The hardest part of my day

I've often joked that the hardest part of my day is getting out of bed. I love sleeping. Really I do. If I believed in an afterlife, my idea of heaven would be snuggling into a soft, warm bed with lots of blankets and pillow and sleeping. It has never been more difficult to get out of bed than in the past two weeks. My bed is not particularly comfortable (I sleep on a communist-era fold down couch), but compared to the rest of my house it is certainly warm. In fact, I think that if I didn't have the promise of internet at the office (plus a heater) I would probably just stay in bed all day. When I get home from work it is hard to do much but start the fire and crawl under my covers to get warm. Reading, knitting and watching tv or movies are pretty much how I'm filling my time (since these don't require that I get out from under the blankets).

The second hardest part of my day is when I contemplate taking a shower. In this case when I say "shower" think "pouring warm water out of a bucket over my head." This is because I have now been without running water for more than two weeks. Luckily, my landlord has been providing me buckets and bottles of water from his house every few days- enough for me to cook, drink and take an occasional "shower" with. I now realize, not only how lucky I was in the states to have hot and cold running water, but how lucky I have been for the last few months to have hot and cold running water here. I know that many volunteers in different parts of the country have to live by a city water schedule in which their water may run only for 4-6 hours a day (usually a few hours in the morning and a few hours in the evening). Because I have a water tank and pump I usually have water whenever I have electricity (which, since New Years, has actually been 24 hours). But two things seemed to have happened: when I was in Gjirokaster, it got cold enough that my pipes froze (and got colder after I got back) and it seems, my pump died. So, even though the past two days have been warmer (and a lot of the snow is melting, creating gross slush everywhere), I am still s'ka uji (without water).