Ups and downs of life

So… it’s Monday and the week definitely has to pick up from here. Poor Monday gets incredibly bad rap as it is.

I woke up in the early hours to a thud. Jurgis had gotten up, decided to check something on my pc and knocked my stand with the webcam over. I still don’t know if it’s damaged. I’ll check it out later once the day starts improving.

The sound of gentle rain woke me up later. That was worth a smile. I lay listening to it for a while, then was slapped by the sound of our UPS’ beeping. Gah… power failure! It lasted for 2 hours and now our internet won’t start up. Thing is, if our internet doesn’t work, we’re without a phone too, as our phone is through our net service. We could call them, but they make you hold for ages and we’d have to call with cell phones. On our regular phone, last time we called, it turned out to be less than cheap.

I texted my student for this morning to confirm her class - her times were due to change. Just got the reply. She had told the agent I get work through that she was stopping classes as something had changed with her work. Thanks for letting me know, folks! No one told me. It was thanks to a gut feeling that I texted her. I was dressed and ready to go to meet her.

Yes, she did say it was due to changes in her work, but it’s so, so hard not to take it personally. I’ll never know if it was me. One thing about Brazilians is that they’re polite to a fault (ok, polite in some ways, such as not being able to say ‘no’). Any excuse will do as long as they don’t have to tell you to your face that something is wrong. My head is telling me that it’s bull. My heart is asking far too many questions. Ah well.

As I said, the morning can only get better, right? On the bright side, losing a student means my schedule is clearing for better students or for the course to enter that school… the one with all the super benefits. Yeah! That’s it. Now to convince my self-esteem that all is well.

The little blog that tried

The good news is that I might get quite a few Kippy votes in today. We're on a dynamic IP address. Uh... this brings me to the bad news... while I was out teaching this morning, our modem was struck by lightning. I wonder if it was all the cursing I did at scammers and ISP's this week. What do you think? Anyhow, we have an old back-up modem on hand, but it is very dicey (reason it was replaced to start off with), as we're more offline than online with it. It took me a good while to load this compose page. I have no idea when or how I'm going to get this blog to post, so it may end up being a long blog. Good thing you all have nothing else to do other than read my waffling, right?

This week has been downright gruesome. Remember I posted about our ISP changing and how odd it was that they were going offline for 6 months? We got the call for that from our internet Carrier late on the Friday afternoon (well timed) before a long weekend. Monday was a public holiday. They pushed us to register with the new ISP within 24 hours or we'd lose out.  Now, anytime we have internet issues, it is well nigh impossible to get through to the ISP... even on a good day. Everything was very official with this whole setup. Who're we to argue? When you encounter regular oddities, you get to a point where little surprises you. This changover to the new ISP happened literally a day before the bill was due for the old ISP. On Tuesday, I got a nasty call from the old ISP. Why haven't we paid? Uh.... well... I have no intention of paying for a service I'm not using. "But you're signed up with us." No, we're not. Yes, you are. I told them about the call from Telefonica telling us that we were to change to UOL because Terra would be going down. The caller claimed to know nothing about that. The conversation went downhill from there. Jurgis was out at a client and I was home getting my knickers in a knot. They don't give you much leeway here before cutting your internet. When Jurgis did finally get to speak to them, we were in for a surprise (that's putting it nicely). It turned out that we'd been scammed into changing... by who, we don't know. When your Carrier phones you, you can hardly ask them to show ID. We had confirmation calls and emails from the new ISP, UOL. The 3 'players' in this little game are all massive companies. We are now registered with two ISP's. It's a mess. Procon, the consumer rights organisation says we can only take action once we have proof that we're actually paying both. In the meantime, we should just choose one to cancel with *muttering under my breath*

Thing is, we need to move. We've been needing to move for a while now, but we're taking advantage of Brazil's never-never attitude to procrastinate. We've been wanting to change to cable (we're currently on adsl through our telephone company). To install cable in this house before we move is not practical, as we'd be faced with two lots of installation fees... one here and one once we move. Now we have the bust modem... the pressure is on.

Aside from our internet woes, I have been headachy, generally feeling unhealthy and grouchy *snap... snarl* Our electricity bill arrived. The price of electricity has gone up... way up. The tax alone is R$50 (around US$30), 50% of the actual bill, plus an extra fee for street lighting. The electricity tax is threefold... a municipal, state and federal tax. Eish! If we got great service and had excellent facilities, I wouldn't mind, but we don't.  I was shuffling students again this week, as one of my Skype students had a power outage during our class this week and it wasn't even raining very hard at the time.

Jurgis just surprised me with a bit of information. I have been looking online for work by the artist, Stewart Titcombe, for years with little joy. It seems his paintings are now only being sold, usually by auction. When I have a respectable connection,  I'll post the photo of the painting I have. Stewart Titcombe was visiting my home town of Port Elizabeth some time before I was born. He went into my gran's florist shop and fell in love with some proteas he saw there and asked her if he could paint them. This painting is of the PE harbour. I found it on an auctioneer's site. Something that took me by surprise here too is that the ship is named Vergelegen, which was the name of the one farm my gran had. She spoke of it often.

Ah the joys... shall I try to post this blog? Guess saving it all first would be a good idea...

 

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I'm trying... I'm trying...

But I seem to be fighting a losing battle. We had a long weekend. I was home. Do you think I spent that time visiting blog friends? Nope.

See... it's like this. A time back, our internet carrier was hacked. Yep... how's that for security. They went pretty much belly-up for a while. We could access nothing on the net and when we could get on, it was at 1 or 2kb/second. The problem was apparently nationwide. Since then, our internet has been on in fits and starts. Some people are saying that the service is back in full swing, but we're having to reset our modem a few times a day. I clear caches every few pages I load or I get the stupid Telefonica "This page does not exist" notice. We now have a little system. Load the page. Page doesn't load. Clear cache. Load a different page, which, naturally, doesn't load. By then, the original page might load. Grr!!

I have been reading though. My mail tries constantly to send and receive, so I've been getting the e-mail alerts of the blogs. Getting to where I can respond has been another matter. I'll keep trying. Now... I'm going to try and post this. Fingers crossed...

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