More small victories

I've been trying to take care of small repairs and replacing defective items around the house. Recently I had to buy a new flashlight due to corrosion in the old ones (no idea how that happened), but it is currently only being used for one thing--illuminating the contents of the microwave through the glass in the door since the bulb went out. And of course the microwave manual says to take it to a certified repair person to *change the lightbulb*, which is ridiculous, even if you have to take off the entire casing to reach it. As soon as I can get to the hardware store, I'll be looking for a replacement bulb to do it myself.

I also have to find the proper knob for the radiator unit in our living room and exchange the one I bought last weekend. Ages ago, I was able to pop off the knob from the radiator in the dining room and snap it onto the one in the living room, and it worked just fine, but the stuff I found all had ventilator valves and extra bits and pieces I don't need. Unfortunately, everything in this apartment is rather outdated, so I don't know how easy it will be to find "just" a knob for this particular radiator when neither the radiator or the knobs that are still intact have any part numbers or other identifying marks.

Speaking of light bulbs, John replaced the light bulb in the fridge, lo these many years ago, and it never lit up again. While fiddling around with the microwave, the unfairness of it struck me: John had gone through who knows what ordeals to find the stupid bulb, had stuck his hand at an uncomfortable angle into the frige to remove and then replace the bulb because the cover would not come off, and then it didn't even work. So I fiddled around with it and finally got it to work by some combination of tightening and wiggling. Now we can finally see everything in the fridge, and boy is it a mess!

I think I mentioned that John is the president of a local club for Swedophiles. This club does not have an office or a fixed location for events; they just have to rent out space on an as-needed basis. This means that anything the club has accumulated--books about Sweden, leftover items from parties and events, coffee and tea thermoses and decorations for their annual xmas event--has to be divided up among the members of the leadership committee for storage. We seem to have gotten more than our fair share of this stuff, but since our apartment is rather snug, storage-wise, and our cellar rather, eh, *earthy*, we've been stashing boxes under a patio table at one end of our sunroom, which currently doubles as my office. I think I mentioned that John and Hannah moved our stuff in the cellar to a slightly less moldly corner, so that led to us reorganizing the Sweden stuff under the table and moving some of it into the cellar. Yesterday, I got some more of it pared down and into a smaller box that I hope to move out of the sunroom soon. As of right now, the space under the table is clear. My plan is to clear out, at least partially, one of the bookcases in the downstairs study, move it upstairs to my office (where it will provide storage for my books and binders and a surface on which to put some of my plants), and move the table onto the lower balcony. I want to claim the whole room as office space, and although I have been using the spaces between the plants on the table to hold papers and office supplies, I think it is better if I am not using a sizeable chunk of the room for storage.

I was relieved to find that I had stored my notes about our Italy trip in the folder with our digital photos, so that survived the great involuntary laptop-purge of 2010. I think I will work on labeling those photos this weekend.

--Nee in Germany likes to plan ahead