Thursday, June 26, 2008

Thursday Thirteen #16

13 Facts about our house and our neighborhood
(Bit of a long one this week)

1) When we have a power outage, it also means that we have a water outage because the pump won't be working to get any water into the house.

2) These beautiful lilies have been blooming around the house for 2 weeks now. I didn't plant them and there weren't this many last year. All of them are in little ledges of that stick out of the walls outside.


3) The bathroom next to the kitchen must have been what the original owner designated as the maid's bathroom. It has a squat toilet and no flush. The other two bathrooms are normal toilets that flush. Just another reminder of how some people can have such low regard for another person who helps them out 24 hrs a day with chores that they'd rather not do. Plenty of people like that around...

4) The drains in the neighborhood are filthy and mostly so bogged up that water flows nowhere. We stupidly cleaned the muck out of the drains immediately in front of our house but unfortunately we're now at a lower level than other places 'down-drain' so we have even more water stagnant. Still working on a solution.

5) These horrible drains have a lot of wildlife in them. In addition to the germs and diseases, there are also little crabs, fish and supposedly some sort of small eel. The eel is something that Richard told me about but I can't imagine that it really is an eel. Maybe just some big worm....

6) The neighbor's son recently caught himself a pair of doves and has been 'training' them. The doves are a craze amongst the kids this year. They're all walking around with a bird in hand. Last year it was kites.

7) I'm supposedly getting a new neighbor, two doors down, that is from Singapore. Don't know yet if its just a single guy or a family.

8) I live 200m from a mosque. Five times a day, when the prayers are broadcasted, a neighbor's dog howls his own prayers. He does this 5 times a day, every day. None of the other dogs are as disciplined as he is.

9) Directly opposite the mosque is a house inhabited by a Canadian man, his Indonesian wife, 3 daughters and about 5 maids. The man is oldish and has been in Indonesia 30 years. He's friendly with lots of good stories but its hard to chat with him long because he never wears a shirt (and has a HUGE beer belly) and his pants are always falling off him. One day, we drove past the house and were treated to a view of his entire behind. EEW!

10) All the names of the roads here are animals. We live on Bear St.

11) The clanging has stopped but the past few nights have been noisy with cats mating.

12) The housing area we live in is 'gated' and takes about 30 mins to walk the perimeter at a leisurely pace.

13) So far, we've only heard of 3 thefts in the 16 months we've lived here. Haven't heard of any other types of crimes in the area.

3 comments:

Bilbo said...

The dog howling along with the mosque prayer calls is hilarious...does he have a beard and bite other dogs who don't howl five times a day? And Your Canadian neighbor sounds like quite a fellow. I was pulling weeds in the front yard the other day when Agnes came home from work, and she got hysterical...it turned out that my jeans had split wide open at the crotch seam and I was mooning the neighborhood without realizing it. Oops.

MamaGeek @ Works For Us said...

These were ALL interesting. But the animal road names was by FAR by favorite. Classic.

Cynthia said...

"Cats mating" that can't be good!