A Study in Contradiction

What do an outdoor football match, hamburgers on the grill, and the first use of our fireplace have in common? Well, the past few days of our lives!  Now let me explain.  I'll start with the good stuff.

Last Friday, we attended a football match of the second professional team in Eindhoven, called FC Eindhoven.  It was a last minute decision to go, and luckily, these matches don't sell out, so we could just buy tickets upon arrival.  FC Eindhoven is in the Netherlands' second highest division of football, and they are ranked dead last. Ah well, it was still fun to go.

The nice part of going to non sold-out matches, is that you get excellent seats for cheap.  It was good entertainment for a Friday night.

On Saturday, we continued with the good stuff with a great dinner at the home of some new American friends of ours here.  Jessica, Keith, and their son Liam had us over for a meal.  After Liam went to bed, we broke out a few bottles of prosecco and had fun just hanging out American style.  Thanks so much for hosting us you guys!

Sunday began well with the purchase of our new grill (well, to be clear we bought the grill on Saturday - not much is open here on Sundays).  Check out the beauty:

Todd even indulged me and let me get the one in the pretty color.  We went with the tiny charcoal grill since we have our larger gas grill waiting for us in storage back in the US.  Todd went to town on creating a delicious meal:

The boy knows how to make a good burger.  They were great.  Following our meal, our weekend took a turn for the worse.  In fact, at around 7pm the heat in our house stopped working.  Now you might be thinking, what's the big deal?  The weather's warming up, right?  Wrong.  Our weather has gotten very cold over the last few days and now we got a bunch of snow this morning!

Since our heat went out on a Sunday, we called our rental company's emergency number, but had to leave a message.  We figured we wouldn't hear back until Monday.  Come Monday we were able to get a hold of them and they sent someone to check out our heating system.  After checking it all out, the final diagnosis is that we have a pipe leaking somewhere under our house. This means that we cannot maintain water pressure in our heater, and therefore can't pump hot water to our radiators.  Joy!  So, the next step is having someone come out to use infrared to see where the leak is below our house.  Then, since we have no basement, they will most likely have to dig up our floor to get to the leak!  Can you tell how happy I am about this?  Hopefully it will all get resolved without too much craziness, but it's very hard to tell how this will all turn out.

In the meantime, we lit a fire yesterday:

That's a fake smile.

This provided some much needed relief for the numbing sensation in my hands and feet.  We also bought a space heater which is why I'm spending my day in one room at a time, letting it warm up the space:

Jack is so lucky to have that nice, thick fur.  At least I don't have to worry about her being cold! Ok, I think I've done enough whining for the day.  I suppose things could always be worse, so I will try to keep a positive outlook!  Let's just hope they can fix this bugger soon.