Adjusting to the house

I am way behind on my blogging.  Between our 17 trips to the base trying to get all the adapters for the electrical stuff for the house, and trying to figure out the fricken Internet, and trying to get things halfway organized around here, all while taking care of Abbie – I just don’t know where the time goes sometimes.

We’re slowly getting adjusted to living here, although this place definitely doesn’t feel like home to me yet.  It feels very bare and cold.  The walls are concrete, the floors are all tile or wood, and the lights are scarce and dim.  I HATE dark houses, and this house feels very dark to me right now.  We managed to get 2 nightstand lights for our room, and one floor light for the living room while we were at Ikea, but I need to get a BUNCH more.  We bought rugs when we were in AZ, so those will be coming with the rest of our stuff at the end of May, and that will help a lot.  I really wanted to be able to leave our shutters open at night and put curtains up instead, but I don’t think that’s going to happen now for 2 reasons.  1.  The walls are concrete and I don’t feel like drilling a bunch of holes into them and 2. even though it’s completely claustrophobic in here at night with all the shutters closed, it is safer.  Every single one of our neighbors has ALL of their shutters closed at night and I don’t want to be the only one with them open (aka a perfect target for the gypsies).  It does feel very European to open the shutters and see the mountains every morning, so that part is pretty neat, I just don’t like feeling so closed off at night.  I’m sure I’ll get used to it.

The other thing that’s taken some getting used to is the electricity here.  Europeans are very environmentally conscious so the houses aren’t equipped to handle a bunch of electricity being used at one time.  In our case, we can’t run both the washer and dryer at the same time.  It’ll cut the power to the entire house if we do that.  We really need to figure out the transformer thing also since the few times we tried to plug in a 2000watt transformer it blew the circuit too (and we only had that and the fridge running).

Hopefully all of our stuff we be here at the end of May and then we can really start getting settled into this house.  Mark’s heard from co-workers that it takes months to get things organized though because of the lack of closet and storage space.