It’s Saturday and we are settling into our house and loving it. SL Telecom is here now installing our landline so we can sign up for ADSL, which ain’t nothing like what we have back home but it’s better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick. Hopefully we will be on line early next week. It took three men a little over an hour to install the phone.

Last night we had salad for dinner here as the cooker (stove) wasn’t fully hooked up. We have what we would consider an apartment size stove with one electric burner and three propane burners. We have what I would guess is a five gallon tank for gas. You call the hardware store down the street when you need a refill and they charge 50 rupees for delivery. That’s $0.50 for those of you who didn’t know a rupee is worth a penny. The gas is $8.50.

The mosquito net folks were here last night but couldn’t finish the job so they will return today. The main problem with mosquitoes in Colombo is dengue feve.r Unlike malaria there isn’t any prophylactic for it. You can end up in the hospital with dengue fever. It is impossible to completely avoid mosquitoes but we spray ourselves in early morning and early evening and so far so good! The mosquito screen is help also. We need to take anti-malarial pills due to Ron’s travel to rural areas as malaria isn’t an issue in Colombo. Malarial drugs are really hard on your system so our doctor here recommended taking them two times a week instead of daily.

In the afternoon, we bought a bunch of electronic stuff (boring) to make the computers and appliances functional. We have two kinds of plugs in the house and no matter which kind of plug your appliance has, the wall socket will be the other one! Then we went to Paradise Road, which is a fabulous store with house wares, furniture, etc. We got a rattan/wicket set for the patios. We have little balconies off each of the bedrooms, a patio off the living room and the roof top garden has a small patio. So we will put some chairs on some of the patios. Not sure yet which ones. I’m eager to sit and watch for tropical birds. One is singing out my window now. We wrapped up the shopping at Aprico Supercentre which is like a Fred Meyer sort of. Got more Tupperware for food storage and bought our first eggs. Yikes, they don’t refrigerate eggs in Asia.

We came home and I made marinara and linguine, salad, and toast. Our first real meal in the house. Made my honey happy. After clean up, we headed for bed. It was 8:30 but we were beat. Must be the heat/humidity factor. We ran out of hot water, literally. None comes out of the hot water faucet. So we had a cool refreshing shower. We woke up during the night to a tremendous electrical storm, lots of thunder and lightning. That’s two nights in a row. Very exciting when your entire bedroom is lit up by lightning.

11-27-05

We will need to check with Veena as there still isn’t any hot water. We are on a solar system here so maybe there’s some trick or switch we don’t know about. We had our traditional weekend breakfast of eggs and toast. The eggs yolks are almost white. I’ve never seen such light colored eggs and it sure makes me miss the wonderful farm fresh eggs we got in Vancouver. I’ll look for a source at the fresh market. Yesterday was our first cup of homemade coffee. Oh my god, what a treat after the stuff the hotel was serving. I bought six pounds with me. I have found a source for good coffee here but it is $11. for 10 oz. Oh well, it’s only money! Life is too short to drink bad coffee.