Lazy Day

As I was lying in bed this morning planning out the day, it had great possibilities because I believed the weather forecast from yesterday when it said we’d have a little sunshine today with no rain.  I had a mountain to climb and today was the day to do it, except for the fact it rained.  It’s no fun to climb mountains in the rain because the trails are muddy enough already and the only motivation I have is the view up on top.

So I sat with my morning cup of coffee and tried to come up with Plan B.  Kory and Kaleb sat around with their various electronic devices and waited for me to come up with something, as the rain continued to pour.

I had to bake a cake since we were invited out for dinner tonight, at five o’clock or so I thought.  I decided to use the day to pack for our trip to Greece and get that task off my list.  I ironed clothes to take along and sorted through things to toss out before we leave. It was a tedious, rather boring day.  We played a game together just to pass the time.

Several hours later, after we still weren’t sure about how to use the day, it was about two o’clock and the sun finally came out.  By then, it was too late to climb a mountain, or so I thought, so we just sat around again and didn’t do much.  No one even wanted to go for a walk as our electronic devices were keeping us well entertained.  I wrote another article for next week’s paper, and it was good. J

As we were leaving the house at five to go to dinner, I rechecked the text message I’d gotten, inviting us over in the first place, and realized that dinner wasn’t until seven.  I could have cried.  They use the military times here so when I see “17” or “19” it just doesn’t compute the same in my brain as when I see 5 or 7, so there in lies the problem.  We certainly would have had enough time to climb a mountain if I’d known we had so much time, so then I was mad at myself the rest of the day for wasting a perfectly good afternoon.  At least we’re packed for our next journey and I printed out all our tickets and itineraries, so it felt like something got done anyway.

We had a wonderful meal over at the Bjerknes’ house tonight.  Kory even ate chicken so he was a happy man.  Kaleb challenged most everyone in the family to chess and beat all but one.  I was telling them my love for finding records of the dead here in Norway and Haavard challenged me to find out what happened to his great uncle that moved to America maybe a hundred years ago.  They heard so little from him after that.  All he gave me to work on was his name, and that he moved to Alaska.  I tried for hours at their house to find him, but had no luck, so I knew it was something about the spelling of his name.  Once I got home, however I couldn’t sleep until I found some kind of information on him, and sure enough, I saw that he was in the 1940 census in Juneau and served in WWII, but never married.  His name was spelled completely different than the Norwegian rendition so it was near miraculous that I found him.  Haavard was thinking it would be nice to visit his grave sometime, so at least now we know what city he went to.  I was so proud of myself, but now am so tired as it’s two in the morning and I’m beat.

The sunset tonight was spectacular so we drove around before we went to dinner, taking photos from different spots of all the color in the heavens.  Glorious, to say the least.