P was finishing her dinner when I remembered she hadn’t taken her evening vitamin. I went to fetch one while she told me that she didn’t like them because they tasted horrible. I laughed and suggested that perhaps it wouldn’t taste so badly if she didn’t suck on it for hours like she had that morning, and I told her to eat it before her last few bites of food so that she could wash away the taste with the rest of her dinner. She popped it into her mouth and was careful to make a pained expression as she bit down. She launched a lovely greek theater worthy drama of the situation, complete with alternating bug eyes and wincing, so many gulps of milk that there was barely any room left in her cheeks for swishing, and flailing only interrupted by occasional gagging motions. I did my best to ignore the performance and looked in the other direction as if I hadn’t noticed.

This went on for some time.

My plan to render her masterpiece useless, however, was foiled when she summoned the vomit gods one too many times and gagged a mouthful of vitamin chunks and pink tinged milk back onto her dinner plate.

“Uh-oh,” she said as she realized she’d taken the theatrics too far and glanced in my direction to see if she was in trouble. I shrugged. “Nice shot. At least you only hit the plate.”

I hopped into the shower this afternoon to find that we had no hot water. L called for service.

In the meantime, I looked in the closet and found three knobs. One said degrees Celsius at the bottom and had a range of numbers next to a picture of a radiator (room thermostat). One had a triangle to indicate bigger and smaller with a picture of a dripping faucet next to it (water thermostat). One said “on” “off” and “reset”.

So I’m guessing, oh, I don’t know, that maybe it needs to be reset? But not wanting to overstep my bounds, I wait for a professional. Not much later, a pasty and portly man waltzed in wearing his utility belt with a mess of keys dangling below. He cheerfully introduced himself and breezed past to said closet. “Aha!” he exclaimed and reset as I described above. I mumbled something about how I was right and sorry to bother him and he whipped around and said, “No! You must never touch this! It’s very complicated and requires much training and certification.” I thought he must be joking at first, and then was perplexed to realize he was completely serious. I was struggling to comprehend what “training” might look like for such an utterly intuitive panel and I must have looked confused and glazed over because he proceeded to explain that the one knob we COULD touch – and only because he explained it to us in great detail (a training session, if you will) – was the radiator one described above. “Just turn it this way if you want it cooler. And this way if you want it warmer. See? So when you find a temperature range that suits you ::indication of range with hands:: just turn this. Remember: this way for warmer and that way for cooler.” And on and on.

I couldn’t help but think of the movie Brazil with all the superfluous contraptions and ridiculous training and hilariously dumb procedures.

One should never post pictures of other people’s children on the internet without permission from the parents.

Good thing P refuses to pose for any pictures and has faster reaction times than I have shutter speeds:

Ponce knows.