artykins

Hello! I thought I'd take a moment to give myself a much-needed break from various things. As we speak, the sweet noxious fumes of cleaning products are emanating throughout my flat. You see, our fridge was fixed (yay!), but in order to have that done, two handymen had to traipse through my apartment (boo!).

One of the handymen was adorable. He was an older Latin gentleman whose name is Javier. I know that because I carried on many a conversation with him in Spanish. Admittedly, I was able to understand a whole lot more than I was able to speak. Still, I wanted to adopt him but Matt said we couldn't afford him. To this, I said 'he's a plumber, he can probably afford himself and us as well if we adopt him!' But at the end of the day I am Javier-less.

So the fridge turned out to be broken, not dead. I came home yesterday to find the two handymen in my kitchen poking around in my freezer. The culprit was a defrosting coil that had given out. That meant that ice crystals were accumulating at the back of my freezer and thus preventing cold air from getting down to the fridge. Funny, isn't it?

Anyway, this morning, Javier and handyman two, who was more like an annoying overseer came back with a new defrosting coil and fixed our fridge.

Which brings us to why my apartment is filled with sweet noxious fumes...

I don't care how careful handymen are, they ALWAYS end up bringing dirt into the house with them. It seems to be a pre-requisite habit in order to even think about becoming a handyman. That said, my kitchen floor has been dirty since last Friday*.

* Rewind to last Friday: Javier came over last Friday in order to look at our toilet, which had been driving Matt crazy because it wouldn't fill, so the sound of water would go on forever into the late hours of the night, thus preventing sleep, thus inducing tossing and turning, which in turn produced a very cranky wife because she was being kept awake by a husband who was being kept awake by a toilet.

Case and point, we got a new toilet. It's lovely. And most importantly, it works like it should, thus allowing Matt the sweet blissful slumber he was heretofore robbed of.

Back to today.

Anyway, in the process of having the toilet replaced, dirt inevitably found its way everywhere. And let me just say that our toilet (which was old) had things underneath it that I don't think would be able to survive in sunlight. Or air. It was really nasty. But all that's over with! We have new caulking and everything.

When Javier was finished with the toilet and after I had offered him some ice water (he accepted!), he looked at the fridge and cleaned out the back of it and told me (in Spanish) that he didn't know what was wrong with it, but that he had cleaned it out and I should call if it didn't get any better.

Well, things didn't get any better, so I called the property manager, who in turn called Javier and much to my delight, he was here yesterday seeing what could be done.

And so it was that Arty and her husband, Matt, lived happily with the prospects of being able to keep milk and juice again! Seriously, having no milk in the house sucked. We're going later to drown ourselves in the stuff, which can be translated as 'we're going to Trader Joe's to get the stuff we've missed the last few days.'

Jeremy's birthday is tomorrow. We'll be going out to Concord for dinner with him. He's excited about that.

Jeff has been occupied the last few weeks writing a summer camp program for our church. Every summer since before I can remember, our church has done a summer camp for local kids. It's changed dramatically from the time we were kids going to camp and now. Jeff prepared everything and took it to Nancy (who heads up the camp thing at church) with the resolve that if she didn't accept it, he would wash his hands of camp all together and not do it anymore.

Well, he presented the idea and camp to Nancy today and she accepted it!

He's really excited and I'm excited for him. It's a good thing for him. I might even help out in some capacity.

I sent my resume and a cover letter to a prospective job today. I'm excited about this. After college, I was kind of at a loss as to what I wanted to do. Well, I'm a year older now and a little more sure of what I would like to do. I'm more sure of what I don't want in a job, which is pretty much everything I'm having to deal with now.

I was talking to Cat yesterday afternoon and she asked me why I didn't like my job anymore when I seemed to love it so much just a few months ago. Well, I can't deny that. But things have just gotten bad. Bad to the point that no sane person would deal with it regularly, which is what I've been doing all summer. I'm about ready to snap.

So I'm looking to start somewhere new. Somewhere without a micro-managing person overseeing me. Somewhere that I can stretch myself.

I have a couple other jobs in mind that I'll be applying for. One of them I'm actually waiting for a family friend to get back to me on. He's got an in at this place and I want the skinny on the position before I go for it. Then I'm always looking. New things pop up every day, right? Right.

Today I took Matt to the dentist to have a filling re-filled. He was quite impressed with our dentist, whose office fails to resemble the hole-in-the-wall dentist offices in the UK where no one can hear you scream.

Anyway, they numbed him up nicely. It's been about three hours and the Novocain is just now starting to wear off. It was actually pretty amusing because we went to Chipotle for a late lunch/early dinner and he remarked that the salsa was making the left side of his mouth all hot whereas he couldn't feel a think on his right side. I can imagine how strange a sensation that would be.

Still, Chipotle rocks my world. And I have recently tapped into the sweet realm of cooking with chipotle peppers. They're amazing things. They're smoky and bold with a serious bite. Still, I sometimes wonder if packing them in adobo sauce is necessary. I'd like to taste what a plain chipotle tastes like without it being smothered in a sauce.

Well, that about does it from my end of the continuum. I'm going to go into my freshly cleaned kitchen and make a big pitcher of iced tea. It's supposed to be hot for another day before it cools down, but as long as I have iced tea and lemons, I'll be a happy camper. I'll holler back atcha sometime later this week(end).

Later Days,
Arty