Eish-kom

After my 2 days of almost-solid sleep I found a fullish day rather tough, and I left university in the late-ish afternoon content in the idea that my day was over. I planned to go and collect a DVD or two, settle down at home, and sleep until I have to get up for work tomorrow morning.

It took me over an hour to get to my house - half of the robots on the main road by my house were out/ I found out later that there was no power at home. Oh dear. I attributed it to a return of load-shedding. For those of you who don't live here, load-shedding is when our electricity supply doesn't match demand and they shut off areas for between 2 and 4 hours. It used to be 4 hours twice a week, and we got used to it surprisingly quickly (an afternoon off work once a week was one of the 'downfalls' of the new system). The electricity company (Eskom) decided that we all ahd to cut back on our electricity usage by 10 % or face rather nasty tarriffs. And, amazingly enough, we did it! Load-shedding was stopped and we were all happy, to the point of my family refusing to use heaters even though we were all shivering and turning blue because "we wouldn't want load-shedding to happen again, now would we?" As I returned from the rather warm Lowveld in the middle of a cold front, I felt very noble, shivering away while wearing almost all of my clothes at once.

So I drove along, smiling and waving at pointsmen at the major intersections and saying nasty things to all those peopel out tehre who must have been using their heaters and thus bringing the curse of load-shedding back down on us. Until I got home to find out that the power had been out for over 4 hours, and after a long and not very productive call to Eskom, we found out that there is some kind of fault with our supply (just my suburb) and they don't know what's wrong or how to fix it. Last time this happened some areas didn't ahve power for a week.

Fortunately my mother was more awake than me, and she interrupted my lying on my bed watching DVDs on my laptop to mention that I'd brought home blood samples frmo the field and not got around to taking them to university. They were sitting in our freezer (for some reason, having blood samples in the freezer upsets her far more than having dead lizards in the freezer. Go figure). So, at 7pm, having watched Martian Child (a very sweet movie) I rushed across to university with a cooler-bag of blood samples and my laptop and phone to charge.

So now it's 8pm, and I'm sitting in the lab, all alone, and still procrastinating!

And I parked badly, and it felt realy good!