Jamaica not living up to its name

Who knows what that is?

Give up? it's a swing check valve I bought last week to replace a spring check valve that is on the outlet of my water tank that is preventing me from getting the last few liters of water that potentially remain in my tank. To back track a bit let me bring everybody up to speed for those of you who do not live in Kingston, Jamaica. We are currently going through an extended drought and the NWC reserves(for the Liguanea plains) are running low. Now to prevent them from running dry they have instituted drastic blackout periods with areas, such as the one I live in, seeing as little as 4 hours of supply per day at low pressure.


The last time I checked Jamaica was supposed to be the land of wood and water, in fact it is inherent in the definition of Jamaica but some how I only "have" water for 20 hours of the week. I also need to mention that during those few hours I still do not actually get water as the pressure is so low it only serves the ground floor and I live one floor up. To further complicate things my water tank is on the roof, 4 floors up, so you know that has not seen the likes of water for many weeks now. Ahh the many joys of apartment life.

How do I cope? I have some 5 gallon buckets, some smaller buckets and a large array of 5 litre bottles that I fill up by the garden pipe on the common front lawn when water is available downstairs and haul up the precious commodity back home. Other people have opted to buy water from water trucks who are making a killing during this period. They charge retail $2000 to fill a 200 gallon tank and I think around $8000 for the whole truck of water. I also question the quality of the water these trucks are supplying as well as people see them drawing water from questionable(swamp) sources and delivering it untreated.

I also have my parents who live on the outskirts of town to rely on. I took a shower at their house and gathered water from them today since there was no water at all for the past two days and my in apartment reserves were running low. But when I came home it seemed like the whole community reached a low point as I saw a water truck delivering water and about 10 of my neighbors came out with their bottles to get some "free" water. A pretty sad sight to see them scampering for the little water that the truck man would allow them to take.

UWI Carnival '10

As with my usual tradition I was at the UWI Mona ring road Carnival event today. Unlike the other years things have changed though. First of all I actually belonged there, I stepped out class around 4:30pm and things were just getting kicked off. I heard them advertise it a few times on the radio leading up to this so I came prepared with my EOS body, 50mm and 135mm M42 lenses, this is the other change. I would usually try to capture all the action shots but my intentions with these lenses was to capture wonderfully focused portraits drowned in poor man's bokeh. These manual focus lenses with such a shallow depth of focus is the amateur photographers arch-nemesis to action scenes such as what I was facing, young college coeds gyrating their waists like they were on fire.

I was pretty casual, only sitting down on the grass waiting for someone to stop long enough for me to snap them. I am sure the thousands of viewers that google pours in to this site yearly will be disappointed that there are no scantily clad 18 year olds here anymore. Don't worry though I got an eye full for all y'all as they worked themselves up into a frenzy.

I wish had more old M42 lenses, most of my favorite shots of my daughter was taken with 50mm lens, my money goes elsewhere now.

At work..

*sigh*

It is almost 1am and I am at work yet again. I was in the middle of watching the hurt locker(great movie so far) and I got the call to come in. meh.

My work here is just to watch the building services people flip between JPS, UPS and all sorts of combinations of bypass while my servers go flip flop waiting for the power to settle.

All is well though, I haven't blogged in a bit for good reasons. look out for more in the near future.