.fr

we were panicked, when last i spoke to you. missy talked to our upstairs neighbor about the hot water situation. sounded like she'd lost her hot water too, and was pretty mad about the whole thing. all the other neighbors, including our landlady and next-doors (the ones in charge of our heat), were away on vacation. landlady to return at the end of the month. nervousing news.

we got used to boiling water on the stove every couple days to take tiny baths.

then missy caught our next door neighbors coming home and tried to grill them about it. they have bourgeois accents and speak fast. they play with our 19th century fusebox for a bit and tell us they'll help us call the rental company on monday. very nice of them. and about an hour later missy's washing her hands and notices that the water is slightly warmer from the hot tap. somehow, some way our heater got turned on again.

i'm not asking any questions. i have my ideas, but i won't risk jinxing things. boy oh boy warm showers are great! i took them way too much for granted before. no longer.

well, maybe i'm jinxed anyway. missy has just finished giving me a haircut. i'm good and itchy. and the construction workers outside just buzzed up to say they're shutting off the water for "5 minutes" to switch over the lines or something. an hour later... i'm curious if they'll get around to it before quitting time.

it means the bathroom is off limits too.

really, i'm only whining. it's something to blog about since most of what fills up my life isn't barely interesting. but i ought to be used to random interruptions and outages from my time at oak st. at its worst there was something new and annoying every day for a month. i hear it's the european way. a little bit of chaos to give spice to your day and remind you what's not important. we have electricity brownouts here all the time. wanadoo upstream DNS breaks fairly regularly for hours. that anything works at all should be considered a miracle. i don't mean that sarcastically. one forgets the amount of progress that's been made when your own history is so recent.

i try to put it in perspective by thinking about the same streets i walk on having been home to lepers and littered with chamberpot dumpings out of second story windows. cobblestones were revolutionary. probably the same stones being dug up now to run new water and fiber lines. for that matter, avignon is the site of the oldest evidence of human construction in france. in 600 BC people were building fort towns on the hill. things are pretty good now, comparatively. no more "god turned off the fish supply and it looks like it's going to be a cold winter."

update: it's 6pm, all the workmen have left, and the water's still off. hee hee.