My apartment doesn't have much in the way of appliances, but what we have still gives us trouble. Actually there are only three pieces of life-enhancing technology in the apartment--a stove, a refrigerator, and a television. I don't watch TV, and even if I did, we only get about seven channels (some of them fade in and out).

The stove/oven was the first act up. When our landlady showed us the apartment, she mentioned that the stove has a small gas leak, so if it smells too badly of gas in the kitchen, just turn off the gas supply valve. Fortunately she had the gas supply line changed a few weeks ago, so that has diminished the gassy smell. The oven, though, has its own personality. It is a Soviet oven that you have to light manually; there's a little tube you drop a lit match into. You first select your temperature--on a dial that has numbers one through eight (I have no idea what temperatures those line up to)--then push a red button, allowing gas to flow to the burner. You hold down the button for a little bit until a thermocouple warms up and tells the oven that it's lit. That thermocouple, though, is a finicky beast. Sometimes it heats up almost instantly, but other times it takes a few minutes. The poor oven operator, who has far better things to do with his life, is stuck holding down the button until the oven decides it is ready. My record so far is four minutes.

The refrigerator also has an attitude. Yesterday morning I noticed that the fridge door had been open all night because the freezer cabinet wasn't shut and was blocking the main door from shutting. The freezer was completely iced up, so the door was stuck open. In the process of fighting with the door and trying to chip some ice out, I bumped a button labeled оттайка, a word I quickly guessed means "defrost." That turned the compressor off, but I managed to get the door shut, so I didn't give it any more thought and went off to work. I got back later that day to see that the floor was covered with water. All that ice had melted--the defrost cycle was doing its job. I did a quick Yandex (the Russian Google) search of our refrigerator and the problem we were having and figured out how to heat up the thermostat to trick the fridge into working again. Fortunately I need to go to the grocery store, so there wasn't much of anything in the fridge that would spoil. I just hope the water didn't rain down on the neighbors below--that's definitely not a good way to endear yourself around the old apartment building.