Hello!

It has been a long long time since I've updated anything. We're leaving for New Dehli tomorrow so I wanted to put up some updates before we go!

Andy and Melody visited from Seattle. We went to Hiroshima and a few other touristy destinations while they were here. It was really fun and we were so happy to have visitors!

Miyuki also came out from Tokyo!

The pictures above are from Miyajima. The big red tori sits in the water and looks really cool at high tide. Miyajima is a tiny tourist island with a lot of fun food and shops. They also have deer! The deer did not care for bosco, not one bit! They tried to head but him and I had to dive in front of him to save his tiny life. 

That's all that was really noteworthy. The sakura bloomed a couple of weeks ago so there was beautiful cherry blossom goodness everywhere

But now it's going to be the rainy season pretty soon, so we've had showers on and off and it's still fairly cold at night. But summer is right around the corner!

I will post more updates when we get back from India! I have 3 hours before we have to leave and I have done NOTHING. Truly nothing. I have been videochatting with Laura and that's about all my accomplishments today. 

Happy Spring!

Watergate 2012

Ahhhh not since the great garage/laundryroom flood of o'ten has water wreaked so much havoc on the Tsimberov-DeColebi  household. Why must you constantly battle against us, water????

So....late the other night, Bret came in from a late night Bosco outing and said the water pump is leaking. It's situated off to the side of our dirt road driveway, pretty out of the way, next to the stone wall that seperates the neighbor's yard. Fine, the water pump is leaking, fine, turn it off, fine, call the landlord, fine. Everything is fine. We just turned it off and turned it back on when we needed water, right? Wrong. This sweet deal only lasted about 12 hours, then the water pump decided to call it quits on us altogether.

Oh well, it's just a water pump....not.

Water is EVERYTHING.

Bret had to go out of town for a couple of days the following morning, and the landlord said he'd send someone over. So I was alone with Bosco, had no water, and it occured to me after my second trip to the bathroom that something had to be done. Grave is the toilet situation with no water. Grave indeed.

There's a water spigot in a neighboring field about a 7 minute walk from the house. I started looking around the house for big containers to haul water with, and find a big camping water bottle. I go back and forth from the field a couple of times, and try to fill up the back of the toilet reservoir. Turns out, the bottle is 40 percent insulation, heavy and very ineffective. I went outside and found a big old bucket people use for farming in the field in  our front yard. Much, much more effective, but heavy and I can only carry it on one side, and it made me feel a bit lopsided. Whatever, I got the toilet to flush. Great success!

I have to run to work, so I fill up an empty plastic trash can with water for reserves for when Bret and co. come back (Andy and Melody are visiting from Seattle, plus our friend Kyle and his girlfriend). So 6 people will be at the house with no running water. Yikes. I hauled more than 30 buckets of water that evening. It was tiring work, but someone has to keep things going!


The next day, our landlord came and installed the new water pump in less than an hour. We didn't even use all the water I had hauled out from the field! What a waste. It was very satisfying dumping the water over the dusty driveway though, it gave it a good wash!

In short, I learned that day that I am not cut out for farm life in my present condition. Not at all.