Inese Dūka

Lessons in living or frozen fruit and ice cream forever!

It is said that there is a first time for everything. So this weekend it was time for my first time… A new refrigerator! I live with my aunt and we used a 37 years old fridge called OKA. It was performing all the basic tasks of a fridge with the exception that the freezer was lousy. Resulting in, for example, us never having ice cream at home. Nothing catastrophic, right? But finally time did do its thing and the freezer doors broke and wouldn’t close any more. This finally led my aunt to contemplate buying a new fridge. As she is a pensioner she can’t really buy stuff on credit. So I offered that I could lend my name for that. But it was left at that for the time being.

Last Saturday morning my aunt wanted to clean the old fridge and I kind of jokingly said that she shouldn’t because then we’ll never get a new one. For some reason this comment really hit her and she was left pondering for a couple of minutes. Once she had gathered her thoughts my aunt agreed with me and we set out looking for a new fridge. Our main wish was to have a bigger and separate freezer compartment, as lately we had acquired the habit of using lots of frozen vegetables for cooking. We couldn’t buy the fridge on the weekend as I had left my passport at work. But we decided that we should look anyway and settle for one to buy it later. I had heard a commercial that the company Elkor offered zero credit, i.e. no initial payment and you don’t pay only what the thing is worth for 6 months. But we had to act quickly as this offer ends in May. We actually visited 2 of this company’s stores to see everything they had to offer. In both of these places we were told that the delivery is free of charge. Not only to your door but they would also carry the thing up to your kitchen. That of course was very important for us as we have no car and no men at our immediate disposal… ;-)

After we had found a nice fridge that suited our needs we returned home to deal with the old fridge. Later that evening Mārtiņš and Āris (my younger cousin Ilze’s husband and eldest son) arrived and carried the old fridge into the living room, as there still was no clear plan as to its future. The cupboard the fridge stood on was moved away from the wall and the wall was whitewashed. Everything was ready for the new arrival…

Yesterday at lunch I was supposed to find the nearest Elkor shop, buy the fridge and agree upon a delivery time after my work ended. I arrived at the shop, threw a quick glance at the fridges, recognized ours and proceeded with the purchase. I had decided that it would be less complicated to pay everything right away so I didn’t press for the credit option to be offered. Once I received the receipt I was surprised to discover that I also had paid for the delivery. When I addressed this question to the sales clerk he said that the delivery was part of the price so it actually is free of charge. Well, maybe in my case it turns out to be so. But what if I had a car and intended to drive home my new fridge myself? Would they really subtract the delivery charges from the price? I somehow doubt that…

The next stage was delivering. I was called by them and asked to be home at 6 pm, which is a bit difficult considering the fact that my job finishes at 5:30 pm and it usually takes around 45 minutes to get home. Well, luckily I managed to be at home on time and they arrived precisely when I was about to enter my house. The two guys carried the fridge up to my apartment (luckily for them I live on the 2nd floor as we count it (for you Brits it would be 1st floor)) and stopped in the corridor. The doors to the kitchen cannot be opened completely. They removed the packaging and tried to get the fridge through the door. It didn’t seem to go… Needless to say that I was rather unconvinced by their single try as I had seen the old fridge carried out through that door and I refused to believe that the new one would actually be bigger than the old (and it wasn’t – after the men had left I measured both of them). But of course I couldn’t make the men try again. And I didn’t really want to make a scene. I guess at some point I should learn how to do that… So the men left me with the fridge right smack in the middle of the corridor and a hole in the corridor’s linoleum. One thing was clear – I am not going back to that store!

Once again the only way out was to call Mārtiņš. Thank goodness he was understanding and did arrive later that evening. To be on the safe side he lifted out the kitchen doors and we easily got it through and lifted on the cupboard as my aunt and I had intended but… for some reason I couldn’t reach the upper shelf of the fridge! It was clear that it wouldn’t do so we put the fridge back on the floor and put the cupboard on top of it. That was also when my aunt finally arrived and was instantly displeased with the cupboard on top of the fridge. Luckily, as the only alternative was to throw it out, she had to agree with us and the cupboard remained on top of the fridge. But then there still was the mysterious question of why the fridge had turned out to be so tall. The answer was found once my aunt started to measure it… I had bought the WRONG fridge!!! Instead of Whirlpool ARC 5510 in had bought ARC 5520, which has one shelf more. Oh well… a sigh… Only the one who doesn’t do anything is never wrong! At least now we have plenty of space. And a separate freezer compartment. So now some shopping is due to fill the free space! And there already are some frozen fruits and ice cream… ;-))

Musical baton

After Stan sent me an e-mail letting me know about this baton thingy and accusing me of not reading his site I had to pull myself together and pay the necessary attention both to his and to my own site. So here is what came out of it…

Total volume of music files on my computer…
As I try to juggle my life between my work and home computers I can only say for sure what I know about my work computer – a bit above 2 GB. I believe it is around the same if not a bit more at home. Am almost a total stranger to downloading music from the net, so this is mostly music from CD’s that I have borrowed from other people.
The last CD I bought was…
I wish my memory was a lot better as I cannot remember the last CD I bought… But my guess would be Diana Krall’s Love Scenes from 1997 and All For You : Dedicated to the Nat King Cole Trio from 2002.
Song playing right now…
“Just one last dance” by Sarah Connor… ;-))
Five songs I listen to a lot/mean a lot to me…
This is an almost impossible task imho… As I am known more for a like of the variety than for singling out clear favourites. But I will try to come up with something… What makes these songs so good is of course the music but also very important for me are the lyrics. And all of the below mentioned songs have some sort of great message in their lyrics.

• Diana Krall – A case of you
• The Real Group - Long way to go
• Bon Jovi – These days
• Joshua Kadison - Beautiful to my eyes
• Faith Hill – Secret of my life

The five people where this meme will go on…
Once again I will contradict the instructions of the task and not pass this on. It is very interesting to find out about your friends’ musical taste but I think that this topic has already been covered by many questionnaires we have filled out in the past… Maybe I should go public with the old questionnaires?

Aliens in Latvia

Now please don’t be misled – this has nothing to do with unidentified flying objects. And everything to do with relationships among people. I can’t even say relationship between two nations because I am sure it is much wider than that. It’s not just Latvians against Russians and vice versa. It’s the Latvian-speaking population against Russian-speaking population.

Normally I don’t bother much about politics in Latvia. It has never interested me and I never have felt its direct impact on my life. Only when being somewhere abroad from time to time this topic is picked up. Why do you Latvians deprive Russians of their human rights?... One thing after countless hours of discussions I have understood – it’s almost no use discussing it because the Western world will never understand…

What brought out these thoughts were yesterday’s events. We celebrated the 15th anniversary of the signing of our Independence Declaration. This included many events throughout the city during the whole day. One of them was politicians laying flowers at the feet of the Freedom Monument. This event was interrupted by a clash between Russian-speaking demonstrators and Latvian-speaking on-lookers. I won’t go into all details of what happened as I wasn’t there and only read about it today on the internet. All I can say is that it made me very sad and I must agree with our Minister for the Interior Ēriks Jēkabsons who said that those people showed not only disrespect to the president and other officials, but also to the state, which they hate. I personally don’t think it speaks well for the people why try proving their point by ruining other people’s celebrations…

But nonetheless the rest of the evening turned out great. The only thing that was left desired for better was the weather – luckily it didn’t rain but it was so cold that scarf, hat, gloves and boots were very necessary. I went to the embankment where there was a choir concert with karaoke. This has proven to be a very well received practice that first surfaced when Riga was celebrating its 800th birthday. It is at moments like these that I still have a hope for the Latvian nation because there is seldom a thing more powerful than thousands of people singing together about their country. After one and a half hour of singing from the top of my lungs I was left barely able to whisper, tired but very happy. The only thing that was missing from complete happiness was my sweet friend Arta singing next to me… But it’s only 16 days more before she’ll be back! ;-))

P.S. Sorry if I didn’t make all that much sense as once again this was a purely emotional outburst… You know me!... ;-))