Kattappana was still diskonnekted so I grunted though the Greenpeace website at dial-up speed, identifying and downloading abstracts of research done by their labs which might be relevant to the talk I was due to give on the 25th. I also allowed myself to get into yet another pointless and stupid online argument.
I was very dismayed when I found that the PC I was using didn't have Acrobat Reader. There was no way I wanted to sit through the 16MB download of the installer, even if the cybercafé was going to stay open long enough. So I decided to transfer the PDFs to the other PC which had a CD burner, then take the CD to the other cybercafé which had Windows XP and Acrobat Reader.
Afterwards I met up with Ajeesh back at Mini's café. He drove me up the hill as far as he could go and then turned the car around. Tonight he was taxi-ing someone to Munnar (3 hours each way) and would be back in the wee smalls.
Mosquitos are bastards. Bites on my feet had been rubbed by my sandals (metiyadi in Malayalam) to leave small amounts of raw flesh. Sticking-plasters didn't help: especially on my right foot, the sandals tended to rub them off again and then there was the pain of removing the remnants from the hairy parts of my feet. Ook! Ook! Ook!
This morning, as I was putting some allopathic soothing cream on the affected areas, Radhalakshmiamma offered me a traditional salve based on turmeric powder. Nothing ventured..., so I slopped the salve on as directed, then put on a pair of thick socks.
Maybe I should have expected the result: my right sock became stuck to my foot by a glue of sweat, neosporin, turmeric and tissue-fluid. I feared that taking it off would cause even more pain. Oh well, it was funny, really. (BTW tamaasa is Malayalam for 'joke'.)
My socks came off with almost no pain. My feet were yellow-ochre from the turmeric, apart from a penny-sized bit on the upper surface of my right foot that where the skin is AWOL. By comparison with my left foot, my right foot could have been ever so slightly swollen or I could have been just hypochondriac.
I decided to leave it to heal overnight, then slap on neosporin and a large sticking-plaster that would extend beyond my sandal's frot-potential. Hey, I was blessed - I had my own pair of fricatrices!
This was of no consequence whatsoever apart from being amusing and vaguely interesting and making walking while wearing my sandals very slightly uncomfortable. I was more upset by the turmeric stains on my formerly white socks. My foot would heal but I feared these stains were permanent.
So why did I go on about it?
Still, it was the first time that 'roughing it' had gone beyond a laugh, a learning experience or a trivial inconvenience.
I had a lot of difficulty adding the photo of map to my blog. Both PCs in my usual cybercafé ran Windows 98 and so needed drivers for my camera card reader. However, the PC I was using wouldn't load the drivers, nor would it see the PC which did load them, nor could I copy the image across on a floppy. Thwarp!
Just in case you're interested:
© (except the blatantly ripped-off bits) Random Bozo 2006