Sunday, September 6, 2009

Rice cooking, leaky pipes

I don't know how to cook, but I do have a rice cooker that I received as a gift. After my parents sent me some money for groceries, I went to the store and bought some butter, four eggs, and some frozen chopped spinach, plus a jar of tikka sauce. I already had a bag of rice. I managed to concoct a rice meal that doesn't taste too bad. There's enough to last for several days. It's hardly French cuisine but it's one of the few things I know how to make, and in theory, at least, it should be cheap—my calculations reveal that it works out to about 2 euro per serving, which is a slight savings over ready-made meals (although it's more expensive than a small loaf of pound cake, which is one of my other low-cost meals).

I found a plastic pail that's bigger than the cup I was using to catch the leak in the kitchen that I've had since the meter man worked on the meter. I had to cut one corner away to make it fit beneath the leaky fitting. It holds six liters instead of the single liter the cup held. However, the leak is now dripping once per second rather than once every two seconds, so it still fills up every few hours. No progress yet on getting the meter company to fix it (or pay to have it fixed). I don't have the several hundred euro a plumber would charge to fix it, and my insurance has a deductible that probably would prevent it from covering the repairs. That's what I get for letting the meter man in (at the syndicat's insistence).

The weather is turning hot again, after about a week of very nice, cool weather. Sometimes the weather is simply seasonal, but most of the time it's warmer than seasonal, as usual (if that makes sense). We are getting far less rain than we need.

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