As I have mentioned, I was sharing a flat with one Kiwi girl and I had assumed that we would be able to share most stuff quite easily.  I mean I am an easy-going guy.  My rule was share and share alike etc.  Not so.  At the beginning we had cable TV connected to our flat and before we could afford to buy a TV, my flatmate, whom I shall call ‘the kiwi’, managed to scrounge a little black & white TV from a girl she’d met.  She came home and said, “Look, I was given this TV for free.”  So I think, “Great, at least we can tune in and pass the time at night.”  So we have a look at it and I work out how to get it going etc, “Look we can plug it in here, in the living room, there is an outlet..”  No such luck, she takes the TV into her room and plugs it into her room outlet.  Her room was sacro-sanct, and totally out-of-bounds for me.  So she would sit in her room and just watch “her TV” and with no thought of sharing her good fortune or anything.  Oh well, stiff @#$% I thought, you’ll hurt your eyes looking at that little thing anyway.  We went grocery shopping together though and it was her idea, so I thought, oh well, we’d pool our resources together and buy food and share those responsibilities.  Wrong!  Once again, she bought what she wanted, and I got what I liked.  When we got home she set about making the demarcation lines in the kitchen cupboards and drawers, this is mine, this is yours, this half of the fridge is mine, this is yours, oh crap, so this is what the flatmate from hell begins like… I didn’t care about the TV anyway, I had a laptop which I was accessing the internet with so I didn’t watch much TV anyway.  I went to Walmart though, and bought myself a clock radio, and listened to right-wing talk-back radio into the night, so there. 

This morning the girls and I went to a Baptist Church, and I realise it was different from the one I went to last week but we are doing, as Allison so eloquently puts it, ‘Church surfing’, until we find a good one.  This is not to imply that the ones we have been to are necessarily bad but, you get the picture.

          The apartments have a Dumpster and recycling area where people throw out what they don’t want etc, so I saw that someone didn’t want a bookshelf, so I decided to recycle it and when I showed what I’d done to my flatmate, “What do you think of this shelf thingy?” she screwed up her nose and said, indicating her dismay at my decorating sensibilities,

“Hmm, you ARE going to keep it in YOUR room aren’t you,“ so it now holds pride of place in my bedroom. 

          Incidentally, a few weeks later, when they finally paid us, I went to Walmart and bought a large flat-screen colour TV with a Remote.  I thought to set it up in the living room and play it very loud, but being a congenial person I put it in my room and invited the said roomie to check it out, then sent her back to her little black & white set.