Category: Stuff I don’t like

I just suffered for 15 minutes with this person on my computer-silly me!  I should know better than to click on something called Windows Dancer just to see what it is.  It iook way too long to find out how to get her off my screen!  Now I’m going to uninstall her, if I can…

This is a photo of my fridge in happier days, when it still worked.

Yes indeed, my fridge is sick, maybe unto death.  It’s kind of a tragedy, since it is a German import which can’t be replaced (it works off bottled gas) and might not be able to be fixed.  Sigh.  I was really, really mad when this broke.

Then, that night, I was rereading a biography about a radical guy from the 60s and 70s, Keith Green.  I was reading a part that talked about his stance on materialism.  That struck a chord.  The fridge is just stuff.

But, I still want cold water (and Coke).  There’s electricity from 6 pm to 1 am where I live.  Someone else here told me that he had a little chest freezer that he used as a fridge-having it cool for 7 hours in the evening was enough to keep things refrigerator cold. 

I’m in the city right now, playing the paperwork game, so I went to a store I just heard about.  It’s run by an organization in France that teaches young people that have rough lives the trade of working on appliances.  They get the appliances (donated, maybe?), refurbish them, and then ship them over here to sell them.  They also teach people here how to work on them, creating jobs.  All in all a pretty cool operation, no pun intended.  So, now I am the excited owner of a little chest freezer, for less than $200 and with a three month guarantee.  Not bad!

I love buying fabric here!  Last month I bought 3 pieces to be made into pajamas for me-about $4 of fabric for one pair of pajamas.  The seamstress finally got them back to me ($7 to have one pair made).  Happily, I put some on after my evening shower, nice and clean, ready to be nice and cool.

But I wasn’t.  Yet again I have accidentally bought a polyester/cotton blend.  I can tell the difference as soon as I put them on, but I can’t tell the difference when I’m feeling it in the market.  Aargh!  I now have a plethora of polyester pajamas.  Say that 5 times fast.

In case you hadn’t guessed, it’s hot here.  So, polyester is not a fabric you want touching your skin.  Last time I accidentally made polyester pjs I had them cut up and made into cloth napkins.  I don’t need any more napkins!

Someone told me that you can tell if fabric is pure cotton or not by burning it.  If it’s cotton, it will smell like burning paper.  Ok, so I’m supposed to go to the market and set people’s merchandise on fire before I buy it?  I’m not sure, but that just might be culturally inappropriate.  Then I learned that what you do is pull out a thread from the cut end and just burn the thread.  If it turns into a little hard plasticky bead, that means it’s not 100% cotton.  We’re still talking about burning stuff in the middle of the market, though.

So, I guess I’d better go shopping again and try to get pure cotton this time…rats!  More fabric shopping! 

After 6 years living in Texas and 3 living here, it finally happened.  I saw a legendary flying huge cockroach.  Ick.  Thankfully, I was in a guest house and not my own house when I saw him.  Thankfully it didn’t fly right at me.  But it did fly.  Ick.  And don’t try to reassure me and tell me it’s a water bug.  That is a cucaracha.  Or in French, a cafard. Interestingly enough, cafard is also slang for being depressed.

Back to the bug, I dropped one of my favorite sandals on him, not wanting to get too close.  He just shrugged it off and walked out from under it.  Not having a hiking boot with me to drop on him, or an anvil,  or a rifle/shotgun/flamethrower/Uzi to shoot at him, I smacked him with the aforesaid favorite sandal.  The picture is of him, recently deceased, next to a Q-tip to give you an idea of the size.  Ick.  There are reasons other than mosquitos that I sleep inside a mosquito net.  Ick.

So, my friend Lois gave me a little orientation to the inside of my new truck.  Her hands are the tan ones that are capably pointing things out, mine is the confused pale one.

Lois pulled out the dipstick and told me that my oil was a little on the low side, but still ok.  So far so good.  I saw what she was pointing to.

Since then, I’ve driven the car about 10 miles, not much.  This morning I went to check the oil and probably add some before I head on my 300 some odd mile trek up north.  I pull out the dipstick, clean it off, stick it back in.  Then I pull it out again-and there’s oil going way up the dipstick, like 4 inches past full, but only on half the length of the thing.  Ok, try again.  Now It’s showing completely full over the whole dipstick, with half of it oily about 3 inches up.  Now I feel like a dipstick.

The same kind of thing happens when I check my tires with one of those gauges that makes the white thing shoot out like the thermometer in the Thanksgiving turkey.  I use the gauge once, it says they’re low.  I do it again, it says they’re overfull.  I end up taking it to Jiffy Lube where they check my tires and my oil.  I would have a long way to go to find a Jiffy Lube here.  The tire thing is solved easily enough-I bought a digital gauge.  The oil thing however, is another story.  And I get my hands all dirty on top of everything!  Anyone got the number of a Jiffy Lube that does really long distance house calls?