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.

The Zolomonster

I was looking for an exciting photo to reintroduce myself to blogsphere and I could only find pictures of my daughter. I am not sure if it is sad that all the photos I have taken in the last 2+ months are of the same theme.

Tonight is my first entire night alone with my daughter and thus far she has been mostly well behaved. She just woke up and I fed her with formula for the first time. I picked her up to burp her and she was out cold, one thing is for sure, she loves her papa's shoulder.

I have a new found appreciation for my parents. Give thanks.

Hello World

It was a few hours after my last post and was now 3:30am.

I was awoken by groans from a mommy to be ready to pop so it was off to the hospital.

The wait was not long(for me) and at 5:33am out pops a pink hot mess that immediately starts crying.

Hello World

She makes the cutest faces.

I now spend my mornings before work trying to dodge projectile poop while we bath her.

September to remember

I would like to introduce a 36 hour day.

It is now the end of September and this is my first post. The last time I wrote a post I was living at my old apartment, I am now fully moved and almost finished settling in. As with every other procedure that involves the Jamaican government offices I could not get the new place certified in time but I still had to move since I gave notice. I ended up moving into a place with no power and suffering for two weeks.

With no power and no fridge I survived on my tea candles, 3G dongle and my laptop to get me through the nights when I got home from work. For the weekends I crashed at a friend's house and she treated me like a king. Eventually the power service was turned up and I quickly got my security grills and curtains installed, I could now rest with piece of mind and with privacy.

Of course in the mix of everything is still school. I have already completed two courses, submitted one research paper and sat one exam already. The first exam wasn't so bad, I finished with about an hour to spare probably a first for me. Lets hope I passed with flying colors :p. Other than that UWI has changed greatly since I've left. They have added a special section to the library for postgraduates only and I am loving it.

Between the school tuition, moving to a larger apartment, having three mouths to feed and general homeowner expenses has put me in a situation I have not been in for a while.. broke. It is just really a matter of cash flow and normally it wouldn't be much of an issue but I am looking to upgrade my couch and I saw a really nice three piece leather living room set that is now haunting my day dreams. I quickly wrote it off as being unaffordable but I saw in a magazine today the price has been slashed by over 20% to something more acceptable. It's time to reshuffle the budget to get in on these sales prices!

August updates

Oh blog how I have forsaken you.

Time is not on my side, there have been many things to do.

1. Tie up loose ends with the old landlord
2. Get electrician to re-certify new house then get power supply activated
3. Get metalwork contractors to install security grills in the new house, a must in Jamaica.
4. Buying baby stuff to quell the irate pregnant girl.
5. Get curtains made to stop new neighbours on spying on me.
6. Homework. OMG going back school is crazy.. I have to suffer two more years of this.
7. The side job. I will probably lose this work given the amount of time I put into it last week.
8. Bills. I paid all of my July credit card and utility bills late not because I didn't have the money, because I didn't have the time.
9. Day job. Two people doing the job of six? a recipe for delayed but sure disaster.

I plan to try and get two days departmental leave this week to handle some of the monster tasks that are yet to be completed. Wish me luck because I don't think my boss will be too happy with this.

On a side note, I like the finer things in life, I can't afford them but I will admire from far. One of these items are watches and last week my coworker reminded me of this when he left his watch on his desk and asked us to secure it for him. I dropped it in my desk draw and locked it without much thought but when I didn't see him the next day I popped it out to further inspect it since I knew that he liked to collect nice watches. It was a very nice auto winding mechanical watch, I couldn't tell when was the last time I saw one of these. After a quick google search it turned out that the watch could buy my car, they start off at $5000USD and go up to $90,000 depending on the casing and options. I promptly took off my watch and wore his watch for the rest of the day until he popped up. Ahh the finer things.

summer work

Did I mention that I had an intern? the key word being had.

I did mention that they were slashing 20% of my department at work and that some how maths out to one person with that person being my coworker. We had the same job title, worked at the same level and sat in the same large empty room alone in a mostly abandoned building downtown for many years. I always figured that he was my competition and would most likely be promoted before me since he had many years experience over me.. I was wrong(thankfully).

I am not promoted but at least I have a job. It was the decision of my boss' boss and for the first time I could see it in his face and hear it in his voice it was a hard one as he explained how he reached to this decision. It was a bittersweet moment as apparently my efforts had not gone unnoticed by the senior management but he the fallout is that will be jobless now and I will have to pick up his workload. To put things into perspective when I joined the company the job that my boss and I are currently doing was being done by a team of 7 people, a 71% reduction in staff. Now the competition(if any) is between the boss and myself lets hope I can survive.

Anyway back to the subject, shortly after they cut my coworker they gave me an intern. I was a bit confused as to how they were cutting people but still managed to maintain a summer program but I was happy for any assistance I could get. He was a fresh grad from university and was hoping to get a permanent job, this was perfect, exactly what I wanted. I treated him with respect, assigning him weekly objectives, giving him training material and gave him the ultimate goal to finish developing a database webapp I had started in my free time. My boss would have(and wanted) to give him some brainless slave work to do and I should have. He sucked at the work I assigned to him I had to be following behind him and fixing everything he did.

The final slap in the face was when the intern came to me at the end of his second week and resigned ughh!! two weeks gone down the drain. He was offered a [ever so scarce] permanent job at some other company so I let him go, I would never hold it against him in these harsh economic times. My friends and coworkers all think that I drove him away but hey if you cant stand the heat stay out of the kitchen.

Homeowner: check.

- Go back to Disney world.
- Get post graduate degree.
- Become propertied by 26.
- ... etc.

Well this is one life goal I am glad to cross off the list and I have now replaced it with the goal of shaving 17 years off my mortgage term to finish paying back my loan in 8 years. This of course is under the assumption that all things remain equal, yes I aim high.

It has been one week since I got the possession papers and keys and the only thing I have done so far is given my old landlord notice. Of course she asked why I was leaving(I am a great tenant) and I had to remind her that 3 years ago when negotiating my lease with her I made sure to assert that this will be the last place I was going to rent(I hate moving) and the next time I move it will be because I bought somewhere. good memories.. lets just hope that when my end date comes she gives me back my full security deposit and not try to nitpick like my last penny pincher landlord who kept a portion because she wanted to pay her way through medical school.

The place is fairly new, about 2 years old and mostly move in ready. I need to get the electricity turned up and security grills installed(a must given Jamaica's current crime situation). I bought a new deadbolt lock for my front door today and I'll probably drop by there early tomorrow morning before work to attempt to install it myself, how hard can it be?

Did I mention that it is less than a 2 minute drive away from one of my office locations?! Being so retardedly close to work I'll probably end up working from home and not going to the office most days.. lol lets see.

Holocost movies

I think the first Holocaust movie I watched was 'The pianist' a few years ago. I don't remember much about it but I remember that I liked it very much. Recently I started watching the HBO series Band of Brothers and my interest on that time in history awoke again. Since then I have watched:

• Valkyrie
• The boy in striped pyjamas
• Schindler's list

I've always heard about Schindler's list, never saw it on cable before though. It's a shame that I only recently when looking for it 15 years later. That's about 14 hours of movies/tv series on the second world war and the Holocaust. It is a bit much but I'd recommend all of them in a heartbeat.

Future plans

I got a phone call, she wanted to return a few misc. items of mine.

It was now the afternoon of day two 2009.

She rejected my offer to pick up my stuff the next time I was on the road later on in the week, she wanted to pass by now and be rid of me. She explained that she called everybody and told them the news. By everybody I mean she called all of her family and friends none of which I met. They were mostly understanding of the situation and her turning point that made her even consider speaking to me again came from her male best friend who now lived in the states. I was surprised that anyone would have been on my side or that she would even call her friends in the states to tell them.

It didn't take her long to reach and it quickly became clear that she wasn't here just to drop off my stuff. She was now sitting on my veranda just looking at me with the saddest look on her face and I kept my distance just to be safe, this was all new ground to me. In explaining to me what was going on in her mind she couldn't hold it together any more so she went inside and was laying on the couch, I followed her and sat by her feet. At this point in time she just let it all out, how much she liked me and how she had everything all planned out. The key thing I took away from that conversation was that she wanted to have a child with me around 5 years from now. wow, what ever I was doing I must have been doing it right.

I knew girls liked to plan but this was definitely a first for me. During the hours of her getting things off of her chest she eventually managed to jim screechy around in the couch and was now cuddling me, crying every now and then and now she was trying to kiss me. I was confused, I knew she didn't want to pursue a relationship with me since I got another girl pregnant but she was getting pretty restless on my couch grinding on me and full on eating my face. Once again I threw out all of my "man" training out the window and I stopped it from going further.

Many hours had passed and it was time for her to leave, I walked her down to her car and she stopped for a goodbye kiss. It got pretty hot and heavy quickly and I had to dig deep not to do anything stupid that night, I knew this was going to be the last time I would see her for sure. I watched her get in her car but she didn't drive off, I went over to find out what was wrong and she was just slumped over her steering wheel crying like there was no tomorrow. What could I have said to make her feel any better? I just stayed with her until she was composed enough to drive and that was the last time I saw her.

Surviving p.2

I found this video on the Jamaica Gleaner's[local paper] youtube channel a few months back and I had to make note of it. To bring everybody up to speed in one sentence Cash plus was a company that tried to pass them self off as an investment club that offered high returns that of course turned out to be big pyramid scheme and a lot of people lost their money. The big boss of cash plus, Carlos Hill, has recently making the nightly news as he has now been evicted from his house as it is to be liquidated to help pay the receivers, investors, cash+ ex employees, .... long list of people he owes. It is a very sad situation for the people in the video but I do not feel sorry for them, the local regulatory bodies went far beyond their duties to tell people to stay away from these schemes and to date they have all toppled over.

I too have lost a significant amount of money in legitimate regulated investments as well with the down turn of the economy. I have essentially written off my stock and equities based unit trusts as they have lost more than 50% of their value with no signs of coming up anytime soon but the difference is I knew the risk going into them and I could afford to take the hit. I just need to pretend they don't exist and if the companies don't wind up I could probably break even[- potential interest] if the companies/economy recovers in a couple of years, so all is not lost yet.

I see on stunner's blog that they made his entire dept. under him redundant, I also heard today that 20% of the people in my dept. will also be made redundant. I should be worried but for some reason I feel safe[foolishly?] for now. So what have y'all been doing to weather this storm? I have been mostly against this due to time restrictions but I took on a small job on the side for May/June as a consultative type role. I drafted my first invoice and was proud. I could totally keep doing this if I had the time but my day job keeps me pretty busy. One still has to be mindful of the fact that they are cutting people left right and center so I should probably explore other opportunities. I do have some skills I should be able to capitalize on:

• Photography
• micro controller application
• programming/web dev
  
• fsf consultation
• personal accountant/debt advisor

Clearly I got jokes.

Some of the simple things

I often walk around with my camera but I do not often feel the urge to take pictures. It is kind of a horrible waste given my camera+lens weighs like 1+ lbs to drag it on the road and drag it back home with nothing new. What is even worst is even if I take shots they sit on the memory card or on my computer never to see the light of day again. I have a 6" digital photo frame in my room but that also goes unused, maybe when I move I'll start to use it more. Anyway here are a few photos I took recently(relatively) that will not fall to the same fate as many others before.

The simple things in life are free. This badly built paper dinosaur that I freed from his over priced cereal box prison set me back around $400.

My skin tingles all over, this can not be good but let's hope it is just sun burnt and not any form of infection. It was low tide and I spent the better half of last Saturday combing the beach for anything different, the sun wasn't out in full force so I didn't bother reapply more sun block after coming out of the water. The waves battered me against the exposed reef a few times but it was worth it to get a glimpse of the sea life on the other side. I only walked away with a few bruises on a finger, lets hope nothing poisonous poked me. Am I the only one mortally scared of sea urchins? The reef had hundreds of them just waiting to stick someone up.

Give blood, save a life. Simple concept eh? I am not a believer though, someone please explain how this works and I would also like to see some statistics on how many people die in Jamaica annually due to lack of supply of blood or its components. Even though I am a critic I still do give blood and as of yesterday have given an equivalent of all the blood in my body. The mad scientists at the blood bank can now bring the Frankenstein Adrian to life.. or use it to save someones life.. which ever is the most likely story.

Have I said how much I ♥ Disney world before? I'm surprised I haven't posted any of the 1000's of pictures I took while I was there last month. This photo was taken at the end of the day after I spent the previous 10 hours exploring the park. About 30 minutes later as I was preparing to leave the park I realized I lost my canon 72mm lens cap. I searched all my pockets, it was gone and my heart sank. As I was about to catch the bus to the animal kingdom the following day I decided to stop by the lost and found to see if by some miracle they found it. After some digging in the back the guy found my lens cap and commented it was the largest of the bunch. I was all smiles, they have 27,000 acres of theme parks and they could somehow manage to have a lost and found that works. I have yet to see one of these work in Jamaica on any scale.