Battlestar Galactica

It has been a good day in Kosele today – despite the bore-hole guy not turning up. It has also been a very long day, (it’s actually now Tuesday as I am typing), so I’m now well past my new regime bedtime. In the interests of making sure I don’t just drift into previous bad habits and actually try and claw back some of the sleep deficit this will be a short post tonight/this morning.

Highlight of the day was a successful Skype call to my wife Judi back home who is having a good day today, having endured what sounds like a couple of chemotherapy induced horrors for the previous couple of days. It is hard focusing over here at times knowing that Judi is having such a rough time but I know it would be frustrating for her if I wasn’t here working on our next steps for this year. It was great to hear her voice after sorting out an initial connection problem. This involved setting up a new account for her, (as I couldn’t remember the password I had originally used for her account), troubleshooting by short messages in order to discover that the microphone didn’t work on her laptop and finally using our daughter Ellie’s laptop, (and Skype ID), to eventually have a conversation lasting an hour and three quarters.

Having been unable to establish basic mobile phone contact at all predictably when we first came to Kenya ten years ago it is incredible being able to have a long, uninterrupted and very cheap chat using Skype. I am, admittedly, a late adopter as far as Skype goes so I guess for many of you Skype isn’t such a miracle. (In my defence this is because I never found a need to use it in the UK and it has only been realistically available over here in the last few months). Suffice to say it has revolutionised our communications and means that Judi can be involved in our day to day operations.

I do have one minor concern. Despite the amazing clarity of the connection for most of the call I think that threatening aliens have got designs on Skype and are using it for their own imperialistic ends. Last year I spent, (to be honest quite a lot of), time watching Battlestar Galactica with my son Tom. For those of you who haven’t watched it I would recommend it. Those of you who have will be familiar with the sound associated with the Cylons, (the ‘baddies’), as they hove into range on Battlestar Galactica’s monitoring systems. (It sounds like a particularly malevolent static). My call home today was definitely interrupted by this sound on a number of occasions. I hope that those with responsibility for planet Earth defences are on the case. If not we should all be very worried.