robinchartier

I love my house. Cardboard shelves, bins for clothes, and all. It’s still bigger than what we need, but it feels more cozy and homey than our last house. It’s not as divided (as is the traditional Arab way) and it has a kitchen that we can live in. It reminds me of our house in Bahrain in all the best ways.

We’ve always been kitchen people. Gathering around the island in this house and actually having room to sit and eat together (well, there are chairs for 3, a step-stool for one, and one can stand) is the biggest change from our last house. There, the kitchen was a closet of cupboards and appliances as it was designed to be a kitchen for household help to work in, not as a family room. Here the kids can come down in the morning, actually hungry for breakfast because they aren’t rushing to catch the bus at 7. They eat, argue over whose turn it is to walk the dog and whose turn it is to walk Camille to school, and leave around 7:30. I can even make them go back upstairs to pick wet towels up off the floor — running late now just means they’ll be late, not that they’ll miss the bus. Freedom.

Same with dinner. As kids come and go with play practice, sports, and church activities, we feed them on a rotating schedule at our kitchen island. I’m in there with the food and the baby birds fly in, eat, and fly back out. The play starts tomorrow night and we get to go watch both boys perform — 

in a comedy about a troupe of Shakespearean actors who are a bunch of misfits. At least that’s what I’ve gathered from overhearing rehearsals for the past month — the auditorium is next to the library and I’ve gotten an earful of it every day. 

We are still adjusting, but each week it’s feeling more and more like home.

We are settling into a rhythm this week, our first “normal” week in our house. Josh is back in the UAE, figuring out his job, the kids are walking or riding to school every day, and I’m on my gym in the am, library in the pm schedule instead of unpacking every morning.We spent 95% of our weekend finishing up the house — Josh and Carter installed lights (replacing the single bulb hanging from the ceiling with some brighter, more homey looking options. The jail cell minimalism look wasn’t doing it for me. Good thing we bought them before we went on our essentials-only spending plan or I would be learning to embrace the single bulb right now. Ah, my Turkish lamps. They always make me smile. In the background are free curtains that came as part of Camille’s canopy bed, but we stole them to screen our windows that face the street. Clearly the last 5% of work to be done needs to take place in this room. Ugh.
Inventive storage solutions — take that IKEA! (though this ended up being temporary as I found a better shelf from the living room and moved my cardboard box masterpiece to Camille’s room where she can stuff it with all of the knick-knacks that she can’t bear to part with. It’s nice to feel settled and I’m amazed by how much we been able to repurpose without buying anything else. And miracle of miracles, someone asked me this week, “Do you need a wardrobe? Because we have one that we need to get rid of.” God providing, right and left. This wardrobe is huge, and it holds all of the boys’ clothes, turning their room from a disaster of piles into a streamlined space that doesn’t make me want to weep when I walk through the door.

It took me all week to compose this post and thankfully, I find myself at the weekend again. We have been moving through life non-stop and I need the break. There is nothing on the schedule for this weekend (other than that last 5% of house organizing) and I’m happy to stop and catch my breath!

I’ve written about it before, but there’s a term to describe the experience in the Middle East compared to living in America: Not Quite Right. In other words, “Close, but no cigar.” Friends of ours joked about it before we ever moved overseas with examples of ordering pizza and it arriving with corn kernels as a surprise topping (yes, really) or being in a store and wanting to buy something, but the cashier is unable to sell it to you because it doesn’t have a price tag on it. Even if there is another item (but broken) with tags, they can’t take the price of the same item and apply it to the thing that you want to buy. Been there at the Sultan Center in Oman with a table that I wanted and had to walk away from because they couldn’t/wouldn’t take my money . . . so NQR.

Sometimes it seems that things are almost normal, especially here in Abu Dhabi, but the NQR lurks right under the surface. Today Josh and I went to IKEA to grab the most minimal of things (adhering to our spending only on essentials challenge) to pick up sheets for the boys’ beds that would hopefully fit. (Spoiler alert: they do, butI like my fitted sheets to be *tight* and these fit, but are baggy, even though they are supposedly the right size. Oh well. #overit). Anyway, we also needed a curtain rod to hang our Qum (carpet art for the wall) so we found a basic black one and got out of there before the need for MORE STUFF hit.

When we got to the car I realized the curtain rod hadn’t made it into our bag so I went back to the register to get it. The cashier said, “Oh, it’s your curtain rod! You need to pay this man for it since he paid for it already” (pointing to another customer). Say what now? The cashier had missed it on our order and put it on the transaction behind us. Normal people would expect the store to refund him and charge me, but at IKEA, an international, major company, they wanted to avoid the paperwork and just have me hand over cash to a stranger and walk off with my curtain rod. That is NQR in action.

It probably would have been fine, but I wasn’t having any of that today. I’ve used up all of my “roll with it” energy for the month, or maybe even for the year. I said, “No, I’m not paying him anything. I’ll pay you.” And all was fine and I went home with my curtain rod while poor customer was still waiting for his refund and Josh and I laughed at the things here that are crazy, but masquerade as normal.

As a followup to yesterday’s post about my AC/power woes, last night the guy said they had to get a compressor and would come back on Saturday or Sunday (since Friday is our holy day and everyone has the day off generally). He didn’t say what time, but I assumed that one of us would be around since we’re still trying to make this place a home. Get me a few more packs of cement hooks and I could spend all afternoon throwing things up on the walls. Good times.

Anyway, I caved and decided to hire a helper/housemaid/nanny/cleaner/domestic assistant . . . pick whatever name you’re most comfortable with. As Americans, we’re generally uncomfortable with them all so while most other nationalities will say they need to hire a maid, and specify which nationality they require because some are better than others, we shy away from all that and talk about our helpers like they are friends who just happen to do our laundry and we give them money randomly every now and then.

I had been trying to do it myself, but I can’t go to the gym and work and keep the house clean. Maybe that makes me lazy, but the gym is a part time job of its own since it generally eats up 3 hours of my day. (I only work out for an hour, but it’s 20 min each way, plus shower/changing time, plus if I talk to anyone after . . . trust me, it eats up my entire morning). And I had 2 different people comment on the muscles in my arms this week so I’ve finally arrived.

Of course there’s always the trepidation of hiring the right person — no one can compare to Josie and certain people are more trouble than help (I’m looking at you, Nanny), but I was barely treading water in keeping the house straightened up and never had time to actually clean. Thankfully a friend had a recommendation of someone to hire and she came over this morning to rescue me. Lady (not her real name) is going to come twice a week to vacuum, mop and anything else that looks like it needs doing. I love her already.

About 10 minutes after I left for work, I get a phone call from Lady and she’s whispering, “Madame, someone is at the door. Should I answer it?” Um, I’m not expecting anyone . . . maybe it’s the yard guy? (Oh goodness, that makes me sound ridiculous, but trust me, it’s totally normal and worth it). But when she answered the door, surprise! It’s the AC guy totally out of the blue, expecting someone to be home so he can fix the AC. With no notice at all. Also totally normal. I told her that as long as she was there, they could work, but she could kick them out when she was finished as they hadn’t scheduled with me first. Oh Abu Dhabi, you are so weird sometimes.

  The new king of Al Rawabit street

Josh is in Saudi this week on his first business trip with his new company. He’s had several meetings and all is well there, but you know what happens whenever he travels, right? That’s right. I came home from work to no power and no AC. And I didn’t have a contact number for the maintenance people. It was the first night in over a week that I was going to get to enjoy an evening at home and instead I had to play the repairman waiting game.

Thankfully the boys figured out how to get the lights back on and solved the problem of what was tripping the house (the downstairs AC unit) and Josh texted me the number of the repair people. So I call, a man answers, “Hello?” I explain the problem, talking for about 20 seconds and after I pause he replies, “Hello?” Oh good grief. I ask if he can hear me and he replies, “Hi, Arabic?”

It’s going to be a long night . . .

While we waited for the repair people (the man eventually brought the phone to someone who spoke English) we at least had lights and cooling upstairs. Even with the AC out and temps in the high 90s (and at 10pm it still “feels like” 103 so it’s hot 24/7), our new house seems to stay cooler than our old one. Yay for that!Of course the electrician came in the middle of dinner and tripped the breaker to the house. Then he asked if he could go get his tools. What did you come with? Your hands in your empty pockets? Totally normal here.
Yay, power is back on (and my house is looking more sorted than a week ago)
and then off again  . . . so that was my relaxing evening at home. And then they had to come back the next morning to complete the job. Which meant I couldn’t go to the gym today, sort of a good-news, bad-news kind of thing. I’m always thrilled to not have to go to the gym, lol, but it’s annoying to have to rearrange my schedule to wait on someone whom you’re not sure is going to show up (these guys did though — winning). It doesn’t matter to most people because they have full time house help that is always available to answer the door, but that is not my life.

And they didn’t actually complete the job so we get to do it all over again on Saturday or Sunday once they get a compressor — probably from a vacant house nearby. That’s what they did at our last residence. Totally normal. Another normal crazy: we finally got sheets for the boys’ beds (I have no idea why I don’t have sheets for that bed from our last house), but they are the wrong size because it’s an American size mattress and even though I measured, they are too tight and pop off in the night because the corners are too short for the thicker mattress. Maybe I’ll just wait until Calvin comes to visit at Christmas and have him bring me some from the US. At least I was productive this morning while the guy was at the house fixing the AC — until I ran out of the special hooks for cement walls. To hang things you either need a drill, which I can’t be bothered with, or these nifty hooks with tiny pin-like nails that get hammered into the wall. They are fine enough to go into the concrete and the several connection points in each hook holds it into the wall. But once it’s in there’s no going back — pulling one out takes a chunk of the wall with it. So I go wild with my hammer and eyeball, no measuring for me, and 95% of the time it comes out OK. I tend to go with intentionally eclectic spacing so measuring becomes less essential.
Finally we have my normal crazy girlie who I realized has been spending too much time on computer screens lately because she gets fully absorbed and goes into withdrawal tears when I tell her it’s time to turn it off. I won’t post the wailing photo out of respect for her (because she’s old enough to care), but this is after she pulled it together, apologized and we worked on folding laundry together before bed instead. I’m thankful that tomorrow is finally Thursday because I have needed a weekend all week.