apartment

I never took that egg class in high school.

Brooke, , , , 2 Comments

Boaz is still out of town so it’s just me here, taking care of his 43 houseplants.

Only 43? I can almost hear Boaz saying as I type this. There should be 46, which ones do you think you’re missing? Did you get the fern on the left side of the dresser? Not the dresser with the potted moss on it — the dresser that has the four succulents.

There are probably a few dozen more plants hidden under the bed, or in the cupboard behind the granola, or some other last place I’d expect. I’m only watering the ones I can find, and there are 43 of those.

We have so many plants. Or Boaz does. A week ago I called them our plants. A week ago I talked about the home garden with the smugness of a man who says “We’re pregnant” when his wife is. “We love plants.” I’d say, oblivious to the unspeakable burden that is actually caring for 43 different plants on a daily basis.

forest

Well not every day.

The outside plants, yes, every day. Of course. But inside, the tropical plants get watered 2-3 times a week depending on the size of their pot. And the succulents, those only need to be watered every 7-10 days, depending on soil wetness, root density, proximity to a window, and whether or not Mercury is in retrograde. I look up photos of the rainforest and the desert and study them on my phone as I walk around our apartment jungle trying to figure out what’s what. I’ve solved all of them except one. “Tell me what you are” I whisper angrily to that one in the corner that really could be either a fern or a succulent. I really want these plants to live.

park

When he’s here, Boaz waters the outside plants in the morning. So for the first few days I did that too. Watering plants in the morning is nice, it feels like something Oprah probably does. You can pick tomatoes and eat tomatoes for breakfast.

But then one day I forgot about them until I was brushing my teeth that night, so I watered the plants at 1am. Oprah, it’s so much better.

Now I only water the plants at night. Now my favorite part of the day is going out on our balcony and quietly watering four tomato plants and three strawberry plants and a zucchini in almost pitch darkness.

While I’m watering them (Boaz says you have to water tomatoes slowly, is he messing with me?) I watch tv in our neighbours’ windows. No one has curtains in our neighborhood.

It’s so quiet that you can hear the plants drinking the water like someone sucking the last bit of milk through a straw.

Since everything fun has some sort of side effect, I’m sure this is bad somehow. Maybe it gives the plants stomachaches, maybe it keeps them up all night. Maybe it puts our Boaz’s produce on some sort of lunar cycle, maybe they’ll all start menstruating and we’ll have tomatoes filled with blood. When you’re out there in the moonlight with the watering can it sort of feels possible.

At night all the strawberries have shiny leaves, almost reflective, and they look sweaty in the best way. And all the spiders are asleep, or that’s what I tell myself.

I’m excited for Boaz to get back, and it’s not just because last week I had to cut into a carton of ice cream with a paring knife because I couldn’t open it myself. And it’s not just because all the Shabbat songs sound weird when you sing them alone. And it’s not just because he can get all our plants back to a regular sleep schedule.

I’m excited for Boaz to get back so he can tell me once and for all WHAT THAT ONE PLANT IS. Is it a fern. Is it a cactus. Are there tropical plants that grow in the desert? I need answers.

I can not, all but nothing teach.

Brooke, 1 Comment

I don’t remember why I looked up reviews of our thermostat and then used Google Translate to read them, but I’m so glad I did because they turned into beautiful robot poems about broken thermostats. Here I’m pasting my three favorites.

 

Unreliable

Regret, regret, regret. We have now a year in use and, indeed, a huge decline compared with our old thermostat.

At that time “forgets” the boiler.

Well, he further plans nothing. I hung him back today.

 

Everything, except comfort

I have now a few weeks of use. At least half of the time I can not connect what is excellent:

Weekly schedule includes regular way, and must be reset.

Manuals do not go, then, if nothing happens, everything stops.

Try again weeks to connect, in one way or another, Nothing Works.

Indeed.

In short, do not know what to do.

 

Never buy !!!

The worst part is that you can Never get your story. Worthless

every week, sometimes the connection lost.

If you do not Watch and gateway not again (power off of ten second setback) time starts, deviates from weekly program.

I can not, all but nothing teach. Could at least be.

Brooke vs Mouse II

Brooke, , 1 Comment

My real goal is for this just to become a blog about mouse updates so here’s another one.

It seemed like the mouse living in our apartment was pretty much gone. We hadn’t seen or heard any signs of her in weeks, and we’re really good about cleaning up food.

But if you believe for a second that the mouse was gone, you’re really not reading into the sense of foreboding I’m trying to convey right now. It seemed like the mouse was gone. We had all but forgotten she had ever even been there. Do you see what I mean?

If you have a mouse, night is mouse time. That’s when they have free reign of your living space. I woke up during mouse time last night because I remembered I left something on the porch, and I walked through the kitchen. I know you’re not supposed to look at your phone when you wake up at night but that’s what I did next, standing at the kitchen counter.

If this were a movie now we’d cut to the mouse who has been interrupted and is standing frozen just a few feet behind me. She’s trying to hide behind a chair leg. Keeping her breath shallow.

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We cut back to me. In this movie I’m pretty  much a pile of flesh as tall as a mountain and I move in big clumsy steps, so loud that everyone in the theater covers their ears. It seems like I’m going to go upstairs now, and we can almost relax. Wait. Nevermind now I’m looking at Twitter.

The camera cuts back to the mouse, her tail in plain sight if I turn around. Tiny  beads of sweat are rolling down her face. It’s now or never.

The mouse gathers all the courage she can and runs straight through the middle of the room, to her little mouse hole I told you about. Everyone watching in the theater holds their hands up over their eyes, peeking at the screen through their fingers. She’s going as fast as she can, which is frankly not that fast.

I turn slowly, squinting at what at first just looks like a small brown ball. The mouse they’ve cast in this action movie about a mouse who lives with two American expats is grayish-brown, medium sized, and less shiny than I expected. It’s always weird to see celebrities in person. I blink a few times.

Then she’s off to hair and makeup to get ready for whatever our next interaction is. I’m going to start wearing socks inside, just in case we have a scene where we touch more.

Ghost apartment

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Our new apartment is great, I’m not complaining about it. It’s so great that it has a fancy thermostat, the kind you control not only by adjusting the display on the wall, but also via an app you can download.

The apartment’s former tenants used the app to set the thermostat on some sort of schedule, but we don’t have the app yet. It’s only available in the Dutch iTunes store, which we need a Dutch credit card to access, and the bank won’t give us credit cards until we’ve been receiving paychecks for 90 days. So for the next 40 days our thermostat adjusts itself as it pleases. It’s like living in a great apartment with some very finicky ghosts.

Our invisible roommates will get very warm, maybe they’re doing ghost workout videos or baking ghost bread, and they’ll turn the thermostat down to 16 degrees.

We put on sweaters and go to sleep but the ghosts wake up in the night, peckish and FREEZING, and they the thermostat up to 22 degrees to make themselves comfortable.

For those of you who haven’t been thinking about Celsius thermostats as much as I have lately, which is hopefully everyone, 22 degrees is very warm. I’ve been thinking about thermostats a lot. The goal of a fancy thermostat might be to think about the thermostat less, but ours makes me think about it almost constantly. I don’t mind. I like our ghost roommates, they’re helping me get the hang of Celsius way faster than I anticipated.

Our apartment has floorboards that used to match up, but right now there are quarter-inch gaps in between some of them because the apartment is a little bigger this year than usual. The apartment’s size fluctuates a bit, because of wind or because the entire city is built on sand.

Sometimes we’ll be sitting at the table and everything will adjust slightly, and sometimes I’ll wake up in the night because the ghosts have turned up the heat, and I’ll hear all kinds of shifting sounds.

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