Construction Refugees

As I’ve said before, my apartment is stellar. It's big and modern and cool with a crossbreeze on hot days and I love the location and Sol is a great roommate and I could go on and on. It was recently made even more comfortable by the purchase of a queen-size bed to replace my very cozy but very small single bed. There are, however, two main annoyances.

First, and by far the lesser annoyance, are the mosquitos. These little buggers are a major problem in Argentina. They. Are. Everywhere. The weird thing is, they seem to always come one at a time. Every single night I turn off my light and wait for the inevitable ‘bzzz’ next to my ear. As soon as I hear it I jump out of bed, throw on the light, and smash the holy living hell out of that night’s mosquito, hopefully before he got to me first. But, why only one? Do they eat each other? Or do they have some sort of "one at a time" mosquito code? It's a mystery I'd love to know more about.

Second, and infinitely worse (since I am unable to kill it), there is the unending theme of construction. There are THREE construction projects going on underneath, above, and next to us. One is a new building under construction from 7 or 8 am to 7 or 8 pm, another is the remodel of the apartment above us, and the other is a bank on the ground floor which literally goes on 24 hours a day. For the past three days the new building has been jackhammering from early in the morning to late afternoon, and it shakes the house and us out of bed. It's pretty awful and gives me new sympathy for torture victims (I don't say this snidely; I know that loud and unending noises are used as a method of torture and I really, really can't imagine being unable to escape it).

The good news is, we're in it together. Yesterday morning when Sol walked into the kitchen and asked me if I wanted to kill someone, we both laughed and made a mate. This morning we'd had enough, and Sol called her mom to ask if we could be her refugees for the day. What a pleasant idea! I took a 2 hour nap, awoke to a delicious lunch, and now I'm sitting in the backyard on a warm day with a cool breeze and the smell of jasmine surrounding me. Which leads me to today's observation.

I need to start taking my camera everywhere I go. I always see such interesting things. It would also make the blog a lot more exciting, I think. For instance, right now Sol's mom Lidia is mowing the lawn. Unto itself, this is is not that interesting, but it showed me a fun new fact about Argentina: the lawn mowers here are run on electricity! She has this long power cord going from the outside bathroom to the lawnmower. It's kind of rad, but makes me wonder: how many times have people mowed over the cord?