This past week I had the pleasure of having a visit from a friend who lives in Pennsylvania who is married to a Dominican man. I swear we didn't plan this LOL. It's just an interesting coincidence. Like me she's working her way through the process of getting her husband's visa so that he can come to the United States. They have a place here in a town named Higuey which is about six hours away from Puerto Plata. My husband and I had a great time showing them around the city of Puerto Plata. I thoroughly enjoyed having someone to talk English to or maybe it was more like Spanglish LOL. We are both learning more and more Spanish so we tried to talk in Spanish as much as possible but many times we just had to resort to our English words. I know if anyone who understood English was listening to us they would have been rolling on the floor laughing. Many times our conversations started off in Spanish but when we didn't know the word we wanted in Spanish we just threw in the English word. So trust me there were lots of laughs along the way. Here is a picture of all of us together before they left on Sunday.
Some of the challenges I've face recently are how my husband and I perceive things differently hence the title glass half empty or half full. I occurred to me the other day that of course I'm the spoiled American who is used to having things readily available to me and it's true. For example there's just two of us, my husband and I living in this house. Why do I have a mini panic attack is we have less than four rolls of toilet paper in the house? I can't let us run out of anything or it's a major problem for me. For my husband it's very different. If we have any toilet paper at all in the house he's cool. This difference in attitude doesn't cause problems with toilet paper, that was just an example. It does cause problems with our drinking water supply and the propane gas that I use for cooking.
Let's tackle the drinking water first. We keep two bottles on hand. When the second bottle gets down to half which is approximately 2 1/2 gallons I get antsy. I start telling my husband that we need water. He looks at the water bottle and says, "Mucho aqua." At this point I've given up arguing with him about it and I'm satisfied that I've made him aware that soon we will need water. What I've learned is that he is not going to buy water until we are completely out of water. I'm a survivor so after that halfway empty marker I start stock piling water. I fill up as many of my cups with water as possible. I also fill up the pitcher that I use to make his lemonade. Of course my fear is that we will run out of water in the middle of the night when there's absolutely nowhere to buy it and I will die of thirst until the following morning. I'm not sure if he's figured out yet why there are so many cups of water in the refrigerator and freezer LOL but once the jug is completely empty he will go buy us water. Once we are back to being fully stocked with water I can return to normal water usage and consumption.
The propane tank that is connected to the gas stove is a little more tricky for me. I can't actually see when it's almost empty. It does have a gauge on it but of course that thing stopped working a very long time ago. I'm not accustomed to cooking on a gas stove but I'm learning that when the gas is low when the burners are on they sometimes make a popping sound. About a week and a half ago I noticed my favorite burner making some unusual noise. My sister wife happened to be here and I asked her about it. We go outside and she lifts the propane tank up and tells me that it's low on gas. I can make it through the day cooking but by the next day I will run out of gas. I finished cooking dinner for the day and when my husband came home from work I told him that we were going to need gas. Of course he goes over to the stove and turns it on and there is gas. He then walks outside and lifts up the tank and says that there is plenty of gas. I know that there is gas in the tank right now but my fear is that I will be in the middle of cooking and it will run out and I won't be able to finish cooking. I don't understand why he can't take the tank to fill it up even if it isn't completely empty. He tells me that it's better this way to let it run completely out then go get more gas. For the next few days I have anxiety every time I begin to cook. I think to myself is this the meal that will be ruined because I run out of gas partway through the cooking process? Fortunately it didn't happen for a few days. My friend was coming to visit and I was cooking dinner and I worried the entire time that I would run out but I didn't. One day my husband asked me to make him fried plantains for dinner. The previous day I had made a beef roast in the crockpot but we didn't end up eating it because we had a BBQ instead here at the house. My plan was to warm up the beef and the other side dishes I already had and then make his fried Plantains. Well as I began warming up the side dishes lo and behold I ran out of gas. I texted my husband to let him know that we were now officially out of gas. I was able to finish warming the side dishes up in the microwave but you can't make fried plantains that way. When he arrived he had a panicked look on his face as he walked in the door. He had received my message and assumed the worse that there was no food to eat. He was pleasantly surprised to find that there was food. I resisted the urge to point out to him that if he had gotten the gas earlier, he would have had his fried plantains also. There was no point in rubbing salt into that wound.
This gas thing seems to also apply to putting gas in the car. I am accustomed to filling up my car when it gets low on gas. It seems that filling up your car here is absurd. I mean why would you do that when you can just stop by the gas station every time you need to drive somewhere? Makes perfect sense right? Well maybe it does since the price of gas here is so crazy. Right now it cost almost $5 per gallon of regular gas. The other day the tank was low but the gas light hasn't come on yet. I put $40 worth of gas in the car which is a Toyota Camry by the way not a Hummer and that only took it to just slightly over half a tank. Insane right? I make every trip I make in the car count. No useless trips in the car just because. It's too expensive to go joy riding around here.
I've also finished my book, gone back through it at least three times and now it's off to the editor. I'me very excited about it. It's a memoir told straight from my personal journals about how I met my husband and became a Passport Wife. In case you missed it in my last post here is the book cover again.
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