The tyranny of Babelfish

Before I start, let me apologise if I sound too much like a Mormon Housewife.  I read this article on Salon.com and have wasted several hours reading Mormon Housewife blogs since.  I promise I haven't started putting on makeup and changing my clothes so that my husband can be greeted with my delightful visage when he gets home from a hard day at work.  Nor have I purchased a hot glue gun.

Yet.

So, a condition of the rental agreement when we moved into this furnished apartment, was that they change some of the furniture in the second bedroom.

Specifically, that the great big heavy king size bed be shifted out of the room and replaced with a sofa bed. This is only a two-bedroom apartment, which suits us just perfectly - we don't want anything bigger. Actually, it's not that easy to get a decent two-bedroom apartment in this town.  Most people seem to want more room, or to want to live in houses in the ex-pat compounds. We have modest ambitions and not a huge amount of stuff, so a two-bedroom apartment suits us perfectly well - so long as the second bedroom can be used as a study room.

I think our Vietnamese landlady thinks we are mad.

Anyway, they brought us a catalogue, and we chose a sofa-bed design.  And they brought swatches of fabric and we chose a silver fabric.  The options were not many.  Most of the fabric swatches were heavily patterned or bright colours.  There is patterned silver and black wallpaper on one wall, and gold curtains, so I didn't want to add another colour - or another pattern, and there were no black fabric swatches. So we chose silver.

The resulting sofa looks nothing like the picture in the catalogue, of course.   Having said that, it is perfectly fine for what we need and we have now been liberated of the second big bed. I have draped the sofa with the pashmina my Nana gave me, which is black with gold threads, and it looks pretty good, though I'm a hopeless photographer and can't get good pictures.

ART

It's actually really nice in here at night time, because the lighting is really well designed, and the wallpaper and lampshades kind of shimmer.  Bless the Vietnamese love of glitter!

Can you see the glitter?

After the workmen had been and gone, the receptionist girl gave me a note she had prepared earlier.  It is the second time she has shown me a note, but the first time I didn't get to keep it - she took it with her.  The first note was after the bath was fixed.  It said:  All done.  Tell her she can use it in an hour.

This is the sofa-bed note:

Everybody loves getting letters!

It says:

How to use the sofa:
The first three legs spread and break the back
seats back seats pull down the three stars which
will become a bed to sleep if she wanted to
re-sit examination of three drag position. 
Three can do try.  Thanks her. 
Have a nice day. 

It was pretty funny, but I promise I didn't laugh until after she had left.  I smiled and said "Oh!  Wonderful!  Thank you!"

So, anybody got any ideas about how to use the sofa?

Dear Phil

Do you remember the scenes with the Maenad in the second season of True Blood?

Her house is constantly filled with luscious piles of fruit and flowers.

So's mine:

Staffed

Right now, I am sitting in my home, and my home is full of people whose job it is to look after me and my possessions.  I feel quite odd about it.

There are two young women who are cleaning the apartment.  We have only been here for two days, and in my opinion all that was really needed was a sweep of the floor and wipe the tables and empty the bins.  All things I could easily have done myself, but I knew the girls were coming – and it is their job. They need their jobs. 

I thought they would be about ten minutes but they have been here for an hour already.  The bathrooms have been completely cleaned and the bed linen changed.  I stopped them from changing the linen on the spare bed which nobody has slept in. The floors have been swept and mopped, the bins emptied, the breakfast dishes washed, dried and put away.  The tables have been wiped and all the surfaces polished.  The place is gleaming.  A natural slob I have never lived in such cleanliness.

There has been a problem with the bathtub.  Instead of draining down the drain, it drained onto the floor.  So as well as the cleaning ladies there is also two plumbers, a handyman, the receptionist and the building owner in the apartment.

Meanwhile, I am sitting on the couch trying very hard to be invisible.