Of Feathers and Fridges

As you are doubtlessly aware, the value of the US dollar keeps on falling lower and lower each day. Just turn on the radio and tune in to any station, and you'll hear numbers like 3.88, 3.90, and 3.91. Don't get your hopes up; that's just the price for a gallon of gasoline. The actual exchange rate for shekels is way lower.

While digesting these important facts, one thing immediately became clear: there is no way in the world I am going to write a blog post about economics. I cannot do my readers the disservice of providing them with possibly useful information; in fact, before each and every entry gets posted on my blog, it undergoes a thorough fact check by a crack squad of proofreaders equipped with pruning shears. If they encounter any bit of information that looks even remotely like an important or useful fact, they rip it out immediately, with great force.

So instead of economics, we'll do something far more interesting (well, at least to some of you) today: an update on life in my dira.

First of all, we have a new roommate. We finally got a bird: a gray cockatiel (which looks like a large parakeet, except that it has a hairstyle strongly reminiscent of Tintin). My roommate, who bought the bird, claims it's a female. (I don't know how he knows this. Perhaps the bird is always talking on the phone. Or perhaps it's always asking him "do these feathers make me look fat?")

The bird has so far been named "Tutzy" (pronounced "TOOH-tzi"), and for a very good reason: a sensible, smart person like me was not consulted first - my roommate decided to give it that name on his own, although I wonder what kind of narcotics he was under the influence of at the time. I personally cannot think of any logical reason to give the poor thing such a weird name, but that's none of my business, is it?

At least the turtle has a semi-normal name: Norman. We chose that name because it acts like an old geezer, spending most of its time sleeping or bonking slowly but deliberately into the walls of its tank, and we decided that Norman sounds like a real geezer-ish, Harry-esque name.

Norman and Tutzy are good neighbors: Tutzy's cage is perched (har!) on top of Norman's tank, and except for the time Tutzy pooped straight into Norman's tank, scoring a direct hit into his water bowl, they each seem to mind their own business. I doubt each one even knows the other one exists.

In other animal-related news, the highly annoying neighborhood rooster has been very quiet lately. Perhaps the rooster read my blog, and realized what he would be in for if he didn't shut his noisy little beak. Or perhaps he thinks Tutzy and Norman are gonna gang up on him. Although if that's the case, he really doesn't have much to worry about: poor Norman doesn't even seem capable of ganging up on his food bowl.

At least his food doesn't need to be refrigerated, thank goodness, since the dira fridge has still been neither fixed, nor replaced. At this point, the mold colony growing in the fridge has grown so advanced that they're registering to vote in the upcoming elections. Rumor has it that we may be soon getting a replacement, second-hand fridge, but I'll only believe it when I see it. Call me a pessimist, but as far as I'm concerned, the chances of actually getting the fridge issue resolved once and for all is so low you gotta dig to find them.

Personally, I already gave up on the communal fridge, and so I bought my own fridge. It's a cute little blue portable mini-fridge with a carry handle on top. And I do not use the term "mini" lightly: the interior of my fridge is roughly the size of an ice pack, only less likely to keep things cold. But hey, I was getting desperate already. I needed someplace to keep my... ummmm... my... what did I need a fridge so badly for, anyway?

Seriously, though, I usually keep a couple of small items in the fridge: a small jar of mayonnaise, a small bag of milk in a small pitcher, a small package of cold cuts, and a small container of chumus (did I mention that everything is small?) I don't know if it was worth the 320 shekel (around 80 bucks) I paid for it, but at least now I can eat my cans of tuna fish. In my humble opinion, they taste much better with mayonnaise (the tuna fish, that is, not the cans), but your preferences my vary - perhaps you like to eat tuna fish with chicken soup; although in that case, I assure you that you are completely insane.

So that's my approach for coping with the lack of a communal fridge. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for coping without a decent phone line. In a previous post, I speculated that Bezeq had perhaps excised our phone line using a commercial-grade blowtorch. Little did I know that I wasn't so far from the truth: upon opening a phone jack in the wall near my room, I discovered that the actual phone wires had been ripped from the wall completely. So any thoughts of getting it reconnected have been scrapped.

There is another jack downstairs in our erstwhile "kitchen", but while that one still has its wires intact, it nevertheless does not work. But at least maybe there's hope for getting Bezeq to hook it up to the network someday, and eventually, maybe I can even run a wire upstairs to my room and install my own phone jack.

Although if we do that, it's probably gonna be impossible to get Tutzy off the phone.