The mosquitoes

There have been shit tons of mosquitoes in our apartment lately.  We never open the windows and we have a screen door, but they still manage to get in somehow.

We have a mosquito racket, which is a lovely device that looks like a tennis racket, but you press a button and the mesh part becomes electric.  So you swipe at a mosquito, there’s a satisfying snapping sound, and the mosquito is dead.  Electrocuted, I suppose.  They get no sympathy from me.

For some reason the mosquitoes seem to prefer our bedroom over all the other rooms.  Luckily we have a net over our bed and M’s sleeper, but sometimes they get under the net.  Those nights are the worst.

Before we go to bed every night, we shake all the bedding, curtains, and drapes, and that usually rouses the nasty buggers.  One of us stands there with the racket, waving it all over the room, while the other anxiously points at the mosquitoes, shrieking “There it is!  Get it!” (I should note that Nate doesn’t shriek.  That’s primarily me.)

But the mosquitoes are so darn fast, they can be almost invisible.  So there’s a lot of frantic racket waving, pointing and yelling.  It’s quite the sight, I’m sure.  You know the night has been a success when the smell of burnt mosquito lingers in the air.

Luckily these aren’t Aedes moquitoes, so they won’t give us dengue.  But they’re still annoying. Thank goodness M hasn’t figured out how to itch mosquito bites yet.

Haha, I just got up to get something from the bedroom, and I killed another mosquito.

I never thought I’d say this, but I’m looking forward to the intolerably hot summer months just because it seemed like there weren’t as many mosquitoes then.

At home, finally

We moved into our permanent residence, and we love it here.  In our temporary apartment I never really let myself get 100% comfortable because I knew we’d be leaving, but here we can arrange the furniture how we want, re-organize the kitchen, and actually spend some time making this place feel like ours.

Our apartment is really long. Like a “huh, that’s interesting” kind of long.  We are trying to decide how to rearrange it and partition out the space because you could literally have a banquet for 25 people, at least, in the dining room.  Luckily the flooring is these huge square tiles, so I could easily map out the dimensions of the rooms and furniture.  And this is what I’ve been playing around with:

Some people (Nate, most likely) would say I have too much time on my hands

We are going to request some additional furniture, and hopefully things will be set up the way we would like in no time!

My favorite things about this apartment are the living area, which gets loads of natural light, especially in the morning, and the roof-top garden. We are lucky to have houses next to us rather than apartment buildings, so they don’t block out all the sunlight.

We might not have a yard, but this is almost as good!

The roof has a nice, high wall (at least five feet tall) and tons of grass.  In our last apartment, the people that lived above us actually lost one of their dogs because he jumped over the roof wall chasing a bird.  So, we were always very careful whenever we took Athena on the roof there, because she could definitely put her paws up on the ledge.  Thankfully, here there is no risk of that happening, and there are these glass areas where she can look out, so she has no desire to see over the wall anyways.

Athena explores new spaces and new species of shrubbery

We also have loads of storage in the kitchen, which is something I’m very excited about.  This is the first time in my adult life that I’ve had a kitchen to call my own that I don’t feel totally cramped in.  I’m starting to sound like a broken record, but I seriously can’t wait for our HHE to get here.  All our bakeware, kitchen appliances, and weird gadgets/dishes won’t need to be stashed in random places around the house and will finally have a place to go!