Hose-eating rats and more

Moving always provides a good share of unexpected and unforeseen incidents. We thought we’d share some of our favorites from the past week or so…

- A rat built a home in the bottom of the washing machine. Don’t worry, I watched him run over the wall into the neighbors yard, not before he chewed his way through one of the hoses. I suppose it takes a hungry rat to eat a rubber hose.

- I’m now referring to the Internet situation as a saga. It pains me too much to tell the whole story, and it would only bore you. Remember dial-up? I’m now dreaming of dial-up. What they call broadband here is the speed of dial-up back home (they oversell the bandwidth and so there are too many people trying to use the same server). The service we have now is pathetic. I can occasionally get on long enough to send and receive email, but not after 7:30 am and before 11:00 pm.

- We realized we needed to re-grout the tile in one of rooms. I hired a guy and when he showed up he had no tools. I think he used a key to scrape out the old grout and then he asked if I had an old flip-flop (in case you don’t know, the flip-flop is the standard Brazilian footwear), he actually said something more like this, “go get an old flip-flop” (of course, everyone has an old flip-flop). As per his instructions, I then cut it up into 4 smaller sections so that he could use it to trowel on the new grout.

- It’s been fun to see our girls get to know the neighbors. One family in particular is large hanging around in front of their house most of the days. Fortunatly for them, they are either oblivious to, or just care, that they don’t exactly blend in with their surroundings…