Siberian Winter In Tunisia

Yesterday was the start of the winter in North Africa, it was blowing a gale, maybe 30mph all day long but it was the cold rainy biting nature of it which told me that the warm days of summer are now over and i needed to have my cold weather clothing on. we had a late start as it was sunday and when i left the restaurant at 9.30am i was startled by the manager shouting "your bag has arrived", this was the best news i could have heard, it is now nearly 4 weeks since i arrived here and my bag had taken this long to find me, it is full of the work clothing and cold weather jackets and socks and the essentials of travelling. I was as happy as a pig in shit, rooting through my huge bag of 59 pounds and pulling things out and ooohing and aaarghing at finding things that i could wear, it was like christmas all over again.

The job site is over the rushing about stage and we are now into testing the process part, testing valves and fire&gas systems, so things are now as slow as the customer wants to be, we achieved our contractual part of the project, being ready for the 18th and now it is down to the customer as to when he runs the units, everything should be good for them, I found out that i will be moving to the next station up the pipeline towards Algeria. it is a remote plant on the border and the roads towards it are dirt roads and the majority of drivers are gasoline runners, smuggling gasoline into southern algeria and probably other countries in that wild part of the world, our hotel is supposedly a very nice 5 star tourist about 50Km away and this is basically all that is that is important when working anywhere, nice food and a nice bed is that is all required.

My new computer is a Dell and to be honest it is crap compared to the HP i had been using for the last 3 years, the company has decided that Dell is cheaper so now we are all using Dells and they feel cheap and they are working OK but mine seems to have a heartbeat, i play music and it sounds like it is a record player that every record has a scratch on it, i have tried many thing to try and eliminate this irritating problem, i can transfer all my music to an Ipod and they all play perfect but on this piece of crap they sound rubbish, also this computer has decided it has 2 microphones, 1 internal and one rear mounted and the rear mounted one is the one it prefers, it has taken me 8 months to manage to find this out and be able to use Yahoo messenger, yahoo tells me that i am muted and this is not true, i am using it fine, but this goddam Dell machine is trying to kill me. Life with a cheapo machine is not a happy existence. but at least i can download music from the hotel with Limewire, my new piece of P2P software, i never new billy Idol produced so many tracks, 'in the midnight hour' was his finest piece or maybe white wedding.