Tuesday, September 17, 2013

lightbulbs. again.

I feel like a lot of my life here is consumed by thinking about lightbulbs. I know I wrote about my bathroom light saga already, but in the past week I lost one of two lightbulbs in the living room (on a three bulb fixture- one of them was already out) and then the single bulb in my kitchen started flickering....

I was a away for the weekend, so I sort of forgot. And then last night I cooked dinner while wearing my headlamp. So on the way home from school today I stopped to buy some lightbulbs. I bought four, feeling fairly confident that I had the correct size (a mistake I had made last time).

Well, I was right on the size. But. One of the fixtures doesn't appear to work at all in the living room. The other one blew the bulb when I turned the light switch on. Eventually I got another of the bulbs to work. Then the kitchen. First a bulb that didn't seem to work (and I was starting to fear that I would have to call the landlady again because the fixtures don't work) and then finally one that did.

I can't explain. And my suspicion is that the bulbs may have been faulty to begin with, in addition to my apartment possibly having been wired by a teenage amateur electrician. But I have lights in all my rooms. For now.

The other exciting thing is that last weekend in Greece (and I will do a post about Greece, probably tomorrow) I found lentils. Lentils!!! I'm pretty excited about them. People keep telling me that they do exist here in Pristina, but I have yet to find them. Apparently that's how it goes; sometimes you can find stuff and sometimes you can't. So this afternoon, beneath the glow of a new lightbulb, I made an amazing lentil salad with tomatoes, peppers, olives, and feta in a delicious mustard-balsamic vinaigrette. So. Amazing.

I still feel like, foodwise, I'm struggling to figure out what I can and want to cook. The ingredients are not so unfamiliar, it's just that there's not the same variety of options. So I find myself making a lot of spinach mac and cheese, pasta with olive-tomato-feta sauce, grilled cheese and ajvar (it's kind of a roasted pepper spread), I made a frozen pizza once, some frozen chicken cutlet things (in fact, I think the fact that nearly all of the chicken is frozen and my freezer is TINY is the reason I haven't bought more meat), eggs over fried potatoes, hard-boiled eggs, and now this lentil salad. I haven't been able to get myself back into green salads like I'd been eating at home and I only made some smoothies the first week I had my blender. Also I've been super obsessed with chips, particularly ketchup flavored Ruffles. I'd like to get back to a little more healthy diet, when I get time to figure out what that might look like here. Though I don't think I'll have that much time any time soon.

And I promise to write about school sometime. It's just right now, I kind of hate all my kids and I'm feeling frustrated about stuff. But soon.

No comments: