Today we headed into town on the free tram and headed to the market. I had only two things on my list: beans and flowers. Nichole wanted a bouquet of "I'm sorry I made us late" flowers and Eva and I found 50 Tulips for 10 Euro. Red. They're gorgeous.

By the time we came back Eva's father was gone and the house was all to ourselves. As much as I wanted Nichole and Jennifer to not miss their flight, it was great for Eva and I to have some breathing room before they got here.

Having half-cleaned the apartment yesterday, today saw us finishing up the next round. We were sitting on the couch when we realized our beautiful view of the sky and street was grossly masked by the film that years of rain and street-construction dust does to windows. With a sudden burst of energy, Eva and I started working on the front windows. I squeegeed, and she showed me the Paraguayan newspaper version.

I said, "Don't you have Windex?" I was half-joking and half-serious. I remember as a kid I had loved helping my mother clean the mirrors and glass surfaced portions of our house. The squirt and the wiping clean. I think I used to squirt and wipe clean over and over again because I loved the disarray of the spray distorting the image of my face and then the wiping clean to my reflection.

By merely using the squeegee, I ended up with streaks, much like the version that people get when they don't know how to clean their car windscreen properly. My father too, taught me that at a young age. And I've got the streak-less version down pat. Soak with the sponge side, wipe with the squeegee side, wipe of the squeegee with a paper towel, and then overlap the dry window and the remaining wet. It's nearly streak-less.

So we combined efforts. Eva's was work-intensive. The people in Paraguay, apparently not wanting (or having) the money to buy a window cleaner, simply taking newsprint and rubbing the grime away. I took to squeegeeing the entire surfaces of our front windows and then using the newspaper method to get the corners and streak lines.

We sat back down on the couch and marveled at the sky; blue like we had never seen before, and the windows so clean it appeared that we didn't have windows at all.

Now we just waited in our little apartment for their arrival, listened to the news, watched the perfect-park-day turn into night, and settled into dinner.

IN THE NEWS:
An American college student in Gaza to protest Israel operations was killed Sunday when she was run over by a bulldozer while trying to block troops from demolishing a Palestinian home.

And:
On the brink of war, President Bush and summit partners from Britain and Spain gave the United Nations a Monday deadline to endorse the use of force to compel Iraq's immediate disarmament.