From Here to There, and the Subluxations Between: Extreme Makeover: Home Edition

I sure am glad I waited three weeks for this apartment. It’s hard to describe how it feels to come home to a place that I inhabit solo. It feels good to be within these walls. All the bars on the windows and doors, which I will refer to as “the fixins,” are so french quarter with the lavender walls that I think, “You are lovely against the white shutters” and I beam in their general direction. What I was expecting to be a large porch has been transformed into a magical second bedroom, catching the morning light and encouraging stomach crunches, push-ups, and dumbbell curls. The truly awesome thing about this place is that there are windows between every room. The two bedrooms are separated by large sliding windows. There are small pop out windows from the bathroom to the kitchen. There are sliders from the second bedroom to the kitchen. Who needs privacy? Since I have no furniture, I also think this would make a good Marrakeshian “pillows everywhere” room. My friends from Edmonds, WA have deemed it Carrot’s room. They imagine that I will adopt Carrot and they can be co-owners from the next street over. See Carrot’s ad here:

I have a Siberian husky dog. But unfortunately, my mom is allergic to its fur so I have to sell her, which is my last choice. Otherwise, my mom will throw her to the street :( This is so sad because she's very special to me.

Some information about her

- Her name is Carrot

- She's a Siberian husky

- She's 6 months old & weight ~20kg

- She's very nice & friendly, even with cats

- She loves to go jogging, play ball

- She prefers beef & pork & ribs than seafood or crab/fish/prawn

- She's well taken care by my uncle, who is a vet, so I don't have any paper but if she has any problem, just ring me, I'll tell my uncle to come over to your place :)

Siberian husky is easily bored if you leave them alone. So I want to find Carrot a loving, caring new parents. I don't want my baby to be left behind. Carrot will come with some of her favorite toys :)

I bought her for 12 mil dong. I will sell her for 10 mil dong. I can reduce the price a little bit if you are a really big dog-lover.

Email me at catherine5989@hotmail.com or text me if you are serious. Thanks

But I already have a CARmela and a ROTtweiler, and there is no room in my life for CARROT. James and Megan do not cease to pursue the dream. Off of Carrot’s room (the name will stick, I think) is a barred up window with an opening that swings shut. My landlady speaks no english, so she flung open the cut-out and mimed jumping out of it. I made a “birds flying” motion with my hands and an implied question mark. Maybe this is where you release birds that accidently fly into the house. She shook her head and was stumped. Her daughter told me today that it’s the fire escape. Hmmmm. If I jumped outta there, I would get entangled in a mess of telephone cables which hover over a barbed wire fence. Tough decision.

There are still a few things left to be done for the apartment to be completely ready. Had to walk about a mile to the Vincom Towers, a shopping center, to get towels. I went into the nicest bedding store I could find, grabbed two towels, two hand towels, and bathmat, and rang them up. The total came out to one million five hundred thousand dong. It's twenty thousand dong to a dollar. I guess I grabbed the equivalent of The Hotel Collection. Oh well. Now I have really nice looking towels that don't really get you dry. I have ok’d the fact that I might come home to workers all up in my house. I just pack all the important/expensive stuff to work with me. Tonight I came home and noticed that about a quarter of a new bottle of Aquafina was missing. Wow, they totally just opened my shit. I had also created a dish dry rack with a large bowl and all my clean dishes drying in it. For some reason, it was half full of water. It was sitting next to one of my formerly clean cups which was also half full of water. I rewashed everything, and thought to myself, “Really!?”

And that was my first full day in my Vietnam apartment. Minus the bulk of the day training my chiropractic staff. More to come on that later.