Hubby moves up the corporate ladder!

It's been a while since I've blogged and I won't make any excuses except to say that I've been rather tied up with things that sort keep me from ruminating...which is necessary before a good blog can form itself up. But Hubby has recently had a event of which I am inordinately proud...

The Western Cape has suffered from electricity supply problems for just about a year now. Not only has the unprecedented (and unexpected) migration to the Cape from other regions of the country caused unanticipated demand to the existing infrastructure, the local power plant suffered a shut down of several months for repairs, throwing us into months of rolling blackouts and unplanned interruptions.

Koeberg Nuclear Power Station, Africa’s only nuke, provides about half of Cape Town’s power needs, the rest coming overland from upcountry coal-fired stations. Cape Town, being the most outlying location on the national grid, continued to suffer from unplanned outages whenever there was a disruption on the grid. In addition to seeing to the repair of the damaged Koeberg generator, Eskom, South Africa’s national power utility, responded to Cape town’s travails by embarking upon an ambitious plan to increase generating capacity in the Western Cape, a plan that could eventually end Cape Town's virtual dependence on the national grid.

First, however, Eskom had to replace the damaged rotor in one of Koeberg’s two generators…and they had to do it fast. The reactor powering the undamaged generator was scheduled to be taken down for refuelling in just a few months, and there was no way that Cape Town could enjoy an adequate electrical supply with both generators out of service. A replacement was located in France, but the massive 200 ton behemoth defied conventional methods of transport. My husband was appointed Logistics Manager on the “Generator Recovery Project,” and tasked with finding a way to transport the rotor not only to Cape Town harbour, but up the 30+ miles of urban and suburban roadways to the power station as well. The generator went down on Christmas Day, 2005, and on 5 April, 2006, after weeks at sea on a South African naval vessel, the rotor arrived. Hubby arranged the loan of the naval vessel and crew, a 12-axle trailer and two tractors to transport the rotor from the harbour to the power station, and a pair of massive mobile cranes to offload the rotor from the ship and onto the trailer, and later from the trailer to the generator housing. It was a Herculean undertaking, but ultimately successful. By the time the second reactor had to be taken off line for refuelling, the rotor had been installed and the damaged generator was repaired and on line. And Hubby returned to his regular job as a Senior Engineer for the PBMR project. http://www.engineeringnews.co.za/eng/sector/energy/?show=84289

Eskom, however, was determined not to get caught with its pants down again. Construction of two gas-fired power plants near Cape Town were fast-tracked and nebulous plans for a second nuke at the Koeberg location were firmed up. Cape Town, the fastest growing location in South Africa, was no longer going to be a poor step-sister on the grid: the Mother City was slated to have enough locally generated power to at least meet her needs, and possibly enough excess power capacity to meet peak seasonal demands without depending on the national grid.

Ground was broken in Mossel Bay, a small town on the other side of the Cape Peninsula, and at Atlantis, an economically depressed settlement only a few kilometres from the Koeberg power station, for the construction of the two gas-fired plants. Hubby was restless after his success with the rotor project, and his present assignment was moving ahead at a snail’s pace, affording him little professional satisfaction and precious little opportunity for advancement. Looking at the company intranet one afternoon, he found a division that was seeking to fill four Chief Engineer openings. With his rotor project success recently tucked under his belt, he applied and, just a month ago, flew up to Johannesburg for an interview.

Most new job offers are anything but instantaneous. Usually you interview, you come back for at least one more interview, then you wait interminably until either you get a card saying “thanks, but no thanks” or The Phone Call. Less than an hour after Hubby left the Johannesburg offices, while he was still in the car en route to his hotel, his cell phone rang and the division had an even better offer for him than Chief Engineer (in a location that would not require us to leave our idyllic Cape Town home). Seems the Atlantis gas plant, which is presently half built, needs a Site Engineering Manager…and once that site is up and running, there will be a promotion available, 12 to 18 months out, on the new nuke that will be going up on the Koeberg site…was he interested? They faxed the formal offer to him at home the very next day.

Requesting a transfer, offer in hand, turned out to be a bigger drama than going to Joburg and interviewing for the new job. The whole of Eskom has less than two dozen turbine specialist engineers, and of those, only two are nuclear qualified…Hubby being one of them. When he presented the offer and the transfer request to his boss, all hell broke loose! Not only did the boss refuse to sign the transfer request, he tried to turn the meeting into an impromptu criticism of Hubby’s performance. Strangely, his boss claimed that the project really needed Hubby’s rather rare skill set, but when Hubby said he would consider staying for a salary increase and promotion (there are three open management slots in the department), the boss turned him down…and heaped a bit more character assassination on him. Great way to keep the talent, eh?

The new organization, however, was keen to have him and, once the transfer was signed (the boss wasn’t allowed to refuse…the transfer request was just kicked upstairs until someone in authority signed it) Hubby discovered that his new boss was someone he knew and had successfully worked with for five years at another location. Because the gas plant was only half built, Hubby was concerned about offices and local infrastructure, and didn’t even know if he was going to be the sole engineer on site or if he would be assembling a staff. Imagine his surprise when his new boss chatted with him a couple of days ago and revealed that there was already an engineering department of 10 on site! Last Friday his present department gave him a going away party and he has been accosted half a dozen times since by engineers in his old department volunteering to come to work for him at the new location.

So, at the tender age of 34, he’s broken into the engineering management ranks, his first assignment giving him a staff of ten in a brand new facility. He tries hard not to show it, but I can see that he’s proud of himself, and with good reason. Here’s hoping he finds management everything he has hoped it would be!

Lifestyles of the Crazy and Famous

I am among the growing numbers of people who think Tom Cruise has slipped a cog or two and is now paddling his canoe up Cuckoo Creek. Craziness, however, does not necessarily mean a person lacks intelligence or the ability to think and plan well…it just means the person’s thinking and planning are carried out within a framework of standards, beliefs, and perceptions that the bulk of us do not share.

Yesterday it was announced that Cruise and Paramount had, after 14 years, parted ways. Since there was a controversy as to who bounced whom, I spent a little time perusing a variety of websites dedicated to celebrity news, hoping to gather enough diverse crumbs to piece together the most likely scenario.

All things considered, I’m taking Paramount’s version of the event. In the Wall Street Journal Viacom chairman Sumner Redstone remarked “His recent conduct has not been acceptable to Paramount.” Reducing euphemism to Corporate-Speak, what Redstone is saying that due to his increasingly nutty personal behaviour, Cruise’s box-office appeal is declining and, now that contract renewal time affords an ideal opportunity to divest itself of what is beginning to look like a growing liability, Paramount doesn’t want to be chained to a sinking stone. In plain English, Tom’s crazy behaviour is starting to drive people away from the box office and Paramount wants to ends its association with Tom before its profits are hurt. Continues Redstone: “…we don't think that someone who effectuates creative suicide and costs the company revenue should be on the lot."

Yah, he’s cost Paramount a chunk of money…it’s reported that he gets a 25 percent cut of the gross of his movies…one quarter of every coin you spend on a ticket…and the cost of the production has to be borne by what remains. His antics have caused his box office to decline, so fewer people are seeing his movies than in the past…but his budgets aren’t declining. Apparently the production costs of MI3 exceeded the US box office take, of which Cruise got 25% off the top, leaving Paramount to make up the difference. The movie may have been a box office hit, but it left a dent in Paramount’s bottom line. Had Cruise not poisoned his well, more of us would have gone to the movie and maybe Paramount would have made a buck.

One of the problems with this kind of production deal is that misbehaving stars like Cruise, Lohan, or Gibson don’t actually bear the brunt of their behaviour. If they have a substantial cut of the gross of the film, success or failure are immaterial because they make money whether the film does or not…and whether they behaviour influences the ticket-buying public or not. So, Cruise can insult women with post-partum depression, talk down to his host on national television, and revert to his simian ancestry on Oprah with relative financial impunity…even if we stay away from his movie in droves and the thing is a box office flop, he still gets 25% of the take and Paramount drowns in red ink.

Shame…I used to like Tom Cruise movies, but I have to side with Paramount. As a movie-goer, I find it difficult to watch Tom on-screen without images of his embarrassing couch-hopping or his incredibly supercilious pillorying of Brook Shields or his arrogant behaviour towards Matt Lauer overlaying his on-screen character. I don’t want to go to his movies anymore…I don’t want MY hard-won money to fund a silly pseudo-religious cult that was founded by a crazy conman-cum-crappy science fiction writer. I don’t want to be a party to the kind of insanity that publicly scorns the users of legitimate medical treatment absent solid scientific reasons. And I especially do not want my ticket money ending up helping to fund the exploitation of the innocent.

Yes, I’m talking about Suri Cruise. The fact that her daddy is virtually certifiable at this stage does not mean he is bereft of guile and cunning…or greed. “Crazy like a fox” is a phrase that comes to mind here. With the world hanging on the imminent birth of Shiloh Jolie-Pitt, Crazy Tom had the business acumen to realize that his little gift to humanity would be upstaged by the arrival of Brangelina’s babe, so he took the sly tack of hiding Suri from the world until it was sated with Shiloh and suddenly remembered that there was a little Cruise cruisin’ around, sight unseen. And, once Shiloh’s pictures were sold, the value of Suri’s photos could then be established…and if the offers weren’t high enough, she could continue to be hidden from view until the value inched up enough to surpass the benchmark figure of Shiloh’s photoshoot.

Aw, do I really think he is that mercenary and calculating? Yup, I do. Over the past year or so it has become increasingly obvious that Cruise veered sharply off the path of compassion and common sense sometime between his divorce from Nicole and his ensorcelment of Katie…oops—Kate…Holmes. His suffocating control of Holmes, from dictating what she will be called to how she would be permitted to give birth (silently and without drugs!) bespeaks a bone-deep misogyny and ingrained controlling nature that has flourished since the departure of the strong (and strong-willed) Kidman. Pity the girl child raised by such a father…a man who can do no wrong in his own eyes, a man for whom the accumulated wisdom of the world fades into subordination to his own concepts.

Yup, I got to go along with Paramount. They took a sound business decision to unhitch their wagon from a falling star, to a man spiralling out of control for lack of rational touchstones outside his own microcosm of incestuous thought and support. Tom Cruise and Company can contradict Paramount’s announcement with claims of having quit rather been fired, but the fact remains that contract negotiations broke down when Paramount balked at renewing their old, profit-bleeding deal (confirmed by Cruise’s production partner, Paula Wagner). Whether Cruise then walked or Paramount chucked him out the door is virtually immaterial: Paramount made the decision that Cruise wasn’t worth the cost to them anymore and calculatedly made an offer that they knew Cruise had to refuse. Damned by faint praise, as it were.

So the question now becomes, what is to happen to Crazy Tom and his entourage? Will he feather his nest by leaking the occasional multi-million dollar pic of little Suri? Will Kate Holmes ever make another movie? Will Tom? Does anybody really care anymore?

Life’s Odd Little Details…

I have been sick. Not just sick, but sick. And this weekend I finally began feeling a little bit like normal myself.

In the weeks I have been under the weather, life has continued apace. For three weeks I battled one of the worst sinus infections I have ever had, taking three double-strength courses of antibiotics before it was finally brought under control. Unfortunately, that much antibiotic tends to have side effects…and I immediately came down with a fungus infection which, mercifully, was short lived. This was followed by a virus that attacked my joints and muscles and digestive system and lasted nearly a week, which was followed by a mild cold or an allergy…which has reactivated the sinus infection, but much milder than before. Today I’m sitting up, my mind is clear…although my head is still a bit stuffed up…and I feel like I just might make it through the day without resorting either to a nap or pain pills.

Hubby managed to time his business trip to Richard’s Bay…to see the old rotor off to Europe…to coincide with my virus and managed to escape unscathed. Nashie’s sister, Sasha, is getting along better each day…she is now sleeping with the other doggies in the doggie bed, rather than huddling alone on a cushion.

Nashie seems to be unaffected by the addition of another dog to the mix, but Candy is ambivalent. On the one hand, she makes regular attempts to play with Sasha…but on the other hand, she doesn’t want to sleep in the doggie bed when Sasha is in it. Nash, however, has bigger fish to fry…he is being romantically pursued by a Hadeda bird. Yup, you read that right…a Hadeda bird.

We have a really big back garden and after a rain it is not unusual to see a small flock of these big, loud creatures probing the back lawn for grubs and worms. Recently, a single bird has been dropping by and, rather than silently harvesting the goodies from the soil beneath the lawn, it stands in the middle of the open space and raucously calls for Nash to come out. At first we didn’t get what was going on…we opened the doggie door for Nash to rush out and chase the bird…his normal response to them…but instead of flying immediately up into a tree to escape his attentions, the bird took off running! And it ran until Nash came within catching distance, at which time it flew up onto the garden wall, only to come back down and resume the game as soon as he had retreated to a safe distance.

A few days later we saw the bird collecting nesting materials in the back garden and came to the conclusion that it was female, so Hubby christened her “Cleo.” Her visits became more and more frequent, and she became more and more bold. When Nash didn’t respond to her rasping calls, she came looking for him. She would tap with her beak on the window he uses as a doggie door, or flutter her wings against it and, considering the size of her, it made quite ruckus!

This has become a regular thing now, and over the weekend she actually perched herself on a patio chair outside the bedroom window and peered inside, looking for him, crying hoarsely for him to come outside and play. Silly bird…

So, today I’m back on the road to recovery, surrounded by little white doggies and listening to the hoarse song of a lovesick Hadeda bird…my rather unconventional life seems to be coming back on track…

Our family grows

First there was Nash.

My husband was never very fond of dogs, having been rather savagely bitten as a child...on two occasions...but while dating me, he grew rather fond of my ancient little Pekingese, Chloe. When I came to South Africa, Chloe had to stay behind...I feared she was too old to survive the trip...so when I arrived here, it was to an empty house. My furniture was in transit, my dog had a new home, and my husband was at work all day.

But he is a kind-hearted man and loves me enough to face his fear of dogs. Leafing through one of the local circulars one day, I came across a small ad about an elderly woman in our town known to everyone as the "Dog Lady." She was known to be a person who would rescue abandoned animals and care for them until she could rehome them. Unfortunately, she had unexpectedly died recently and left a houseful of animals with no caretaker. The woman's daughter and granddaughter had taken on the task of finding homes for a dozen or more dogs and cats, and were advertising for interested homes.

After conferring with my husband, I called the ad and gave them a rather detailed set of specifications: an adult dog, small sized, housebroken, gentle natured, preferably female. I explained that my husband was not keen on dogs and if we were to get one, it had to be as non-threatening and "user friendly" as possible. The following day two rescuers showed up at my house for a visit, and with them was fluffy white little Nash.

It was a surprising visit. Nashie is a very friendly, open personality dog but not highly active or energetic. So he walked up to Hubby with a wag in his plumed tail and a smile on his doggie face, stretched himself up and put a paw on Hubby's leg. They bonded. We had a dog.

The nice thing about the Maltese breed is they have hair, not fur, so they don't shed or have dander or activate my allergies. The not-so-nice thing about the Maltese breed is that they have hair, not fur, so their hair never stops growing and if you don't take them to the groomers every month, they quickly come to look like animated dustmops. Nashie had recently been groomed, so his body hair was cut short, and he looked like a dapper little gentleman. But there were a couple of things that seemed a little off: he wasn't a very good eater and was therefore a little on the thin side, and he had breath bad enough to wilt plants. That last particularly concerned me, so I whisked him off to the vet and soon learned the two were related: he was thin and not eating because his teeth were bad...which was causing the bad breath. Further, his teeth were so bad that he was on the verge of sepsis! The very next day he was put under and emerged with only 7 teeth left in his whole mouth! After two courses of antibiotics he was finally healed and we were to quickly learn just how formidable his appetite really was!

But he was lonely. Having been abandoned several times (failed placements), Nash had developed separation anxiety and everytime we left him alone, he howled nonstop until we returned, much to the chagrin of our neighbours. After trying behaviour modification and tranquilizers, we finally found the solution to his anxiety problems: enter Miss Candy (AKA Evil Doggie, Mad Thing, and Toothsome Wench).

Hubby took me to the SPCA for Valentine's Day and we found a rambunctious, long-legged, spring-loaded young Maltese/Jack Russell female who had the beautiful white coat of a Maltese and the boundless energy of the Jack Russell. After filling out a five page form, paying R265, and having our home and garden inspected (!), we were approved as an adoptive home under the SPCA's guidelines, and Candy was ours.

It was slow going in the beginning. Candy had been a street dog and what manners she had were bad. She nipped me and Hubby, she dug in the garden, she was aggressive with Nash, and she was given to bursts of mad, frenetic activity, racing around our large garden like the devil himself was perched on her ostrich-plume of a tail. And Nash's little nose was put squarely out of joint by her arrival, his position as spoiled darling of the household in jeopardy. The Count of Maltese Cristo was definitely not enamoured of his Countess! But time is the greatest of healers and eventually Candy acceded to our discipline and Nash came to tolerate her antics and within the span of just a few months they were friends...and Nash stopped howling when we left him home.

We made a cosy little family, the two dog-babies and their indulgent parents, and had no serious thought about adding to the family, but a year and a half after Candy joined us, the daughter of the Dog Lady called us out of the blue...Nash's sister, Sasha, with whom he had lived the first six years of his life, needed a new home. Her second family was emigrating to the UK, which has a six month quarantine for incoming dogs (at the expense of the owner), and she was about to be homeless again. Were we interested?

We agreed to a one week trial, concerned about how Candy would react to a new dog, but the trial was short lived. Sasha arrived here at 7 last night and I was appalled that these people had had her for 2 years and she had no collar or leash, it was winter and she had a short haircut but no jersey, and she had no toys, no blanket, no doggie bed...nothing but a bowl. Candy came from the SPCA and I expected her to arrive naked as the day she was born, but this dog supposedly was coming from a loving home and she didn't even have a collar and a tag with her name and owner's phone number, in case she got lost? By 10 pm, our bedtime, the decision was made: Sasha would stay and as soon as I finish recovering from my sinus infection and can drive again (no driving while under the influence of these pain pills!), we have to go to the vet (she has bad breath, too, and she won't let us touch her ears), the groomer (funky doggie smell!), and the pet store (collar, leash, jersey) with a stop at the kiosk where doggie ID tags are made.

Sasha needs us and, I am sure we will soon discover that, without knowing it, we needed her, too.

I used to have very nice neighbours...

When we moved into this house in December of 2004, we were pleased to find ourselves living next door to a very nice family. Two clean-cut, wholesome teens and a puckish, energetic 6-year-old, parents and a sleep-in maid. We didn’t establish any kind of a friendship, mind you…simply introduced ourselves and continued living our own private lives, but they were very nice people and, with the exception of the occasional security gate slam that reverberated through our house, quiet.

A few months back we noticed they were cleaning out their garage and then, in a casual conversation with the teen aged son, it was revealed that they were planning to move in a few months. Nothing more was said, but the big black sacks of discards kept showing up on trash day, and finally one morning we saw a “To Let” sign in the front garden.

We braced ourselves for new neighbours…you can never tell what you are going to get when the house next door changes hands, and we hoped for the best. We live just a stone’s throw from the high school, so teen-aged kids next door was almost a given: we could only hope that the incoming family would make as comfortable a set of neighbours as the outgoing.

After a few days the board disappeared and we naturally presumed that new tenants had been procured and would be moving in shortly. One morning we awoke to the sound of slamming doors next door, chaos in their back garden, and other various and sundry noises. Sounded like moving day. The problem was, moving day seemed to go on forever. Although we never seemed to hear fighting or deafening music, the sounds of slamming doors and other disturbing noises continued—even escalated—and they got earlier and earlier in the morning…and later and later at night. I began watching for the new neighbours to arrive home so I might stop over and introduce myself and have a chat with them, but they were elusive: never did I hear their car enter the driveway or see it leave.

The racket continued unabated. One morning, before the early sun had cracked the hard shell of darkness surrounding the city, banging, shuddering noises came from the house next door, as if someone was beating on the security bars. Inured to their noises now, I did not call the police, but listened carefully for a few minutes, in case any sounds of distress might come over the wall. Quiet soon reigned, but it was not to last. Before I knew it afternoon had crept upon me and the private bus engaged to transport the youngest child to and from school had arrived. From my vantage point at my office window, I could see the curly headed moppet emerge from the bus and bounce his way towards the gate in the front wall, out of my line of sight. He looked amazingly like the kid who had moved away!

It took only a few days of careful listening to the next door noises (as opposed to intentionally tuning them out) to discover that, indeed, it was the same child. In fact, it was the same family! Apparently they had renewed their lease with their landlord and remained in the house.

But something obviously had changed for, the quiet neighbours who occupied the house next door during my first 18 months here have unaccountably changed into a houseful of noisy, door-slamming, window-rattling, pot-banging, peace-fracturing characters who make my bedroom, the windows of which face their house, something less than the sanctuary it once was.

I miss my old neighbours. I wonder where they went.

Winter's Embrace

Winter…7 am and still as dark as the inside of George Bush’s brain.

With the seasons reversed down here at the nether end of the globe, the shortest day of our year falls in June. June 22, to be exact, nearly a fortnight distant. Although the recent days have been bright and clear, there is an unmistakable crispness to the air that lets you know, make no mistake about it, winter is upon us.

The doggies wear their hated jerseys day and night now, huddling together in the fat, cushy doggie bed at night and squirming into the big bed full of warm people at first light. Slim, long-legged Candy, with her curly white poodle cut, wears her forest green knit turtleneck like a supermodel, platinum ears flowing, dark, expressive eyes flashing. Portly Nash, on the other hand, looks like a rotund little white-whiskered professor in his fleecy green-and-grey argyle vest.

The past few nights haven’t been cold enough to turn on the heaters, although we had a cold snap a week or so back that had us all huddled together beneath the fat new duvet we bought on holiday last year. Amazingly, South African houses are built without heating systems…unless you count fireplaces (which are no more numerous than in American homes)…and the winters here can be bone-chillingly cold, particularly with the stiff winds that are an integral part of the Cape Town experience. Those winds are a blessing in the dry, scorching summer months, for they both cool the air and remove air pollution, leaving the area a veritable playground in paradise. In the winter, however, they serve to exacerbate the deep chill.

By the time the gardener arrived at eight the sun had flung itself into the sky, but its light lacked warmth. Time being money for him, Christopher set to work immediately, his breath issuing out in a visible vapour ordinarily uncommon here. The lack of winter cloud cover proved itself a blessing, allowing the sun to grow robust enough to finally warm the crisp air and chill earth. By ten, Christopher’s jacket was draped neatly over a patio chair, his bare arms glistening with sweat as he clipped and snipped the rain-driven recent growth of what was rapidly becoming a small suburban jungle. Only Christopher’s weekly ministrations keep the enthusiastic vegetation at bay.

The afternoon was sunny and warm outside, but the thick brick walls of the house tend to retain the night-time chill. Sans furnace, with only the feeble heat of a fireplace to warm us…and then only in a small circle immediately in front of the hearth…I pondered dinner: what kind of dish can I prepare that will cook all day and warm up the house? The answer was a sudden craving for Texas chili and that truck stop delicacy, the Chili Size. A quick inventory of the cupboards revealed I need a few things, so it was off to the market and, an hour later, a rich pot of chili bubbled on the stove, sending a fragrant heat wafting through the house.

Dark descended upon us as quickly as it had decamped in the morning. At five I handed Christopher his daily pay and a quart of chili, the old mayo jar thickly wrapped in newspapers, and by six, when we sat down to heaping plates of chili, onion, and grated cheddar, the moonless night had returned. Black as bin Laden’s heart, the night hurls itself upon us without even a twilight’s warning, banishing the frail winter sun until it can screw up the courage to bring us yet another pale and pallid morning. It is winter in Cape Town.

My husband was born in a barn

Winter didn't sneak up on us here in the Cape the year, it arrived with a bang. One day we were eating lunch on the patio, the next day we were huddling in the bed with the doggies in midday just to keep warm!

Fortunately, as a person of foresight, I helped the maid put the electric mattress pad on the bed a few weeks back, moved my winter nightgowns to the top of the pile, and shifted Hubby's long-sleeved shirts to the front of the cupboard. The doggies have become reacquainted with their winter jersies, the fireplace is clean, the space heaters have been dusted and tested, and a small stock of coal and wood are conveniently placed in the garage. As much as is possible, we are winterized and ready for the chilly temperatures...except for Hubby... How do you winterize a husband?

He was born and raised in Durban, a place with a climate roughly akin to Miami. Durban houses have doors on their rooms solely for the purpose of privacy...there is more of a need to open doors for air flow than to close doors to conserve heat. And so my Durban born-and-bred husband has great difficulty remembering to close doors behind him when entering or exiting a room during our chilly Cape Town winters.

This is not a huge problem when the door is the one that leads to the bathroom...but when it is the door that opens onto the patio and I have just spent thirty minutes shivering as the puny little space heater worked itself into a sweat trying to heat up the frigid space I wish to occupy...well, that's a problem! Our home office is located in a room that was built in a section of the garage and is accessed through the patio: two steps out the kitchen door, turn left, open the office door. A conversation with him these days goes something like this:

SV: "Hi, honey. What can I do for you? Close the door, please."
H: "Where is the bread?"
SV: "Close the door, please. In the cupboard above the toaster."
H: " 'k."
SV: "Close both doors, please."

We shut off our geyser every evening so we don't impact the peak demand time; we run around turning off lights when the TV says power usage is increasing; we run the pool pump only during off-peak hours. He is an engineer for Eskom and is intimately familiar with the negative consequences of wasting electricity...so why does he exit the kitchen into the patio, leaving the door open to admit the frigid outdoor air?

I am teaching my maid to bake, encouraging her by striking a deal that she can take home half of whatever she makes (I supply the ingredients). Using the (gas) stove to cook an all-day pot of soup or pasta sauce or baking something like bread, which requires a warm rising place and a pre-heated oven, are good ways to efficiently use the energy expended: get something good to eat and get the room warm at the same time! This morning the oven is hard at work heating the kitchen and dining room while a luscious batch of scones browns inside...Hubby (who is home on leave) is still tucked up in his bed...how long will it be before our precious heat is vented to the frigid expanse of patio as he pops his head in to ask where I have hidden the milk for his tea?

What is it with men...and boys...with doors? I can remember my mother bellowing at my brother "Close the damned door! What? Were you born in a barn?" My own sons were equally door-knob challenged. One would think that an engineer for the power company (who is also the household member who actually has to pay the utility for our power consumption,) would be a bit more circumspect when it comes to conservation of a resource for which he must shell out hard-earned rands. But old habits die hard, I guess, and while I am sure he wasn't actually born in a barn, I know he was born in a place with a far warmer winter clime.

Maybe I should place under his pillow a subliminal tape recording to program his subconscious brain...close the door...close the door...close the door...