I could not sleep last night for some reason. I went to bed at midnight and fell asleep sometime after 5am. I knew it wasn’t a good thing, so I stayed home from school to sleep and rid myself of the headache I woke up with. I didn’t get all the sleep I needed today, but at least the headache went away. It rained hard off and on all day and I had no desire to go outside, even when the sun peeked out between the clouds. I worked on my Bible study lesson for Monday and “played” on my computer while Kaleb was at school. I had no energy for anything else. I was tired.Kory was busy today preparing for the car wash tomorrow. He has big hopes it will build a bridge between the refugees and the community. I’m thankful it’s supposed to be sunny.
The woman with the radio program called today to say she had a schedule change so she wanted me to come next Saturday instead – which works much better for me anyway. I was sad to be missing out on the car wash tomorrow, and also sad Kory couldn’t be with me on the radio, so it all worked out just fine.
We got an e-mail today from the attorney Kory’s been working with saying we need to get an agreement set up with the Aalesund Kommune to keep living in The Sinking Houses, or we need to move out. So I guess Kory will go talk to the Kommune next week and hopefully we can pay rent for the few months we have left so we don’t have to move.
Kaleb came home from school all excited that his friend Andre asked him over for a playdate this afternoon. Kory drove him over to Andre’s house and he stayed until 9:30 tonight. I called a few times to see how he was doing and the mom said he was such a nice boy – and so polite. I questioned him about that afterwards as “polite” isn’t a word I would use to describe the Kaleb I know. He says he knows how to be very polite, he just doesn’t do it around me. Good to know I bring out the best in him.
Our house phone still wasn’t working today so I used my cell phone to call the phone company – a daring move on my part – not only because I had to listen to all the voice jail options in Norwegian and try to figure out the proper button to push, but also because it’s the phone company. I used to work for one and I know how exasperating they can be. Fortunately I picked all the right buttons and got to a guy that was able to speak English. He spent over an hour on the phone with me trying to help me diagnose what was wrong. Apparently the same modem that gives me wireless internet service on my computer, gives me broadband wireless phone service in my house. I unplugged the modem, I reset the modem, I defaulted the modem to its factory settings, I went on the internet and clicked a bunch of boxes he had me click, and in the end, my phone still doesn’t work and the wireless internet has now stopped working too. He apologized and said obviously my phone is really broken and a repair person would be out on Monday to fix it. I’m glad I had all the time in the world today to find that out. I knew it was broken before I even called him. At least I outsmarted him and found a cable I could connect my laptop to the modem so I wasn’t out of the internet all weekend. I nearly started to believe in all that “Friday the 13th” stuff, but once I got reconnected, life was good again.
Kory and I were alone tonight and didn’t know what to do with ourselves. We made dinner together and then thought about going to a movie but none of the three movies playing sounded interesting. We decided just to stay home and watch TED.COM – my all-time favorite website. I’m so thankful they don’t discriminate against foreign computers like so many other websites that say, “This video is intended for viewers in the United States only,” and the screen goes black. I hate that. What’s wrong with letting Norwegians see a few video clips for goodness sakes? But Ted came to the rescue and filled our otherwise boring night home alone waiting for Kaleb, with deep thoughts and much laughter. The day ended much better than it started but it was still a pretty boring day. I guess I’d rather have boring than earth-shattering. Today I saw in the news an area, not too far from here, had a real earth-shattering day – a huge chunk of earth the size of several city blocks just gave way and slid into the fjord – taking six houses, a cabin and several outbuildings with it. Miraculously, no one was killed, but it’s big news here in Norway today. So I guess it was “Friday the 13th” for those folks.
