It was bound to happen. Late nights, not enough sleep, a little too much freedom – and ka-pow – my sweet little boy turns ugly. All I asked him to do was clean his room. But no, he wanted to do other things. It just breaks my heart when he makes choices that result in nasty consequences, but such is the job of the parent. So today he got no Nintendo, no computer, no DVD time, no Pokemon cards and the final blow was, no time to play with Tobias. He threatened to run away from home after that one. But his behavior kept escalating to such heights of disrespect and disobedience with each consequence he received, there was no way out. Even by day’s end he was blaming me for all his troubles, not once wanting to take responsibility for the choices he made. He cried buckets and I nearly cried myself. Kory just busied himself with vacuuming and cleaning up a bit as tensions ran high for a few hours in our house today. But finally a peace came, Kaleb settled down and read a book, I started getting dinner ready and Kory went to check on how the empty houses here are doing. He also took Kaleb for a short walk in the snow just to get him out of the house. Oh the snow! It’s been snowing all day. I’ve only seen it out the window today as we had company coming for dinner and there was much to do. I needed to go through Kaleb’s closets and sort through the clothes he’s outgrown. We invited Kory’s mom’s cousins for dinner (two brothers and their wives). The couple on the left (Olav and Jørun) are parents to Bjørn (Tobias’ sort-of step-dad) and the other couple (Terje and Lila) have a grandson a few years younger than Kaleb that I wanted to pass his clothes on to, so that precipitated the purge. (I’m starting to like “the purge” and think I might try to incorporate it a little more into my life.)So tonight we had a lovely evening visiting with the Solevåg cousins (massive snowfall alters NO plans here). I still struggle with understanding their Norwegian because their dialect is so strong but I understood most of it, which is an improvement from previous visits with all of them. Every time we come to Norway we visit with Terje and his wife Lila, who live across the fjord in Sykkylven, and we’ve eaten many a meal at their table, so it was finally my pleasure to cook something for them and have them to our house for a change. And naturally, the conversation always turns to the family tree as Terje is the one in the family who has done all the work in hunting down the names of the dead relatives. We share that same love so it’s always a kick for me to be with him, even if I can’t understand everything that he says. He suggested that while I’m here I should go meet with some of the elderly cousins and write down their family history memories as no one has documented anything and once they die, the stories die with them. “Jeg kan gjør det,” I said. (I can do that.) And I will.
I finally got my phone/internet bill today. I’ve been wondering why it hasn’t come as we’ve had service now for four months, but as I’ve discovered, billing here in Norway is a little different than in America. There are very few things that get billed monthly. People aren’t as transient here as they are in America so I guess it makes more sense. (If you have property to rent out, by law, you have to sign a three year lease with the tenants.) Electric and utility bills come quarterly, phone bills come bi-annually, insurance bills come annually. So my phone/internet bill was for six months and it was close to eight hundred dollars and that included two months free phone service because I was a new customer. I’m glad I set money aside every month waiting to get that bill so it won’t hurt so much to pay it now. The internet connection is almost $90 a month no matter how much it’s used. The basic phone service is $20 a month, but they charge additional rates for all the calls. Incoming calls are one price, outgoing are another, calls to a cell phone are the most expensive and calls to America are pretty reasonable. They also charge $7 for printing the bill and sending it to me. One time I had to pay $10 for a bill I received for Kaleb’s afterschool program because THEY made a billing mistake and when I pointed it out, they sent a corrected bill but by the time I got it, it was past the original due date so I got a late fee. There was no arguing with them on it either. I went into their office in downtown Ålesund to point out the absurdity of penalizing me for their mistake. The billing person said she agreed with me, it didn’t make sense, but everything is computerized and you can’t tell a computer what’s “fair,” so I had to pay the ten bucks. As advanced as computers are supposed to be, when it comes right down to it, they are a lot like ten year old boys who just don’t “get it” when they’ve done something wrong.
