The Nepalese Adventure: Day 18

Day 18 – Wednesday

• Awake at 6 (nice little lie in) spent some time sorting out the comments issue on the Blog site and adding "Subscribe" option etc. (In case you didn’t notice.)

• Chow Mein for breakfast and off to school.

• A little more structured today with everyone required to achieve basic “select”, “copy” “Paste” before they were allowed to “freestyle” within the boundaries of the current mouse software & Paint -  though some of them discovered a new game pre-loaded that looked pretty good for them too. A few of them seemed to focus on a new game called “Try on Chris’ hat” which they thought was hilarious.

• Finished at 12:30 and went for lunch: Dahl Bhat

• After Lunch I decided to tackle the toilet door. This was the door before, No lock and a tendency to swing open of its own accord:

• Now I know exactly how Tom Hanks felt in Castaway when he had to make do with the most basic tools and materials. With just my penknife I managed to re-engineer the entire door structure. OK, admittedly I had one or two additional tools I brought with me (44 Kgs remember!!))  but I still made use of the saw, Bradawl and knife attachments. Under a lot of pressure as this is the (only) restaurant toilet so once the old door was off and I was hammering the hinges straight again, there was no toilet until I’d finished. The stream of people who came down the stairs? I’m not totally sure they were just coming to see what I was doing. Anyway, final result was this:

• (I know it doesn’t look straight in the picture but the picture is misleading! 

• This is a major achievement. I’m only at chapter one in the new book on my Kindle and now I can finally make some progress in the book as well as strengthen my thigh muscles!

• Whilst I was about it, I made some modifications to the toilet roll holder. The first attempt was just a prototype and presented a few flaws (like falling off when you pulled the paper.) Not what you want when you are balancing yourself and trying to hold your clothes off the floor and at the same time hurrying in case someone comes.

• Jane W – the advanced model is far superior as I know you placed an early order for one. (PS – I know 2 Jane W’s…)

• After finishing and testing the toilet, I retired to the roof where I laid out my towel, applied some sun cream and tried to relax for a couple of hours. Not particularly successfully though. I need to get past feeling guilty when I stop and take time out for myself.

• After a while got a text from Hindou to say afternoon snack and Tea were ready. I went to eat though didn’t feel like it at all!

• Pounding headache now and Fitbit showing resting heart rate of 101.Definitely something not right. Talking of Fitbit: When I was climbing up on the roof the other day to hold the wireless internet mast, I took my Fitbit off and put it on the side. When I picked it up, it had powered itself off as I left it in the sun. On powering on, it was 10 minutes slow. Try as I might I cannot get this to sync the right time from my phone. Time zone set to Kathmandu so I guess this is now actually on Nepali Time!!

• Skipping dinner tonight and going to bed. Just need to get this out…