these I understand most of that they are saying and can more or less respond. Now the week before I left the hotel was full of workmen working on our new water treatment plant, one of them came to me and said “The french guy wants you to call the police.”

I walked up to his room wondering what it was he really wanted or what had happened. I knocked on his door and the French guy peaked out the window at me. He was an attractive guy, about 30. He'd originally booked for two nights but had extended his stay for an extra week. I was really hoping he hadn't been robbed. After he saw me he opened the door a crack. “They are going to kill me. Kill me. Call police. Kill me. Say going to kill me.”

I called the police and he hid in the room.

When the police came I took them up to his room and I caught only parts of the story. There was a girl, at the bar, and well he thought she was a good girl. But she wasn't a good girl. Not a good girl. And now they told him they would kill him. Leaving the rest to my imagination apparently he'd picked up a prostitute and in his arrogance and attractiveness he hadn't thought he needed to pay. So her brothers had threatened to kill him. Which he believed. Like I said when you don't speak English or Spanish things can get a little complicated.



Saturday, May 17, 2014

Fat again, naturally

My weight is up again, up about as high as I let it go before I totally freak out, but over the years it's easier and easier to get heavy and harder and harder to let it go. So how did I do it, how did I rush one more time past a comfortable weight, past a weight where my clothes fit, past a weight where I feel even slightly attractive.

This time I can say it's not really my fault.  Sort of.

Four months ago I fell. Fell about 12 feet.  I was on top of a ladder painting the top of my wall and the ladder slid, it just slid down the wall and I landed 12 feet or more down on my feet. I didn't break anything, or so I thought, I hurt but I went on with everything as if nothing had happened.  I kept painting my house so I could move in, I kept working, I kept doing everything and a couple of weeks passed and the pain in my right foot didn't end.  So I got an x-ray, the woman in the emergency room said it was nothing and told me to take Ibuprofen  Another 2 months passed and the pain got worse. I wasn't walking, I was moving as little as possible, although I wasn't limping the way I had for the week or so after the accident my foot burned and ached and hurt.  Hurt enough to keep me from moving, hurt me enough that when someone wanted to know where to go I'd point rather than show them, hurt enough that the regular walking I would do around my office was reduced to rolling my chair from one area to the next.  I just wasn't moving.  I went to get another x-ray, now they saw the new bone, a heel spur they called it.  A piece of bone that my body had grown because I'd had a hairline fracture that they had never seen on the original x-ray. Now it made sense, it was like having a rock in your shoe all the time except that you couldn't remove it.