Monday, July 31, 2006

It never rains

..but pours is what they say. Power was restored Thursday evening and then disappeared again Friday morning around 9 am!! This time a tree had fallen over the wires a couple of houses from us.

The good thing was that plenty of houses were affected, the bad thing that this type of fault is dealt with by Mabvuko Depot that we know since before are sloooow in arriving.

It was Saturday afternoon when they finally showed up. Without a chainsaw. To a fallen tree!!! So back they went to get the chainsaw. By the time they got started it was getting dark so they left again. I was more than irritated when I called the fault center to hear what I suspected, they were leaving for another 12 hours or so.

It took them the better part of the Sunday to clear the wires and reconnect things etc. They then came to our house to ensure wires were not touching each other. After that we walked to the substation together only to find no power whatsoever! Another fault somewhere else was being fixed.

And how do they "replace" a blown fuse? They wire a copperwire round the blown one... I shudder to think what spikes could come from that system.

Finally power was restored around 3 pm only to disappear again after 30 minutes or so. I was ready to breathe fire over the phone when it did come back again after some 10 minutes.

And I hope that is enough for a while now, I think we have had more than our fair share of outages lately.

Thursday, July 27, 2006

Powercuts here, powercuts there, powercuts everywhere...

It has been a while, have been busy with work and what-what. July has been freezing cold and that has meant that the much predicted power shortage has hit Zimbabwe. A nice schedule for load-shedding was set up and publicised. It has never been followed. As usual. As of now we are experiencing more or less daily powercuts from as early as 6 am to lunchtime and sometimes in the evening.

Just back from an unexpected trip to Dar es Salaam together with friend Andre Bongers. Apart from sitting waiting 5 hours at Harare International for fuel before we could take off it was a very nice visit to a much warmer place. BUT powershortage there too... every second day from 7 to 7 no power. At least you knew and could plan for it.

Back here it is now getting a bit warmer but powercuts are getting worse if anything. We now on top of loadshedding has a "normal" powercut and to even manage to report it is a 3 hours attempt to get thru on constantly busy lines. And then they could not come because we "reported it late". Talk about Catch 22. Now we have been without power for near 36 hours and that is not good for freezers.

Time to go and pick up kids and then home to see if power might have been restored. Keep your fingers crossed.

Saturday, July 01, 2006

How to play soccer


Completely "on spot" comment by Bradley yesterday as I was watching Germany - Argentina;

"Today I was playing soccer with Matthew (his friend at Montessori preschool) and I was falling because that's what you do when you play soccer"

He has obviously observed how the professionals behave when they play soccer...

Above a photo of Bradley and Eric taken in April