How Ya Feeling? Hot! Hot! Hot!

India and electricity is interesting to say the least. Driving down the road you would see wires split and coming from every which way as power is "stolen" and half-hazardly spewn around from window to window, business to apartment, lobby to house and back again. The power usually goes out 3 times a week or so. It is usually for a few minutes but has lasted hours before. Living on the same block as Stalin Jr. (the Deputy Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu) the power on our side of the block is usually turned on first. Living near to him has turned out to be quite handy. With a battery backup/inverter in the house as soon as the power goes out the battery back up should kick in and cover at least the lights. Well today the power went out and the battery backup failed for the last and final time. It just completely died. So sad. Back home it is said, "if its not one thing its another", right? Well its the same here in India. I was reminded of one of my favorite books growing up about Alexander and the Terrible Horrible, NO Good, Very Bad Day and how through it all he wanted to move to Australia until he found out that bad days even happen on the other side of the world...even in Australia. Well they happen in India too.

Maybe it was a meltdown of sorts, maybe I was just frustrated, maybe not. But it was not a good day. Everything was going wrong today. And it was hot. There was no power for hours, no battery backup, which meant no lights, no fans, and no air conditioning. It is not so much the heat as i can take the heat most of the time. However the air here gets stale so quick. do you know what i mean? Perhaps its the humidity but the air becomes thick and heavy and stuffy and that is hard to breath. If anything the air conditioner gets rid of the stuffiness and helps dry the air out to be comfortable for breathing. For the last three months we would usually just patiently coax the battery backup, and pathetically coddle the dumb thing, calmly whispering sweet nothings and the thing would eventually switch over and run a couple lights and one air conditioner until the main line power returned. But like i said before, this time to no avail.

We called Rama in to see what needed to bed done. A few of the blog readers know Rama and are probably smiling right now reading this because Rama is amazing. He is our driver, bill payer, all around fix it man, translator, and go anywhere you want to go and get there "real fast" kind of guy! We love Rama. He is the one you would call no matter what the time is, no matter what the need and he will come running and quite literally go to bat and fight for you as well....if you ever needed him to. What would we do without you? At this point in time i am quite certain we just couldn'tWell the process of replacing the battery back up took 6+ hours. Ugh! Did I mention it was hot today? Really- Really Hot!

There was some funny parts amidst all this drama. That part came as our cook, Raju couldn't cook what he wanted to cook that day (quite the tragedy actually as that means no dinner) and he was standing in the kitchen with the people trying to install a new battery backup. Raju speaks Hindi while Rama speaks Tamil and it was hilarious listening to them" argue" over how to fix the thing. There was somehow some sort of communication between the two of them with hand gestures and a load of words in different languages. Craziness. Languages colliding over battery backups...it was electric...or maybe not so much :) Eventually the thing did switch over and allow the power (that had already come back) on. And yes, we did get fed as well. Just a little later than Raju had anticipated.

Never-the-less a very interesting day.
...and I am quite thankful for air conditioning!
-Jenny