Here but for the grace of Electra!

I've been offline for a while - we had a minor catastrophe with our internet connection. All service was suspended by a major thunderstorm last week, which left us without electricity (Electra is our tahitian service provider) the outage blew our high-speed router, our desktop PC and more disturbingly the surge-protector! So, I have been trying to cope once more without the luxury of internet on tap - awaiting a replacement router ordered from Tahiti, the local post office were out (my dad thinks it's hilarious that we can buy high-speed wireless routers at the local post office - and it is pretty remarkable).....anyway it has arrived and thanks to our wonderful post-mistress I was the first to get my hands on a replacement! It was a timely reminder that we are in fact living on a tiny island isolated in the Pacific, and that in fact it's pretty miraculous that we have electricity at all (the expats whine about the prices of life here, but in the end it's pretty incredible that we can enjoy this quality of life, for goodness sakes there's frozen foie gras, from France, in the local shop specially for Christmas). I can't lie it was a hard few days without my usual dose of websurfing, but now there are no more excuses, so it's back to the blog.....

Random, but rather cool, image of a lightning strike
on the Eiffel Tower in 1902, shamelessly pinched from Wikipedia