Girlfriends, Pizza and Christmas Trees

Ξ December 6th, 2004 | → 0 Comments | ∇ -My Favorites, Costa Rica, Humor, Life in Costa Rica, Maria Luisa |

My girlfriend is a most thoughtful person.
She is also caring, warm, sexy, beautiful, and generous.
She is also really hard to train. She resists this, preferring her way at all times. Many times this is good thing as I often do or say really dumb stuff, and she is always there to fix that. Other times, it is most annoying.

For instance, let’s discuss what I call the pizza incident last night.

This occurred when we (read SHE) invited a few family members over to decorate the Christmas tree. In Costa Rica, when you are involved with a (Costa Rican) woman, your involvement extends to her family as well. Actually, I like this!.
Some definitions!

As this is a good Catholic country, this “extension of family” translates into roughly 732 family members who show up (announced or not) for all functions.

“Function” is broadly defined as just about anything that is not done in the bed with the lights off or in the bathroom involving the toilet. I say this as tooth brushing can be an acceptable event (as can be flossing). The act of taking out the garbage qualifies as an event. In reality though, that event seldom attracts more than a half dozen or so persons. Decorating a tree is certainly higher up on the function list.

A tree decorating event, which really IS a function as defined in the US Culture of Acceptable Events & Functions, vol 3, may easily draw 90 folks who thoughtlessly expect to be fed and given something to drink.
Something to drink means something with alcohol.

I have mixed feelings on this.
When I lived in the US, only the closest family members arrived to decorate the tree. We ate a few cookies. Drank some eggnog, decorated a bit. Drank some more nog. Listened to the carols and drank some nog. Sang some carols. Downed some more nog. It was a fine time.

So last night, we decorated our tree. I do not have a body count, but the expression “shitpot fulla people” may give you an idea of how many arrived. There was merriment and fun. Music and dancing….and PIZZA. A LOT of pizza.

Remember the olde expression “Many hands make light work”? The tree was decorated in perhaps 6 minutes. Now… the tree looked great… until the lights were turned on. We had a problem.
When I was a young person, I was taught early to hang the lights first, test them to be sure they were distributed properly, THEN add the rest of the stuff.

Well, apparently, it is done differently here. Everything is done at once. However, when the lights were turned on, there were roughly 392 lights in the top third of the tree and perhaps 9 to cover the middle and the bottom.
As you may imagine, this gave the tree a somewhat unbalanced look. With the lights off though, it looks first rate!
My suggestion that we un-decorate the tree and re-do the lights brought forth a veritable blast of laughter, so the tree remained as it was.

An amazing amount of pizza and beverages were consumed and finally her family went back to their homes. Happily, there was left over pizza! I went to my bed dreaming of the next morning when I could rush to the kitchen to eat COLD pizza preferable washed down with Coca Cola (Diet is OK) to sorta cut through the grease if you catch my drift. Certainly cold pizza is an item very high on the list of “the foods of the Gods”.

I am never clear if eating cold pizza is a guy thing. I certainly know of no man in my life who ever warmed up pizza before consuming. IN fact, many of the women in my life enjoyed cold pizza the next day…

Sadly, my dream was to be dashed.

I made grave error. On my way the kitchen this morning, I stopped to check my email. The next thing I know, my wonderful sweetie is bringing me WARMED UP PIZZA and COFFEE. Oh the pain!

I have discussed the fact that many Americans LIKE cold food and will happily munch away on leftovers fresh from the fridge. She cannot fathom this! In fact, when first I mentioned this, her reaction was akin to mentioning I had a penchant for cooking and eating small children. She was horrified and told me eating cold food could kill me. She believes this! Argh.

But I have aged and know the value of a wonderful near-perfect relationship. I ate the pizza and washed it down with coffee. I also promised to get my ass outta bed earlier when there was cold pizza awaiting. One must adjust to life in the tropics….

 

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