Mould. Tuesday March 30, 2010

My house smells damp. In fact I could rephrase that along the lines that my house is damp. It has rained here pretty much every day since we arrived. There were a record breaking forty plus consecutive days of rain followed by a few dry days, only to be followed by yet more rain. And when I say rain, what I mean is tropical thunderstorms. The sort that floods everything really quickly, causing power blackouts and localized flooding on the roads.

As a consequence nothing really dries. To give you an example, Steve uses my hairdryer every morning to dry the shirt, socks and underwear that he is about to put on. Boy do I miss my tumble drier and my AGA cooker (check that out on Google)

As Charles commented on his Face Book page whilst he was staying here “I now understand why the British never colonized Brazil – the weather”

We have a laundry room that is adjacent to the kitchen. It has two doors to the outside and both of these let in water every time it rains. So that has meant for most of the past 7 weeks, ever since we moved in, I have had a daily ritual of mopping out the laundry room.

Our landlord (who deserves a blog of his own and one day I will tell you all about him) employs an agent to sort out the problems with the house. She is so useless that I don’t suppose that she can even spell the words “fix it” let alone know how to do it. There have been and still are numerous problems in the house, but by far the most pressing is to fix the rain problem. It is not as though Sao Paulo is unused to wet days. We are living pretty close to the Tropic of Capricorn and you might think the fact that there is the word “Tropic” in the title of the line of latitude, one would have a clue as to the climate.

So Useless ( as we have taken to calling her) has been on several occasions to “look at the problem”. She knows that my Portuguese, (although improving by the day,) is still limited, but she insists on gabbling away in the local tongue. She has tried to fit a rubber phalange on the door to stop the water running under the gap – no success - followed by a 2 inch piece of marble which is intended to create a lip over which the rain water shouldn’t but does run.

It doesn’t help that
a. the doors don’t fit properly
And
b. She doesn’t want to spend anything more than peanuts to fix any of the problems.

So the consequence is that water floods the laundry room most days. Clearly for the Brazilians, this is not unusual, because my (rented) washing machine has feet about 3 inches off the ground. It wouldn’t do to have water mixing with electricity after all.

Useless is supposed to come back this coming Thursday so have another look at the problem. Trouble is my patience is running very thin. I have already been told that the real estate company that listed this house have completely washed their hands of her and are refusing to deal with her. Fine for them to do that but I am the one living in a house that she is managing and I don’t have the ability to say “I refuse to deal with you”.

The final straw came today when I went to get Tessie's (our fox terrier) heartworm tablet that she has to have every month. With hindsight it was stupid to keep her (2 years worth) of supplies in the laundry room but there is a very convenient cupboard there which could have been designed for the purpose.

I open the bag containing Tessie’s worldly goods and the smell was disgusting. Everything in there and I mean everything was covered with greenish grey mould - ugh.

So now, in addition to doing battle with Useless , I now have to set about finding a vet.

Whatever they are paying, today it is clearly not enough.