Dr. Alon Schwartz: No, it’s not urgent. You can put off surgery for twenty years. Me: I’m not sure I’ve got another twenty years.

Talk about an anti-climax. What had started months ago with a conversation with our regular doctor, Adam Albert, about the occasional intestinal pains I was having, prompted a referral to the gastroenterologist, Moshe Rubin, which in turn prompted a referral to a surgeon, Dr. Schwartz (and the accompanying CT, a low point in my life). I was expecting a conversation about surgery, mostly how and when. No surprise, nothing could possibly be done until we dealt with the proverbial elephant in the room, actually the very real catheter coming from my abdomen. But after that? No, the surgeon was not suggesting I actually wait twenty years to deal with the problem, although after we got the green light from the urologists, there was usually a six-month waiting list for the surgery. In the meantime, there was the pinch, pull, and wiggle technique, which the good doctor was about to demonstrate while he was examining me. He simply placed his fingers on either side of my navel, and with a few deft strokes returned the protruding parts to where they belong. Of course, when I got up, everything reverted to where it wasn’t supposed to be. The simple solution? Get an abdominal belt from a pharmacy, which would keep my intestines in place. Now there are a whole bunch of food type places in the hospital but somehow no pharmacy. Around the corner, there are even more food type places, but there is also a Superpharm. So that’s where we headed, first to Café Gregg for lunch and then down the block, where this nice Russian pharmacist fitted me out with just the right size abdominal belt. So now it’s pinch, pull, wiggle, and wrap. We can do that. Actually, it’s pinch, pull, wiggle, wrap, and wait for better times. May they come speedily in my day.

Speaking of which, there may be some in my audience who have been lulled into a false sense of security – as in, Fred hasn’t been writing recently about everything that gone wrong in their new apartment. Must mean that finally things are starting to fall into place and there’s not much left to complain about. Would that were only true, mes amis. But we all know how things work around here. There is, for example, the bare bulb syndrome. Often when you’re moving into a new apartment, all that’s been left for you is a light bulb hanging all by itself from the ceiling, and it’s up to you if you want something a little more aesthetically pleasing.

We’re big into ceiling fans, especially here in The Land, where there may not be a hint of a breeze in the midday sun. It used to be simple. We’d get a light fixture with a fan; you’d turn the light on and off the old-fashioned way, with a switch on the wall, and you’d get the fan going with a pull chain. That seemed to work just fine. At least we had no complaints. But you can’t do that today. Having a light and a fan without a shalat (a remote) would be like having a cell phone that only made calls.

And of course you don’t just walk into a store, pick out what you want, and take it home with you. You have to look on-line at all the different models in the different catalogs, going back and forth from one to another, which greatly increases the amount of time you spend pondering the matter. And then you have to order them, or, in our case, have Yoni, our electrician, order them: three Nisko fans for our bedrooms and a very large unit for our salon.

So there was Yoni trying to put up the fixture in our bedroom. The base with the fan attached was easy to install, if somewhat messy. But then…. There was one part in the light that wasn’t soldered correctly. Undeterred, Yoni took the light from another unit. Same problem. He could have taken the defective parts down the block to his house and, in a few minutes, resoldered everything. But if he did that, he would void the warrantee. And so he had to deal with the store and the company, meaning that for weeks on end we had a fan in our bedroom but no light and bare bulbs in the other two rooms.

We keep insisting that our new apartment is jinxed; somehow nothing goes right the first time. If the brand new compressor for our a/c unit came with a defective motor, should we have been surprised that our light fixtures were similarly compromised? Of course not. Finally, with a lot of verbal effort, Yoni was able to get the concerned parties to provide us with parts that actually worked. And then a week or so later, the light in our mamad (Barbara’s office) gave up the ghost. Normally, we would turn to Yoni and let him deal with the problem. But all the people involved with Nisko were sick and tired of hearing our electrician’s voice. Maybe we would do better if we called the company ourselves? Which Barbara did. There has to be something wrong with the electricity, was the response. Turn the circuit breaker off and on. Needless to say, since the fan worked, that wasn’t the problem. Well then, it had to be Barbara’s Hebrew! Not to be put off, Barbara enlisted the help of one of our neighbors, who came up and did exactly what my wife had done the day before – to no avail. Then and only then did the Nisko guy stop arguing and concede that there might be a problem with his product. He would send out a technician, except that all of their guys were in miluim. Finally, somebody returned from the battlefront and fixed the problem. At least the technician was cheerful and didn’t blame us for what had gone wrong.

Weeks later, Yoni returned and installed the enormous fan in our salon. We’re waiting for something else to go wrong, but nothing has – at least with our apartment. Me? We’re still waiting for better times with some of my body parts – none of which will connect to wi-fi.