gang fight, gang fight

The gang is down to fight. Have I brought this chicken for us to eat?
Gang fight, gang fight, the gang is down to fight. Have I brought this chicken for us to thaw?

Odd sort of day today. On Fridays, the power for the whole city shuts down around 5 AM and stays that way until noonish, apparently so that they can clean the dam in the middle of town. We have a generator here so the fans and lights still worked but the internet connection relies on the grid. So this morning I finished Morning and Evening Talk and also read the few prose poems after the end of Illuminations, then re-read the intro to the latter. I also did some work, drafting up an information/data management flow-chart for CBDRR.

After lunch, which was a strictly expat affair -- I guess the Afghans all go out and do stuff on Fridays -- Beth and I met for a couple of hours about the M&E tools she's been developing with the staff, the log frame overhaul they did and my draft flow chart. Very interesting and productive. She's been very busy. I had a brief chat with Claire, who I woke from her final pre-work in-car nap a little after 7 AM. It was great to talk but the connection ended up getting a bit choppy. Still, way better than last year.

After that did several more hours of work, mostly emails and a couple of Skype chats, and a couple more brief tete-a-tetes with Beth about the M&E stuff, just answering questions she had. Around 3 I got a hankering for some Coke and asked, through another guest here who's Afghan but grew up in Pakistan, for one of the staff to get some. He brought back a couple of liters of Afghan knock-off Coke, which tastes as much like Diet Coke as any sugary soda I've ever had. Oh well. Still refreshing. Tameeza and I had a few rounds of (real) Coke yesterday during our rather intense talk about

Now it's 8:15 and I've still got a bit more work to do, including an update for Jo on how things have gone since Monday. I'll also try to put this flow chart into a slightly more presentable form. It's currently pen on notebook paper with some nice scribbles here and there. A vast improvement over my first draft, though!

I've been working all afternoon in the TV room. Most of the day no one else has been in here (except Beth), but a few times people have cycled in and watched TV and/or tried to chat. I don't mind the TV because it's all in Hindi or Urdu or Dari and I can't understand it, it just raises the background noise level. People trying to chat is a little more irritating and I'm afraid I was a bit short with my Indian colleague, whose name I forget. I feel a bit bad about that but, then again, I was obviously concentrating and he jumped in asking about my family... not a good time, man. He seems really nice, though. We talked for a while last night about a bunch of random stuff, including golf and the relative talents of George Bush, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.

Also, on the name-forgetting, I think I'm just bad at remembering people's names. Doesn't help that with accents and people speaking softly, I often can't hear their name the first two times they say it.

Alright, guess that's enough for now. Perhaps I will have more-interesting things to report tomorrow or later.