waterlogged

I'm pretty sure that most of Jamaica is pretty tired of the rain by now. I normally stay high and dry at home during this kind of weather so I had no complaints. It was a sunny morning when I set off for my parents house to have the usual Sunday lunch with the fambily but that quickly changed to a heavy downpour as the afternoon progressed.

It was only natural that the conversation changed to the inclement weather at hand and my sister mentioned her very wet (inside and out) car. Apparently she tried to drive on Mona Rd. last week during one of the bouts of rain and ended up in water half way up her doors. She of all persons should know that you don't drive on that road when rain falls heavily as her husband lost the use of his car for a couple of months after shutting off in floods on that same road a few months ago. It's a miracle she didn't shut off but its a shame she got all that dirty water in her car.

After filling our gut my sister and I were ready to leave so after waiting for the rain to die down a bit I left and she should have left shortly after too. After coming off Red Hills it quickly became apparent that my journey across town to my home would be a long one. The roads, when I could actually see them under the brown water, were torrents that brought traffic to a crawl. At first I made a u-turn when I saw some deep water but the alternative route was just as bad.

I eventually gave up on trying to find alternate paths and wished I didn't leave yet
and tried to call my sister to tell her to stay at the parents or go back there if she had not gotten herself into more trouble yet. By this time I was in water over 12" deep slowly creeping on where I suspected the road to be and wondering what to do. Thinking ahead of the roads I would eventually have to take to reach home the outlook was dismal.

By the time I reached home the undercarriage of my car should have been clean granted the amount of water I was in. The car didn't shut off and no water seeped inside so I was mostly happy. I dropped in a deep pothole once as I crept through some murky water but at 5km/h no damage was done unlike the pothole on the main road outside of my house. Yes the same pothole that was fixed last year was now back with a vengeance claiming over 100 cars in the past month. The latest of which was a Range Rover HSE which some lady managed to blow out two tires in on Saturday. She was waiting for somebody to come change her tires for her and I noticed she called somebody to pack the hole with sand/dirt... lol lets see how long before I hear people tires being blown out again.

Broke ass friends

I'm sure everybody has friends who just can't seem to hold on to money but some of my friends take it to the next level. Now this same girl saw me online again recently and asked for a big favor. I instantly knew her request would be interesting but she surprised me by asking to borrow a couple hundred thousand dollars to fund a project she was trying to get off the ground. She claimed it was a sure thing and could provide me with documents stating that she would be paid upon delivery of her product so that in turn she could pay me back.

First problem with this situation is that my conservative nature makes me the furthest thing from a venture capitalist and she knew this. Problem number few was that I, along with anybody else who read that post on her was painfully aware of her financial standings which still haven't improved much since May. The third problem is that I tend to have to write off a portion of the money I have previously lent friends as there is normally no hope of getting it back.. no matter how small it is.

I asked her if she approached any financial institutions on a business loan and she explained that there was no way she could get one due to her bad financial standing. The answer was clear, no. She offered the title to her car to secure the loan, it made no difference.. what does she expect me to do repo her car when she defaults? lol that isn't risk I would take on but she didn't seem to be too understanding. What I found funny was that in her pitch to get capital from me she mentioned nothing of my return on investment. Reality is a bitch eh? Welcome to to adulthood.

back to the rat race

My word.. I have forgotten how horrible the traffic is. Ideally I would like to spend 1 hour in traffic daily, 30 mins to work and 30 mins from work and I would be happy but this week had me in traffic for up to 2 hours :(.

After spending the first few days back at work in hiding at the downtown office I decided to go to the main office building. As I walked up to the doors I noticed a group of familiar faces, it was the people from my floor. I thought it was odd that they were all outside at 8:30am but as I got closer their makeshift placards became obvious and one popped out of the group and pointed at me exclaiming it was my fault. I was on a call with senior management so I only paused to read their message and proceeded upstairs to my desk. They were complaining about the AC being too cold and much to my dismay they blamed it on me even though this was the first time I've been back to that office in two weeks.

After I finished my call I went back downstairs to them to try and address the issue yet again. I had previously explained to them that due to a fault in the design of the cooling on the floor I needed the central AC to operate at roughly 17C to ensure that I don't have hardware failures in a server room which is under my responsibility until we can find a permanent solution(which is in the pipelines). Asking them to adapt to this temperature isn't a ridiculous request but increasing the temperature a few degrees on their floor would result in a huge jump in temperature to my servers and have caused failure before. I was then accused of hiding out and being comfortable in my other offices but it is quite the opposite... I am no stranger to the cold as I think my other offices aim for 15c.

They waited until their vice president came and they all negotiated a middle ground. I hope no new enemies were made lol

Time heals all

I have a long way to go but I am on my way there. Before ending things with noodle on Tuesday I allowed her to explain the situation in case there was by some miracle a plausible explanation and it would have all been a big misunderstanding. After trying to deny deleting anything and accusing me of invading her privacy she started to give her reasons.

I already wrote an epistle here when I started this post a few days ago but that shall go unpublished and I will try to keep my comments on her reasons short.

• She referred to me as aunt because she was uncomfortable telling Joe she was out with her bf
• She kept her conversations with Joe a secret because I would misread it and make a big deal out of nothing. She further went on to explain that I was so jealous lately she didn't want to add fuel to that fire.
• She still maintained that nothing went on between them and she was just being foolish.

Noodle was under the impression that a storm on jealousy raged inside of me? This was news to me.. I always thought of myself as secure and nonchalant. I guess I will keep an eye out for it in future relationships, I don't believe I will find myself acting that way though. On a purely coincidental note on the Monday before any of her activities were exposed she showed me an email from one of her clean accounts from a friend that asked what were the top 3 things I valued in a relationship and asked me to answer. Loyalty, sincerity and happiness was my response... how heartless does one have to be to face me after that and lie?

Truth and time tells all

How does one say goodbye to a friend? Noodle and I were best friends for a long time before we got together, she knew everything about me and she (supposedly)told me about everything current in her life as well. Somewhere along the way during the beginnings of our friendship she met a guy, who we shall refer to as Joe, who she dated for a bit while he visited the island occasionally. This was the only guy I felt she never did give me the whole story on but it was okay though, she was in no way obligated to tell me anything at that point in time.

As the months passed he faded to the background and she started sharing some of her untold stories about her rendezvous with Joe which only served to grow my trust for her as she opted to fill in the remaining blanks without me asking about him. Our friendship grew to the point where she started to pursue me as a boyfriend but I was hesitant as I knew the nitty gritty of her past and what she was capable of but she swore her loyalty to me. After a few months passed I felt sure her intentions were pure she was invited to exclusively enjoy all that my simple forest life had to offer.

We all know how her life in the forest ended and she was free to do anything she pleased. She insisted I misjudged her, apologized for taking what she had for granted and still pursued a relationship with me. Her persistence payed off and my nos slowly changed to yeses and we ended up getting back together again in Negril. Now to rewind a bit back to Joe, even though he was faded to the background they still communicated via phone, email and im but I never payed much attention to it as I accepted him as just one of her friends. A few weeks ago she called saying Joe was going to send her a ticket to go visit him and she gave me an acceptable reason #1 for wanting to go, I told her if she wanted to go she should.

At some other point in time she brought back up her trip again asking several times if I was sure it was ok for her to go, the first red flag pops up in my head now as she seems to be feeling guilty of something, I still give her the go ahead. After questioning her motives again acceptable reason #1 has morphed to shady reason #2, I point out to her the change I noticed and she gets upset saying she told me this already and reason #1 was just the pill she fed her family so they wont hassle her for going to visit her friend. of course more red flags. It is obvious to me that there is more here than she lets on but I left it alone to give her time to come clean on her own as she got upset whenever I asked her about it and blamed me for not listening.

As far as I was concerned noodle was exhibiting textbook cheating behaviours so I kicked back and observed, there is no point to start an argument with nothing hard to back it. When we came back to Kingston after our trip over the weekend she went to the pc as usual to check her emails and other things online but I noticed she only flashed her inbox for a second then ignored it the entire time I was close. I said nothing to her as the last time I asked her to show me something in her inbox she said she would show me later but when later came around all conversations were mysteriously deleted without a trace and she had no idea where they went. I went back on Monday night after she left to find the following email trail in her trash.

From: noodle
To: joe
Subject: Hon!

honey you got my mail right? i sent you the dates. when you have the time please reply or call. hope you are good and things going in your favour. miss you!
take care, Love you.
God bless, noodle
---

From: noodle
To: joe
Subject: Re: Hon!

will you be coming to Jamaica this weekend?
---

From: joe
To: noodle

No, I was thinking you would come up ...
---

From: noodle
To: joe

i would love to come up this weekend except my aunt paid for our weekend already. what about the 2 november?

Aside from changing the names for anonymity and clipping the conversation for brevity the emails are untouched. Now this weekend she speaks of was the weekend she just spent with me. It's nice to know that she tells other men I am her aunt. Aside from those deleted messages her trash was empty, I guess I was too late to catch anything else but lucky enough to find those. I then glanced over her inbox to find this other gem

From: noodle
To: joe
Subject: hello

hi joe!

i know you are always busy, which is why i asked for a weekend thats convenient to you. but here is some available times for me starting 9-11.11.2007 im free, so you make a decision.

i really do miss you, its feels like forever since ive last seen you. i wont go in details how much i miss you and what i miss mostly, we will resolve that when we are together.

take care, love you

God bless

Noodle

wow.. I couldn't help but imagine what was said on the phone/in the messages she deleted and emptied from the trash and from the im chat which she explicitley turned off logging for Joe despite the fact she logs everybody elses conversations. I would love to see her explain this one, but I didn't say a word to her until I saw her online the following day. This post is already long and drawn out so I'll post her response later.

Hero's weekend '07

As being advised by the doctors of blogsphere I tried to book the weekend in Ocho Rios for noodle and I. It would have been the perfect setting to reconcile our defunct relationship but of course by that time the decent, yet still affordable, hotels were already booked out. So on to Negril then, we booked a room at the quaint fun holiday beach resort and kept our fingers crossed the weather would improve.

Friday showed promise for the weekend as there was sunshine for a bit during the day. My only other concern was how would I reach Negril granted that many of the routes were impassable due to flooding or landslides. It wasn't so bad though as the first flooded road I reached only had about 8" of water and was still usable with the aid of the locals who ran through the water telling us where to drive and the second flooded road had a bypass handy at the start. This first picture here was probably taken in Savanna-la-mar by the seawall where there was pretty much no signs of the previous 6 straight days of rain.

What can I say.. they are so postcard-esk, so: wish you were here!

There wasn't much going on in Negril since most of the parties were in Ocho Rios this weekend but I wanted to go to the FameFM Hedo property parties but noodle didn't carry clothes nor was too sure about having me around naked/scantily clad hedonism girls with my new found single status. I was cool with just chilling by the beach and pool all weekend though so it was all good.

We passed through Rick's Cafe and saw one seriously cocky cliff diver. He made his rounds and collected donations then proceeded to climb up a dead tree above the cliffs like he was the star monkey man from planet of the apes. Now about 60 feet above the water he began making poses and pointing at random points in the sky for a few minutes before starting to curse the people below who didn't contribute any money and was trying to take pictures of him diving. He then spent about 8 minutes in the tree top waiting for people to pay to film in before I jumped into the water, at that point all the tourists just left and went to the pool/bar as I am sure they were as disgusted with the man as I was. His whistles and calls to get them to come back didn't do much as they had seen enough.

I didn't really walk around with my camera much so I'll just comment on some of the more interesting(sadly) shots I found on my camera.
- dogs on the beach.. we all know how I feel, esp. mongrel dogs.. eww
- my 1-pac in full glory, maybe I should do something about it, maybe aim for 2 lol
- talk about all inclusive, I would love to stay there but I'm not willing to take out the mortgage for it.

By Monday morning the trip fulfilled all set objectives. Aside from a small spat over scoring after a game of scrabble, noodle and I were an item again and I was a well rested man. We decided to check out early and spend some time in Ocho Rios. The journey was long but the new north coast highway made it a lot easier. There wasn't much to do while we were there so we had lunch then toured the town a bit and found Turtle River Park. The place looked new, I haven't seen it before. Just like my last time off I bucked up on a duck. I should make them the mascot of my vacations.. lol.

1 from 10 leaves 0.

I am pooped, nothing is getting done.

• I dumped my clean laundry on the bed with all intentions to put it away over the weekend yet still I slept beside them last night.
• The pile of dirty dishes in my sink reached critical mass this morning where I ran out of cutlery for breakfast and was forced to do the dishes, I did all the cutlery but 3 dishes were left dirty.
• Work starts at 8:00am but you will probably find me at home at 8:30
• Work ends at 5pm but you will probably find me at home at 5pm as by the time 4pm come I am ready to leave. (the 5pm traffic doesn't help either)

To further complicate things it has been raining non stop for the past couple of days and I really shouldn't be at work now as I applied for this week off and got the go ahead. As usual something popped up and my boss needs to leave the island this week so he asked if I could postpone my time off. What was funny was that it would seem he wanted to send me to Costa Rica instead but I didn't have the requisite knowledge for that meeting.

It has been a long time since I last got some days off work and it is long overdue.

on the hunt again

So I am actively house hunting again.. I'm not sure if that one bid I put in for the apartment in January counts but I contacted a real estate agent and arranged to view a townhouse today. The price was nice and it was (perfectly) located in a quiet gated complex on the outskirts of New Kingston.

One thing I can say is that real estate agents seem to be shiesty individuals, before going I asked whats the size of the place and he couldn't give me an exact figure but said around 1000 square feet. Upon reaching the place I asked him again how large it was and it magically moved up to around 1600 sq ft. I had to laugh. I asked him how old it is and he claimed 12 years 16 at most, this man either knows nothing of the place he is selling or is trying to pull a fast one on me. Upon looking at the dated place my estimate was at least 30 years old, I then took out my tape measure and calculated the place to be 950 sq ft... the place was looking less attractive by the second.

The "young first time home buyer" paint must have still been wet on my forehead as he also told me to hurry up and put in my offer as the place will be gone before the end of the day... oh well my or his loss cause I would definitely not put in any offer or deposit based off the string of lies he tried to feed me. I hope it was really his loss as the last time I was hunting for an apartment to rent I found the perfect place and lost it cause I still had a couple more weeks left on my lease and figured I would find somewhere before it expired, oh well you live and you learn.

One thing of interest was that Usain Bolt and his brother was currently renting the place, I didn't recognise him downstairs but when I was looking at the bedrooms I noticed all of their trophies in their rooms. It's a good thing I'm not a fanatic cause I am sure all the people who passed through before harassed them to no end. My mother told me about a newish (< 5years) townhouse up on the auction block due to foreclosure.. at 1700 sq ft in Mona seems to be out of the reach of my pocket but lets see what the auction brings... lots of wishful thinking.

ps.. I think this is my 100th post, break out the bubbly!

coincidence?

A coworker of mine recently started selling apple iPhones for ridiculous sums of money. He sits about 10 feet away from me and is very vocal so most people in our general vicinity knows his business so when he came in last Friday we all knew he was quite cashy. Some of his friends in the office were troubling him that somebody might rob him and one guy even said it was too late, he already sent the guy to do it. Needless to say when he came in on Monday morning he told us he got robbed at gun point over the weekend.

He was in town on his way to the airport with 1/4 million in cash cool under his gym bag in his car and they held him up took the cash and two cell phones from him but left him, his car and his mac notebook to leave unharmed... that is a bit too coincidental for me to handle.

As I have grown more paranoid over the last few years this is how much they would have lifted off of me.. a cool $150. They would have been so pissed they would have probably taken my car to make up for the rest but insurance should cover that. I'm not sure what $150 would buy but I pretty much use my credit cards for everything. I know of a few friends and my sister use this no money approach and it is a pain to get them to pay me back monies owed to me as they always show me the moth flying out their wallet/purse when they say "I don't use cash". Bastards.

I am still amazed at how quickly he got over it though, the only time he seemed upset(understandably) about it was when a coworker was teasing him and laughing about it. Although I wasn't pissed for long either after they stole some stuff from my place last year. Thankfully in that incident my company only charged me about $25,000 for carelessly leaving the laptop in the car so my losses totalled maybe $40k at most. You live and you learn.

Jamaican CES minus the E

So I decided to pass through the 2007 Digicel consumer electronics show last Saturday and yet again I feel robbed that I paid them a $400 cover fee + $100 parking fee. I figured that since they changed their venue from the normally packed Hilton Hotel to the National arena they would have improved the booths they had. If I wanted to see standing fans, fridges, chairs and insurance companies I would have gone to the plazas and done it for free.

The show was so lame that this "silver man" was reportedly the main highlight of the event. He did his robot dance, tore up a newspaper and like magic it came back whole! His silver body suit did nothing to hide every unsightly feature of his aged body and I could barely look as he did a few other mildly entertaining magic tricks. After the silverman's show digicel had a competition where a phone was the prize. This lucky fellow with his arms in the air won and he was quite deserving as he was previously owned one of those nokia flashlight phones. I was tempted to enter but I don't think my company would have appreciated that.
The fame girl on the right came up to me and asked me to give the turntables a try and after explaining to her that my music hand/eye/ear coordination left a lot to be desired she turned to begging me to play. After explaining to her how firm I was on my decision not to play I strongly encouraged her with my hand(pushed her over to them) to get one of the other patrons to play where she spent a few second talking to them, they say now then she comes back over to me. Her pursuit seemed endless so I went to talk to some other booth people and left her by the fame booth and I returned when she seemed to be more occupied. She came back over to plea with me just to come behind the table with her and she will play, I didn't have to do anything but just look. Something was very fishy with this situation, somehow she is trying to con me but I couldn't figure out what she was getting out of it. I wasn't born yesterday and I had a good enough view of the turntables from the side I was supposed to be on so I made haste and retreated from her booth.

This is the first time I was seeing a chat booth and I must say this was probably the only thing that impressed me at the expo. I got a phone call and when I went in there the blasting music and noise almost went away, they needed a few more of these and it would be perfect cause the next time I got a call I looked inside and somebody was already using it. They need a couple of these at every party, club and event.

it's peanut butter jelly time

I'm not really a fan of jam but a couple weeks ago I spotted this grape jelly at the supermarket with noodle and decided to get it since she loved grape so much. It isn't like the other jams I've had before, it's not as sweet so I am loving it. It makes a good breakfast, many days I have some crackers with peanut butter, grape jelly and maybe a banana. The other day I decided to try it with some new Cinnamon crackers and it didn't end well, the crackers were so big, tough and dry that as far as I was concerned it was inedible.. I didn't know what I was going to do with the rest of the bag. They remind me of the same nasty water crackers a previous exs used to snack on without any toppings, it always blew my mind why she liked them so much.

Seeing it was a rather big bag and I wasn't going to eat it and I think throwing away food should be a crime punishable by death I took it with me on the way to work in hopes of finding someone more needy to give it to. I didn't have to drive far before I came across the I am HIV lady, who normally hangs around the Barbican area. She was very happy for it unlike the other supposedly hungry homeless people who have asked me for money before but when I offered them some of my breakfast rejected it and walked off. I guess they were only hungry for coke.

Click her picture for more from Ria on her.

The grass is greener on the other side

After a set of long drawn out discussions Noodle and I are officially dunzo. I am no relationship expert but as far as I'm concerned we were not compatible due to the DR. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde persona she took on in the few weeks preceding our demise. The complaints, resentment, disappointment and bitterness she directed towards me made it clear what needed to be done.

She is normally a very nice girl though so in trying to make sense of her changes into Mr. Hyde I imagined the following explanation so as to not get dirty with details: Maybe she expected a knight in shining armour riding a stallion to come and whisk her away to a pampered life of luxury and no worries but instead she got me, Shrek, an ogre in rags who throws her on his donkey's back and carries her to a life of hard work for her to earn her keep.

Now this ogre was as entertaining as a rock, he thoroughly enjoyed sitting back and watching the grass grow. Tired of life in the forest, working for her supper and watching grass grow his fair maiden longed to go to the royal balls in the town and be treated as a princess should. To further complicate things there was a line of prince charmings with promises to fill said void in her life. Infuriated that all of her grooming and kisses wasn't turning her stubborn ogre into a prince she started unleash Mr. Hyde upon the ogre's humble forest life.

The ogre realizing he was the cause of all the fair maiden's distress surrendered his hold on her and released her back to her village where she can pursue her dream life with the prince of her choice. It was a hard decision to make but the ogre realizes he will never be a prince nor expect his maiden to live the ogre lifestyle and be happy but she seems to be afraid of change forgetting all of her problems she had with the ogre and wants to come back to the forest. The water is always wetter when the well runs dry.

She will be missed.. This song Ralph Tresvant - do what I gotta do seems most appropriate

Landlady changing course

The roof guy called me last Friday afternoon and said he had the material/time/tools to fix the roof and was on his way there now. When I reached home I was pleasantly surprised(thanks to his many broken promises) that the roof was fixed.. finally! What is funny is that rain fell nearly every day before the roof was fixed and since then there hasn't been a single drop.

The next day the landlady came to renovate/garden around the other empty house on the lot and blocked my car in. When I found her we were talking about my roof and she said she had to get a new guy on Friday to fix the roof. Apparently the first roof guy who called me on Friday after wasting all that time lost the job by just a few hours.. oh well, you snooze you lose.

Before moving her car she then took me on a walk around the lot and she started pointing out all the wrong things the caretakers were doing with her garden. The caretakers being the guy who lived in the now empty house and the strip club owner who lives in another house on the lot. It would seem mr. strip club used some weed killer on some weeds about the place and she , to quote her, doesn't take too kindly to weed killer. She claimed she will be taking back responsibility of her garden then finally moved her car after moaning on about other problems she had with the people on the lot... one really has to wonder what she says about me to other people. When I came back the property was well manicured and well taken care of, I hope she keeps this up.

I also visited Barbq and my old apartment over the weekend.. the place is looking really nice. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that one of the two bedroom units are for sale when I am ready to buy a house, it would be perfect :p. My only problem with over there was the parking lot was a bit on the small side for the amount of units so it is a tight squeeze to fit all cars there when everybody is in. After my whole dilemma with the landlady and the roof after the hurricane I am ready to actively start looking for somewhere to buy but I have pumped a lot of my cash into the stock market since the start of the year. I guess when the market becomes right I can reap the benefits of those investments and build a larger deposit. The analysts predicted the JSE to boom this year due to the elections.. I haven't seen anything yet, not even a spark :p, still keeping my fingers crossed.