Plans? What plans?

Plans change.  Resilience is about being adaptable.  We are adaptable.  I had a blog dictated, photos chosen, that would have suited any normal Sunday, but our house seems to be full of weirdness this Sunday.

Just before it became Sunday, F's work phone rang and 'long story short' as they say, she 'slept' on the sofa with her alarm going off at intervals so she could check emails and make phone calls.  Apparently people in Malaysia are eating their breakfast when we are in the deepest, darkest, quietest part of our night.  Strange time to eat your breakfast I say, but F said it was the best time to call them.  I supervised for a while but got bored.  It's the middle of the night for goodness sake.

At 6am I sat on F's legs to remind her that she hadn't published my blog yet.  After a bit more email checking and getting up to put the water heating on and make a cup of tea and put my breakfast out) she came back to read blogs and was just getting round to the post thing, when a little dinosaur appeared on our screen along with the announcement that there was no internet connection.

Glance towards the router - lights out.  We've been having problems with it, there's a new one on stand-by...glance to clock 3 minutes to 8 ..... and then the jack hammering.....

Oh the jack hammering!  Excuse us while we have a rant here - skip a couple of paragraphs if frothing, foaming, ears flat, spiky-tailed, spit flecking rants are not your thing - the bloody jack hammering has been a daily (yes daily, Sunday's included) feature of our lives for about 4 weeks now.  It has been recorded to have started as early as 0645, but certainly by 0700 most days, and on rare days has held of until as late at 0800.  Today, Sunday, was a good day.  It started at 3 minutes to 8.... They (it is always THEY) have been digging a trench down our street; a deep trench.  No.  Trench sounds like a ditch across farmland.  We live on rock; rock with a thin veneer of soil, asphalt, concrete.  THEY have been rock drilling for 4 weeks to create a crevasse about 50m long and about a metre (3 feet for imperialists) deep.  There have been trucks with old Diesel engines and no exhausts, diggers, loaders, compressors, generators, men with no ear defenders and (a guaranteed feature of deaf workmen) voices with no volume modulation (and fruity language). There has been a cacophony of competing noises, a stench of poorly combusted Diesel, dust (oh the bloody dust), blocked street, traffic jams, car alarms, more car alarms,....

Today THEY knocked the wall out of the  front of the building 4 along from us and extracted an old electricity transformer from the basement.  That had involved enlarging the crevasse, immediately in front of the building, into a black hole large enough to give access to the building's basement and drag this piece of antique equipment out, crane it onto a truck and take it away. You would think, when some clever clogs arranged to put this piece of electricity distribution infrastructure into the basement of a residential building, that they would have arranged it so that it could be accessed without having to excavate, from rock, a hole you could bury a double decker bus in and then demolish the front of said building.  If we are tired, stressed, fed up and frayed, imagine how the people living in that building feel.  Two weeks ago notices went up along our street and to the extent that they can read Greek my humans worked out that the notices warned of power outages in 21 Feb.  Nothing happened on 21 Feb, so when the notices reappeared this week dated 28 Feb, my humans assumed it was another warning about possible disruption to electricity supply and planned to roast a chicken on Sunday.

Really?  (Their excuse had something to do with a boy crying 'wolf'....)

Plans change. At 3 minutes to 8 this morning it became immediately evident that I might not get roast chicken for lunch. By midday my crossed toes had cramp.  The power cut was not a brief interruption to the broadcast. 

F put up the hammock chair, so I claimed it. If I can't have roast chicken I'm having the best seat.

The power came back on at 1600. My humans packed up the camp stove that had been making coffee and pancakes, and I saw the light go on in the oven.  I supervised until I was certain the chicken had gone in - with heat - and now I can smell it gently roasting so have retired to my top shelf to await the handing up to me of a bowl of golden crispy skin, soft juicy flesh, and the nice fatty tail bit (that is always my bit)

And my story about going out to fetch said chicken (on Saturday) will get posted out of sequence but you don't care do you?  I have to set the stage for that blog first