Tuesday, August 12, 2003

Today was nothing short of being unproductive, yet ever productive. To some of you, this life I’ve been leading, is really not normal, but in the overall picture, is very normal.

Anyway, most of my plans for today were not realized, as I had planed today to do a little bit of work at the factory and then go to Stepanagert to finally get out of the way a television interview that for over a month I’ve been putting off.

Anyway, after yesterdays swimming, I woke this morning at a very reasonable hour and then after deciding that it was too early, I fell back to sleep to only be waken at a very unreasonable hour by the assistant prosecutor, to tell me that he was interviewing a person I had complained about and that my presents was requested.

I went to his office to discuss my fish farm and the hunter who violated the law and stole form me. The suspect did not deny anything and was ready to pay whatever price he had to for his mistakes.

We determined that the very least was he stole with his calculations was 12 kilos of fish, which has of value of 12,000 dram and he also violated the law of fishing during the time that fish are laying their eggs, which is a punishment of up to 3 years in prison.

After a long debate of what the government was today and the law and what should work and so on, we determined that we would drop the charges that would cause the suspect to sit in jail for 3 years, to him agreeing to compensate us for our loss my means of work. In short, instead of 20% of what we yield, he will receive 10%, for the next 3 months. Of course if he does not make good on this deal, he will face the charges and go to jail.

Though I wanted to make him an example as to the law working so no one would try to pull the same thing, with the present economic situation and other things considered, I figured that this was the best solution and in itself it does send out a message that if your caught stealing, you will be punished in some way. If I had insisted to follow the law, this guy was looking to have to pay out over $1,000, plus possible time in jail, which would have undoubtedly destroyed his life.

Come the 20th of this month, we start to fish and if things work as I think they will, the fish farm will start to generate a positive income for me and start to cover it’s costs and maybe have enough left over to start to build the resort I envision.

Other than this, my addiction to swimming in my lake is starting to become a burden on my work and though it’s a supper way to relax, I need to figure out how to make it not an activity that will cut into my already heavy schedule of things that I need to do.

I just got a call from the commander’s son asking me if we are going to the lake today? I really want to go, but I really don’t know if I should or not, being I have so much work to do. Oh what the heck!!!

I called the Mayor and invited him to come along. He agreed and he also asked if we could take with us another friend of ours, Eric, who works as the regional register.

So Yervant, Artyom (the mayor), Eric and Ashot, who is a neighbor and is the mayor’s nephew, went to the lake, where we swam for over 2 hours.

This time I swam out to the island and this time I used the ores to poke around and scare off any poisonous snakes and then retrieved the netted drum, loaded it on the raft, which I towed out with me and took it back to the guard-shack.

We got back to Martuni just as it got dark and got beer and a nice big ripe watermelon, which we ate at the Mayor’s house.

I am so tired right now and finally my muscles are getting sore (I was expecting this to happen yesterday). One other thing I noticed today is that I can go underwater for literally minutes. I don’t know if this is because the water is so light and full of minerals, or if it’s my no longer living in Southern-California, where I use to smoke the equivalent of 3 packs of smog a day, which undoubtedly had some effect on how long I could hold my breath.

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