Gone Dark

You've probably figured out by now that when the blog goes dark, we're up to a big adventure. We've spent the last week in Bella Tuscany doing some cycling (boys), shopping (girls), hill town visiting, good food eating, and wine buying.

But, today, I'm going to digress a little bit on an event that disturbs me just a little, well, a lot. So the back story is that when we moved into our house 11 months ago, the Electric Man (seriously, that's what our landlord calls him) fixed our garage alarm and gave me one remote control for it. I promptly lost that remote control. I know that I dropped it on base and the next day, I inquired at every single one of the 8 places I'd run errands and added a few more stops, just in case. Nada. Or rather, niente. We just lived with it for awhile, which meant not setting the alarm anytime we left the house - a big no-no here and basically, the thing that would get us mocked and laughed at in the security office should we actually be burglarized.

I finally fessed up to our landlord in the spring and told him I would pay for a new remote if he'd just send the Electric Man to the house. He said he had to have an old remote in order to re-program a new remote. We went around in circles that culminated with me just asking for the Electric Man to be sent over. And niente. Finally, in June, we had another electrical problem. For some, this might be a drag. For me, it meant I got to talk to the Electric Man face to face with the landlord there. The Electric Man said he might be able to get a new remote or he might have to replace the whole alarm, and we arranged for this work to be done sometime at the end of August. Which didn't happen.

Then the outlet that our A/C plugs into went out. During our recent heat wave (100 degree temps). When we had guests. As Nathan's aunt noted, Crazy Dog is not as dumb as we claim since it took him about 95 seconds to realize we weren't fixing the house A/C, whereupon he promptly retreated to the bedroom (with it's working A/C) and stayed there for the next several days. Today was our appointment for the Electric Man. Now remember, he was unsure that he could even re-program a garage alarm remote. And yet, he showed up at the front door today, with a remote in hand, that worked immediately. I don't even think there was any re-programming. It just worked. Ummmm, how is this supposed to make me feel more secure? How many other people are out there walking around with alarm remotes to my garage? Not that I think the alarm is actually going to stop anyone who really wants into the house, but still - any little deterrent helps.

This just goes to show that my landlord was on target back at our pre-lease signing appointment, when he told the Housing Agent on base, "They are Americans. They do not understand how things work here." That's a point that's been proven many times over in the last year!