The Dust Bowl

The good news: I will have heat--possibly as soon as Monday!
The bad news: this required an approximately 2-in. diameter hole to be drilled into my wall. Drilled and then further chiseled. This activity caused my apartment to become absolutely coated in a thick layer of wall dust. Not drywall, I think...grayish plaster or whatever it is that walls are made of. Instant concrete? Cinderblock? Beats me. I'm a little clueless when it comes to such things. But now there is a new black pipe on the wall next to my window, that heads out to my porch, is connected to the meter thingy (I think) and then further somehow connected to the gasline. On Monday, they'll check to see if the gas works, and I'll get a gas heater in here. I'm slightly paranoid about carbon monoxide poisoning, but on the other hand, my windows don't close all the way...so shouldn't be a problem I think.

So I spent most of my day cleaning. And cleaning and cleaning. There's still a lot of dust around, but I don't think there's much else I can do about it. I should still take my sheets outside and shake them off though. I also hope there's no asbestos in the dust, but not knowing what asbestos looks like, I wouldn't know if there was...

Ah well. In a few days I'll have heat. Which will be really nice.

The massive cleaning also led to a bit of furniture rearranging, which I think has improved the look of my apartment--made it a bit less jail-cell-like. The desk is now on the same wall as the bed instead of underneath the windows. Now I should just put some pictures up on the walls and I'll be all set :)

On Thursday night the whole crew set off for Kenya. I stayed up to see them off...they were worried about the weight of their baggage (nine checked bags for five people including camera equiqment and a motorized paraglider) but Inna talked to them at around 4am right before their flight left, and everything went fine in terms of getting through check-in so that's good! They should be in Nairobi right now...tomorrow morning they leave for Lamu!

This makes everything very weird around the office--for one thing there are hardly any guys left. Magnus is still around for the time being, but he's leaving Nov. 1 to go to Greece. Other than that, Tigran and Mher are still here, but Tigran isn't always there, and Mher, being the security guard, is generally not there during the day unless he's asleep. So the girls are currently ruling the office. I'm going to be in the office a lot less in the coming weeks, since there's much less to do. Instead I'll be off doing my own research. On that front I had a bit of a breakthrough last night--I met a bunch of the current Peace Corps volunteers, who are scattered in villages throughout the Armenian countryside. So now I have people I can call/stay with, who know the villages, know who I should talk to, etc. This is good! :)

Other than that, not a whole lot going on at the moment...still plugging away at my Armenian. I put my introducing oneself vocab to good use on Thursday night when everyone was leaving--Arman's girlfriend was there and I introduced myself, she introduced herself, and I managed to say nice to meet you, all in Armenian...but then she thought that I knew Armenian and started talking more and I had to switch to Russian and establish that no, we had already reached the extent of my ability to converse in Armenian. The next lesson is verbs though so soon I'll be able to make sentences other than pronoun + to be + adjective!
There are still some sounds I can't differentiate/pronounce, though. And I'm still essentially illiterate...but I've decided not to bother too much with literacy...speaking and listening are far more important.

And now I should be off--need to wash my dishes and finish cleaning up my apartment, and then I should go shake the dust off my sheets...