We got our person numbers today so we are now super official Norwegian residents and we can order internet and phone connections in our house! Woo hoo! (I just hope it doesn’t take another month for them to be installed….) Kory had to show his work/residence permit to his boss this week and his boss said that the permission we got was very rare and super hard to get – the hardest of them all. I’m not sure what all that means, but he was impressed. I know we never have to leave the country and I know we can keep that permit if we return before one year is up when we do leave, but other than that, I’m not sure of all the details. I guess we’ll find out. One time when I was in the Alien office there were some people in there asking for permission to leave town. They were just going to another part of Norway, but they had to get permission to do it. I’m pretty sure they were refugees so they must keep a tight leash on those folks. We are “free to move about the cabin” as it were, now that the seatbelt light has been turned off.
I will be most thankful for an internet connection as I didn’t realized how addicted I was to it until I didn’t have it every day. Just something simple like trying to save a file in a PDF format was a nightmare. Kaleb’s publication – “The Weekly Puppy” was due to be published today and for the life of me I couldn’t get it to save in the right format. (We’ve never attempted to publish it from my new laptop before with all the latest versions of software.) Without access to the internet to research why it wouldn’t work, I was lost. So, we prayed. And last night, for some reason, a message just popped up on my computer (I’m sure it was from God, but it was written by Microsoft), that said there was a “fix” that could be downloaded from Microsoft’s website that would allow the PDF format to work. How that message popped up, I’ll never know, as I had done the same thing dozens of times and it never appeared, but the minute Kaleb and I prayed about it, the message showed up. (God is so good, as he knew I was about to pop a cork over all the time I spent trying to solve that problem.) So today I went to the library to get on the internet and I downloaded the fix and saved the day and we got “The Pup” out on time. Whew.
Kaleb had a fine day at school today and was so proud he got nice comments written on the homework he got back. He was invited to another birthday party tonight by a kid in his class and he came home with a tummy ache from all the pølse (hot dogs) he ate. (It’s expected that when you have a party you invite all the kids in your class of the same sex.) Kory spent the day being the helper guy– he helped me with a few honey-dos and he helped his cousin Odd by putting up some trim work around his new basement ceiling. And I had another good day at school as we learned some very practical things like how to say “first, second, third,” etc. In America, we can write out “first” or do the “1st“ thing, but here, they always write 1. or 2. or 3. The period after a number indicates it’s 1st 2nd 3rd and you pronounce those numbers quite differently, so I need to practice them. And we learned the secret in pronouncing vowels: if there is a single consonant after the vowel, you stretch out the sound of the vowel, but if there is a double consonant of the same letter, then the vowel sound is short. This is very important, when say for instance, you are asked what you want for your 18th birthday and you say “bil” (pronounced “beeel”) which means “car”, but if you didn’t stretch out that “e” sound, and you said “bil” you would end up with a beetle (bille) – and not the Volkswagen kind either. Our instructor is not only teaching us proper “bokmål” Norwegian, but she also points out how the local folks pronounce the words with their special dialect so when we are out on the street, we can understand what in the world they are saying (fat chance). There are over 400 dialects in Norway and it’s not uncommon for Norwegians to not even understand each other. I found it interesting that our teacher works so hard at getting us to say the words properly, then she said, with so many dialects, it would be OK to just make up our own. Seems to me like that defeats the purpose of learning the proper pronunciation in the first place, but hey, I’ve got no problem having Dialect #401 being known as “The Mickey From America” one.
(Today’s photo is a different view of our Sinking Houses and all the grass I cut. Our house and garage are behind the ones visible.)
I will be most thankful for an internet connection as I didn’t realized how addicted I was to it until I didn’t have it every day. Just something simple like trying to save a file in a PDF format was a nightmare. Kaleb’s publication – “The Weekly Puppy” was due to be published today and for the life of me I couldn’t get it to save in the right format. (We’ve never attempted to publish it from my new laptop before with all the latest versions of software.) Without access to the internet to research why it wouldn’t work, I was lost. So, we prayed. And last night, for some reason, a message just popped up on my computer (I’m sure it was from God, but it was written by Microsoft), that said there was a “fix” that could be downloaded from Microsoft’s website that would allow the PDF format to work. How that message popped up, I’ll never know, as I had done the same thing dozens of times and it never appeared, but the minute Kaleb and I prayed about it, the message showed up. (God is so good, as he knew I was about to pop a cork over all the time I spent trying to solve that problem.) So today I went to the library to get on the internet and I downloaded the fix and saved the day and we got “The Pup” out on time. Whew.
Kaleb had a fine day at school today and was so proud he got nice comments written on the homework he got back. He was invited to another birthday party tonight by a kid in his class and he came home with a tummy ache from all the pølse (hot dogs) he ate. (It’s expected that when you have a party you invite all the kids in your class of the same sex.) Kory spent the day being the helper guy– he helped me with a few honey-dos and he helped his cousin Odd by putting up some trim work around his new basement ceiling. And I had another good day at school as we learned some very practical things like how to say “first, second, third,” etc. In America, we can write out “first” or do the “1st“ thing, but here, they always write 1. or 2. or 3. The period after a number indicates it’s 1st 2nd 3rd and you pronounce those numbers quite differently, so I need to practice them. And we learned the secret in pronouncing vowels: if there is a single consonant after the vowel, you stretch out the sound of the vowel, but if there is a double consonant of the same letter, then the vowel sound is short. This is very important, when say for instance, you are asked what you want for your 18th birthday and you say “bil” (pronounced “beeel”) which means “car”, but if you didn’t stretch out that “e” sound, and you said “bil” you would end up with a beetle (bille) – and not the Volkswagen kind either. Our instructor is not only teaching us proper “bokmål” Norwegian, but she also points out how the local folks pronounce the words with their special dialect so when we are out on the street, we can understand what in the world they are saying (fat chance). There are over 400 dialects in Norway and it’s not uncommon for Norwegians to not even understand each other. I found it interesting that our teacher works so hard at getting us to say the words properly, then she said, with so many dialects, it would be OK to just make up our own. Seems to me like that defeats the purpose of learning the proper pronunciation in the first place, but hey, I’ve got no problem having Dialect #401 being known as “The Mickey From America” one.
(Today’s photo is a different view of our Sinking Houses and all the grass I cut. Our house and garage are behind the ones visible.)
