I am gaining more and more weight every day. That’s worrying me a bit. I consider buying a bicycle these days. My mom objects strongly though. She thinks I might have a heart attack if I push too much. That happened to one of our relatives a few days ago. He was playing soccer when he had an attack. There is another thing that worries my mom too. She thinks the streets of Tehran are very unsafe for cycling. Well, during the day that is very much true; drivers here seem to have the least amount of respect for anyone who’s not in a car. You have to take great care if you don’t want to be under a car. During the night, as in every big city, crimes happen more. We have night patrols but yet any time anyone can kill you for your bike and steal it. I’m not going to listen to her though; this increase in weight is the silent assassin.

It’s been a very hot summer here in Tehran. During daytime you can see much fewer people on the streets than previous years. In the past few days, we’ve had a few pieces of clouds in the sky and a little rain but that didn’t help much; more humidity causes us to feel suffocating more.

It was a rather good working day today. Mohsen and I found some more bugs in our system and fixed it. We hope to get the system up and running very soon. When we left the factory at 5 PM, the weather was so hot. A very light rain early tonight made the weather a little more bearable.
I sat home and browsed the web for some time. Found two interesting web journals, one belonging to a girl called Wendy and the other belonging to Matilda. The good point was that there were a lot of links to other people’s websites too. I guess I’ll have some pretty good stuff to read in English soon.

Almost everyone in the world knows about inflation. You can find no country which has a fixed currency or where the prices stay constant for a very long time. Almost the same is true about Iran. Every year the prices are kind of updated and they are almost always higher than the previous year. But this year things were a bit funnier. First the government doubled the price of many services and goods; then they said they were going to make things cheaper; and they reduced the prices by 50%. The net result was a 50% increase in the price of some services. Well, the government rubbed in our faces as a favor.

Alireza is one of the dullest and laziest people I have ever met in my 25 years. He has a very bad habit of literally poking his nose into everything. Sometimes when I am concentrating on the computer screen, I notice a head approaching mine and going forth towards the screen; a very annoying thing that he usually does. Today I had the great luck of his getting interested in Maysam’s work; and one could guess there would be shouts in a short while and there was a furious Maysam asking me to get Alireza away from him. It’s a pity for a person to be such a pain in the neck.

We have a new trainee, a clever girl that I find so sweet too. I really enjoy it when I see her cheer, like small kids who have won a game, after she has done some piece of work right. The funny point is that our pain-in-the-neck is grabbing her attention fast. I never understand girls.

And we have a very charming and loveable secretary that is prepared to enter a fight with Alireza any minute; stay tuned for more on that.