Load Shedding Showdown

I'm trying to figure out if I'm busy because I have a lot to do, or because I'm having no luck getting anything done.

The power cuts are now up to 17 hours a week with bonuses. That's more or less a day a week without power, and the load shedding is conveniently timed to be when the usuage is at a maximum. This makes sense from an electrical department point of view. It's a grand pain in the buttocks for everyone else.

Case in point: All week I'd been saving up a fair amount of work for a day at the VSO office. I make this occasional pilgrimage so that to use their internet connection, something which is useful when you're doing work on four separate websites.

So yesterday I biked all the way up to VSON, Pattan to Baluwata, which is pretty much uphill all the way but at a JFG pace I can make in 20 minutes (sweaty though, since the weather's turned from cold to hot in the space of a week)

I manage to get about two hours of work at VSON before *poof* the power is gone. Just like the power went the day before, only at a different and completely unpredictable time. Fine. At least I got some work done. I still have two databases I'm working on, which I can do from home.

I stop in at NAPD on the way home to see if anything needs to be done. My counterpart is on leave, one of the other co-workers wants me to show him the finer points of checking his yahoo! email account.

I sneak off a while later to the sanctity of my home and some (geekily interesting) database and VB programming. Lo and behold, I've been home for all of twenty minutes when *poof* the power goes out.

I take a nap out of sheer frustration.

Manage to wake up just as the power comes back on, do a few more hours of work until around 7 at night. and that's how work is getting done right now.

Top Ten Signs You’ve Been Living In a South Asian Country for Too Long

10. 4 seasons is abnormal. 2 or 5 is more like it.

9. You don’t get Narnia. Why’d the lion have to die? And how come he got reincarnated as exactly the same thing?

8. You don’t even blink when you came across outrageous grammatical error in the national newspaper.

7. You are outraged when a shop tries to charge you anything more than $3 CDN for the latest movie on DVD. Or for the full installation CDROM set for Microsoft Office.

6. You’ve started making up responses for curious locals:

“What is your name?”
“Wayne Gretzky.”
“Where are you from?”
“Pheonix, Arizona.”
“Oh! You’re American!”
“Nope. Canadian. But I got traded back in '88.”

5. Rani Mukherjee is hot.

4. So is Sushmita Sen, for that matter.

3. You now know that dogs are nocturnal beasts. And they spend every waking moment barking.

2. Veer Zaara was ok, but it could’ve used some more dancing in the second half.

1. Sacred cow.

Back to Normal

Or at least as close as you can get. Woke up two days ago to a small earthquake (4.9). Perched on the edge of my bed, tried to figure out where the heck I'd go to form my 'triangle of life'. The quake was over before I'd made a decision.

(Is the Triangle of Life the right way to go? After all the conflicting information we've had from VSON, I have absolutely no idea)

This is Pattan Durbar square btw. A UNESCO World Heritage site five minutes (timed it) walk from my place.

All of the next week a bandha (strike) has been called against the upcoming elections: no cars, no busses, nothing open, no work (lots of work from home though, I'm building two databases).

Canadians should be proud they can elect someone like Stephen Harper without even one bomb going off. The entire election process here has been a farce. I don't even know where to start: people nominated against their will (or without even knowing), mass resignations from nominations, not enough candidates for all the posts, candidates held in army barracks for their "protection", etc.

Been stocking up on foodstuffs. This afternoon went shopping with Claire and we walked into the Adidas store on Durbar Marg: in the foyer were a trio of Buddhist monks, wrapped in orange robes, testing out a soccer ball. That's what passes as normal when you're in Kathmandu.

I guess I'll have time to figure out all the strange cooking utensils that Kay left : pressure cooker, miracle oven, multi-tiered steamer. Some other vols were over yesterday and pointed out that this one strange, dalek-esque machine was actually an espesso maker. Instant joy. I made about five this morning.