THE CARPENTER

With temperatures in the 100s each day, I've been complaining a lot to our landlord how hot our house gets inside. At 5pm when it's in the 80s, our house is still hovering around 98. I was at my limit with this house when Joe had to carry me to the cold shower the other day because I got heat exhaustion in my own kitchen. I told Elena, the landlord, that we would be looking for a new, cooler apartment. She immediatly called a carpenter to see what could be done. She wasn't about to lose paying tennants after just 3 weeks.

I got home today from house-sitting at Jessamyn's around 1pm after watching all her DVDs. In the courtyard of our home was the carpenter, all of 5 feet tall, sledge-hammer in hand. Elena knocked on my door and apologized ahead of time for the mayhem they were about to impose.
"I was about to go to the grocery store anyway", I said.
"Don't worry, pay Olivia a few cents and she'll go for you," Elena snapped.
Olivia is our shared maid who does whatever you tell her to do for $8 a day. She has no husband and several grown children who mooch off of her. I have no doubt that there are days when Olivia doesn't eat. Although poor myself, I try to come up with jobs for her just so she can have a dollar or two in her pocket. I gave her $5 and off she went to buy some chicken and veggies for my soup. I let her have the change and she was thrilled.

Meanwhile, Carlos the Carpenter was busy sawing a hole through the wall. We live in a slatted wooden cabin and he and Elena decided to open it up more to let air pass more easily between the front and back parts of our house. The final result was a wooden slatted "window" that looks more like a wooden jail cell in my living room. This makes now the second indoor window we have, the first being in our bedroom and overlooking the kitchen. Odd, I know. As I'm cooking my soup Elena proceeds to redirect my attention to clearing off my other countertop so that Carlos the Carpenter can stand on top of them. Within seconds of me moving my glassware, he's swinging the sledgehammer between the wall and fiberglass roof. Cement was flying all over my kitchen, and before it was all said and done with, the remains of what used to be part of my kitchen wall was sitting broken in a wheelbarrow. It was still 98 degrees in my kitchen, or maybe hotter since now the soup was boiling.
"Wow! Feel that cool breeze," said Elena. "Tomorrow I'll buy another water-hose so we can rinse your roof when it starts to sizzle".

I guess I can tell my friends that I basically live in a wooden tent now because I feel like I'm camping outside in the elements. Except tents are pretty secure when it comes to keeping out bugs. In our home here I might as well leave out the Welcome mat for any type of creature that stops by for some left-over soup. Even as I type this, a kite-sized moth is hovering above. My chihuahuas are afraid that it will swoop down and eat them. Elena is making plans to have a capenter put in screens in our windows- a luxury here in Tena. But she won't hire Carlos ever again.
"He's a crook," she grumbled as she mopped the dust off my kitchen floor. "He charged me $15 just to do those two things".