Home Improvement

As we’ve said before, this August and September has been so much more relaxing than last year’s August and September.  A good part of this is that by the time we left Yangon in June we had our house pretty much sorted out with all the essentials. Last year’s weekends were filled early on with us running around random places to see if anyone could sell us, for example, a chest of drawers.  It appears that the Burmese do not use this particular piece of furniture and we could NOT find any for sale.  Eventually we did stumble upon an antique shop run out of 4 garages behind a mall and they had one which was glorious because we then could finally put away our piles of t-shirts and underwear that had just been leaning precariously in the corner of our bedroom.

This year we have been able to turn our attention to less pressing issues which has been a pleasure.  One small problem we needed to fix was that Nell had destroyed her bed in her crate from pawing at it during thunderstorms.  For some reason, she has the instinct to dig when she feels a pressure change and when you are an inside dog this manifests as balling up the rugs, the bathmats and if she can get my closet open, my shoes.  She also pushes her way into Gav’s shower which opens inwards and means she is stuck there until someone comes home, but luckily she doesn’t seem to mind this.  When she is in her crate, she paws at her bed and it doesn’t move so it got very raggedy.  Every time you put her in or let her out little chunks of foam sprang out from everywhere.  Our cleaner gamely tried to sew it many times but it was so tattered nothing was working.  You can’t really buy dog beds like that here-most Myanmar people would never think of letting a dog inside the house let alone buy it a bed.  So we decided to just have a new cover made for it and at the same time get a few more cushions for her so that she didn’t have to lay on the hard tiles while she is outside with us.  Yes we know we are ridiculous.

We went to our favourite fabric/rug/curtain store and picked out some material and asked the ladies to make some foam cushions.  We did not say it was for a dog bed, they already think we are crazy at that place because we go so often.  Result!  After a week we got her beds back and we thought she was going to be so comfy.  Instead, this is what happened.

I think my dog is broken

Eventually she managed to figure out that it would be more comfortable to not just use it as a butt prop. And now she has two nice cushions, one upstairs on the balcony and one downstairs outside the front door.

At the same time we had the cushions made, we ordered some new curtains for the downstairs.  It’s difficult to explain exactly how ugly the curtains in this house are, but we are kind of used to them and also we are not going to live here forever and curtains are not the kind of thing you can take with you to a new place, so we have been reluctant to replace them except in the bedroom where we really wanted blackout curtains.  But, we bit the bullet and decided we have to look at these ugly things every day, let’s spend a little money.  Bye bye pink floral polyester monstrosities.  I’m so happy we decided to take the plunge.

Just don’t look at any of the curtains upstairs

Gav and I went back to the Secretariat yesterday to have another peek around as we were meeting some friends for dinner.  Another sunny Saturday late afternoon, although a few minutes after taking this picture it stared to rain-and we saw our first rainbow in Yangon!  

One of the ladies who works in Gav’s office said her weather app says the monsoon is leaving Yangon on the 25th.  Our fingers are crossed-we will keep you posted!