Monthly Archives: January 2021

Writing

Weekly writing update #1

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Grammarly dutifully sends me a writing update each week. And sometimes they want to know why I’m not writing. I feel the pressure to write each time – Grammarly’s guilt-trip is working.

This week they gleefully announced that I’m using a new tone! Actually, to be accurate, 3 new tones: confident, friendly and optimistic. I’m friendly, confident and optimistic all the time – for some reason Grammarly has lost my writing history over December. Or it’s disconnected itself from my profile again.

writing update

Of course, I was also 91% more productive, 80% more accurate and used 93% more unique words than other Grammarly users.

The top 3 mistakes:

- Missing comma in a compound sentence.

- Missing period.

- Missing closing punctuation.

On the blogging front, I posted 5 times last week.

And I started reading Barak Obama’s A Promised Land, that I’m enjoying a great deal.

I’m still trying to get to grips with the new AIOSEO (All In One SEO) – I love it that now I can get an SEO score for each of my posts: this one is 89%. (I’m competing against myself, aiming to beat each new score!)

Until tomorrow.

Regina

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Have you read my load shedding complaint post? And do you know that a bug is eating my spinach leaves?

#justsaying

Load shedding complaining

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We were without power for most of the weekend – so I haven’t blogged since Friday. Allow me here some load shedding complaining. We had load shedding early on Saturday morning and imagine our initial surprise, and then disappointment when the power did not come back on as it should have at the end of the period.

The load shedding created an electrical fault somewhere in the system feeding our neighbourhood which, like most places in South Africa, suffer from lack of regular maintenance. It took the municipality the whole day to find and fix the fault. The repair lasted a mere 3 or 4 hours. At 23h45 the lights went off again. I double-checked the load shedding schedule and no, we weren’t due for more until the next afternoon.

In the morning our councillor sent a message confirming another fault – this one more widespread: a few neighbourhoods were affected. As evening rolled in, I began getting rather annoyed with the whole situation. Monday being a working day I began to worry about how I was going to work. Thankfully I didn’t have training today, but I did have a whole lot of meetings.

Our neighbourhood came back on in the evening. We were the second last area to come online. The final area came online this morning only. It must’ve been a complex fault.

We actually have inverters and deep-cycle batteries, but our system is only as good as the battery capacity that we have. So we had to prioritise – keeping the deep freezer with food going, or work. So I chose the food. We don’t yet have a method to charge the batteries without Eskom power. That is the next iteration of the system – a generator or solar cells to charge the batteries.

I feel grateful that the food didn’t spoil and I was able to work today. 

I will be coming by to visit your coffee shares this week and I’ll look forward to participating again next week.

PS: I took a break from typing this post to water my veggie garden. One thing led to another and before I knew it I was kneeling on the ground, hands in the soil removing the weeds. The patch is beautifully weeded and the soil turned, ready for the next batch of veggie planting.

It is almost 8 pm here in South Africa, and it’s time for shower and dinner. Have an amazing week! Keep safe and healthy.

Regina