Week 5

Marg:  The past two weeks have been a mixture of recovering from the flu and catching up with some of the neglected activities while we were down and out.  A slight easing of the winter temperatures has helped our recovery - night times are now varying from 8 to10 deg and daytimes are up to 20 at mid day.  

Yesterday afternoon, apparently encouraged by this slight improvement, the people next door started a 24 hour outdoor party. Canned music blared out at top volume from a sound system right beside our boundary wall, limiting the possibility of sleep until exhaustion set in.  Apparently there is a law limiting noise after 10.30pm but you have to call the police, and of course, we didn’t and nor did anyone else apparently.  

Something that gets my attention a lot here is the way most of the younger women are very fashion-conscious and appear to be vying for height.  Shoes with platforms and/or 4 inch stilettos leave most of them tottering in a disturbing way, causing me a lot of concern for their musculo-skeletal futures.

Negotiations for a house (in a gated complex) which we hope to move into in a week or two, developed in a rather bizarre way this week.  The owner of the house we were to look at on Wednesday morning wasn’t available, so the ‘Estate Manager’ was detailed to show us around.  However she was reportedly in the local clinic seeing the doctor for high blood pressure and was expected to be unavailable (lying down) for the next two hours.  Someone suggested we might go along and see her there in the clinic.  

Much amused by this idea we did venture cautiously into the clinic and asked for the said lady. ‘Yes, go in and see her’, the nurse said.  So as she lay there trying to de-stress and relax she agreed for us to be shown round a second house in the same Complex, which we duly did and decided we liked it. On reporting back to her at the clinic she told us the owner of that house had just been phoning her, begging her to find him a tenant, so she was able to inform him that a ‘very nice couple’ had just gone off to see it.

So with the imminent possibility of agreeing the lease etc we’ve been looking at furniture, fridges, etc,and buying kitchen stuff and bedding - generally spending money in small amounts in preparation for spending large amounts when we definitely have a place to furnish.   

Andy: My predecessor in this job has returned from leave to take up his ongoing official position as Flight Ops Manager, so I’ve been feeling rather less vulnerable about things he knows about but I don’t as yet.  However, he’s been flying nearly every day since he returned so I still have a lot of questions to discuss with him.  

Aircraft reliability seems to be improving, fortunately, though not through any conscious activity on my part.  We have faced a lot less doubt about availability for flights over the past couple of weeks, which has improved our confidence when responding to medical emergencies.

For some reason a lot our medical flight requests arise during the evening, presumably when doctors at the regional hospitals start to worry about caring for their most serious patients through the night and decide to get them transferred to a higher level medical facility..  This means that a certain amount of oversight of night flights falls to me, which includes taking text message updates and tracking aircraft on the computer system.  We’ve found these activities not always compatible with us both getting a good night’s sleep – and with the all night party this week it can be a bit much…