Daily Archives: 18 March, 2006

Water – can I have some ?

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I think I have had enough. Its 2 weeks of next to no water in the house. It varies but it seems if you run the shower for 10 minutes in the morning, it will eventually come good. I have measured it at 5 litres per minute at its best. Apparently low-flow shower heads are in the range 7 to 12 litres per minute back in the real world. And high-flow shower heads (as my mother preferred) run at up to 20 litres per minute.

But at night, water will run for about 20 seconds then disappear. Nothing from any tap. Outside, there is a tank full of water and a pump which should be an on-demand pump but it runs 24 hours 7 days a week. There is a big problem. Either the pump is buggered or there is a huge leak somewhere.

Anyway, so I arrive home after a day of intense physical activity. No water. So I decide to try filling the bath from a hose directly from the water bore. I get my Milo, come back and find the bath half full of dark grey water and it smells of diesel. I suspect someone’s diesel tank for their generator has polluted the underground source where we have our water bore.

I contemplate converting to Buddhism again but realise that taking lives is not part of the deal so Buddhism may not be my best option.

Postscript : After careful analysis, it appears that the 3rd segment of hose that I added, had been used to siphon diesel.

St.Patricks Day

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Three pain killers, coffee, a shower, food, exercise, more coffee and still the headache remains.

Yesterday was St.Patricks Day and while it is a great day for the Irish, it is also a great day for the Guinness drinker here in Dili. The usual Guinness available in the shops is made in Malaysia and I am afraid it bears little resemblance to Guinness at all.

By absolute chance, I came across news that the Irish Embassy had shipped in a special consignment of genuine Irish Guinness in cans with a widget. Next mission was to get an invite to St.Pats Day as I had absolutely no doubt where that consignment was going to end up.

As Dili is so small, its actually not that hard to arrange these things but I felt a little out of place initially. It didn’t take long to work out that half of Dili had been invited.

Now when you have been pining for a Guinness for a while and the genuine article is put before your eyes (not even the Australian-made version) and the Irish government are paying, well, you take your chances, don’t you ?

I managed 6 pints of the good stuff, talked the leg off a chair, danced like Fred Astaire and possibly made some new acquaintances. But I blame the 2 glasses of red wine after all that for the headache this morning.