My first day as a Spanish housewife

and it has not gone swimmingly.

Let's start with my wake up call, the now classic collapsed bed. This has happened to me about 6 times now. When we first got to the apartment, we were in the smaller bedroom but Ricardo felt cramped so we moved to the room with the two twins pushed together. It's much larger and airy. But it turns out there is a reason the landlord didn't say it was the "master suite" even though from looking at it it obviously is. And it seems the reason is that the bed on the right has a malfunction. What malfunction? Well it seems that the frame is slightly bent which means that every so often the slats collapse under the sleeper, comme ça:

She'd tried to remedy this (the landlord) by putting in two sets of slats which made it feel a lot like I was a monk sleeping on a pallet (because essentially I was sleeping on a pallet although not a monk). To no avail. Since I had been putting up with this about a month, I had told Ricardo this was it, the next time I fell through the bed we were switching rooms with the Kid. Period.

Guess that meant I was going to be doing the switcheroo today while the Kid went off to school and the husband to the library because now I am the hausfrau. Which is fine, because it's not like I have a job or anything right now. But the thing is the other room is definitely smaller, and the Kid has a tendency to stretch out into every nook and cranny available to him (as middle schoolers are wont to do). So I've spent much of the morning switching closets and dressers which is easy enough.

I then took a break to make some iced tea for almuerzo (the main meal of the day eaten around 3pm). The Kid's school does not have a cafeteria and they do not offer a meal at all. They go to school from 8:30 (today from 9:20) to 2:50 and they get no meal. There is a 1/2 hour break around 11 when the kids usually eat a snack from home but it's expected they will go home for their almuerzo and not really need a meal at school. We've been eating this way and the Kid will likely be fine, but he took a PB&J (you would NOT believe how much a tiny thing of peanut butter is here! we are sooooooo bringing some Jiff back with us!) and a couple figs for his break since there is no playground equipement or anything for them to do during break anyway.

But I digress. One thing I miss a lot from home is iced tea. I can't drink soda because of the migraine medicine I take (which makes everything carbonated taste like the inside of a rusted pipe) so I have become an iced tea addict, particularly green tea, especially Arizona green tea. In fact yesterday I spent an ungodly amount of money at the Starbucks just to drink an Arizona green tea (ok, 3.50 E) because I felt so sick and we'd been walking for hours and I was completely parched and well you get the idea already.

So I've come to the conclusion that the only remedy to this is to make my own iced tea. And since I am now a housewife, this should not be a troublesome thing to do. I have all the things I need, bags of green tea, honey, a liter pitcher, and a kettle and stove.

Let's start with the fact that Ricardo put the pitcher on the top most shelf of the kitchen. Ordinarily, this would not be in the least an obstacle. I would climb on a chair and get it down. No problems. But in the house that Ikea built (as cheaply as possible), it is a problem. All chairs are folding and designed for slim, Scandanavian asses, not mega American ones like the kind I sport. So that was not an option. Not to be dissuaded from my mission, I looked around for whatever I had that would help me poke it down. I found (luckily enough!) my tongs which I had insisted on buying because I am a total baby when doing things like pan frying chicken or even bacon. So using the tongs, I got the pitcher down.

Now I turned to my kettle. This is a bizarre kettle. It doesn't whistle. and you can't tell when it's full or not or if it's boiling. Also it leaks. And it's easy to over fill it. So I put the kettle on and went back to the great room flip. The next thing I hear is a wretched hissing and sizzling and then smell a weird smell.

I bolt back to the kitchen in time to seen that there is a puddle all over the stove and dripping onto the floor. There is water sizzling all around the bottom of the kettle and it's steaming all

over as well. I can't tell if I've overfilled it and it's poured out, or if it's leaked out of it from the bottom or the spout or what the fuck is going on when it begins to spout steaming water out of its joint between the spout and the base and also between the rolled bottom and the burner.

But god damn it I am going to have some tea today!!!

So I don my ridiculously huge and largely unusable Ikea oven mits, grab the kettle and whip it off the stove, spraying steaming geysers across the kitchen as I go and pour the water (which oddly enough is not actually boiling) into the pitcher. I let the tea steep while I go back to try to fix the slats of the broken bed so that it doesn't look like shit, which I do. I manage to set up all "the guys" (The Kid's stuffed animals) exactly the way he likes them, tuck them into his new bed and get back to the kitchen before the tea over brews. I add honey and put it in the fridge.

Missions accomplished!