Minor Adjustments

So, I thought I would share a little bit more about my acclimation to life as a noikokyra (Greek for housewife.)  Here is a picture of to spiti mou (my house.)

I want to start by saying that I really do not consider myself spoiled.  While I would certainly agree that my life has always been comfortable, I always had chores, and I have done dishes, laundry, etc. since I was able to reach the sink.  Some of you may have always done things the way I just learned to do them, and that is fine....it had just not been my experience...up until now. 

So, where to begin.  I first began actually living in Greece "officially" and keeping house in the month of January.  It is cold in Corfu in January.  And it is not just cold; it is damp, bone-chilling, only-way-to-warm-up-(at least for me)-is-in-a-hot-shower cold.  Houses around here do not have central heating (and they do not have air conditioning at all....another matter altogether...heat I can handle...it is the cold that hurts.)  We had only this small space heater in the living room.

I basically set up camp next to this thing for about 4 months.  This contraption takes about 780,856 watts of energy (and we had the electric bills to prove it...believe me when I say there were 4 digits last winter....oh. yes. 4) and puts out less heat than the oven when it is on. 

A hot shower is the best way to warm up, but we do not keep our hot water heater on (how about a hand for energy conservation...and attempting to avoid 4 digit power bills?)  You must flip it on about 40 minutes to an hour before you want a shower, let it heat the water, flip it off again, and then take your shower.  So you cannot just hop in.  Gone are the days of running home in a hurry, jumping in the shower, and going about your merry way.  A shower must be a planned event.  This, as you can imagine, was a bit hard to adjust to..remembering to prepare the shower for my shower.  Oh, and the tank it heats is not of a size that allows a leisurely soak....I found this out the hard way.

Use up the water that was in the tank, and it is cold again....I mean really cold, really fast.  The only thing to do after that (since it will take another hour to heat again) is rinse your shampoo out with freezing water and proceed to a) warm your entire body with a hairdryer for half an hour or b) snuggle your wet body up to the space heater and attempt to avoid electrocution (that is unless the oven and washing machine are on...see below...in which case you may have to resort to cuddling up to the oven.) 

Another reason to keep your shower short around here is our sewer is about the size of a king size bed.  Take a shower that is too long, wash a company-over-for-dinner sized load of dishes, or give the toilet a couple of extra ole flush-a-roos and your front yard starts to leak, well, can you guess?  In Corfu, in rains a lot in the winter.  No matter how much we try to stop it, the rain water somehow also leaks into our sewer as well, filling it up waaaay before its time, and cheating us out of a couple of good leak-free weeks before emptying.  I am sure some of you have experienced this, but I had not...when the sewer is full (aka you smell something bad from inside the house, look out the window, and see a new small lake has formed in your front yard) you call the "sewer man."

                               
(How about a picture of some pretty flowers here?  Rather than the subject matter at hand....)

The "sewer man" comes in a big nasty truck and sticks a hose down a hole in your front yard.  You pay him a wad of money, and your husband has to watch, because he may try to get away with only emptying half (so that the truck only gets half full and he can fit in more jobs a day, thus acquiring more wads of cash.)  He is completely careless with this hose upon insertion and removal, thereby slinging its contents everywhere in a 30 foot radius (enter, once again, my love affair with chlorine bleach....consequently, our driveway is a gloriously blinding shade of white.)   All of this to say, I have learned to be incredibly "environmentally friendly" with my water consumption.  Around here, wasting water = waste water, so rest assured that am turning off the faucet when I brush my teeth.  Another round of applause from my more "environmentally aware" friends.

Another thing I had to get used to was dishes by hand.

I have been fortunate enough to always have a dishwasher in every place that I have lived.  Even all of my college-apartments, single-girl pads, etc. all came with a dishwasher.  Now, I have no such luxury.  In the beginning, without the knowledge that the dishwasher was reaching temperatures high enough to kill off all of the bacteria, and being hesitant to use my trusty bleach on objects I plan to eat off of, I would stand at the sink for literally hours scrubbing off every imagined or imaginable spec of bacteria to the tune of Christos saying "Enough.  Enough already.  They are clean!!!!"  He still says that.  But I have certainly cut back on the amount of time it takes...maybe 40 minutes on a good day!  And I have also learned to cook and serve using the absolute bare minimum of utensils, etc. necessary to get the job done.  Once again, this conservation of energy should serve me well if I ever intend to win the vote of my eco-friendly comrades.  Oh, and after every wash-up my shirt looks about like this.

On top of all of this, my poor little fusebox was not made to handle life in the 21st century. 

It can handle no more than three large appliances on at one time.  You may think this would be easy to work around.....may I remind you.....my washing machine takes two and a half hours per load on a good day, the heater being on is an absolute necessity in winter months, dinner often demands to be cooked in our oven, the hot water heater, while not on all the time, has to come on and stay on for at least 40 minutes prior to shower time, oh, and that adorable little kitchen sink has its own little (large appliance category) hot water heater, and a hairdryer and treadmill also count as large appliances.  Additionally, the "drying machine" (more on that another day) occasionally makes a cameo appearance and we recently acquired a small heater for the bedroom.  I cannot begin to explain to you how many times our little fusebox was overwhelmed and overcome last winter.  In that event, here is what happens.....

1) You look at the fusebox and see if any switches are down that should be up.  On rare, wonderful occasions, all that is necessary is to flip that particular switch up again.  If that is not (and it usually is not) the case, then

2) Replace the fuse.  Should I be ashamed that I had never actually had to do this before?  The only place I had ever experienced a fuse blowing out was at summer camp or in the college dorms.  In both cases, manly men would appear on the scene in a matter of moments to rescue us bath-robed maidens from our horrors of half-dried hair.  I am now an expert at fuse replacement.  Call me if you have a blowout.  (P.S. they are very very hot!  So, if I have inspired you to attempt to do it yourself, be careful!!)  Sometimes, Christos would be home, and we would have no more new fuses, and he would do something very impressive with the wires from a spare cable by the glow of the flashlight in an attempt to fix the old fuse.  And it worked a lot of the time.  I cannot do that; don't call me for that. And if replacing the fuse does not work,

3) Go outside to this little box, often in the rain, almost always in your slippers, hold it open with one hand, close your eyes, pray for safety and avoidance of electrocution, and use a screwdriver to reach inside and flip a little switch in there, thank God that your soaking wet slippers at least have rubber soles, run back inside to see if the power is back on, repeat as necessary.

As much fun as this all probably sounds, it became my daily aim to avoid a power outage.  It actually became an enjoyable challenge, almost like a game....me against the blackout.  It was a lot like working a puzzle....how can I use all of these appliances in one day, but arrange them around each other, spacing them so as not to overlap and cause an outage?

All in all, my whole life....standing in the dark, dressed in every article of clothing in my wardrobe for warmth, in a puddle of water (due the unimaginable act of forgetting to spit on my washing machine prior to starting it) as I hear the rain start pelting on the roof (and also on my at-last-almost-dry clothes hanging outside,) while I clean up the remnants of Bella's last night's feast of steak-bones....reminded me an awful lot of Goldie Hawn's character in "Overboard" when she first went to live with Kurt Russell. 

But, although my shirt still gets wet when I do dishes, and my almost-dry clothes do still get rained on occasionally, for the most part, I have got the hang of it all now.  I have become a master of the "fuse-box game" and my shower has not gotten cold on me in over a year.  I have adapted.  And, truth be told, I really actually enjoy most of my household duties. 

And having views like this makes it all a lot easier to handle.

  

And having this makes me know it is all most certainly worth it.     

                                                                 

Until another day,

Haley