An American in Provence

Busy doing not much.
Well, still continuing with the apartment- I have finally finished cleaning the walls and the rash on my finger is slowly fading away. Might one day be able to wear my wedding ring again.
Yesterday we went to a store and ordered an AC unit. It will be installed, hopefully, next Friday. Neither of us are big AC people- when I lived in Virginia I never needed air conditioning and went most of the summers without it. But here, I just cannot. The first two summers, I thought I would have to crawl out of my SKIN it was so hot. Last summer was tolerable, and this summer is starting out rainy, so maybe it won't be an eyeball boiler this year. Still, we decided to put one in. We can't really advance too much on our apartment until it is done, because we aren't 100% sure where they will put the pipes connecting to the outside unit, which we will have to put on our back balcony, the one that is onto the inner-courtyard and where everyone hangs their laundry. If we put on the street side, some of our neighbors would have aneurisms I believe. While that could help indirectly solve the blasting TV problem....
So next Friday, hopefully, they will come and drill lots of holes through the cement walls, making our neighbors happy, and then we will have air conditioning. The unit also does heating, but we aren't supposed to have just this unit for heating, we have to have a back-up, because it doesn't work below -2 celcius. So we will keep our large ugly radiators that have pipes running all over the place. In addition to the electric wires and water pipes. Anybody ever hear of HIDDEN pipes and wires? I guess not. Though on the other hand, I guess that would make it harder to do all the work we have been doing.
Once the AC is installed, we can order the crown molding that will be placed along the ceiling, and then I can start painting while Alain works on building a closet in our bedroom. Now we are sleeping in the medium bedroom, which is on the indoor courtyard side. It is much quieter, but I am so used to wearing earplugs that I can't not use them at night.
Work is going fine. I am so happy I stayed. (That was the thing I was struggling with a month ago).
I will have one week off in August, so we will probably go to Italy again.
Our internet connection was down for a few days, and so we spent about six hours today reinstalling the service provider, trying to fix internet explorer, etc. Finally figured out that it was our anti-virus program that was blocking it.
To everyone who has commented that I haven't responded to, I'm sorry. Will try and get caught up on everything this month. If internet works. And if I am not sitting in front of the fan, too hot to type because our air conditioning doesn't work.
Here's to a mild summer!