Today I went and had a very positive meeting with a real estate agent regarding getting our dream apartment, about which I should be ecstatic.
But you know what's really got me stoked?
The lady and I bought our first appliance tonight. Five and a half months of marriage, and we finally bought our first piece of motorized housewares.
We were slogging through the thick, heavy central Paris air, my freshly adorned pair of pants (I changed from shorts to a pair of pants in order to look like a respectable apartment-seeker) already soaked through with sweat. With humidity and temperatures in the 80's (Fahrenheit, of course), it's often been feeling like a Manhattan summer, without the scent of garbage juice in the air.
I was about to suggest going to some open house we saw listed in the Marais (the prospect of which sounds utterly dull after locating our dream pad in the far less American-colonized 2nd Arrondissement) when Alannah suggested - nay, instructed - that we go to the Darty electronics/appliance megastore and buy a fan. "We NEED a fan," she insisted.
Fair enough. It was not only hot as hell last night, but I slept barely two hours, royally pissed off that I was being constantly eaten by mosquitoes. And mosquitoes hate moving air. And even more so, I really hate mosquitoes.
Inside the Darty near our pad, we found the appliance section and found a number of people clustered around the selection of fans. Nobody was very willing to move or make a selection, basking instead in front of the wall of cool air. This could be because there is no such thing as a reasonably priced fan here, so the best thing to do is camp out.
Personally, I hate sweating even more than mosquitoes. I rarely used to sweat without a workout or a police chase as the cause, but in this sort of humidity, I'm wetter than Ann Coulter at a GOP fundraiser. And I'll do anything to not be likened to Ann Coulter nor the GOP.
So I started looking at the air displacement capacity of the fans. 1.5 m3/min.... 4 m3/min... Ooh, what do we have here? 24.1 m3/min! And when it comes to not being sweaty, preventing mosquitoes, not being like Republican shitfucks, and making my lady happy - all in one go - well, then, money is no object.
I'm proud to say that we now own a Rowenta upright oscillating fan that's got better displacement than Rush Limbaugh and Karl Rove swan diving into a bathtub full of sulfuric acid. And is almost as pleasurable.
The author enjoying his new hardware, in his underwear. Expect to find him like this every day for the rest of summer.
