A Virus, A Typhoon, A Lot of Free Time, A Water Crisis, & A Lost House

or: How I've spent the last three days.

I don't really know where to start, since the last three days have been full of events. I guess chronologically is the best way to do it.

Let's see. I told you guys about packing my sickness on the weekend. Well, that is where this fair tale picks up again.

Monday night I started having eye pain. I got home and my eyes were killing me. You know that pain where it hurts to move your eyes in any direction? That's what I had. Plus it felt like someone was banging on my head like a chimpanzee. So I took my temperature. 38.5 again! Arrggghhh. So I went to bed with an icepack on my head and fell asleep with a bit of a struggle.

Cutting back to Sunday night. I had another headache and couldn't fall asleep. It was so bad that I actually watched all of Men In Black II. Yes my dear readers it was - that - bad.

So Monday night I was in pain, but I was able to fall asleep without too much of a struggle. One nice thing about this was that a Typhoon was coming to Taiwan and Tuesday was declared a day off. This meant that if I couldn't get a good sleep on Monday night, I would have all day Tuesday to recuperate.

On Monday night the landlord for the new apartment called and asked if we could meet here Tuesday morning to sign the lease and take possesion.

Tuesday morning we woke up to a downpour and high winds. So she called and said that we could meet on Wednesday. No worries.

With a day off and nothing to do and nowhere to go, Louise and I watched TV and cooked lunch and vegged for the day. Tuesday night we watched the news and 50 First Dates. Then, after the movie I had another visit from the headache fairy. What a killer this one was. I went to bed with ice on my head again. A friend called me at 11:30 to say that the power in her house was out. I just said "I have a headache. I'll call you later."

After a few hours I was feeling better and Louise was hungry. So we walked to the corner of our apartment complex and got some food from the convenience store. Amazingly ours was the only apartment complex with power in the whole area. Everywhere else was black.

This typhoon was a doozy. The footage on the news was of pure devastation. Flooding and mudslides and rock falls. Quite the disaster. My area of Taiwan was fairly well off though. The wind was probably the worst thing for us. There are metal gates on the top of my apartment (I live on the top floor) and they were banging open and shut all night.

That nigt it was announced that Wednesday would also be a Typhoon Day. And Wednesday morning the landlord called and said that we should meet Thursday because of the weather.

So Wednesday was just another day at home doing things to kill the time. Louise had to go to work at 4:00. So I spent some time alone and then hung out with Adrian a bit.

Wednesday night was a delluge of bad news. First: Louise called my current landlord to tell her we were moving and to talk about settling a few utility bills. But before Louise could tell her that we were moving, she told Louise she wasn't going to sell our apartment. WHAT!? That's right. She told us in June that she wanted to sell this place and that's why there was so much energy put into finding a nice new apartment. But now our sole motivation for moving was gone. What do we do? Do we double our rent and move into a much smalled apartment? Or stay where we are for a low low rent? Well the decision was obvious.

We will stay in the cheaper, but bigger, apartment. This has created quite a few projects in the house. I don't want to live in an "OK" place for the next year. So, Louise, Adrian and I will be creating some new decoration ideas and paintjobs to make this a much more comfortable house. And my friend Theo is going to come and help me out with some electrical problem. All-in-all it should take a couple months of working on weekends, but it should be a great house by the end.

Two more pieces of news - hang in there.

Also, on Wednesday night, I found out that my computer had a virus. The Bloodhound Virus. Not as cool as the gang. Adrian had this one a while ago and it's a doozy. It cut his internet connection. My internet was fine, but I couldn't turn off my computer. It would just keep restarting. I didn't know what the solution to this virus was so I went for my Dad's solution. I moved my important documents onto my external harddrive and formatted everything and reinstalled windows.

Now I have a clean and fast computer once again. And to keep it that way I will have to make a big sacrifice. I will no longer use Kazaa to download any programs. So that means I may never see the end of The Amazing Race 5.

Another pieceof negative news is that, thanks to the typhoon there is too much dirt and silt and sediment in the water in the reservoir. They estimate it will take 2 weeks to rectify the situation. So that means that the county I live in could be without water for two weeks. Imagine the funk that will be in the air if this is the case. One thing that may save us is that most buildings have water tanks on their roofs (rooves) to collect rainwater. Meaning, if it keeps raining, we'll still have water. The bad thing is, it hasn't rained in two days and the water in my building's tank seems to be nearly depleted and the forcast calls for sunny skies.

Should be an interesting 14 days.