Funny little quirks of our new home

We love our house here. It is an incredible blessing to us. Really, it is. We haven't lived in a single famiy home in 9 years and we finally have a little bit of extra space to spread out. Not to mention the pool and yard. And the massive screened in patio. Most people here do not have a yard, or a screen patio, so the fact that we have both does not go unthanked by us.

It's easy some days to forget that I am living in Africa. We don't yet have a car and we found out today that our Africar, that we were told had arrived last week, was actually somebody else's...and ours is still floating through the Atlantic....arrival time unknown. So. There are many days due to lack of transportation and fear of being crushed to smithereens on my bike that I just hang out at home. Hence, the reason why it's easy at times to forget that I live where I do.

It doesn't take long though...for me to remember where I am.

Actually, all it takes is sitting down at my computer and getting electrocuted.

We were told before we moved here that our assigned house had some small electrical issues...like, whenever you touch something metal you get a small electrocution because of improper grounding. We were also told that it was going to be fixed. At least, I think that's what we were told. That could have been my imagination. 

Either way, whether I imagined that conversation or not, it is not fixed. So whenever I sit down to the computer and touch my metal keyboard, I get painful little shocks in my fingers. I'm sorry, but that is not some small electrical issue! It feels like somebody is stabbing me repeatedly with a needle! At first I thought that little microscopic bugs had crawled into my keyboard and were biting my fingers (which is a totally believable conclusion for where I live, okay, I am not insane). But every time I looked down to see if something was biting me, there was nothing there. (I have faulty logic...apparently I'd already forgotten that I determined they were microscopic).

When I told Isaak that it felt like something was biting my fingers every time I typed, he told me not to worry, there were no bugs, I was only being electrocuted.

Phew. Thank goodness! Just minor electrocution.

It's gotten so painful in fact that I am currently typing in gloves. Have you ever tried to freakin' type on a keyboard in gloves?! Every three words I have to auto correct my spell check because I keep typing stuff like rthids/. But, if electrocution is the price I have to pay to be able to bloig, so be it. My fingers will toughen up eventually, or go numb from nerve damage.

Thankfully there is nothing metal right inside the kitchen door, because we have a...good sized leak in our roof over the kitchen, and when it rains, of course it drips, and creates a nice sized puddle on the floor right inside the door. Which, after living here for almost a month now, and having it rain and leak and rain and leak almost every day, you'd think that I'd remember, "hey, we have leak in our kitchen ceiling! Do not to go running in there while it's raining expecting it to be dry! Because you will slip on the water!" But, funny enough, I still forget. And there I'll go, crashing into the kitchen right through the growing pool of water...always grateful in that moment that I am not touching something metal so that I can escape greater electrocutons.

I mean, of all that things that could kill me in this country....I never thought it'd be my house.

Thankfully though, I don't have to worry about escaping electrocution all day long from metal objects and leaky roofs, because our power goes out about ten times every day (on average, sometimes more). So, during those times I'm safe. The city electricity here is not good. But when we moved in we didn't realize this because our generator wasn't working properly so it would run non stop 24 hours a day. So, we never lost power. But then they came last week for the 60th time and finally fixed it, and now it only turns on when the power goes off. Which, we discovered, happens quite frequently. Some days it's really bad and we lose power every ten minutes or so. And after the power goes off, it takes about 5 seconds for the generator to turn on and switch over, and then when the city electricity comes back up, we lose power again when the generator shuts off, and then everything turns back on again five seconds later.

Repeat that dance ten times a day and I finally gave up resetting the microwave clock.

Add to the mix our family fruit flies, flees, ants, rice bugs, and ninja mosquitoes (mosquitoes here have freaky ninja Jesus powers where they can disappear from right in front of you and materialize in another room to escape mid air squishing. It's crazy.)

So yeah, it doesn't take long to remember where we live now when I start to forget. I have lots of wonderful little quirks to remind me. And they're not so bad. If you can learn to deal with ninja bugs, and electrocution and leaky roofs and frequent power outages....it feels quite homey. It is quite homey actually. Most of the time it makes me giggle. The quirks are a part of what makes this our home. Random little oddities that are a part of our new life. So I'll take it all. If it means this is home, then I'll take it.

*(Except the whole being electrocuted thing. That actually hurts. Someone needs to come and fix that. And the leaky roof, after rainy season ends and the roof dries out, the landlord is having it repaired. Hallelujah! I don't want to break my neck slipping on the floor. And the bugs, they can get ta steppin'. I actually try to kill them every day and do a victory dance when I succeed in squishing one of those evasive little buggers. Other than that....it's all good! We are loving our new home!!)