watering the garden - pineapple express - fuck this (for now)

There's a sprinkler system in the garden, but it's only on a few minutes a day, and some days, like today, not at all. We know a very good taxi driver, Tarik, whose English is functional, and he's great for knowing where to find stuff (reasonably priced suits, and chickens slaughtered before your very eyes).

But trying to explain what a watering can actually was, so that he could take me to a place that sold them proved to be a major production. He got the concept of water for the garden, but thought I meant a sprinkler system. And he understood about a little watering can for houseplants, but the idea of what I want isn't in his repertoire - and Tarik is no numpty, so maybe watering cans just don't exist here.

So later, I went on my own to a hardware store near the Bungalows, (I notice Tarik's started calling it "The Complex", when he was talking to his pal Ahmed on the phone tonight in Arabic), and bought two cheap buckets. I filled the bottom of one of them with holes from a screwdriver heated over the stove. It worked, but by the time I got around to it it was dark, and I managed to drag in a lot of wet earth as I trudged back and forward to the sink. I suppose my best bet would be to make friends with the Complex's gardner, I think he might be called Ashraf, and see how I go about putting the sprinklers on myself. The problems is, he always seems to be in a tearing hurry.

Today was hot - summer's here. The cicadas have arrived suddenly with their astonishing volume.

We've got a troubled internet connexion. If it didn't work at all, it would be better. As it is, it works a little bit, too slowly to make surfing feasible, and then it works fine, and then you decide to download something, and it breaks down entirely. And just when you say "fuck it" and go to read a book, it reconnects and you waste another half hour of your life in absurd optimism.

I'm drafting this off line. It might get posted in a moment, it might get posted some time next week. I can't do singing and dancing posts, unless I already have the link, and do the HTML myself, as I'm just about to... I've been trying to watch this trailer from a new stoner movie called Pineapple Express all fucking day. The first four seconds are hilarious, though palling a bit now after watching them dozens of times, hoping expectantly that the rest will follow.

It's an aphorism for our times: no isp is better than a bad isp. Web pages have a lot of content nowadays, because it's expected that you'll have a fast connexion. When you haven't, the whole process is so slow as to be torture. So that's it, fuck it. You won't be hearing from your Tripoli correspondent here or on Flickr or anywhere the fuck else until I get a workable connexion.