Getting Settled

It's hard to believe that we've been in our apartment a little over a week.  Sometimes it feels much longer, and other times it feels much shorter.  We're still figuring things out, but one thing we mastered pretty quickly is the funky power situation.  Of course, I managed to discover it in the worst way possible.  

Sometimes I wake up at night and just walk around and check on things, especially in a new place, so it was about 1:30 in the morning when I realized that one of the kitchen lights was still on.  I responsibly turned it off, and then the whole apartment went dark and silent, no air conditioners, nothing electric.  I have never in my life tripped the power by turning something OFF before.  I knew where the circuit breaker box was, so I opened it up, assuming I just needed to switch the kitchen back on, but all the circuits were on.  I checked them all twice.  All on, all fine, but there was no electricity in the apartment.  I tried picking up the phone that calls the guards to ask for help, but it was dead, so I put on some more outdoor friendly clothes and walked to the nearest gate.  I'm sure the guards thought I was completely nuts, but they said their boss would come help me.  A few minutes later, a very nice man showed up.  I showed him the power box, and he reached for an unlabeled switch at the top right hand corner and flipped it up.  Everything came back on.  What I wanted to do was ask why on earth that one wasn't labeled, but what I did do was thank him profusely.

In discussing this with my embassy neighbors, this seems to be a regular occurrence, and it has to do with the fact that the embassy has put GFCI outlets in the kitchen to be up to code for the U.S..  While that's all very nice, however they did it completely messed up the wiring, and so now, when we turn anything off in the kitchen, there's a 50/50 chance that the power will go out.  It's an easy fix, but it's super annoying

A lot of the past week has been about shopping, both for things that we need and for things that just make us happy.  One of my favorite purchases is new mugs to add to our collection.

The wiggle car I ordered from Lazada arrived.  The scooter still has not, but the girls are having a lot of fun with the wiggle car.

Jeff gets a parenting gold star, because it came without any directions, so he figured out how to put it together.

He gave the girls fair warning that it was a piece of junk that could come apart at any time, but so far they just wheel around on it, often giggling hysterically, so I feel it's $10 well spent.

Elena also achieved a reading milestone.  She finished reading Matilda all by herself.

I really want our sea freight to show up, because we have so many more good books in there for her, but for now, she's enjoying sharing her Mo Willems collection with one of her new friends.

That same friend invited her to her first KL birthday party.  It was an outdoor scavenger hunt, but at the last minute they let us know that it would be a costume party.  Ahhh! Luckily, our social sponsor has a daughter about the same age, so Elena borrowed some accessories, put on her sparkly dress, and felt party ready.

Vivian has also been spending a lot of time with her new friends.  A lot of it has been indoors, but she generally gets outside to run around at least once every day, so that's good.  We also bought a new fan for out on the balcony, so evening balcony time is especially nice now.

Noby has been such a help with the shopping.  Most of the stores at our local mall are closed, but more are open near where she lives, so she bought the fan and several other things we needed, and then brought them all to us.

My shopping adventures have been grocery store ones.  The closest grocery store to us is Cold Storage, and I learned that you can load all your groceries into the shopping cart, and then just roll the cart home to Seri Hening.  You don't even have to bring the cart back! You just leave it out in the hall, and the man who collects the trash picks it up and takes it back for you.  Craziness!

While Cold Storage is definitely convenient, they don't have a lot of the more western things that we like.  About halfway between our place and the embassy is another store called Hock Choon.  The aisles are super narrow, and the whole store is a bit claustrophobic, but they have lots of western brands, so it was good to check it out.  

I hit the biggest jackpot though at Ampang Grocer which is a few minutes drive past the school.  They had Sunchips and Pepperidge Farm frozen garlic bread.  There were four of them, and I bought all four.  Vivian was over the moon when I brought them home.  She and Jeff immediately enjoyed some of the Sunchips.

Noby and I have also been working together on cooking dinners.  We have set the goal of me eventually being able to just tell her a meal and she can buy the ingredients and make it, but for right now, we're still in a learning phase for both of us.  I'm finding some new recipes that will work well with what's available here, and she has been a great cooking partner.  I feel bad that I haven't taken pictures of any of the food we made, because as soon as things were done, everyone ate the food up.  Elena used some of the rice in her bowl though to show what the family thought of dinner.

I also made banana bread as my first real oven experiment, and it came out well.

Our biggest achievement for the past week though is that we bought a car!

The picture makes it look longer than it is, but it's a Toyota Avanza, which is an Asian specific model.  It's basically like a cross between a hatchback and a minivan.  We bought it from one of our neighbors, so it just migrated a few parking spots over.  We have two spots next to each other, so I parked it smack in the middle of our area.  It'll be great once we can finally do some road trips, but for now it's perfect for getting back and forth to the embassy when we need to, and maybe even venturing out to the grocery stores that are a bit farther away.  We had a family conversation about naming our new car.  Jeff said we should just call it car, but that wasn't creative enough for me, so I suggested Carla.  We decided it was a perfect fit, because here in Malaysia people often end their sentences with lah, so we bought a car, lah!

We have a couple more weeks until school starts, so hopefully we can get some good routines established, and feel even more settled in before all the adventures of a new school kick in, but I feel like we're off to a good start so far.