Separate Message, Not Really Part of The Blog (yeah right)

Hello Family and Others, It's 2:30 AM and I can't sleep, our Tahitian
cat is resting on my arm, the fan is blowing, window holes open, the
occasional mosquito is whining, and it is quite warm and humid. I
knew I was used to my Internet lifeline for chatting, e-mail, blog
entries, news, and money management, yet it's not until that system
breaks down that I really become fully aware of this convenience.
This little computer, a PowerBook G4, has also been acting up quite
regularly, frequent sudden freezes and crashes, I've become accustomed
to doing manual saves often, although what is really bothersome is a
crash right in the middle of an upload or download, but presently that
is not an issue as our island service provider's very casual attitude
toward customer service has put us off-line. Therefore I type this in
hopes of copying and pasting later today through the use of the rather
expensive wi-fi offered by the little camera store nearby ($.20 a
minute). Our server might be accessible by Wednesday afternoon, the
big problem is a password, that's all, and no one knows it, not even
the people running the business, just the owner who is out of town.

The fan blows, not always, but when the wind dies down there is
nothing better. Because of our time crunch I worked pretty much
through the weekend, wasn't bad, lots of rain, and being indoors
playing with tiles and finish work wasn't so bad. I made one attempt
to check my e-mail at a bar down the road, also 20 cents a minute and
did get through to Sophia for a moment; problem there was the French
keyboard. I'm sure that is a very practical thing when you are typing
in French, using all of those q's u's, and everything else in its own
way, but when trying to rip out a few messages in English and not look
severely dyslexic forget it, it's all messed up, and just to make it
worse the numbers and symbols across the top are in the opposite
configurations, symbol is in regular case and number is upper case,
not to mention the question mark, colon, comma, period, etc. are all
in different places too. Why did they do that?? Answer: Just to be
French. Which leads one to comment on one of the many reasons they
didn't become masters of the universe, they don't know how to put
together electrical or mechanical devices, their plugs are huge and
retarded looking, the little boxes they use in the walls and the
switches are also the type you rather smash with a hammer than use,
their fixtures in general are usually either too big and over built or
too flimsy.

The fan blows on and now here is why the Germans lost their battle for
masters of the universe. In Papeete there are lots of supply stores,
of course, this is the middle of nowhere, there better be. So you
have a wide range of various appliance, fixture, tool, and
construction items to choose from, every country that makes something
must have at least one item there. Well, we needed a table saw and
given the choices, lack of choices, and prices we chose a German
model, nice and strong, heavy, well put together. Only thing was we
got ours in a box with an instruction booklet, ferried it over here to
Moorea and opened it in the kitchen (the only functioning room in our
torn-up tropical remodel). Wow, there it was, all the parts, all the
nuts and bolts and other clever gadgets to go on it somewhere. Of
course getting things like this is common, every parent knows that,
but the Germans get the prize for making this a true torture. The
assembly instruction booklet was thick, in several languages of
course, and full of numbered parts lists and technical photos. Well,
I almost threw the book out, but being that we are so far from any
regular stuff and especially a table saw, I didn't want to make any
mistakes to I opted to read the directions, oh my gosh, these people
were serious, and I wish I was joking, they could write several
paragraphs on how to put in two bolts that are in your face and
obvious. Using lots of numbers, engineering descriptions, technical
drawings, and an English that was probably more commonly used a
hundred years ago in London during the industrial revolution. I think
an American farmer could have written an excellent assembly guide in
about 10 sentences not 10 pages.

Anyway, I have some stories ready to pop up to the blog and some
photos too as soon as our guy can wake up and give us the secret
password, until then I will only make minimal use of this 20 cents a
minute stuff with French keyboards. Just for comparison, in South
America you can use a nice PC with a pretty quick connection and an
American keyboard for around 40 cents to a dollar an hour, rarely more
than that. I might try to get a phone card today, but there are
almost no phones to be seen, most people have cell phones which are on
a very expensive minute by minute system, not the generous plans we
masters of the universe are used to in our secure homeland. So,
basically, all is well, snafu of course, we all know that. The deck
in on, the rafters are tacked into place, the weather just does its
thing, hot, sunny, cloudy, wet, humid, calm, windy, all in a matter of
hours. Looking out at the reef the past couple of days I could see
that the waves breaking from the open ocean were rather huge, I don't
know what is going on out there but it sure is nice to be on land.