Fahim comes home for lunch with a big blue bag hanging from his handlebars. It’s the antenna I figured he’d come home with. Assembly is required.
Assembly is hilarious. The instructions suck, including references to things that are neither diagrammed nor described. And they have us attaching things in the wrong order. As we’re nearing completion, I start to wonder where the base is. “Oh no,” says Fahim, “you attach it to a pole, usually outside. But this looks too fragile to hang outside, so we’ll have to have it inside. It can stand up on its own.” Uh, Fahim, dearest, you’re on drugs. There’s no way this antenna that’s more than 2 feet wide at its widest, will stand up on a base an inch and a half wide by three inches. Ain’t gonna happen.
So now we’re wondering how we’re going to get it to stand up. We start brainstorming on ways to jimmie it. Because, after all, this is Sri Lanka, and that’s how things are done here.
And I need air conditioning.
So the antenna. Fahim attaches it to a leftover piece of plastic plumbing pipe which he then puts in a 5 litre jug of water – water for weight. And it actually stays up. And we actually get pretty decent reception this way. Only problem is that the jug leans, so we had to tie it to the window to make sure it didn’t fall down. 
Only in Sri Lanka.
Although that’s probably not true. It’s probably similar in other places, like India, Thailand, Vietnam, you know. Not North America or Europe.
We watch some television. Or rather, Fahim watches some television – some of what he watches is in Sinhalese or Tamil or something like that – and I work on the website. I now have some content on it, and we’ll publish it at the same time as we publish this blog, so by the time you’re reading this, it ought to be there.
