Posts Tagged ‘house’

At my bridal shower 17 years ago (!), Tony’s mom gave me a book of recipes for some of his favorite dishes. I nearly collapsed with laughter, barely able to blurt out, “Oh, you don’t really expect me to cook for this man?!” Actually, I did try to cook for him in those early days, [...]

If I smell a little ripe today, it’s because: (a) we can’t seem to figure out our bedroom A/C unit, so we wake up repeatedly during the night either in a pool of sweat or frozen solid, and (b) we had no water this morning. Our helpful new night guard, Beng, fixed the water pump [...]

We hired Ae, our night guard/gardener, at the recommendation of a VIS teacher, who was friends with his previous employers – a couple who had worked for a charity organization here but returned to the States last year. The teacher said Ae was desperate for work and had been calling him frequently to find out [...]

As the poster child for Seasonal Affective Disorder, I am a girl who knows rain. I know exactly how much rain it takes to put me in a funk (3 hours of nonstop drizzle). I know exactly how much precipitation must fall before I move from the funk to a near-vegetative state (24 hours of [...]

Our gardener weed-whacked this poor little guy. That’s Tony poking it with a stick. I asked Ae (the gardener) if it was poisonous … OK, lacking the Lao vocab for “poisonous snake,” I actually gestured a snake biting me on the arm and then me dying dramatically … but he just laughed and shook his [...]

Yeah, they leave tell-tale signs of their visit all over the walls, but I just love the geckos here! We usually have one or two keeping us company in the kitchen or living room each evening. They stick to the wall with their plump little toes and freeze for hours at a time before scurrying [...]

Our landlady, Mrs. Villay, and her handyman, Mr. Pye, stopped by the house on Saturday with a couple trays full of little snacks and drinks. When I opened the gate, I said, “Oh, wow, thank you!” and Mrs. Villay said, “It’s not for you. It’s for the spirits.” So she put one tray on the [...]

We had been living in this house for more than a week before I really noticed our living room light fixture. Its awesome-ness simply can’t be captured with a camera. The center looks a big like a bunch of grayish grapes. Five large beige scallop shells surround the grapes, but the extra long fluorescent lightbulbs [...]

A driver took us to our new home straight from the Vientiane airport on Aug. 1. When Mr. Lamon pulled open the huge metal gate, the wildly overgrown yard distracted us momentarily from the two-storey French Colonial home. He unlocked the side door and beckoned us inside, where we found a layer of dust blanketing [...]