Ramadan Mubarak

We, in Pakistan, have our first fast tomorrow. May Allah make this blessed month beneficial for us all!

As for my month-long absence from this blog, I was slightly under the weather. Intense heat, coupled with load-shedding and the resulting water shortages, made for a very harsh June. That seemed to sap all our energy and all we could do was wait and pray for some relief in the form of rain. We did have a premonsoon

rain spell bring some relief and now that we have had some monsoon as well, the weather has become so much pleasanter. Hopefully, it can last through the rest of summer.

This week, I have finally taken up my knitting needles again and cast on a sweater for my older daughter. I am not sure about the color my my daughter seems OK with it, so I am going ahead with it.

Lace Grows

 

Slow and steady knitting on the stole has made it grow to about one-third the finished length ( I intend to make it quite long).

In other happenings, we are having a very hot and dry spell, with the worst-yet load shedding and an acute water shortage. The past few days have been quite miserable. We are all praying for rain.

Hot And Without Power

Like always, this July is also very hot and humid and like what seems always, we again are having load shedding. For those of you who are more fortunate and do not know what it means:
load shedding
the deliberate shutdown of electric power in a part or parts of a power-distribution system, generally to prevent the failure of the entire system when the demand strains the capacity of the system.
Retrieved July 12, 2009, from Dictionary.com website: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/load shedding

Currently we face undergo four hours without power here in Islamabad and it is even worse in some other parts of the country. To top it, our power line broke down in the early hours of Saturday morning and we were left panting and heaving with heat for the next eight hours. And of course, the complaint center had taken its phone off the hook. From experience, we know that as long the phone is "busy" the fault is still being traced and no end is in sight. And when they do answer it is usually a promise of power returning within an hour, but it rarely happens and we go back to the phone being "busy". It is a futile exercise really but being without power, we have little else to do. It is either that or running around the roof in the early hours of the day, as our neighbors seem to prefer. Only, they like our roof much better than their own.

Since then, we are back to our four hours of load shedding, but since our load has been "shifted" to another grid, the hours are changed and we only find out which when the computer goes off in the middle of some work or ... It is a miracle really that our appliances are still working.
Not to forget, there is another form of power outage of 10-15 minutes and this is also sudden and unannounced. This happens when our grid "heats up".
It is reassuring however to realize that we have come through a few years of this and what is wrong with putting up with another few!