Forget what I said earlier this week about the government of Albania being kind to us this year by giving us predictable power outages. Hogwash! Apparently some Albanians figured this out as well and challenged the government with the info. So... the government quickly denied that these outages were in any way planned and scheduled. Uh uh... they are completely unforeseen and random they said. Right 3 days in a row the power cut at precisely 9 am and came back at 11 etc. Random? I think not. So after they denied that we were on a schedlue of any sort, the cuts are now much more 'random' and I can not seem to predict when they will occur (at least not in our area). This is much harder to deal with and feels a lot like some form of terrorism.

We finally convinced out landlord to install a generator for the elevator/lift. We're on the 9th floor and walking up is a little tiny bit if a chore for these old legs of mine, especially when I have a bag or two to carry. So I ended up feeling like Rapunzel in her tower- trapped and rather sad. How can you invite a friend over for tea of you don't know if they might have to walk up almost 200 stairs? All sorts of fun challenges present themselves. Well yesterday was the big day- a huge generator was installed and guess what? While putting it in they kept turning the power on and off in our apartment an well--------- POOF----POOF----POOF!! Suddenly our computers were off..... our coffee maker was kaput... the lights wouldn't work. Aha- the lovely workmen/electricians had produced a nice big power surge. After some fiddling and a trip to the electronics shop for a new power bar, it seemed everything was fixed, including the elevator, which I am so thankful for. But NO--- later in the day we opened the fridge for something and hummmm.... no power. A call to the landlord and in a short time we had 2 electricians back here demolishing the kitchen to get to the back of the appliance. Right- built ins are a pain! Two hours later and they finally declared that they knew what the problem was but that it couldn't be fixed til Monday of course. Nice boys- they put the fridge back in place and left. So we are dealing with puddles and defrosting food this morning. And I have discovered I don't really like warm milk on my Special K.

Well I am off to work at our charity Christmas Bazaar for the day. A little Christmas spirit will make everything better I'm sure!

PS Peter just called to me from the bathtub-- the jacuzzi's apparently not working now either! Yippee-- more work for the biys tomorrow. Won't they just love me?

Ciao ciao!