added a 60s sleep after the partition, which then got me a notfound, which I suspect means that the CRDT value isn't on this side of the partition at all when these failures happen, intermittent failures could be due to non-determinism in partition layout.  Although when you add the sleep, the failure becomes pretty consistent.  it also only ever seems to happen to this counter?  Not sure what's going on.

I changed the update_2a clause to this:

```erlang
update_2a({BType, counter}, Client) ->                                          
    lager:info("updating ~p with ~p", [BType, Client]),                         
    case riakc_pb_socket:modify_type(Client,                                    
                                     fun(C) ->                                  
                                             riakc_counter:decrement(10, C)     
                                     end,                                       
                                     {BType, ?BUCKET}, ?KEY,                    
                                     [{timeout, 10000}]) of                     
        ok -> ok;                                                               
        {error, {notfound, counter}} ->                                         
            lager:info("retrying"),                                             
            riakc_pb_socket:modify_type(Client,                                 
                                        fun(C) ->                               
                                                riakc_counter:decrement(10, C)  
                                        end,                                    
                                        {BType, ?BUCKET}, ?KEY,                 
                                        [{timeout, 10000}])                     
    end;                          
```

This seems to work consistently, and always seems to hit the retry case.  

Setting {create, true} in the options seems to work, but only with the long sleep.

Otherwise the client times out.

Playing around with various sleeps and timeouts, I found that a 15s timeout post-partition seems to keep it from happening. 2s is too short. 

running out of time, will do more with it on monday.  not sure what to make of all this.