Friday 8th – Sunday 10th January

I ended up having a half day Thursday, and Friday off as well. I’ve had the feeling like another migraine or something was hanging around, and Thursday lunchtime I felt bad enough to ask Tiff to drive me home. I was at ITA Hardware, getting prices for bits and pieces we need, and when I walked back outside my vision went entirely for a few seconds, then came back a bit, mostly blurry. I almost fell off the sidewalk, but ended up taking one of those BIG steps that look so funny when someone else does it. Made it back to the office, but it never improved so I spent the afternoon and most of Friday asleep.

I walked to the Malaria clinic Saturday morning, and had a blood test, but it was negative, so probably just a bug I’ve picked up somewhere. Other than a nagging headache I’m back on my feet again.

I think I’m over the choleric outburst of earlier in the week. Then again, it could only be a matter of time till the frustration level hits a high point. We are still trying to find somewhere that has paving, Tiffany and I are sure Dalgro would have it, they are the only supplier of concrete products, gravel sand etc, but it isn’t as easy as a phone call to find out. If we get the chance we’ll go to their yard Monday, only one truck still working so we have to juggle stuff around if Tiff and I need to use it.

It finally rained last night, fairly heavily for a few hours. December was drier than normal, the monsoon is not happening yet which may make January and February wetter than usual again. The roads that were damaged last year and the bridges, have finally been allocated resources for repair work. The hold up has been getting permission from the village Chiefs along the road to do the work, plus payment no doubt for having people working on the roads and bridges. I’m still coming to grips with all the small obstructions to life here, it’s been a year since the roads and bridges were washed away, and until the Chiefs agree, no repair work can be started. Which has effectively cut off a lot of eastern Guadacanal.

We got the small job at the World Bank Office, well, it’s small, only 6 bougainvillea to plant along a wall, but the cost comes to $4,580 with the mesh I’m attaching to the wall for support. I’ll take Rose and Naomi on Monday and get it done, so they can see how to attach the mesh to the wall. I’m using wood blocks glued to the concrete, and fence staples to attach the mesh, so we don’t leave holes or permanent fixtures in the wall. It would cause long discussions with the wall owner otherwise.

We’re hopeful that something will come out of all the meetings we are having this month, Ministry Infrastructure & Development for Commonwealth Ave and the Median Strip, Government House, Tourism Solomon Island for the Cultural Centre, plus trying to convince businesses along Mendana Ave to pay for upgrading the road frontage.

Tiffany wants to alter all the roundabout plantings, or replant them all this year, it is something that needs to be done. They have got to the stage where the plantings are starting to look tired, so that got passed onto me to come up with some designs. With the new pricing we have finally got accepted there is a bit more money coming in to enable us to do more work on the roundabouts instead of the weekly pruning and rubbish clearing. I’m going to need a lot of seed and bare rooted cuttings imported to improve the plantings so we are considering adding a quarantine area to the Nursery as well now. More discussions with Solomon Island Agriculture coming up.

Honiara is still sold out of flour. The flour mill closed for the Christmas holidays, without stock piling or storing any extra, and also stopped importing wheat till the end of this month, so until we get a few containers of flour imported from Australia, the home baking is on hold. Only one bread shop left open in town, but even they admit it is going to be closed if the imports don’t arrive soon.

I was down at Kukum Fish Market this morning, as usual. I haven’t worked out the best time to go yet, after a year, but I seem to get discounts off stuff no matter what time I’m there now so I guess I’m almost a local finally. Although with the amount I spend, a discount is neither here nor there. A dollar off here, maybe an extra pawpaw there, extra chillies or 2 $8 pineapples for $10. Still keeps the expenditure down each week and helps. I have to try to spend $50 there now, initially it was trying to keep it down to that, now I manage to walk away with money left over.

$50 Solomon is only NZ$9, or about US$4.50. That buys beans, bokchoy, pineapples, bananas, pawpaw, cucumber, chillies, ginger and green stuff like spinach. Which is usually more than I can eat in a week, and I end up dumping some of the bokchoy and spinach because it is going off.

I get really seriously annoyed with some of the other white folk here. Mostly the Australian ones. I was having a bit of a chat with one of the traders this morning, he had some really huge pineapples, $40, far too big for me to consider, but anyway, we were discussing fertilisers and what he used, when this palangi woman just inserts herself between us, demands, not asks, how much the pineapples were, does a Humphf, I’m not paying that for those, then proceeds to walk through the fruit and veg on the tarpaulin to get to another stall instead of walking around. I said sorry for my wantok to the guy, he laughed, and said Australians always the same, New Zealand good people, then gave me 2 pineapples for $10 instead of $16.

The rains seem to be here finally, between 4pm and 5pm it has started raining solidly the last couple of days, which is really good. It carries on for most of the night, so by morning everything is fresh looking and a lot of the rubbish has been washed away. You have to like thunder and lightning. I’ve mentioned often enough about it, tonights effort feels as if it is barely above the roof, the house is vibrating and shaking with each clap and roll, and the lightning is almost horizontal across the park. And its raining! Heavy, solid, buckets of water, not the shower type rain of the past month.

An aside to mention AGW, or manbearpig, or Zombie Armageddon, or the end of civilisation as we know it. If you rely on Wikipedia for any information, James Connelly has finally been removed as administrator for Wiki, due to his editing and altering of every article about AGW/Global Warming/Climate Change/Mann08 etc over the past few years. It is still suspect though, as everyone involved with realClimate.com is still editing Wiki, if they were so sure about everything there would be no need to deny/alter/remove anything. Hopefully 2010 will be the year when the whole doomsday scenario falls apart.

I know here it will upset a lot of people who have been happily blaming AGW for everything that happens, and expecting a huge payout from the West. I’m still trying to work out how an island in the Temotu group can have a beach that has AGW tides washing away the beach, and rising, when around the end of the island, the beach is growing and stable. Having 2,500 people living on a narrow strip of land above the beach, cutting down the forest on the slopes above for gardens, and digging up the coral reef to make building material would never have anything to do with it.

Which is much the same thing as with Tuvalu, and Kiribati. Too many people living unsustainably on too little land, and destroying the ecosystem. The Carterets are in a slightly different position, with the volcano they are built on subsiding, and faster with each earthquake we get in that area. Throw dynamite fishing, killing all the parrot fish and cyanide fishing into the mix, and it is no wonder there are problems happening. Calling it AGW and standing around with your hand out isn’t going to solve a bloody thing.

Once you read into the failed resolution from Cop14 and realise how disasterous the whole thing would have been. It would have stopped any developing country from getting ahead, and crippled the western economies totally. As well as making energy and resources too expensive for any progress or development.

I’m all for sustainability, and cleaning up everything, but not when it cripples the world, and condemns most of the 3rd world to poverty and starvation. And achieves nothing in the long run.

Hopefully all the doomsday predictions will start to fall apart this year, a cold winter and the Artic ice sheet will be back past the last thaw line again, and there might be a lot more closer scrutiny of how the global temperatures are recorded, or used, without them being adjusted to fit a preconceived hypothesis.