Tuesday, December 12, 2006

Busy !!!!

I have got a few "pings" wondering why no updates recently.
Unfortunately my work has got in the way of fun, and this is the reason.

For my IT friends, we have just entered the Go Live phase of the SAP implementation for my Free Zone client. This is the culmination of 18 months of planning and development.
The biggest challenge in the end is the people, and in this case it is very true. They are going from a paper based process to an enterprise class online system, virtually overnight.
Lots of training, lots of work, not a lot of fun.

On the other hand we have had winter rains arrive in exceptional fashion, recording 63 mm of rain in three days last week. That is 50% of the annual average. For the non-metric readers that is about 2.5".

Not a lot of water for most of you but here the ground is rock hard, the streets have no drainage system, and waterproofing is not a strong consideration when building houses.

We did take a short drive out to Wadi Baih to see the report of 300 meters of road washed away overnight.

And large gravel pit, about 10 meters deep, completely full of water runoff from the mountains. In the middle of the "lake" was the port-a-cabin bunkhouse floating and the fuel tanker for the heavy equipment floating also. The heavy equipment was completely submerged.

Many traffic accidents as people here do not understand hydro-planing very well until they strike an immovable object.