BETTER YET

the shower is not fixed, but it is working (as well as it had been, which was not well but more than not at all) in the meantime.

yay!

what where?

i like giving directions to strangers.  i feel sympathy when i see people standing on sidewalks looking down at their map and then up at their surroundings, over and over again, trying to work out where the hell they are; and i feel (possibly a bit smug) satisfaction when i am able to solve the mystery by, for instance, turning their map ninety degrees to the right.  you can see everything snap into focus for them -- you can almost hear the click before the whrrrr.

but i realized, just now, helping a couple of young women from East Of Here to get their bearings and showing them, on their map, how to get to the other side of town, that my saying it's about a mile from here was probably utterly unhelpful.  among people of my acquaintance, the british tend to be pretty ambisystemic with metric and standard dumb old money; the americans, apart from those trained in the hard sciences, are metrically challenged; and the rest, which includes all non-native english speakers as well as canadians, australians, etc., are as baffled by feet and inches as i am by centimeters.  more so, actually, because i at least have the sense that i should be more comfortable with metric than i am.  at the blood bank a couple of weeks ago, i said to my friend -- just thinking and doing sums out loud, you know, like you do -- 'hang on, how many pints are in a gallon?' and he said 'i have no idea' as i was saying 'eight, right, because it's two pints to a quart, and obviously four quarts to a gallon' ... to which he said 'that's not obvious to me at all.'

quarts!  quarters!  nope.  it wasn't decimal, he didn't want to hear it.

in short, i should probably not expect that non-english-speaking tourists in europe will even be able, when i say a thing is about a mile away, to convert that into kilometers in their head.  more likely, no matter how helpful i've otherwise been, it's about a mile away is more or less meaningless.