Ex Patria

Sizzle

Yesterday, my nanny called me into the kitchen.  "Listen", she said.  I listened.  There was a crackling noise coming from under the refrigerator.  My first thought was, "It's a mouse".  The nanny declined.  I banged the basebord with my foot but the noise continued.  No mouse worth her salt would do that.  I opened the baseboard... and sparks were flying.  There was an extension cord with two outlets sitting under the fridge, two plugs running in from the fridge and the dishwasher.  It sat in a puddle of water (where from?  Well, the sink is right next to the fridge!) and sparked.  Sizzle.  I unplugged the extension cord from the wall outlet that is, yes, directly under the sink.  The sizzling stopped.  I went and bought a new extension cord, one with a circuit breaker, just to be on the safe side.  We mopped up the water.  We reconnected the cords, everything was dandy.  I decided to rig up some little propup so that next time water dripped, the extension cord wouldn't sit in a puddle again.

This morning, I opened the fridge and it was dark.  The dishwasher hadn't run, although it was turned on.  First I thought the extension cord had fried, again.  I only found that the breaker had popped but pushing it back in didn't do anything.  Experimentally, I turned on the oven that plugs in that same wall outlet under the sink.  Bingo - no oven.  So now the outlet is fried? Who knows.

We use light bulbs at an astonishing rate.  They seem to have a lifetime of about three to four weeks.  We don't even replace them much anymore.  One per room must suffice.  Those giant ceiling light arrangements with six, seven, ten bulbs must suffer.  I'm not buying light bulbs in bulk.

The ceiling light in our bedroom exploded a few weeks ago.  It made a really loud bang, sparks rained on the (polyester) carpet and if I hadn't been in the room, stomping them out, I don't know what would have happened.  Sizzle. We don't use that light anymore.  This morning my maid pointed out that sometimes, the washing machine tingles upon touch.  Sizzle. It also leaks water. 

Our electric gate doesn't budge anymore.  It got blown open during a storm a few weeks back.  Whenever you push the remote to open or close it, there is a faint clicking sound from the cable box.  No sizzling, this time. Which cable box?  Why, this one:

This jumble is not connected to any fuse box.  It neatly bypasses any safety devices.  We have two fuse boxes, and the jumble box has an indicator light.  I flicked all fuses off, but the indicator light is still shining brightly blue.  Some of the wires look exposed.  Not that I get too close to it.  It just seems to scream, "Touch me and die!" While sizzling, probably.

I called the guys from Fix it now.  Let's see if they can prevent our house from burning down one of these days.  Just to be on the safe side, I'm storing our passports in the car...

(Why am I not calling the landlord?  Well, who do you think put that clever jumble box in in the first place?  Huh?)

Homeschool story: writing

My boys abhore writing.  I  have to arm-wrestle them into answering lab sheet questions in complete sentences, coax one more word and then another short word out of them, and my mantra is, "Answer in a complete sentence, please".   They are verbal enough but the act of writing, the physical labor of putting words on paper seems overwhelming.  They even prefer doing long sums and multiplications in their heads, in order to avoid writing down the digits on a sheet of paper.

In today's curriculum, we had a section of introductory sentences in books - "hooks".  We pulled six books out of the shelf, and read the first sentences.  I also had some prepared.

"It was a dark and stormy night."

"Five minutes before she died, Grace Cahill changed her will."

I asked the kids whether they wanted to read the respective book, or not.  "Tax day is April 15" did not get any votes.  "Dark and scary night" was great,  and they are reading the "39 Steps" right now.

Then I challenged them to write (gasp!) four first sentences that they thought would draw a reader in.

Alan wrote:

• They peered into the robot's heart.
• As they entered the maze, they heard a terrible roar.
• It all started on Sentai Mountain.
• As he activated the battle armor, the alarm was triggered.

David wrote:

• As they walked into the woods, they heard a creak.
• They walked into the village.
• They race began when she saw the sun.
• Before the bird died, it squawked.

Yes, well, you can see the inspiration.  They are still pretty nifty, for kids who don't like to write. We also didn't have to argue about word count, and they voluntarily made some sentences longer to make them better.  I was stunned.

Alan was so pleased with himself, he decided to write a story.  For that, he needed a book.  I do pretty much anything if it turns my kids into better (or more willing) writers. I went to my trusty friend, the Internet, and found how to make easy books on Angry Chicken.  I had always swooned over her three girls filling book after book with drawings and writing, thinking I should be so lucky!

So we cut some pages, folded some origami paper, sewed through paper and ended up with not one, not two, but three books. Insipiration is inspiring, or some such.

(The papers are the few left-overs I had from an origami set that my sister-in-law gave me.  I like that even books about robots and trains have flowery covers!)

Alan sat down and started writing (after I drew him some lines).  His book is titled, "X-Force".  He is, after all, a little boy.

David decided to do a nature journal, so we collected some leaves and flowers and are pressing them now for his book.   Jacob, on the other hand, has swallowed this project line, hook and sinker.  His book is almost entirely filled already.  It's titled, "All about trains (and some rockets, too)".

He has about twenty different designs of trains in there - trains that come equipped with cranes, trains that have special wheels, trains that do special jobs ("baseball delivery!"), and some rockets complete with "USA" lettering.  He must have worked for hours on it. 

(Which, incidentally, leads us to the story of how we cured our little boy from violent temper tantrums, wildy age-inappropriate behavior, and very low frustration levels.  But that's a story for another time.)

In the news

Earlier this week, I got an email from the head of the IWCM (International Women's Club of Moldova) asking me whether I'd be willing to do an interview with the local newspaper Timpul.  It's Europe Day on Saturday and they would like to portray a European family.  I asked Doug and he said, "Sure."  So I wrote back and said, "Sure."  (That's how European I am.  I didn't even think about the US connection first; after all, Doug does have an Irish passport.)

The reporter called me the next day and asked me whether she and another reporter and a photographer could come by the same day.  I said, "Sure."  However, if they wanted to meet Doug as well, they would need to come around 6 pm.

They came a little after 7 pm, apologetic - our street seems obscure (it's on all the maps but somehow, that seems not to make a difference).  Taxis can't find it, and the reporters had trouble, too.  They were really nice and friendly and we sat down and chatted.

They asked about Moldova and how we like it, whether we expect Moldova to join the EU at all, what is different about Moldova, how are the prices, what do we like, what don't we like.  We answered.  Do I like the EU?  Well, I love the EU, really.  Are Moldovans Europeans?  What kind of a question is that?  Of course they are!  They might be ex-Soviet but that doesn't take the Europeans out of them.  Europe is big - if we can make Malta and French Guiana fit, we certainly have space for Moldova.  Mind you, and I said that, I think that the EU has enough internal problems not to consider another extension for quite a while but that's not Moldova's fault.  (There's also the Transnistria question which we simply glossed over as "Moldovan politics are complicated".)

The photographer went wild and took 500 pictures of Leah.

We had a pleasant hour.  Then we shook hands, they said the article would be up on Friday, and they left.

Friday morning, I got an email from Doug: "Wow.  Front page, above the fold, and all of page 4!" In fact, it was all of page 4 plus a remainder on page 11. 

The gist of the article is basically what I described above.  We like Moldova, we like the green in the city.  Moldvans are not happy-go-lucky-smile-at-everybody people but if you dig out five words of Romanian, they are superfriendly and helpful.  I had people help me find help, if they couldn't help me themselves. I've only met two grouchy people (the customs lady and a traffic policeman who caught me making an illegal left turn) but both ended up not giving me a lot of grief.  I love how people have flowers in front of their houses - flowers everywhere!  (Lilies-of-the-valley should be the flower of Chisinau, they are simply everywhere.) We like it here, we hope to stay.

People are - mostly - loving it.  I had one Moldovan come up to me and say, "Thank you, thank you for everything you said!"  Which made me go back and check whether I said anything unusual.  I didn't.  It seems that Moldovans are so used to being bashed, they are astonishingly grateful if they aren't.  They really don't deserve that.

Someone told me that Moldovans are European in the summer and Russian in the winter.  Maybe we'll be here long enough to find out.  In the meantime, we bought some copies to send to family. After all, this might just be our fifteen minutes of fame.