He came. It finally happened. The man I've been waiting for forever... the phone guy. YAY!!!!!

But there's a catch. After waiting three weeks for a phone line, we found out that the computer's modem was damaged in the move, so now the computer has to be repaired. But the shop is closed till Monday for remodelling. And the damage will take a few days to fix. So by the time I get both a working computer and a working phone line together under one roof, it will have been a month.

And I’ve typed up various blogs since then, and designed at least four new layouts (yours too, Hijabified) and written pages and pages of letters which are now stale and probably shouldn’t be sent anyway. I’ve also had a very blog-worthy few weeks, having received a proposal for a paper-marriage, witnessed a major accident, been attacked by a car seat and sat in a pile of biryani. Good stuff folks, good stuff. And there was the earthquake last night too, and the various testimonials people have told me of their experience with it.

Me: woke up and thought the house was swaying
Aniraz: woke up and thought she might be getting sick and having a dizzy spell.
Dog: woke up and barked ferociously at all and sundry
Dad: Slept through it (no surprise)
Student: woke up and thought someone was underneath of bed and shaking it.

It was a scary earthquake too, lasted for at least a minute, and as the newspaper says, it was 6.8 on the Richter scale. Fortunately the epicentre was rather far away, somewhere in Afghanistan, and no casualties have been reported. Man, I would like to go back to our old house, the one we just left three weeks ago and check up on it. As we were moving, we took down the curtains and wall hangings and furniture discovered cracks, huge cracks in the walls and stairwells from the last earthquake, which was just about a month ago, and far less severe. That house was rather shoddily constructed actually, just bricks and cement with an overly large quantity of sand mixed into it. How do we know that there was too much sand in the cement? The corners of the walls had started to crumble off in some places, and water from a single drippy faucet upstairs caused water damage all the way down to the ground floor.

Alhamdulillah, our new house is made out of RCC, Reinforced Concrete-Cement, which means there are steel rods in the cement, holding it all together. And things are mostly unpacked and looking relatively normal, so yeah, it’s all good. :) I will end this hodge-podge blog with a joke,

A man joins a big corporate empire as a trainee.

On his very first day of work, he dials an extension and shouts into the phone - "Get me a coffee, quickly!"

The voice from the other side responded, "You fool! You've dialed the wrong extension! Do you know who you're talking to?"

"No," replied the trainee.

"I'm the CEO of the company!"

The trainee shouts back, "And do YOU know who YOU are talking to?!"

"No!" replies the CEO indignantly.

"Good!" replies the trainee, who puts down the phone.

posted by Abez @ 4/07/2004 12:30:00 PM