Our house is a fun land of excitement

Sometimes I hate our apartment.

Yesterday when I went to have a shower I couldn't turn on the taps. It took me about 15 minutes, several grumblings about Andrew's freakishly strong hands, 2 raw hands on my part, and the plastic lining of Rachel's bib before I was able to get any water out.

And then when I went to turn the shower off, nothing happened. I tightened the taps as tight as I could but the water stayed on full blast. It took me about 15 minutes more to get the water to turn off, and several more grumblings about Andrew's freakishly strong hands.

My shower experience put a damper on my day. I missed breakfast before we left for the leper colony and was tired and grumpy and starving to death when we got back, which led to my not being a very good mom to Rachel and putting her in her room while I took a nap.

That's the first time I did that and she actually did a very good job. I told her not to cry because mommy was having a timeout and if she cried mommy would go crazy. So she just played nicely while I took a nap and it was awesome.

This morning's shower experience was a little better, aside from scalding Rachel. When I flipped the lever to make the water to come out of the shower head, though, only cold water would come out. All the hot water was still coming out of the tub faucet and I couldn't make it come out of the shower no matter how hard I tried.

And then I saw Templeton--our rat. We knew he was walking across our windowsill because, duh, we could see him through the glass, but we didn't know how he was getting up into the ceiling.

When I saw him I ran to the window and moved the curtains that were covering the last pane of glass. That's when I saw the wires--I hadn't noticed them before, this big braid of wires leading right into our ceiling through a huge gap in the outside of our apartment.

Templeton climbed right up them like a staircase.

I told Andrew. He asked if we could move them. I told him that I highly doubted that because it looks like those wires probably provide us with the meager electricity we have. Moving them would mean we had no electricity. I only do that willingly on special occasions, like camping. We aren't camping in Cairo. We're living here, so electricity is a must, in my opinion.

His reply?

"Our house is a fun land of excitement!"

No kidding. No kidding.

We've had cockroaches and ants; a rat lives in our ceiling; we used to have a pigeon living on our balcony but I think a rat or cat got it; it takes at least 5 or 10 minutes for the hot water to get to the bathroom; we have to turn the shower on and off a new way everyday; sometimes magical mangoes appear on our balcony--I suspect the tree in the yard is a mango tree although I have never seen a mango on it; we have sporadic power outages; we have sporadic water outages; we turned the water off in our second bathroom because the toilet leaks; our tub leaks; the lock on our front door won't lock sometimes unless we use force; at least 1 lightbulb per day pops and scares the living daylights out of me (haha! get it?); our balcony is scary and full of trash; we have electrical and phone wires strung about outside and our rat uses them to get into our ceiling...

I coud go on, but I sound like I'm complaining. Really I'm just trying to illustrate the fun land of excitement that our house is.