On the mend

Snot does not make good brain matter.

No matter how hard you try to think, no matter how experienced your fingers are at finding the right keys on the keyboard, if snot has taken over your brain matter, you are intellectually doomed. At least until your brain reasserts itself.

It's times like this that I am almost willing to bow down and kiss the feet of the Micro Soft monolith for inventing spell check and a grammar checker, otherwise my snot-tainted mental efforts would be even more puerile than they are. I cannot even correct half of the typos, my befuddled brain guiding my fingers over and over again to the wrong keys. Sludge behind the eyes keeps them half closed and contributes to the slowness of logic function. The "Aha! I get it!" moments are few and far between, and when they do occur, they are sufficiently after the event to be embarrassing.

Everything about me is slow except my nose, which runs with alacrity. My brain is slow, my comprehension, my composition, my gait...my life seems to be running in slow motion in comparison to the giddy antics of my dogs, who are enjoying my poor reflexes and the treats they can snatch when my attention is drawn away from my lunch or snacks. Of course I try to foil them with snacks of fruit but that doesn't work on Candy, who shows an alarming propensity to eat anything that crosses her nostrils, from curry to almonds to cauliflower to sweet fruits.

My nose, on the other hand, seems to have moved into superspeed. It can go from clear to "ACK! I CAN'T BREATHE!" to a compromise of one side open, the other side closed, all in the matter of a single minute. I should be owning stock in Kimberly-Clark so I could get some dividends back on the gross of Kleenex boxes I've gone through in the past few days.

Little by little my brain functions seem to be returning, soldiering through the sticky sludge that pollutes their environs to begin to rebuild what is left of my inundated brain, rather like slogging through the layer of mud after a flood. I'm still tired...I wanted a nap after I expended all that energy on a shower a couple of hours ago!...but Hubby says I must be improving since my curiosity is returning and I am asking questions again, instead of just groaning and hacking.

Speaking of Hubby, there's the one bright spot in this, one of my less enthusiastic adventures. Without complaint he has endured my crankiness, whining, moaning and various unpleasant noises that go with an upper repiratory infection. He's brought me tea and fruit and juice, opened and closed windows and doors, endured my alternating needs for heating and cooling, and has generally been a really great sport about this whole thing.

On balance, icky germ or no, I think I'm pretty lucky.

Generators, Eskom, and my wallet

Hubby is an engineering manager for Eskom and, as such, has access to information the rest of us don’t have. A few weeks back, based on some of that insider knowledge, he began to consider having a generator fitted to our house and wired into the DB board so that in the event of a power cut or failure, we could still have electricity.

We had a brief discussion over the weekend and, for a considerable variety of reasons, have decided against it, despite knowing that the load shedding may continue for as many as five or more years. Access to the funds to do so is not an issue…we have a comfortable income, investments that could be liquidated if necessary, excellent credit and a huge amount of equity in both our home and our rental property. Access to the cash to add a generator and have it professionally installed so that it would automatically start up and switch over at the drop of a KW is no problem for us.

The problem lies in our assessment of the situation. We have come to the conclusion that it is the wrong thing to do for a variety of reasons:

1) First of all, we decided that we can live without electricity for 2 to 3 hours per day. The notion that our lives will crumble and fall apart because we can’t watch Oprah or Noot vir Noot is just stupid. Yes, it will be inconvenient, but since when are we guaranteed convenience in our lives? I mean, how spoiled can I be that I resent having to light a couple of candles and read a book or play scrabble or cards with my husband?

To be honest, it just wasn’t that hard to arrange my maid’s work around the outages. Since, if we are going to have an outage, it usually occurs between noon and 2:30, I’ve restructured her work schedule so that, during that period of time, she is doing things that don’t require electricity, like sweeping, mopping, dusting, washing windows, changing beds, etc. She can vacuum and do the wash as soon as she gets here, and when the power returns at 2:30, she can do the ironing and any other chores requiring electricity.

Why can’t my own work be arranged that way? The blackouts are a good time to do tasks that don’t require electricity, whether it is cleaning out cupboards, clearing out the garage or wendy house, sorting and filing papers, or hauling stuff. Sitting down and thinking of ways to be productive without electricity for a paltry two hours a day may not exactly be easy, but who among us was promised that life would be easy?

My own father was raised in a household without electricity or running water or telephones…and he’s still alive and kicking (and fully electrified). All of our ancestors until about a hundred years or so ago, lived their entire lives without the stuff. How can we be such whingers over losing its benefits for a trifling two hours every couple of days?

2) Purchasing a generator is quite a financial commitment…I’d rather spend the money elsewhere. The cost/benefit just doesn’t move me to parting with thousands of rand: how much is a couple of hours of electricity a couple of times a week worth to me, anyway? Not that much!

3) One thing nobody has thought of is the pollution problem. If you run a diesel or petrol generator, you are going to create both noise and air pollution. Having that diesel generator clattering along at the back of your garage would be very much like having a large diesel truck sitting there, idling for a couple hours and pumping a mass of hydrocarbons into the atmosphere. Imagine if all of your neighbours also had the equivalent of a diesel truck idling in their gardens all at the same time…

4) Then there is the matter of fuel. First, you have the logistics of keeping your generator fuelled: you’ve got to get fuel containers, then you have to fill them…which is not going to be cheap. Then you have to transport them safely. Then you have to have a safe place to store them…how close to your bedroom or lounge or children’s playroom do you want a fuel dump? And, of course, there is the matter of filling the beast and then going out again for more fuel.

Second, if we all decide to run out and buy generators for our homes…even if that many generators are available at prices we can pay…we will put huge pressure on fuel availability. And what happens when a commodity is in short supply? The cost increases.

Did someone say “biofuels”? Well, if we are dealing in futures here, eventually Eskom is going to get this sorted out and we won’t have the load shedding anymore. Biofuels come with their own set of problems, including lack of immediate availability. And, frankly, in a country where poverty-induced hunger is still a significant social issue, I have serious moral qualms about removing food sources from the reach of the poor just so I can surf the net while my neighbour’s house is dark. Only if I can be absolutely guaranteed that turning corn into fuel won’t make the price of corn rise or reduce the availability of cheap mielies for poor people, will I consider biofuels a viable solution. It is more important for poor people to eat than for middle class people to have light.

5) One of the things we are not considering is that this is a short term problem. Do I want to spend thousands of rand to purchase an alternative power source for my house when, in just a few years, it won’t be needed? Ok, if my power was down 4 hours every day, I might consider it, depending on what time of the day the outages were occurring. Or, if this is what electric service was going to be from this day forward…then it might make sense to have the alternative power. But two hours just a few times a month? Sound like a huge waste of money to me.

6) Which brings me to our final reason for rejecting the idea of installing a generator: cost effectiveness. It ain’t.

Diesel generators costs thousands of rand. Installing it so it will power at least a few of your mains plugs isn’t free, and setting it up to automatically switch over isn’t free either. Then you have to count the cost of fuel and maintenance of the generator (just like the engine of a diesel bakkie, it’s going to need maintenance from time to time). Add this all up and divide it by the number of hours you think you are going to need it this year. If you get hit with load shedding twice a week, that’s about 5 hours a week or 260 hours per year. Assuming you can do all your own electrical installation without frying yourself or your house wiring, what is it going to cost you?

Well, a generator big enough to supply a small household can run you R10 000, assuming you are not buying a name brand like Honda or Cummins. One that I investigated has a 12.5 litre fuel tank and will run about 12 hours on a tank of fuel. So, assuming best case scenario, i.e., no maintenance required on the generator, no increase in petrol/diesel prices, you average two outages a week and the power crisis is solved in 5 years, allowing you to retire the generator, how much is that 2.5 hours per day going to cost you via generator? Just under R22, or about R44 per week. Now, let’s assume the criteria remains constant, but the power crisis is resolved in 2 year: just over R50 per day, or R100 per week. If fuel prices rise, so will this operating cost. If the number of load shedding incidents drop to less than an average of two per week, the average operating cost will also rise. And, if you had to hire someone to do the installation, that cost will be higher still. Bottom line…are you prepared to fork out R400 a month for 20 hours of electricity? What do you think you will be doing with that electricity that it is worth R400 over and above your current expenses? Washing a load of clothes? Surfing the net? Watching TV?

For me, it seems a lot of cost and not a lot of benefit. The outages don’t happen that often, and when they do happen, they don’t last that long. I can live without a couple of hours of electricity…I could do it every day, if I had to, without much difficulty. Oh, I’d have to give some thought to things I could do by natural sunlight or candlelight, but I like to think and solve puzzles, so it’s no biggie.

When I consider that my father grew up in a house with no electricity, that he was able to finish high school (including homework), that he ate nutritious meals and didn’t suffer from food poisoning, even though they didn’t have refrigeration, it tells me that being deprived of my power two hours each day is a very tiny sacrifice for the benefit of my adopted homeland.

What can you do when your electricity goes out?

I have a very nice life...

I have a very nice life.

It’s not perfect, by any stretch of the imagination, but at this time in my life I am living better than at any time in my past.

For some people, life is a struggle from the moment they are born…and it remains a struggle until the day they die. The definition of struggle is subjective, of course, dependent on the lowest common denominator for survival in the society in question. But in my life, the struggle to simply survive, to have enough to eat and a warm, dry place to rest my head, often came perilously close to being lost.

A person living in a tipsy shack on the edges of Gugulethu might find that comment laughable, since I grew up in America, but it is no less true for all that my definition of privation is richer than hers might be. Before the word “homeless” came into common use, I found myself so, staying with a series of friends and working peripatetically. When I was able to establish my own place, it was an endless struggle to earn enough money to pay for that roof and eat. There were infinite days of hunger, eating one scant meal a day or living on unsweetened, milkless oatmeal for days at a time. There was a time that my entire cache of personal possessions could be rolled up into a sleeping bag and carried on my back.

This life of privation was not freely chosen, not a vagabond manifestation of my hippie soul or artistic free spirit, but the culmination of a series of events in my life, most of them not of my choosing. From the sexist paradigm that deprived me of a scholarship opportunity in favour of a less-deserving male student to the corporate ball-gazing that deprived me of a respectable career opportunity because their tests told them I was “too smart to be happy doing this work,” I found myself uneducated, unqualified, and unemployed.

For most of my life I compounded an unfortunate beginning with expedient choices that had short term advantages but were long term disasters. But hardship creates limits, not only on opportunity but on your thinking. Long term planning is not possible when you have been forced to focus and plan only as far as the next meal or the next night’s rest. It was a relief to come to a place where I could plan week by week instead of day by day. And it was a luxury when I could indulge in month-to-month living, although no less a struggle.

My life has never been one of plenty. Even when I reached a time of having an abundance of stuff, I knew no other way to live than to battle my way through life. I never lived in an upscale community, I could barely afford to buy a house in a working class neighbourhood and then it was a never-ending struggle to scrape together enough money to pay the mortgage. Twice I came perilously close to foreclosure, and only managed to get out from under by refinancing the house…increasing my debt and monthly burden, and paying the instalments from the proceeds of the new loan, a strategy calculated to end badly, but the only solution available.

I had dreams, but unlike others, I never mistook those dreams for reality, entitlement, or even goals. Life had ground me into a pragmatist, a person who knew her dreams were just that…castles in the air…pretty fictions to be enjoyed but never mistaken for reality…or even possibility. One of my favourite dreams was to come to a place where I could work for the pleasure of it, not for the necessity. In this dream, I would have a fine house…not opulent, but generously sized and nicely situated in a pretty garden…and I would drive a nice car. My life would have security and I would feel loved and valued by my partner. In this dream I would have a nice car…practical, of course, so I would not feel guilty for having it…but a quality marque. I would not have to worry about money…and although I would be able to surround myself with things of beauty and quality, lavishness didn’t seem to be a part of my dreams. And I would be forever relieved of the drudgery of housework…I had laboured as my mother’s maid from the time I was big enough to drag a chair to the kitchen sink and wash the dinner dishes, and the ultimate luxury, to my mind, was someone to wash my dishes and clean my bathroom on a regular basis without stressing my budget.

It is perhaps a supreme irony that I grew up in the richest nation on Earth and could not partake in its wealth. I was born with a fine native intelligence but that is not enough in a society that values educational certification over intellect and quickness, that values one gender over another, that substitutes supposition for empiricism. Like most women of my generation, I ultimately looked to marriage for my salvation but I soon found myself in another situation of short term gain followed by long term loss: marriage should never be entered into with ulterior motives, no matter how compelling they might be.

Ultimately I was able to have a life free of hunger and privation, but maintaining that life was an endless struggle. Always, I was one payday away from disaster, one severance package away from losing it all. In Silicon Valley, where I lived most of my adult life and where big companies eat little companies and giant corporations swallow big companies whole without warning, sudden unemployment is a fact of life. But in a place where an executive secretary earns less than $5000 a month but the monthly payment on a modest tract home in a lower middle-class neighbourhood can take all that and more, the distance between affluence and desperation can be measured in weeks of unemployment after a sudden downsizing or corporate buy out. When it takes all you can earn to just keep above water, when you are no longer earning, you drown quickly. And all of the months of princely earnings do not blunt the sword that hangs portentously over your head…on the day the pay checks stop, the sinking begins.

And so I found myself widowed, alone, my income cut in half, my obligations undiminished. Life insurance is an unattainable luxury when you have to worry from one month to the next if you will have enough money to make your modest mortgage payment, when you don’t have enough to put new tires on the 14-year-old truck or the 24-year old station wagon, when you have given up all of your costly vices and still have to scrounge for change for enough gas to get to work. What had been a modestly successful effort by two people to live with a modicum of comfort became the uphill battle of one person to survive.

But there was an epiphany in that sudden plunge into widowhood and self-sufficiency: the sure and certain knowledge that if I kept doing the same things, I would keep getting the same results. A never-ending length of days full of scrimping and struggling stretched before me…unless I changed something.

And so I did. I took out that loan and finished the renovation of my house. I took a long term temp job that paid rather well because the boss was especially odious and couldn’t keep employees from throwing up their hands and walking out…they had to bribe us with fat salaries to stay in our jobs. I just ignored her nasty barbs, icy demeanour and picky personality and put those voluptuous pay checks in the bank. And I began rewriting my life rules.

The first rule I rewrote was the one that said I had to pinch every penny and live close to the bone. I finally remembered that worry is a wholly unproductive activity…the only thing it is good for is to increase stress levels.

The next rule I rewrote was the one about being appropriate. I started wearing brighter colours, I quit fretting about my weight, and opened myself to new experiences, people, even foods.

I then decided that people who live in the past have no future and began planning the next chapter in my life rather than staying stuck in old ones.

Funny thing about opening yourself to new stuff…new stuff happens! Today, that little old tract house is someone else’s burden and I have a lovely, spacious home set in a third of a landscaped acre. My old pickup has been replaced by a Mercedes SUV, and that horrible boss is ancient history: now I employ the sweetest little maid you could ever want to meet and a weekly gardener. My new husband is a professional man who earns a respectable income, is investment savvy, and pays the bills without stressing me about finances. “It hurt me to think of you alone and struggling like when I met you,” he told me the day he increased his life insurance…this, despite his being considerably younger than I am.

I like my life. I live in a beautiful home set in a beautiful garden, all located in one of the most beautiful cities in the world. My house and garden are superbly kept with very little effort on my part. I can buy what I want in the supermarket, although years of frugal living have conspired to keep me from being a spendthrift and I still shop the sales…but now it’s the steak and chops sales rather than hamburger!

Most of all, my life is filled with love. A horde of happy yappy little doggies dance at my feet when I return from an outing, my maid hugs me when she comes to work with her handsome little baby boy tied to her back and again when she goes home in the afternoon. And my husband…he has half a dozen pet names for me, he brings me chocolate when I least expect it, and tells me he loves me without warning or prompting.

Yes, I like my life. It is full, it is abundant, it is rich with those things necessary for a life of comfort and security and love.

Pity I had to come half way around the world to achieve it.