Just Call Me "Mr. Fix-It" (Scott)

Now that we have a house of our own, we have finally realized all the ups and downs that come with home maintenance. Since school has been canceled because of the H1N1 craziness, I have found myself with a lot of time on my hands. I have been spending much of this time sitting around the house thinking of improvements I can institute to make our house a little more a home. Here's what I have been up to.

Electrical Wiring:

We recently had a site visit from a couple of our Peace Corps managers in UB. Basically they wanted to check on us to see what our living and working situations are like. One thing they noticed about our house was that our electric wiring was not "up to Peace Corps code." As such, they shipped out 40 meters of new wiring that my school's electrician installed. Here's a shot of his handiwork. Shawn and Kay, would you like his card in case you need some electrical work done at your place?


Bedroom Door:

The actual living quarters of our house are divided into two rooms: a kitchen/dining/family room and our bedroom. The rooms are divided by the chimney, our closet, and perhaps the fanciest door I have even seen in Mongolia. It is so fancy, in fact, that it is inlaid with 9 marbled glass panels. I know, I know, we are just living in style. Well, the problem with the door was that the glass panels were so loose that every time we even touched the door, they wobbled in their frames so hard that I was afraid they would pop out. Don't worry, I used some Mongol ingenuity and I fixed the problem: I stuffed cardboard into each glass panel and it seems to have worked.


Front Door:

Since I had so much success with the bedroom door, I thought I'd tackle the front door that leads into our home from the uninsulated and unheated entryway -- in Mongolian, this room is called a "ping." The problem with this door is that there are several cracks in it through with the insidious winter cold has been leaking into our living quarters. Following the old fraternity adage, "If you can't duck it, f**k it," I simply applied liberal amounts of duct tape and it seems to have vastly improved the situation. Actually, I have found that duct tape is one of the greatest tools to have in your bag-o-tricks here in Mongolia -- there are few problems that it won't fix.


Ping Window:

Now that the weather is hovering around 0 degrees F, we have followed the advice of our Peace Corps medical officer and we have begun using the services of a chamber pot. Apparently it's not a good idea to bare your buttocks over a hole in the ground when it's so cold that your boogies actually freeze in your nose. Anyways, we decided to keep the chamberpot in our ping. The only problem was that our ping has a window in it, and since we were weren't sure whether or not a chamberpot is culturally appropriate in Mongolia we didn't want our family to inadvertently glance into this window and "catch us in the act." Now, if we were back home we would simply have headed to the nearest Target and picked up some sort of window arrangement. But here in Olgii, we had to be a bit craftier: I devised my own window covering using packaging tape and cut-outs from a magazine. Margie, if you can't tell, I actually used pleasant scenes from the Country magazine you sent. It works like a charm -- although it was a bit awkward the other day when my hashaa father popped in to ask why we were covering the window from natural sunshine. I pretended I didn't understand what he was asking. Phew!


Creaky Floorboards:

If you can't tell from the pictures, our house actually comes complete with gorgeous hardwood floors that are painted a very welcoming shade of vibrant yellow. The problem we have encountered though is that a few of the boards are uneven and they wobbled a bit if stepped on wrong. No worries -- tearing a page out of my own book after my success with the bedroom door, I have managed to stuff cardboard into the more problematic of our floorboards. It seems to have worked like a charm.


Unsolvable Issues:

With that said, I'll leave you with two vexing problems that we are not sure how to tackle. The first is our refrigerator. To begin with, I think it must be a bajillion years old and I don't think it has been treated too kindly during those years. It actually seems to work OK (as long as the power is on), but whenever the condenser cycles on and off the entire thing shakes as if there's a monster inside of it that is tearing itself apart to get out. Sometimes it scares us at night. This is actually one of the few instances where duct tape has failed me. I'll have to keep chewing it over in my mind for a bit.


The other problem I have encountered that I can't possibly fix on my own concerns some Double-Stuffed Oreos that Ashlee's dad, Scott, was kind enough to send out in a care package. Now no amount of duct tape, cardboard, or magazine cut-outs can keep the package from running out within a week. What can I possibly do??