I'm Sorry....Another Frog Blog

I just thought I would take a minute to say I had to apologize to Rebecca for making light of the frog situation she is dealing with. Remember the title of a blog post she did recently, "You can't flush a frog?" Well, maybe you can. In fact I'm about 99% sure I did last week. We were traveling and we stayed at a really nice resort type hotel. I was pleased when we saw the room because we had stayed in a well....how should I say it?.... not so nice hotel the week before. Even though it was nice, I was a little leery just because or our experience the previous weekend and because of Rebecca's creepy frog stories. I know you won't believe this, but I had a frog/toilet experience also. Because I was a little leery I checked things out before I went, but when I flushed, a frog shot across the water in the toilet. I about killed myself trying to get the door open and get out of there. After I calmed down and told Alan we went back in to see if Kermit was still there. He was not to be found. I truly think I got him flushed! Shortly after that we got a phone call from the front desk that our car alarm was going off. Great. We went out to see what was up and while we were checking it out, we saw the night manager. Alan told him about the frog and he simply said, "Yeah, it's frog season." It's frog season? What is that supposed to mean??? I thought he would apologize and offer us a rate reduction or at least acknowledge my serious invasion of privacy. But no, just, "it's frog season." Since that experience I have become more compassionate with Rebecca's situation and I swear, no more lame frog jokes.


P. S. Nothing was wrong at the car, but as you can see, our battle with beepers, buzzers and most things electronic continues.

Nosso Apartamento ( Our apartment, I think)

This isn't our apartment building. Sorry for the misleading title. It is another picture I took from Alan's office that I thought was a little better than the one below. Fortaleza had a few more high rises than I expected.

I took this picture from the window in the mission office. Our apartment is probably in the picture somewhere , but I couldn't tell you where. The building we live in is only 10 stories high, so it is would be pretty tough to see.This picture was taken at night and it's a little tough to tell what it is. Sorry. It is a big window thing in the laundry room. The reason I call it a window thing is that there is no glass in it, just these slat type things. We are amazed that birds or bats or bugs don't fly right in, but they don't. Knock on wood!
The laundry room is nice and big. The water heater that leaked all over the second night we were there is located in the opposite corner. It didn't turn into that big of a disaster because they have tile floors and they have a drain in the floor in this room too. I just pushed it all over to the drain and washed the floor at the same time.

This is the bathroom off our bedroom. You can't see the shower/tub. It is nice, but the way it is arranged I think it would be beast to clean, so we use another shower most of the time. I'm lazy, I know, but mildew grows pretty fast here and I just didn't want to fight it. This is our bedroom. We thought we would have a hard time without our king size, but it hasn't been bad at all. The mattress is comfy and the pillows are great. All the bedding was new, so that was nice.
This is the living room. It is nice. The decorations aren't exactly what I would choose, but it is starting to feel like home. I had to put a few of the flower arrangements in a closet. There were just too many. I left out the most normal ones, at least in my opinion. There is a ton of lovely closet space and storage in this apartment. It's almost a shame because we don't have anything to put in it and I doubt the 4 boxes of stuff we had shipped is going to take up much room. By the way, had I known that quite a few of the items they listed that were supposed to be in the apartment weren't really here, I would have sent more stuff. Take measuring cups, for instance. They were on the list, but not here. Let's just say I've had a few cooking adventures. Alan might call them disasters, but I'm going with adventures.

Dad is checking out the refrigerator. They left us some basics which was nice. We still haven't really got it stocked though. It is hard to figure out what to buy. I don't know what a lot of the stuff in the store really is and a lot of things I'm accustomed to cooking with they don't have. We have been surprised at the cost of things. We thought food would be less expensive than it is.

I made a bouquet out of the beautiful roses they gave us when we arrived. It lasted about 5 days and then I had to throw it out, but we enjoyed it. There were two sets of candlesticks in the house, but no candles. Looking at this picture reminds me I was going to try to find some to buy. Too bad Mini Bazaar isn't a little closer.

That Bugs Me!

Just a little incident...Yesterday we had a zone conference in a city about two hours away from here. There were only 8 Elders there. One of them suddenly flipped a big bug off the cuff of his pants. As luck would have it, it came Alan's way. The Elder was totally embarrassed. Anyway, Alan "took care" of the bug by stepping on it. It could have been a roach, I'm not sure. We just left it there and thought we would get rid of it when the meeting ended. We didn't have to worry about that though. By the end of the meeting an army of tiny ants were working that roach over pretty good. This took place inside a pretty nice church building. Yikes!

What the Beep?!

So far one of the biggest challenges for us has been to know what is beeping.? When we arrived one of the first things the previous president and his wife did was give us their cell phones. Let's just say they definitely seemed anxious for the hand-off. Alan got two, I got one. It wasn't long before they were ringing. Missionaries had a lot of questions for the new president and a few for me about health issues, which by the way, I know nothing about but have been trying to bluff my way through. The real problem was when we came to our apartment. There were two more phones there, a buzzer for the front and the back door, a sound from a clock on the hour and half hour, and buzzer on the dryer. Every time we heard a beep we started running around checking everything to figure out where the sound was coming from and what we should do about it. About the time we would figure it out, it would quit beeping. To add to the confusion the words on the cell phones are all in Portuguese and when you are electronically impaired anyway, that does not help AT ALL. Let's just say we missed more than a few calls.

Things are a little better this week. I don't know if they were just trying to initiate us or if word has gotten around that we don't know what we're doing and they might as well not waste their time calling. On to WEEK 2!!