You Win Some, You Lose Some

GOOD LUCK (BUENA SUERTE)

Well I don’t know what the rest of you were up to last weekend, but Renzo and I spent some time babysitting his younger brothers Ray & Rene.  With no TV, and no working dvd player, my impulse purchase from La Sirena (DR’s answer to Walmart) came in quite handy.  Enter: DOMINICANOPOLY.  Dominicanopoly is a kind of low budge, unauthorized version of the classic game Monopoly, but with a Dominican theme.  I thought it would be a fun way to learn more Spanish, as well as more history and trivia about the country.  Plus, I used to be a monopoly champ in my youth.   I remember epic games with my friend Gerard in elementary school and I had a lot of fun kicking his butt with all my hotels on Boardwalk & Park Place.  (Btw, my player piece of choice is always the top hat!)   Anyway, I was kind of wondering if I still had the magic touch.

With nothing better to do, we opened the box.

Dominicanopoly

Rene (aka "sticky fingers" with his stash o' cash and his best friend Samba.

We started the game around 8 or 9 pm.  After playing ensued it became clear that our banker was *ahem* a bit crooked.  After lots of trash talking, and plenty of scheming, we were knee deep into our game.  Ray (the banker) was out.  He didn’t buy property fast enough.  Renzo was holding steady.  Rene had some good properties and a nice stash of dinero (even though I think he stole most of it from the bank, lol), and I was quickly emerging as a Donald Trumpess, amassing lots of property and benefiting from some really lucky rolls of the dice.  Finally at 1 AM we agreed to retire to bed and reconvene in the morning.  It was pretty clear to most however, that I was going to emerge victorious.

Wheeling & dealing the Dominican way.

After we woke up, of course the first thing the kids wanted to do was get back to our game.  Things went downhill fast for Renzo which left Rene (aka “sticky fingers”) and me.  As the game went on and things continued in my favor I was getting a little giddy and started thinking of myself as some kind of unstoppable international ‘opoly queen.  The fact that I was also knitting while playing and only marginally paying attention annoyed my fellow players but delighted me, as I rode my tidal wave of good luck.

You don't have to be Dominican to Dominate this game.

After some necessary gloating about being the only non-Dominican and beating this band of brothers at their own game, we made nice, gave each other a round of high fives like a bunch of good sports, and went off to eat some mangu and aguacate.

And here’s where my good luck for the week ends…which brings us to…

BAD LUCK (Mala Suerte)

It was Wednesday morning and Renzo had gone back to the land to work with Nelson’s friend Cecile to clear more of the weeds & vines from the ground.  I decided to sit this one out since we had just gone the day before and instead opted to stay home and work on writing a blog post and some chores like laundry and making a big pot of soup with the massive amount of root vegetables taking up valuable real estate in the fridge.

About 3 minutes after Renzo left (around 9am), the power went out.  Since that meant no blog post and no laundry I decided to start making the soup.  After gathering and washing all the vegetables, I began to peel the calabaza with a cerrated vegetable peeler (dumb idea) and WHOOPS, vegetable peeler right into the thumb.  (AND I COULDN’T GET IT OUT, YIKES!!!!)

Yeah, so I couldn’t exactly get the peeler to dislodge from my finger right away which was just a little bit scary…after “unhooking” it from my finger it was bleeding quite a lot but a few minutes after some compression and elevation I realized it wasn’t going to need stitches and would heal well, so I could relax.

A little later I remembered  was time to bring Samba outside to “do his thing” so to speak, but he tends to prefer “doing his thing” in private here if he’s not being walked.  Soooo, I went outside and zipped up the greenhouse to avoid him getting into it while he was out there alone, and then I went inside to relax for a bit.  After 20 minutes I went out to get Samba and brought him inside.  A few hours later Renzo arrived home and immediately went out to check on the plants (they’re like his babies).  He came in after about 10 minutes looking pretty bummed.  Turns out I forgot to open the greenhouse back up and our poor little seedlings were smothered by the heat & humidity all day. 😦

Before

After

Luckily not everything was affected, but we did lose some of our  lavender, milk thistle, ashwaganda, and comfrey (plus a few others).  This unfortunate turn of events led to us putting our energy into a mass planting session the next day.  Here is our newest crop of seedlings:

new seedlings

So, even though it’s a bit depressing to have lost so much of our hard work, I have to take it as a lesson and move on.  I’m not the first person to make a mistake since we started this process, but my mistake did cause us the greatest loss thus far.  Luckily we have kicked things into high gear and hopefully over the next 8 weeks we will see a lot of progress and new growth.

A bit of good luck couldn’t hurt either.  We’ll keep you posted.

Tags: bad luck, bueno suerte, dominican republic, dominicanopoly, good luck, greenhouse, mala suerte, monopoly, republica dominicana, seedlings