In the Dark

It seems that our country is experiencing a bit of a power shortage these days. There is not quite enough electricity to go around, so they've resorted to a random rolling blackout system. Currently, we lose power for about an hour almost every day, but the fun part is that we never know when it's coming. Most of the time, the outages happen in the evening, which means we get to spend some quality time in the dark.

Sometimes the kids will watch a movie on a computer; other times we read together. We have an emergency backup light that comes on automatically when the power cuts out, and of course our phones make great flashlights, too. We also keep some flashlights in a drawer really close to the emergency light, so when it comes on we just walk toward the light and we can find our flashlights. 

Driving around town, we see that it's not just residences that are affected by the blackouts, but businesses, too. It's amusing to drive down a street and see one dark block in the middle of a busy, lit-up street. We often see the blackout hit a new block, and all of a sudden everything goes dark. When it goes out in a restaurant, the people often just stay put, sitting at their tables in the dark, until it comes back on. 

One night recently, we tried to go to a restaurant, only to get there and find all the kitchen staff hanging out outside, smoking cigarettes. We weren't sure how far they were into their hour outage, but they didn't look like they were getting ready to go back inside right then, so we decided to go to a different place. Thankfully, our second choice had power.

Tonight it went out at our house right around 5:30, as the sun was almost down, so we decided to order our dinner rather than try to cook something in the dark. But the place we tried to order from wasn't answering their phones (probably because their power was out too and they weren't taking orders), so we had to make a different choice.

We realize that many people in the world would be thrilled to have electricity 23 hours per day, and we're very grateful for what we have, but we did want to give you a little picture of our life right now. 

Sharing the Love!

We had a sweet Valentine's Day this year! A few years ago, we started a fun family tradition: Each member of the family has a mailbox, and for a few weeks leading up to Valentine's Day, we all write lots of "I love you because" notes to each other. Then on Valentine's morning everyone gets to read their notes. It was something I did on a whim the year we started, but it has become a family favorite for all of us.

This year, we weren't able to use our regular mailboxes since they were still in storage when we got started, so everyone got to decorate a new box.

They turned out pretty cute!

We spent the week leading up to Valentine's Day getting our house ready to move into, and that morning was our first morning in our new house (in other words, complete chaos), but I was able to find our V-Day decorations in a box and have this ready for the kids when they woke up:

I brought a few little V-Day candies and small gifts with me when we left the states a month ago, and they were all excited about their new dry-erase boards (in their favorite colors) and the Valentine M&Ms and SweetTarts they found at their places.

They also loved reading their notes from each other. I think Sawyer is giggling here about the note from Lee Anna that said, "I love you because your hair is funny in the morning!" Some were silly, others were super sweet.

And Sawyer (with his funny hair) wrote us all this sweet note when he finished reading his cards:

I'm so glad I get to love these people--on Valentine's Day and everyday!

Progress!

We made some big steps toward getting moved in to our new home yesterday! The movers came and brought all of our furniture and belongings. They even removed the cardboard and plastic wrapping from each piece of furniture, and assembled everything that they had taken apart for storage (beds, wardrobes, dining table, etc.). In our last few moves, we've had to do that part ourselves, and we are so grateful for the hours, if not days, that it saved us for them to do it!

Here are a few pics I took right before we left last night. Thankfully, we still have our other apartment for a few more days, so we can go back there to sleep and eat while we get things arranged and unpacked in our new place.

The kitchen looks a lot better with appliances in it! The oven is still in its cardboard box, but hopefully someone will come hook it up for us in the next few days. We've missed our toaster and microwave and coffee pot this month, so it was fun to see all those things again!

The dining and school rooms are coming together, too! We are going to do some more rearranging, so there won't be quite that much furniture lined up against the left wall, but it works for now. The kids got so excited as the movers unwrapped each piece. They were glad to see their stuff!

And our living room furniture fits nicely in the spot we had planned for it. Now we need some curtains for that huge window! Thankfully, the people next door don't seem to open their curtains very much, so we don't feel too conspicuous.

 The girls' room is coming together...

 and so is ours!

and I don't have a picture of Sawyer's room because the light doesn't work in there, and it was dark when I took these. That's on the list of things to get fixed today!

The kids even managed to find a few toys boxes to unpack! They were super excited to be reunited with toys they haven't seen in nine months (and it kept them quiet and occupied while the movers worked!).

Now it's time to head back over there and unpack some boxes.
Hoping for another productive day!

Fully Furnished...and then some!

While we've been hunting for a permanent home this month, we're staying in a furnished apartment that a friend found for us before our arrival. We were so grateful to have a place to land after the long trip that got us here, and the place he found for us is great, with plenty of room and all the basic things we need...but it does have some quirks that we thought it would be fun to show you.

The living room area is decidedly Arab in several ways. It's a nice-sized room, but way too crammed full of furniture! In addition to the dining table, there are not one, not two, but three entire sets of living room furniture--all in one room! You can see one set directly behind the table in the photo above...

then another orange floral set to the left...

and a third 80s-looking set on the right. None of the sets matches any of the others, and the large curtains on the wall don't match any of the three! However, on the positive side, we're ready if 40 of our closest friends come over and need to sit down! You can see that we've designated the 80s living room area as our "laundry room." The washing machine is in the bathroom, and the dryer is, well, you're looking at it. Our dryer is still in storage until we move into our apartment, so until then we're drying all our clothes in the living room.

If you scroll back up to the first photo, you'll also notice one other common decorating feature from this part of the world--chandeliers! Our living room is home to FIVE crystal chandeliers. Pretty impressive, huh?

And this is the kitchen we're working with this month. We don't have a dish drying rack, so we've been spreading the dried dishes out on a towel on top of the stove (stoves here all have a fold-down lid that makes them flat on top). It's a great spot for drying dishes, but a big pain anytime we want to actually use the stove.

The kitchen is also very sparsely equipped, so we've had to improvise when making meals at home. I cooked garlic bread in a skillet that had lost its handle one night, and another day we made cookies in these little foil pans. We've also eaten out or ordered in A LOT. Thank goodness for cheap delivery and restaurants in walking distance!

Finally, we wanted to show you one other room in the house--the bathroom. We're all five using this one bathroom for bathing because the water heater in the other one has a short and won't stay on. We tried turning it on a few times, but it always ended with a loud POP and a blown fuse. So we finally gave up.

The water heater in the bathroom pictures works ok, so we've all been bathing in there, but we wanted you to see one glaring omission in this bathroom that makes it different from any we've ever seen in the states: No shower curtain. Shower curtains are entirely optional and not really that common here. In fact, bathtubs themselves are also a luxury. However, every bathroom has a tile floor and a drain somewhere in the floor. What millions of people do here is simply stand in the middle of the bathroom, turn on the shower head attached to the bathroom wall, take their shower, and then squeegee the water into the drain when they're done.

Now if you did that in Florida, your floor might be wet the rest of the day, but when you combine our desert heat and lack of humidity, it's not really a problem here. We do have a bathtub, so our floor doesn't get too, too wet, but the lack of shower curtain does mean a fair amount of splashing onto the floor. So you can add "shower curtain" to the list of things we'll be excited to unpack when we move into our new apartment next week. Stay tuned for new house pics soon!