Yaramaz Went Away

Somewhere up on the main road, quite audible from my office, muffled only by the Garanti Bank building, cars have been honking long and hard for the last several hours. Not the usual honk-honk annoyance.  This is a brutal symphony of hands to the horn wailing.  (Note: Steph just came back and informed me that the PM of Iran is in town visiting our PM and all the roads between here and Dolmabahçe Palace – major workday arteries- are shut down for the procession)

Also, I sent in my edited stories Monday for the Turkish Daily news (as usual) and the editor has sent me several emails informing me that she hasn’t received them so I went back to my sent mail and have forwarded the done-stories back to her with a note noting that it had been sent on Monday. She has since replied twice again stating that she’s still waiting for my stories.

Yesterday, the internet disappeared as I was checking my email. D. spent several hours on the phone with Umut The Helpful Techie but no one could figure out what went wrong.  Eventually, some sort of signal was sent from HQ to our modem and everything was fine again. No one actually knows what happened or why it happened. 

Earlier this week, our water was out for about 36 hours. It was also phenominally hot, so we had bucket showers with 5 litre bottles of water from the bakkal on the corner. Something in this water-outage triggered something in our already-sensitive toilet and now you have to reach in under the barely liftable lid and pull the little plastic flush mechanism with your fingertips, knuckles grazed by the tight ceramic. When the water was off, the little plastic flusher thingy came loose from the centrepiece that is connected to the external flush-button. If I could actually lift the lid off, I could fix it in two minutes. Because the bloody dumbass who installed it seems to have tightly tethered the lid to some mechanism at the bottom of the tank, allowing it to be lifted maybe 2cm with great effort, I cant do more than just feel annoyed and to rub aloe vera on my grazed and swollen knuckles every time we need to flush. I refuse to send for a plumber when I could so easily do this myself. But the bloody plumber made it impossible. Grr.

Teachers are calling in sick; things have slipped my mind about timetabling and covering; other teachers are hemming and hawing when I ask them to cover and I have no one. It’s annoying.

I’m tired. And sunburnt. And raw-knuckled. And hungry. 

Went to Heybeliada yesterday, however, and cycled and swam and it was nice. But everything physical sucks. Our bikes felt as though they would delf destruct at any moment.