Activities of Saturday, October 11, 2014 Smaller needed items/ new maid candidate

Today was another day filled hunting for more essentials. Purchases today included pen holders so I can take my pens out of their Ziploc bag. No, we don’t just have an extra container to use as a pen holder. That’s what’s so difficult about starting here with so little. You have to obtain all of those big items and then also all of the little items.  {Example:  Because of the drinking water issues you don’t see refrigerators with automatic ice makers. They come with these very small ice cube trays you manually fill with potable drinking water, then freeze the trays. They have a sort of flip it over switch to empty the trays but that’s as high-tech as it gets. Because of this I would like to have some American style plastic ice cube trays. I have not located any yet so the hunt goes on. The typical Indonesian person does not use ice by the way.]

First to in Kemang (a grocery plus store). They have cheap prices.  Then it was back to ACE again, but this time we went to the one in Lippo Mall so Catherine wasn’t there. Still, we found pretty helpful people as always. Didn’t fully complete our lists but we are making huge progress. We decided to go back to Hypermart to buy the perishables we hadn’t purchased earlier because we were running out of time.  Shopping takes much longer here because of the language barrier mostly. Another item continues to elude me. I can’t locate a proper razor scraper. This is the type of scraper that you slide a single edge razor blade into. It opens and closes to expose the blade. This device is great to scrape labels off of glass, goo off of solid surfaces and especially tiles floors,etc. I need it to scrape some stuff off the marble floors in spots. Everyone just keeps mopping over it but with the right tool, it can be scraped off. The hunt will continue. 

Why the rush? We had a 3 pm interview appointment with another maid candidate. We learned of this one because her current employer posted a glowing reference. He is posting back out of Indonesia. It is nice and common for the current employer who is leaving to try to help their staff find new jobs. Anyway, I read about her, contacted her current employer and finally spoke to her and arranged the interview for today. We like her and we hope that it will all work out but we’ll see. Her current boss is out of here on October 25, so we’ve asked her to start with us on October 27. She will live out and work Monday – Friday. We think ultimately we will be happier with this arrangement than with a live-in.