you take the good, you take the bad...

sing it, mrs. garrett.

today had its ups and slight down, which in the grand scheme of things is nothing. 

the goods: housekeeper came today. cost: 22 dirhams per hour, which is roughly 7 dollars. 

more good: water is no longer yellow and actually hot. i'm going to e-mail the lovely customer service at fewa (the federal water and electricity company) to find out what the deal is. that was bizarre.

tangent: there are no real addresses here. if you want to get mail, you have to have a p.o. box. i don't know if it's even possible for regular people to have a post office box and serge tells me he doesn't think people have them anyway. i mean the only good thing about mail is the magazines, catalogs and occasional letter/card thrown in. otherwise, who wants bills? so how do we get our water/electricity bill? someone drives by and slips the bill under the door. i'm not even kidding. then you have to go to the office or post office and pay it within 7 days. 

the bad: i had to run out to the store to buy dishwasher detergent and some other products for the cleaning lady. i tried to get a covered parking space (side note here: a lot of places have covered parking areas - not a garage, but kind of like a pergola only with straw or plastic roofs to shade parked cars from the blazing sun. i will point out, however, that the safeer mall and the al hamra mall have none of the above. i wonder if they will install them before the 120 degree summer heat is upon us. every little bit helps when it's that hot out.) and saw one available as people were packing their car. so i wait with my blinker on. several cars almost came down to do the same thing, but saw me waiting, so they passed. 

one jerk stole my spot. urrr. i guess the moral of this story is that there are jerks everywhere. (duh.) shake it off, shake it off. no stress, just roll on ahead and take a non-covered spot. i can't really complain - it gets only to about 75 during the day right now. that's nice.