I am suffering from pc troubles, and have no clue when I will be online again as I somehow doubt I am clever enough to manage this with online help (will try to seek some though).
Am sitting in a colleague’s living-room, using his internet/pc to write this.
I will be back, and hopefully post something as well then.
Till then, friends….
the Mel
As per Mafdet’s request:
my finger this evening
Can’t seem to be able to shoot less blurry pics one handed and without a tripod. But the scar and the damage to the fingernail that has been growing out of its hiding place are visible, so there…
As per your request: a few charming pics of my tormented finger, taken about 26 hours after the incident. Enjoy. 
all three stitches
from above
from below
Nice blue, eh?
.
still friends (early afternoon of Dec. 30th)
I was bored and sitting around with an unbandaged finger, so now you can suffer more recent pics (Dec. 30th, at around 10pm):
all three stitches - again
from above - again
from below - again
Probably not the appropriate topic to squeeze in between Eid al Adha and Christmas, but I can’t help the timing.
Spam emails - don’t we all know that problem?
On my AOL account I always had dozens. Funnily enough, as soon as they - finally - introduced a bulk folder, hardly any spam arrived at that address anymore at all.
But even with my favourite, yahoo, I have made it a habit to check out my bulk folder, even before it started dumping my Site Meter reports and emails from a stranger with a weird email address 
into it. Mistakes happen, so it’s better to check before the bulk folder eats an important email.
So, anyway.
What I was trying to say is that I have read my share of spam mail titles. And concerning one obsessively returning subject, I have long since started to say that - as a woman - if I really got all those advertised inches I’d by now have one impressive, er, you know…
Annoying or amusing as they were, those email titles always made sense, as far as I remember.
I just found that I had a new email in my bulk folder and thought, “well, maybe PH is as bored as I am right now,” and went and looked.
Wasn’t PH though. Was “Dr. Clark Corona”, and I was not quite clear what he wished to tell me.
“Do not be shame by reason of of your machine size,” he assured me.
[sarcasm] “Well, if I were a guy, I’d sure do my best not to, thank you; finally a voice of reason out there,” I thought.
But - lo and behold! - inside it says: [/sarcasm]
Your girl does not want to have sex with you for reason of your male organ size.
Don’t miss this perfect possibility to solve the trouble.
All you have to do is just make use of our male instrument enlargement.
You will forget about trouble and your girl will be glad
Oh, don’t worry, I think I have 50 inches or so by now. Dunno how glad that would make my girl if I had one.
*wonders what exactly “our male instrument enlargement” might be*
*guesses that everyone with a normal pain threshold probably doesn’t wish to find out*
A regular customer insisted today that she had paid less for some plants yesterday. I told her that could not possibly be, as we only had one batch of them and they all had the same price.
As she would not believe me I wanted to call my colleague A. to verify what I was saying. Then I remembered he was still on his lunch break and said so.
“Oh no, I just saw him.”
I looked at the watch and realized that might be true if my colleague was being overly punctual, although I usually note his return. So I asked my colleague S. to go and get him from the “garden” (as we call the outside space with the plants and garden mould) where the lady said she had spotted him. S. came back and said he was not outside; only two customers.
*brain between shutdown and overload* “Um, I just had two Turkish customers who went back outside to get some cypress trees. Maybe you mistook one of them for my colleague…?”
While I was saying that A. was approaching from the other side, which S. commented upon, which in turn kind of drowned out what exactly I had been saying there.
“See, I told you so. It’s not as if I tend to imagine things.” (like the prices of plants… )
After she had left with her plants (paying the price I had told her they were…), A. had disappeared to somewhere, so I asked S. if she had asked him whether or not he had been outside.
“Of course I did. He wasn’t.”
This woman has been coming to the store for years. And she mistakes some stranger for A.? (I don’t recall having seen those two customers before.)
Oh, right, sorry, I forgot. One beer-bellied Turk in an ugly cardigan looks like the next slim Turk in another ugly cardigan… 
You’ll all remember my whining about the weather from last week I am sure. Well, for all my unhappiness about the temps and the snow we were very lucky.
To the west and north of us, in an estimated (by geographically challenged me) distance from 40 km to 80 km people had reason to be even less happy.
Groaning and creaking under the weight of the ice and snow (in some regions up to 20 cm on the ground) around 50 electricity masts gave. You can see some of the wreckage in the pictures. Thus 250,000 people were without electricity for up to five days. The economic losses are estimated at 100 million Euros, not counting the damages that freak surges caused in private households.
The initial explanation by electricity supplier RWE was that their masts had been built according to scientific data concerning average snow, ice and wind levels of each region, and that even after this disaster they would not put up stronger masts because this region is usually not subject to stresses like the ones experienced now.
Still, RWE arranged a relief fund of 5 million Euros to help special hardship cases.
I may be a lay person here, but I’ve been wondering. The more snowy regions in the mountains down south sure have a lot more snow. But winter temperatures there are always lower than here. So what they get is a lot of snow, but doesn’t snow reach a point when piling up on masts and wires where it just starts to slide off?
While this is the region of not very much snow and lots of rain at temperatures around the point of freezing. So what we get in autumn/winter and winter/spring is rain that starts to freeze on things, often magically transforming bare trees to delicate works of art, coated in ice. (Much to the trees’ owners dismay because more often than not, what makes the trees look like they’ve been wrought of coloured glass is so heavy that a lot of branches snap under the weight.) Likewise electricity masts and wires get coated. And that stuff does not drop off unless the weather gets warm enough to melt it.
I remember going to school by train, and every year you’d see the wires along the track coated in ice, sagging sometimes so much that they almost touched the ground. And why did they use the opportunity to put the cables into the ground when the new train company dug everything up to rebuild the tracks a few years ago?
Well, anyway, according to a consumer organisation, the owners of a wind power station and people living close to the masts RWE was well aware that their masts would not hold against much stress, due to old material and lack of repair. Apparently some masts were 40 to 50 years old and thus built of low quality steel that has become brittle by now. Fact is that there is a lot of rust to be seen in all that wreckage.
RWE countered those accusations by saying that on the contrary those masts had been checked and repaired regularly. Also the stresses put upon the masts and wires now had been 15 times higher than average, which no masts in Europe could have withstood.
Investigations are continuing.
If RWE is truly found to be at fault this will become rather expensive for them….