Carnival breakdowns

I've always read about the importance of keywords if you want to drive traffic to your website or blog. I've never put that much in the front of my mind given that this isn't a commercial venture. I'm happy when people find their way here but I'd probably be just as likely to do it in a vacuum.

In the past few days however, I have learned that if I really wanted to drive traffic here, the keywords to use are:

Carnival
Sex
Nude

There, see I said it. Again. And now all you perverts who dropped in can just move along. Nothing to see here folks.

Still with me? Oh good, you're the ones I wanted to hang out with. Not those creeps.

Carnival for me this year has turned out to be a royal pain in the *@!%!!

Last week we started to notice a funny smell in our water. When I got into the shower on Thursday morning it had developed into a funky eggy-sulfery smell and I did a quick "french shower” but wasn't brave enough to get my head wet. By Friday the smell was vomit inducing. So our water was shut off, phone calls were made. It's the big national holiday, so more phone calls were made. Saturday someone showed up to drain and clean our rooftop cisterns (caixas de agua) and it was discovered that sewage had infiltrated the fresh water underground pipes at the point where they enter our building. Ewww, blech! We spent the day without water on Saturday. It was 90º. I hadn't showered since my half attempt on Thursday. It was miserable.

The building super finally managed to jerry-rig a garden hose-type system up to the cisterns, by-passing the broken pipes, and by Sunday morning the water was turned on again. But the water pressure is terrible and we have to be very careful not to over-do it until Carnival is over and we can get someone in to fix the problem.

Then yesterday afternoon we had a huge windstorm that knocked our power out. A few phone calls yielded half-hearted responses from the power utility company that were none too reassuring. On this account we got lucky however, and the power came back on right before the Oscars started at 10pm.

This morning we were without internet.

Why does everything conveniently fall apart when the country is all out drunk in the streets?

All right, I'll stop with the kvetchn.

Instead I'll ply you with some photos I took at the Sambadrome a few years ago. That's much more entertaining, right? And I aim to be entertaining!