Moving....

Hopefully it might be a few days before I post anymore on my blog because HOPEFULLY we will sign a rental agreement on a house and then move tomorrow. YEA!!!! I am so excited. It's been a roller coaster ride. We found out today that the house doesn't have a phone line. YIKES!!! Thankfully, the good people at SIM (MAE) here figured out a new way so that we can have phone service in our home without having to pay the $1500 for a phone line. I won't bore you with the details but we thankful that the Lord and SIM are working it out for us. We will just have to pay for each individual call.



I started the above last night and am finishing it now. Joe has been gone all morning and afternoon to sign the contract. I ended up not going since our four oldest are gone to camp and that leaves us without babysitters. It's amazing how much I miss those guys and not just for all the work they do and how much help they are, but just because I like being with them. Anyway me and the six youngest are here trying to clean the apartment, wash all our laundry, and finish packing up the kitchen while trying to curb our excitement about finally getting a house!! Some of the Bible college students here are going to help us move our bags and furniture this afternoon. We have been storing the living room furniture we bought at the MAE office since it came in last week. We will also have to go by and pick up the 10 twin mattresses we bought for the kiddos as well as our mattress. The dining table and chairs are still not finished. We went last week to the factory to look at them. I use the term factory loosely. It's more like a large outdoor shed where many of the employees are not yet old enough for jr. high. I guess they don't have or don't abide by child labor laws here. They are making me a hutch and table and chairs out of beautiful pine. They called and asked us to come in and see the chairs because they realized they weren't making them like I had asked. When we got there, sure enough the chairs they were making were formal and I had chosen casual ones. They already had six of the twelve made. So now they have to start over. I was glad we went to look at them though because while we were there we discovered something else that needed to be altered. Many of the people of Bolivia are descendants of Incan Indians and are much shorter than we are so the table and chairs were too short. We had Seth and Jake with us that day so I had them sit in the chairs. Now you all know that Seth and Jake are tall even for North Americans so they looked a bit like they were sitting in Kindergarten chairs. :) So now the 'factory' is remaking the chairs to be more casual and taller. We will need to go to La Cancha tomorrow and buy a kitchen table and chairs to have somewhere to eat until the pine table is finished. We will also need to buy a stove, fridge, microwave, washer, and probably even a television and dvd players. After all we are spoiled North Americans. We have been watching movies for the last 6 weeks on Joe's laptop. Getting movies here is a hoot. There are no copyright laws in Bolivia and they don't recognize international copyright laws so we can buy illegal copies of movies here on dvd before you guys even have the movie in the theater in the states. For example, we already own Oceans 13, Shrek 3 (bought before it was in theatres in the US), Spiderman 3, Pirates of the Caribbean 3, Meet the Robinsons, and lots more. Sometimes they are very good copies that are just like a dvd you would buy in the states. Often these are from Russia for some reason I don't yet know. However, sometimes the dvds are illegally made copies where someone took a video camera into a movie theater and filmed the movie. These are sometimes laughable as you might hear a baby crying or someone coughing and sometimes the camera even gets bumped and jars the whole picture. Here 's the best part buying dvds in Bolivia: They cost $1.24!!

I have a funny story to tell you about a mouse at our apartment, but it must wait....so stay tuned!!