Marketing

I have to say, this blogging thing will be a lot easier to deal with once kids are back in school. I feel as though I’ve fallen behind and I’ve barely started! Back to the story, though…

I think it was October or November by the time we got the big empty flat. I remember the heat was on. In Latvia, there were no thermostats then. God forbid anyone has control over temperature, or hot water for that matter. There were only a couple of days of hot water in the summer until October 1 when the radiators kicked on and that also meant warm, orange water flowed from the faucets like honey. That’s too poetic…Flowed like Tang. Anyway, it was fall, it was cold, we had a big empty flat, and I was pregnant.

We started in the little kitchen. If the whole thing was 8x10 it was big. We’d gone to the market one Saturday, as we did every Saturday, to eat fresh pirogi and buy produce, meat and cheese and toothpaste and batteries and bootlegged cds, and found two specific things we needed: rolled vinyl flooring and a little refrigerator which ended up being the biggest fridge we could find.

I couldn’t believe the luck in finding this flooring, not that vinyl flooring is such a much, but remember this was freshly post-Soviet Latvia where if you found Heinz ketchup on the shelves it would be enough to throw a party, so this was exciting. Fortunately, the flooring vendor was smart enough to also carry some adhesive (must have been off the sauce that day), so we could get to work and lay it down. That we did! It was super easy and the one tight seam was barely visible and ended up being completely hidden by the little kitchen table we would later put in the room. The hardest part about laying this cobalt blue, brick patterned flooring was waiting 24 hour for the adhesive to dry before walking on it! I specifically remember, though, being so excited once I saw it down—things were beginning to take shape and this was going to become our home!