You'd think water was an abundant resource hereabouts...

“Good morning, municipal offices.”

“I need to report that my water pressure has suddenly gone away. Who do I report this to?”

“You can tell me about it. What is wrong?”

“My water pressure is too low, something is wrong with the water supply to my house.”

“I don’t understand. What means your water pressure is too low?”

“The water coming into my house…when I turn on the taps I barely have any water.”

“What is your account number, please?”

“This has nothing to do with my account…my account is current. I need to know if there is a break in the water main or if someone is working on the water lines near me…and if not, then I need to report a fault.”

“What is your account number?”

“220440789.”

“Just a moment.” Long pause and background noises. “Sorry, that account doesn’t exist. Did you give me the right number?”

“220440789.” Another long pause and background noises. “Who is the account holder?”

“Mr. RN Smith. I am Mrs. Smith.”

“And what is your address?”

“ #24 Oudtshoorn Drive.”

“ #24 Outlook Drive.”

“No, Oudtshoorn…like the town…O-U-D-T-S-H-O-O-R-N.”

“I will make a query for you.”

“No! I don’t want you to make a query, I want you to tell me why I don’t have any water pressure and how long the problem is anticipated to last.”

“You will get that information from the query.”

“How long will that take?”

“Forty-eight hours.”

“That is unacceptable!! If there is a water main break, that means water will be running for two days before someone fixes it. This is unsanitary…I don’t have enough water pressure to fill my toilet tank, so I can’t flush my toilets. I don’t want a query lodged, I want this reported now and I want to know what is going on.”

“I will make a query for you.”

“That is unacceptable. Let me speak to your supervisor.”

Extended pause and a long, muffled background conversation with a male voice.

“My supervisor can’t come to the phone. She is on a call.”

“Then put me in contact with someone who can help me.”

“I can help you.”

“You are not helping me at all, please connect me with someone who can.”

Click. Bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz. The line is dead.

Guess who is about to write a letter to the mayor…

How to quit cold turkey…and succeed

I smoked two packs of menthols per day for 18 years. I quit sometime in 1985-86 and have not had either a cigarette or a craving for one since. For me, it wasn't that difficult.

The key, I ultimately discovered, is that you have to be ready to quit...you have to really, truly, not want to smoke. In my case, I woke up one morning and as I lit my first cig of the day, the thought "I don't want to do this anymore" crossed my mind. And I acted on it.

I think what some folks forget is that there is more than simply stopping the act of smoking involved in quitting. There are a host of little habits and personal quirks that go with it and those have to be handled as well. My habits and foibles included:

1) I carried my pack of cigs with me where ever I went, except, perhaps, to the loo.
2) There were ashtrays conveniently located throughout the house, as well as lighters and matches.
3) I detested stale cigs...if the pack had been open more than 24 hours, I wouldn't smoke them
4) I bought by the carton, so there was always more.
5) I am fundamentally lazy, so everything was easily accessible
6) I don't like heights
7) A sense of true desperation will actually take precedence over my laziness

I quit on trash day, so I could get rid of the stash of cigs, matches, lighters, etc. very permanently. I put it all in the bin, put the bin to the curb, and waited anxiously for the truck to arrive. I felt as if I couldn't really quit until the truck came and took it all away. While waiting for the truck I prepared.

Since I had friends and family who smoked (and taking into account my frugal nature) I didn’t want to throw away the ashtrays. So, I washed them thoroughly and put them into the cupboard above the refrigerator…I don’t like heights and the fact that I would need to scale a ladder to get them would make me reluctant to retrieve them for anything other than an honoured guest.

I am one of those people who can stay home for days on end, car sitting idly in the garage, with complete contentment. But take my car away and I suddenly get cabin fever. Just knowing the car is there if I think I need to get out is, by itself, proof against my getting antsy. Knowing this about myself, I held one pack of cigs back from the trash bin, just so my subconscious knew that if I got desperate, there was a pack of smokes in the house.

Banking on my laziness, I decided to make the smokes unpleasant…knowing me, in a moment of weakness, I’d go for the nearest pack rather than drive to the store for a fresh one, so I made the nearest pack unpalatable. First, I ripped off the cellophane wrapper and tore the top off. This would make them stale…and every day they would get worse. Then I wrapped the pack loosely in paper towelling secured by a rubber band. This would make me work to get to them, giving me time to reassert my desire to stop. I put at least four layers of loose paper towelling (loose enough to allow air in so the cigs could go stale but tight enough to make unwrapping a nuisance) around the pack, each with its own rubber band. Then I put the cigs in the cupboard above the refrigerator, behind the ashtrays (to make them as difficult as possible to access), then closed and locked the cupboard door. The key to the cupboard, which looked like a padlock key, was put on a key ring with all the padlock keys for the gates and garden sheds (so it was not easily identified) and hung on the peg where the outdoor keys were usually kept, making the key relatively inaccessible.

The idea here was to give myself an out so I felt that I could change my mind if I wanted to…there were cigs in the house and although I had ditched all the matches and lighters, I had a gas stove if it came down to that level of desperation. Knowing I had the freedom to change my mind…made it easier to stick to my resolve.

Next, I had to address my physical habits. Nature abhors a vacuum…you cannot break a habit but you can substitute a good habit for a bad one. Habit number 1 was carrying that pack of smokes with me everywhere: I bought giant packs of sugar-free gum and carried one of them around.

My second habit was mindlessly lighting up. I would not even be consciously aware until after I had taken two or three drags off the cig…and sometimes I would light up, only to discover I already had one burning. So, I would automatically reach for that cig pack only to find a pack of gum, which would trigger my awareness and then I could consciously decide if I wanted another piece of gum or not.

Now, I don’t like chewing gum, so switching to a chewing gum habit wasn’t a problem for me, since I quit the gum habit easily, once I was smoke free.

The battle was largely psychological, and my fundamental laziness is what saved me in the long run. In those first days when the physical craving came, I would mentally assess what I had to do to get a cigarette:

Did I want to get dressed in “outside” clothes, put on make up, put out the animals, and drive to the store for a pack of smokes? No, not when there is a pack here in the house.

Did I want to hunt up the key, climb up a ladder, move all those heavy ash trays, then unwrap half a dozen rubber bands and paper towels to get to the cigs in the house? Not really…especially that ladder bit.

OK, if I was that desperate to brave the ladder…think of how they will taste. Dry, sickeningly sweet, harsh…do I want to do all that work just to get a cig that will taste nasty?

By the time I had pondered all of this, the craving would have passed, assisted of course by a wad of chewing gum.

I treated that gum pack like a cigarette pack and in the beginning it was my constant companion. Within a couple of weeks I was leaving it places and when my left hand automatically reached out for it and found nothing, my consciousness was triggered. Did I really want a piece of gum? Not really…

I sold that house in 1990 and as I was packing to move, I had to clean out the cupboard above the refrigerator. I found the key and opened the doors and found a stack of big, heavy ashtrays that went into the “garage sale” bin. As I removed the last ashtray there, behind it, was a wad of yellowed paper towelling. It was not until my fingers touched the rotting rubber bands that I realized what it was…my “rescue” pack of cigarettes, dried out and long-since forgotten. They went directly into the bin and for the first time I realize I was truly smoke free.

You can quit cold turkey, too, but first and most importantly, you must want to quit…really, really want to. Once you have the desire, then it is a matter of analyzing yourself and your patterns and creating for yourself roadblocks to picking up a cig…roadblocks that work for you because they address your own habits and peculiarities. Maybe ladders don’t bother you, but you hate sticking your hands into small dark spaces where spiders might lurk…then that’s where you hide your rescue pack. Maybe you don’t need a rescue pack because you don’t get antsy when you don’t have a back up…or perhaps you need to remove them all from the house because stale cigs don’t gross you out the way they did me.

The key is a true desire to quit combined with setting up your environment to make it difficult for you to resume. Together, those set you up to succeed.

I’ve been smoke-free for nearly 25 years…you can be too.

Still shaking my head over this one…

Years ago my late husband’s auntie died and we were the recipient of some of her things. Among them was a kitchen timer, circa 1935, made of yellow bakelite plastic in an Art Deco design. It was fully functional and I added it to my collection of kitchen gadgets and thingies.

Well, last week it finally turned up its little toes and died, so I took it upon myself to find a replacement. I went to Boardman’s, a store specializing in housewares, and walked up to a clerk and asked “Do you have kitchen timers?”

She looked baffled by my question.

“You know, a gadget you time food with when you are cooking?” I elaborated

She brightened “Oh, you mean an egg timer!”

I shook my head. To me, an egg timer runs three minutes for timing boiled eggs. I needed a real kitchen timer for timing things like boiling potatoes or baking bread.

“No,” I said, “A kitchen timer…you can set them for up to an hour to time stuff you are cooking…”

She shook her head. “No,” she said “the ones we have only go up to 60 minutes…”

I don’t get it

There is a possibility that Hubby will be transferred to Johannesburg in the next few months and, if it happens, I will be going too.

Obviously, if you are planning to move to another city, the first thing you need to do is find a place to live. This being the era of the internet, we hit the net looking for suitable properties…and came across several that might suit.

Since we found the properties on the net and all of the agents repping the properties have email addresses, I sent them emails asking that they contact me regarding those properties. One would think that in a depressed property market, agents would be answering my emails within minutes of my sending them, right? Agents are hungry right now because the staggering rise in interest rates and a concurrent national tightening of credit-worthiness criteria has put the property market into a severe slump, with houses losing as much as 25% of the value in the last year.

So why, when a live one pops up and says “Please contact me ASAP regarding your listing #2234567890. We are anticipating a transfer to your area and need to find a home,” am I getting no responses”

I seriously don’t get it. If you are selling something expensive for which demand has precipitously fallen off and a buyer says “I want one…contact me!” wouldn’t you burn rubber trying to get in touch? Why don’t these people want to sell those houses?

A possible excuse is that they haven’t checked their email. Well, why not? It has been two days since I last sent mails out…shouldn’t they be checking at least once per day? And since I am out of town, doesn’t it make sense that I will want to conduct business via the net, where I can receive pictures and send details of my needs until such time that we’ve found a couple of places to actually fly up to see?

These people literally have someone coming to them saying “take my money…please!” and are not responding!

What do I have to do to get a pro-active agent who really wants to sell me a house??

I haven’t abandoned you! Really! It’s just that this week has been beyond hectic!

Having a new puppy in the house is a lot like having a new baby, especially in the sleep department. Puddin’ is still getting up in the wee hours, but it seems to be more related to being cold than anything else. She gets out of her bed to go potty and the tile floors are really cold at 5 am, so she comes to the bathroom door and whimpers for rescue. Most mornings she is shivering when I open the door for her, and she snuggles down with me in the bed and goes right back to sleep. But it still interrupts my sleep. So on top of everything else, I am walking around sleep-deprived and not a little punchy!

We live near a vlei, so vermin are a fact of life here. The insects here are huge and more aggressive than I am accustomed to…when was the last time you had a 2 inch long cockroach run AT you in broad daylight??...so we have an exterminator come out every six months and spray, which has worked out very well. Since my allergy to cats has gone out of control, we can’t keep a mouser, which is how I kept my mouse population to zero in California, so we occasionally have to deal with mice. Until last week, some Rattex…a kind of poison pellet…in a plastic feeding contraption was working fine. We’d put some out when we found mouse droppings and in a day or two a dead mouse would present itself for disposal. The good news was that they seemed to prefer nesting in my study, which is not actually inside the house, so they never got into the kitchen. The bad news is that they didn’t stay there.

Early last week Thandiswe made a loaf of bread and put it on the counter on a rack to cool, a kitchen towel draped over it. When she came back later to bag the bread, she removed the towel and found the crust on one side had been chewed away! We quickly mobilized and filled and distributed the Rattex feeders, expecting the problem to be resolved quickly. No such luck.

Over the course of the next few days a plastic bread bag was chewed through and more bread eaten, the Rattex feeders pushed around…one flipped up on end, another actually pushed off the kitchen counter…and I actually surprised the creature as it climbed up the cord from behind the refrigerator! I didn’t see it, but the sounds were unmistakeable. I switched to a more serious bait…one feed and death! the packet advertised…but Mr. Mouse simply wouldn’t succumb. Finally, in frustration, I called my bug guy, Han, and asked if he could help. He hurried over and put out some poisoned grain and some little gel cakes, cautioned me to keep the dogs away from it, and then made the pronouncement I, in the back of my mind, was dreading. There were no droppings around, despite nearly a week of infestation and multiple feedings…he thought it was not a mouse, but a rat!

A rat! OMG! My personal take on things is that having mice in your house can be a thing caused by outside circumstances rather than unclean personal habits…drought will drive field mice into nearby neighbourhoods, construction on nearby sites will do the same. But rats are for people who are dirty and low rent and living in decaying neighbourhoods. OK…it’s irrational, I know, but I have a greater horror of harbouring a rat than a mouse, and now I am one of those low-rent people with a rat in her house!!

So, two days later, Thandiswe is cleaning the kitchen and calls me out. The refrigerator badly needed a cleaning…it had that funky “something in the back of the fridge is past its sell-by date” smell, so I set her to work cleaning and deodorizing it. She had finished the cleaning but the smell lingered, She took out the trash but still the smell lingered. She removed the spare oven rack from beside the refrigerator and peered into the narrow gap and called me. Sure enough, there, between the fridge and the cupboard was a dead rat, stinking up the place, Gross! Gross! Gross!

So, chasing after a puppy and trying to paper train it is a full time job. Hubby, dear man that he is, allows me free reign in training and disciplining Puddin’ while he takes a strong hand in entertaining her, For Valentine’s Day he decided to take us both out to dinner at our favourite tapas restaurant, as they have outside seating in a lovely courtyard with a fountain. I dressed her in the new harness I had made for her, packed her in her puppy purse, and we headed out for our 7 pm…just dusk…reservation. She was a little darling! She slept through most of it but when she was awake, she sat in my lap and took little bites of chicken from my fingers.

We got home about 9:15 and while Hubby prepared to pill the old dog (who is now on a daily dose of Prednisone), I headed for the bathroom to put Puddin’ down on her puddle pad. She is very good about not going in her tote bag. I put my purse on the kitchen counter, took two steps towards the bedroom and stopped, Something was amiss. Suddenly, I realized that I was looking at the back of our big screen TV standing in the hallway leading to the bedroom! We were interrupting a burglary!!

They didn’t get away with much…two watches, a camera, two laptops, and some gold and silver hoop earrings, a few other small items. They didn’t get the TVs or entertainment system, sound system, or the expensive jewellery. But they totally ransacked the house…we don’t think they had gotten to the kitchen yet, as it looked normal…dumping out the contents of all the cupboards and closets in what we think was a search for a safe. Sorry, dudes…that was pried out of the wall by the 2005 thieves and never replaced.

We called our security company and the police, but we couldn’t figure out how they got in! We have burglar bars over every window in the house that can be opened, The patio is surrounded by decorative iron fencing, making it look like a gazebo, but protecting the vulnerable sets of French doors. None of the bars were damaged, none of the doors were broken in…we could not figure out how they got into the house.

Hubby walked around outside with the security people, torches (flashlights) in hand while I went upstairs to figure out how they got to the big TV…there is a heavy-duty decorative iron gate at the top of the stairs and I was afraid I might have forgotten to close it last time I was up there. Our discoveries were shocking.

Hubby and the security guard found the point of entry…the thieves had actually removed a fixed window pane from the frame by chipping out the putty holding the glass in place. They removed the glass and set it aside and then crawled into the house (the window was at ground level, one of several in a column of windows from floor to ceiling) on their bellies like the snakes they are. Through this window they were able to hand out small items like the laptops, but they couldn’t get the big screen TV out this way. There is evidence that they tried to break the burglar bars on the window immediately above their access point, as the metal is slightly bent and there are gouge marks on the window frame. We suspect their intent was to remove those bars, break the wood crossbar, and create an opening through which the big screen could pass.

My discovery was that I had, indeed, closed and locked the upstairs gate: they had broken the lock. When my ironmonger, Davey, came the next day to survey the damage and measure us up for new, improved burglar bars, he took the lock out of its case and took it to a locksmith to get a replacement. The locksmith said that the thieves could only have done this damage to the lock with a chisel and heavy hammer, and that they had obviously worked on it for quite some time. So, these guys came with house breaking tools…not a couple of kids just getting into mischief.

We obviously interrupted them…the bedroom TV was unplugged and removed from its armoire and standing on the bedroom floor next to the breached window, its remote apparently pocketed as we cannot find it. The big screen was on the floor in the downstairs hallway rather than on its stand in the upstairs lounge: its remote was found in our downstairs bedroom, on the bookcase near the bed. My guess is that one of them was working on a way to get the bars off the bedroom window to permit egress of the big screen, the other one was sitting on Hubby’s side of the bed (the remote was found on the bookcase there) rifling through the odds and ends of stuff he keeps there, looking for valuables.

Interestingly, they opened his jewellery box and took two watches, but left four behind: two old collectable watches (one an Omega), a Citizen and a Seiko. They also ignored two pairs of cufflinks, one of them Mont Blanc. The didn’t touch a drawer full of DVDs or a stack of CDs. They took cheap ($7 to $90 in value) earrings and left behind a charm bracelet watch with a diamond set in the face and trendy, chunky sterling silver jewellery. We believe we interrupted them, as they were obviously still working on a way to get the big screen out, but I find myself wondering if they were pros or just chancers…they had pro tools and got in like pros, but obviously did not recognize items of significant value and took stuff of little or no value.

We have numerous windows that do not have bars over them because they are fixed windows…now Hubby is nervous that these guys will come back to finish the job we interrupted. They know what is in here, they know where it is, and they know how to get in. Until Davey gets the new bars installed (which will protect those windows as well) and new, improved locks for the security gates, the house has to be occupied at all times. So, I’ve been a little preoccupied these last few days and not paying proper attention to the blog.

Hopefully, things will be back on an even keel again soon.

Oh…in the midst of all of this Hubby announced that we may have to move to Johannesburg in the next few months, so I also have had estate agents and rental agents out to look at our house, and been poring over the web looking for suitable accommodation in Joburg.

Life is never boring in this place!!

I cannot post

It says my HTML is bad. Any suggestions? I am trying to copy and paste from Word...I don't do HTML.

***************

RESOLVED!!

I was trying to post from Firefox. As soon as I switched to IE7, the problem went away.

I hate Firefox even more than ever, now. It crashed my old computer and on this computer, it makes Blogger crazy.

She is just SO sweet!

No, I don't mean Puddin' the Yorkie,...although she is sweet...I mean my maid, Thandiswe.

The minibus taxis are on strike today, so the people who depend on them for transportation...virtually every domestic worker in South Africa...are without transport to work. When 8:00 arrived and Thandiswe did not, I assumed she wouldn't be coming in.

So, imagine my surprise when she rocked up at 8:25...half an hour late, but here!

"How did you get here?" I asked her. "The taxis are on strike."

"I walked," she said. Walked? that is a distance of at least 3 miles!

"Oh, dear!" I said, embracing her. "You don't have to do that! If this happens again, just call me, I'll come pick you up."

"No! No!" she exclaimed. "The taxi drivers are very mean today. They might hit your car. I don't want that to happen! Where will I ever find another madam as good as you?"

I didn't know what to say, so I just hugged her. What a sweetheart she is, walking all that distance rather than subject me to possible danger!

She really is a treasure.