Behind the Scenes

It was a fairly lazy day for me today as I was home for most of it.  Kory took Ingebjørg to the mall, via the underground parking lot, so she could see just how hip of a place we have here.  They shopped around for a few hours and bought a few things on clearance at a sport’s store going out of business.  I went later just to buy a swimming cap, as they are required at the swimming hall next door and they charge almost $4 to rent one ($10 to buy one), and this close-out sale had them for less than two bucks.  It was worth the effort.

While the house was quiet today, I wrote another article for the LaConner newspaper on the “Open Line” column they have in newspapers here – that we just found out about.  It’s a bit more involved than the Letters to the Editor we have back home.  It’s often use as a “tattling” kind of thing – making public someone’s inappropriate behavior.  I guess this is how they keep people in line – knowing you’ll read about it the next day in the paper if you do something someone doesn’t appreciate. 

I did a little Bible also while the house was quiet, and otherwise, the day was just spent shopping for food and making it, as we invited both aunts over for dinner tonight (below).  They knew Ingebjørg’s mother, so we thought it would be fun for them to meet her.  (I didn’t get out to take any photos so I’m using some from my birthday last week…)

As an aside, it’s interesting to me what people talk about when they know they are going to die.  When Kory’s mom was dying, she told all kinds of things she’d kept “secret” all her life.  Now that Tante Kari knows her days are numbered, she told Kory recently about a family member that was illegitimate.  No one else knows, apparently, including the person they were married to.  I just had to go snooping to verify if this bit of news was true.

Birth records before 1930 are on the internet, so I spent a good amount of time today trying to find proof of what Kari told Kory, and sure enough, tonight I found it.  The other thing Kari said was she thought the “unknown father” to this person was a close relative of the mother, but at this point, I would say that’s just not so.  I needed to settle that matter in my head because there are some generational health issues in that family line that made me wonder if it might have come from a little inbreeding, but I’m fairly certain the father was NOT related at all, based on the information I found. 

When Tante Kari was here I quietly showed her my findings and she was most impressed with my sleuthing… and with the dinner I made.  I don’t know why family history captivates me so, but it does.  It’s like a puzzle that needs to be assembled but there are many different ways it can come together – and all of them challenging.  I’ve been helping a few people this year find family roots in Norway and it’s hard to believe people make money doing this, since I feel like I should be paying them for all the entertainment it provides me.

So Kaleb’s day was fairly routine.  Both Kory and Ingebjørg were napping when he came home from school, so we had to keep quiet around here.  It got much noisier tonight when we played a few games with Ingebjørg and the aunts.  And that was pretty much our day, as we begin the count down now to our final days here.  Kaleb’s decided next year we’re only staying eight weeks instead of ten.  Maybe, so.  We’ll see.