Powerless

A surprise, yet scheduled, power cut today. For infrastructure maintenance, we’re told. That’s good. Some places don’t get their electricity infrastructure maintained. Like the rest of South Africa, for example.
Ostensibly, we’re off for a whole 14 hours. Without warning, nogal.
Well, apparently, there was a warning, but we weren’t told about it. And that’s one of the fundamental things about warnings. If you don’t get them, then you are very much unwarned.
And so we are quite literally without electricity, without warning.

It’s like getting loadshedding back, which might be good training for next week when everyone thinks we’ll be getting loadshedding back…

An aside for foreign readers: next week is election week here, and it’s widely believed that loadshedding has been done away with for the last 7 weeks in the hope that the voting public will conveniently forget that the current (no pun intended) ruling party can’t even supply the most basic of services. Quite whether this is true or not is up for debate, but it’s an entirely reasonable suggestion. Quite how the electricity grid is being propped up is also a bit of a mystery, but it seems like it’s billions of Rands worth of diesel, some sticky tape, and prayers to several (or more) deities. It’s also completely unsustainable. And furthermore, it’s pointless after the polling stations close on Wednesday evening. Hence the widespread belief that we’ll be back to Stage n very shortly.
But I digress. Often.

The council have also chosen the darkest, most miserable day to do the work. Thick black clouds, a cold Westerly breeze, drizzle. If this was Sheffield, I’d look at those clouds and fully expect snow. That’s unlikely to happen though. Still, not only will this inclement weather slow the workers down, it’s also preventing our little home solar setup from helping out with the power situation. We’re only a month away from the winter solstice, and so even if we could see the sun – which is some 151½ million kilometers away anyway – it would only be up for 10 hours and would only drag itself to 35o above the horizon.
I’m not an expert on solar power, but we need is closer, higher sun, for longer.

If we’d had some warning (which we didn’t – see above), then I could have pumped up the batteries and lived a near normal life. Instead, we’ve been in deficit since we woke up, and despite my best power-saving efforts, I’m helplessly watching what’s left slowly, inexorably slip away.

I might be tempted to rig up some sort of system so that as the batteries give up completely, they give a comedic beep…beep…beeeeeeeeeeep noise like one might hear in rather less comedic circumstances in a hospital ICU.
But then again, I suppose that that would only use more power. Which we don’t have. Because of the power cut.

On the plus side, there has been a delicious lack of angle-grinding and jack-hammery from the nearby building site. This is not going to assist with my waning electricity issues, but it has made it a whole lot quieter while the power runs out.

And it’s clearly the little wins that I’m going to have to focus on today.

I’m powerless to do anything else.

Mending

Hi all. I had plans for a big post this evening, but then parenting got in the way and even though the little darlings are now in bed, I suddenly find myself with even more work to do just so that I can assist with their homework over the next few days. Yes, we’ve reached the limit of my knowledge when it comes to certain subjects. And that also means that I’m way out of my comfort zone. And my dislike of History as an academic subject hasn’t changed since the second year at comprehensive school with Mrs Finch. To be fair, I don’t even like it as a concept.

Add to all that the fact that The Guru is doing some maintenance on the blog behind the scenes (without which it would have stopped working in a few weeks time) (the blog, not The Guru) and I think that it’s just better if I take a hint, step away and do other stuff where I can’t break anything (else).

Let’s chat again tomorrow, when (hopefully) I can furnish you with some proper verbiage.

Thanks for your understanding.

Taking no chances

I’m heading down to Agulhas this weekend, and while I intend to wander along the beach, inhale the fresh sea air and generally de-stress, that will only be once I’ve done all my jobs.

And there are quite a few jobs to do, for this is a maintenance visit.

Things need to look nice ahead of the holidays. After all, there are likely to be visitors during the summer season:

Eina.

The worry is that making stuff look nice and de-stressing will leave very little time for other stuff, like blogging. And there’s an additional issue: unstable internets.

According to the local Whatsapp group, the Vodacom signal there has been a bit iffy of late. Something to do with a digger near Napier. Clumsy bugger. And given that I have no alternatives, it seems safer just to gooi up a blog post in advance so that you guys don’t miss out.

I knew you’d be delighted.

Right. I’m off to pack my toolbox.

Have a great day!

Am alone

Hello. I’m all alone.

I’m doing a “maintenance visit” to the cottage: checking that we have enough electricity to see us through until our next visit (we didn’t), and making sure that everything’s generally ok. It’s only the second time I’ve had to do one of these in six years, but we’ve had to cancel our last two weekends here due to important commitments in Cape Town, and we hadn’t planned on not being here for an eight week stretch.
You don’t want your freezer to die from a lack of power. Or anything else for that matter.
I used the opportunity to bring down some furniture as well – easily sorted when you have an otherwise empty vehicle. Two birds and all that.

I could have done it in one day, but the six hour or so round trip was unattractive, so I’m overnighting. I managed a walk on the beach this afternoon (photos to follow, as usual) and I’m now going to lob a steak on the braai. I’m making the most of the situation here.

There’s even talk of some brandy later, but you don’t want to believe everything you hear.