Today my job was managing maintenance calls to the house. Super exciting. One AC unit was out making Carter’s room an oven (he had to sleep in the hallway last night) so the repair people came to work on it today. Meanwhile someone blocked up a toilet requiring another repair call and I have no hot water in my shower so someone else came to look at that problem. Technically I have some hot water, but it’s only the cold water that gets hot from the tank being on the roof and and since my faucet has the hot and cold switched the guy and I went round and round about whether I actually had a problem or not.
Another quirky thing about our house: the doorbell rings in an odd location so it’s easy to miss. I would blame it on my poor hearing except the kids and the dog can’t hear it either. That makes waiting for house calls an adventure. Ironically in Bahrain service people who came to the door would lean on our very loud bell and ring it non-stop until someone came to the gate, behavior that made me want to strangle them. Here it seems that the cultural norm is one short push on the bell and then nothing else. I hope they learn to ring twice or come and knock or they’ll be waiting a long time for someone to come to the door.
The kids have been doing a lot of this.
Lying around, looking at books, watching TV or playing games on their phones/ipads. Today was more laundry, more Gilmore Girls (I’m almost done with the good seasons and haven’t decided if I’m going to torture myself with the later ones or not), and our new nanny/housemaid/personal assistant/organizer/sanity saver came over to meet us. She’s very young and quiet, but was sweet with both Camille and Micah. She’s going to move in with us this weekend which stretches me way out of my comfort zone. but I think it will be a good thing for everyone.
Camille has been busy taking selfies to send to Josie. She misses her a lot.
When Josh came home from work tonight we went to the mall for dinner and to pick up a few more things for the house.
No alcohol here — only juice dressed up to look like cocktails.
We ended up at Chili’s so we could have bottomless tortilla chips and salsa. And because it was the only warmish spot in the mall. I’m going to need a parka to go shopping here. It’s like they’re trying to recreate Ski Dubai here in Abu Dhabi.
Kind of fancy: the glass elevator travels up and down the side of an aquarium.
Shopping for more house stuff.
I need to remind myself that this part of moving is always hard. There’s not much to do, I feel out of place, we spend more money than I want to, and even if I’m making the best of it, I can’t help that it doesn’t feel like home. I have to wait it out. I didn’t love Oman upon arrival and I certainly didn’t adore Bahrain. The only place I fell in love with right away was Egypt and that’s because it was first and was our long awaited adventure. I gave it a lot of slack because it was only “temporary.”
After we came home from the store the kids took the pets outside and ran around our yard before bed. This is what we wanted.
A hot summer night — the kids playing soccer in our yard. It will feel like home soon enough.