Filed under: Uncategorized
Lasse and I have d one a pretty good job paring down our food budget. When I look at how much we used to spend to feed the two of us when I was working, I’m amazed: it’s nearly twice what we spend now. Clearly, we ate out at a lot more and I bought a lot more crap at work.
But we’re still looking for ways to trim it further and stock up on the staple items we buy frequently. We decided it was time to join a Warehouse Club.
In New Hampshire, there are three Clubs to choose from: Costco, Sam’s Club, and BJ’s. We being as we are, we went to each one to see what products they had, how far they were from the house, how much membership was and that sort of thing. We also made a list of the products we use most frequently and wrote down their price per lb or quart and then compared it to where we usually do our grocery shopping, Stop and Shop. Lasse then typed the list up in excel and analyzed it. See, there are some benefits to being married to someone who loves statistics.
The end result?
BJ’s was clearly the best wholesale club for us. Not only is it right down the street, it also has a wide selection of HFCS-free items. We won’t buy things that have HFCS in it, so places like Sam’s Club who would have otherwise been very competitive got booted entirely off the list. Costco also would have done quite well, if it hadn’t been located within spitting distance of the Massachussetts boarder. It’s so close to MA and so filled with Massholes that you can tell when Costco executives were looking at sites they found this one and thought, “Aha! Perfect! It’s so close to Massachussetts, our customers won’t have any problem driving up here, especially since they can do their shopping tax free! And should any Granite Staters want to shop here, they can too!” I swear, 9/10 cars in the parking lot were from MA. It took me forever to get out of there because they kept cutting me off.
It was also quite surprising to see what exactly we were paying out the ass for at Stop and Shop. Things like onions, potatos, and butter are just slightly cheaper at BJs while pure vanilla extract, King Arthur’s Flour, and cheeses are ridiculously chceaper. I can’t believe we’ve been paying $17.99/lb for parmesean reggiano at Shop and stop while it’s $12.99/lb at BJs. I really wish we’d joined sooner! Some items, however, are cheapest at Stop and Shop. Lemons, for example, I will only buy at one Stop and Shop due to a wonderful quirk in their self-check out system. Beans are also cheapest there: $1.00/lb for most types, while lentils and split green peas are $0.79. You can’t find them anywhere cheaper.
We are thoroughly enjoying our ability to buy large quantities of things all at once. This is especially true since we’ve decided to up our paranoia level and start stockpiling some food items we use regularly. Yes, there was quite a bit of discussion involved here. On the one hand, we don’t want to look like we had a great time at a tin foil hat making party. On the other hand, with the amount of money the government is pumping into the economy, there are only two things that could happen:
The beginnings of our stockpile
1) Our government will borrow the money from abroad, thus increasing the number of dollars in circulation, thus causing massive inflation and food prices to increase, thus causing the government to institute price controls thus causing food shortages and rationing.
and/or
2) Our government will print all the money, thus increasing the number of dollars in circulation, which will cause massive inflation, which will cause food costs to go up, which will cause the government to institute price controls thus causing food shortages and rationing. Ta-Da!
Don’t believe me? Think back to the 1970s energy crisis when they imposed price controls and we had gas rationing.
Since it looks pretty likely that the dollar is going to lose value and food prices are going to go up, I think it would be very handy for us to at least have a month or two of food supplies hanging around. If hyperinflation does occur, we’ll be prepared. If it doesn’t, we won’t have to do much shopping for a few months. It’s really a win-win situation.
Filed under: baby
So, I kind of figured out what the problem with the pictures was. They were saved as .JPG files instead of .jpg. Apparently, capitalization makes a difference. Don’t ask me why the archive program decided that the best way to unpack and save my zipped files would be as .JPG instead of .jpg because I couldn’t tell you.
So, here’s a picture of Haakon and Big Foot playing together.
Haakon and Big Foot
And here’s a pic of all the boys (yes, Big Foot is male so it works):
My sister actually got a better picture of this than me, but whatever, it works.
Lasse and I trooped up to Concord yesterday in order to sign against two house bills that would regulate homeschooling.
For those of you not in New Hampshire, a brief back story is necessary. About 3 years ago, homeschooling laws in New Hampshire were a bit stricter and free stater Dawn Lincoln went about changing them. She worked super hard and managed to change the laws to make it a lot easier. Now all you need to do to homeschool is notify the local school board, agree to be supervised by superintendent, private school principal or the State Department of Education, and either collect a portfolio of your child’s work or have them take a standardized test each year.
Well, enter Representative Day, who is the worst sort of politician: the One Who is Just Trying to Help (link goes to another blog post with a video of the hearing). Apparently, there might be some homeschoolers out there who aren’t actually aware of the RSAs relating to homeschoolers and they just might not be instructing their kids in all the subjects required under New Hampshire law. So, in order to help this dreadful situation, she introduced two bills. One would require parents to acknowledge that they understand the homeschooling laws andd the other would require a portfolio review and standardized assessment every year. The portfolio would have to be reviewed by either a superintendent or “certified educator,” and said educator must also administer the test. I guess homeschooling parents have been slipping their kids the answers to the standardized tests or something. And we all know that never happens in government schools. If the child doesn’t do well enough on the tests and porfolio, they have to meet with the superintendent and come up with a remedial plan and if they don’t do better after that, they can’t homeschool anymore.
Got it? Let me just note for one second that if the government had put in these policies in regards to the schools it runs, public schooling would have ended years ago because the majority of kids would have been pulled out for failing to meet standards.
Well, I guess Rep. Day learned a very important lesson yesterday, namely that it’s bad idea to mess with people who can just drive to Concord whenever they like because they have a very flexible education schedule.
We arrived at 1:30, found the hearing had been moved to the Representative’s Hall, ran over to the State House and found it was PACKED. Now, mind you, Rep’s Hall seats over 400 people. Then they have the visitor’s gallery. All packed. Apparently people were standing in the aisles, in the hall, on the stairs, and there was a long line on the first floor of the state house as well.
Never in my life have I seen so many people in the State house for a single bill, not even when gun bills are involved. Newspaper estimates reckon there were 1,000 people there, most of whom were against the bill and I’m willing to bet that the chances of it passing are nearly zero.
It really makes me love New Hampshire to see how many people turn out to defend their liberties, especially since Wednesday was our first day of warm weather in months. How many other states have such dedicated residents?
On an unrelated note, this is not the only bill this session that was intended to help. Some other hapless rep introduced a bill to require licensing and mandatory vaccination of horses. Horse owners around the state got up in arms over the bill and the rep backed down and asked for the bill to be killed. Apparently she didn’t expect horse owners would object to having to pay $50 per horse as well as pay a vet to administer shots most did on their own. She thought that paying $50 a horse was a way the horse-owning community could “band together” and help the state out, since it has run quite the budget deficit. Seriously, if she wants donations to decrease the state budget, why doesn’t she just ask for them instead of trying to pass asinine laws?
Ob in guten
oder schlechten Zeiten,
ich werde Dir stets
viel Glück bereiten!
My host family sent me a package for Christmas filled with baby stuff and other goodies, one of which was this little man, a Wolmirstedter Glückswichtel. He promises “If in good times or bad, I will always prepare a lot of luck for you!” It’s a heavy promise in times like these.
It’s amazing to realize that I’m living in the first real recession to hit the US in about 30 years and I couldn’t be less thrilled about it. Since the recession started in December 2007, it means we’ve been in a recession the entire time Lasse has been in the country. Consequently, his job search has been long and difficult and certainly not helped by the fact that he would really love to have a job as an analyst in the finacial field. You know, the exact same field that got clobbered already in the recession. Then Lasse stumbled on translation work and we found an undiscovered wealth of work, so I quit my job to have Haakon….and then the translation project that we thought would give us enough income for a year in just a few months got cancelled.
Can you say, “oh shit?” We most certainly did. That began 4 months of no income, from September to January we lived off savings while waiting for Lasse’s security clearance to go through so he could start this other translation job. It sucked ass and there were times when we seriously considered just packing up, moving to Finland and making good on his parents’ promise to find him a “good job in the government” there. But Finland isn’t home…and home is New Hampshire.
Now things are getting worse with the economy and it seems like every day you hear about more companies laying people off, or going bankrupt and people who are about to do the same. Friends we thought were well off are turning out not to be as well off as we thought.
And you know what? It makes me feel pretty damn lucky. If Lasse had gotten a job in finance field like he wanted, odds are he would have lost it by now. Most companies seem to fillow a “Last In, First Out” policy on their human inventory. We would have been stuck without an income and no backup. Currently, Lasse has 4 jobs. They’re all contractor positions, which means that some months are very good income wise (like January, for example) while other months are slim pickin’s (March). But, it also means that he’s home all the time and has a lot of spare time to do things with me and the baby when work is slow. If Haakon has a bad night and I didn’t get much sleep, Lasse takes the baby and I get to sleep in. He does laundry and has time to work on side projects, such as his blog (which you can find conveniently located in my blogroll. It’s the one that’s not in English. You should go there and coughclickonadscough.), going to the state house for bill hearings (which we’ve only done twice, but we’re doing it again tomorrow), and that sort of thing.
It helps, of course, that our expenditures are very low. If we needed to, we could live on $2000 a month (and $950 of that is rent). We have no debt and used to have savings (we’re working on rebuilding those…). We’re very lucky that we didn’t give into temptation and buy a couch and recliner or a new car or anything that we wanted since we got our apartment. We still use the futon I bought off of craigslist when I moved to New Hampshire and my car is 14 years old, but still going strong. Everytime I think something’s wrong with it, it turns out to be something very minor, such as the battery being dead, or the cap for the clutch fluid not replaced properly. We’re hoping our patience will have paid off and we might be able to get a couch at least this month, from January’s income. We’ll see, though.
We’re also very lucky that both of us are healthy and that Haakon had a normal, uncomplicated birth. Apparently, it costs $16,000 to have a baby in a hospital in New Hampshire. My boss was complaining about it to me because our insurance at work only covered 80% after the deductible. “So I still have to pay over $3,000! Kids are expensive!” He stared at me when I mentioned that I only had to pay $1,000 because the midwife only cost $5,000. If there had been complications, it would have been a lot worse, not just financially. One of my co-workers had an emergency C-section at 32 weeks due to pre-eclampsia and her son was transferred to Boston’s Children’s Hospital. They had to continuously travel down there until he was well enough to be released and it was quite some time. I couldn’t imagine not being able to spend time with baby and having him an hour’s drive away.
We’ve also been very lucky in that we have hardly had to buy Haakon any clothes at all. Most of them have been given to us, some at our baby shower an others from friends who didn’t need them any more. My host family sent me two large packages of clothes from a friend who had had a son earlier. A former neighbor of mine has been generous enough to give me all the clothes her grandson grows out of, though the story behind this is rather sad. Her son knocked some girl up who was on crack and the baby was born addicted, so they took him away as well as her daughter and gave my former neighbor custody of them both. He’s grown up well though and is now fat, happy and well bonded to his grandmother. The amazing thing is that I pretty much have clothes for Haakon until he’s two, depending on how fast he grows.
The funny thing is that I have so many clothes for Haakon, I have really too many. So, I’m looking to give some away. A friend in Germany is pregnant with her first baby and it turned out to be a boy, so I’ve packed up a box of baby clothes for her so she should have a good selection of clothes at least for the first 6 months. The good thing is that her baby is being born in the spring, so a lot of the newborn clothes Haakon didn’t get to wear in the fall should be perfect for her baby. I figure it’s one of the ways I can spread the luck around, so to speak. It’s nice to be able to give occasionally, instead of just receive.
I don’t know how bad this recession is going to be (though I’m hoping for the best, I also like to expect the worst), but I do hope that no matter how bad it does get, I can at least look at the bright side of things. Or that the Glückswichtel will work his magic. I put it on Lasse’s desk, just in case.
Filed under: Uncategorized
My computer is on its last legs, which is partially my fault and partially the fact that it’s a Dell. First off, I knocked it off my desk on the morning of the Tea Party Money Bomb in my eagerness to see how much money Ron Paul had raised, thus causing the Great Harddrive Crash of 2007.
The casing of my laptop is cracked in various places due to that and other times I’ve dropped it. It falls quite frequently, mainly because I use it while I breastfeed and it perches on the edge of the futon. When I get up, it looses its balance and falls on the ground.
Which brings us to the next problem. One of my USB drives has never quite worked, even when the laptop was brand new because Dell forgot to install a grey thingy in it that would make it transfer data as well as electricity. Now, neither of my USB drives work because I keep knocking my laptop over while the external fan is plugged in and have bent both USB drives. I can still transfer electricity in the top one (which used to be the good one), which is good because…
My laptop overheats. This is apparently a common problem with this model of laptop and it requires an external fan, which needs to be plugged into the USB drive. Even with the external fan, if I do anything that makes my laptop do too much for too long (like watch DVDs), it starts to run reeeaaaaallly reeeeaaaallly slooooooooowly and I have to boot. Plus, now that both USB drives are bent out of shape, I have to make sure it’s plugged in in a very specific manner or it won’t run and then the insides of my laptop will melt, congeal, and die.
And since my USB drives are broken, I can’t download pictures onto my laptop anymore. I have to do it on Lasse’s computer and then he sends them to me in a zip file. But you know what? After I unpacked them and saved them to the file I wanted, none of my photo uploading programs could find them. It was like they didn’t exist. I could find the pictures, they were there, but the programs could not. It was extremely frustrating, so I kicked my husband off his computer so I could upload some pictures.
The files are there on my computer, but the internet refuses to acknowledge their existence.
I need a new computer.
Filed under: baby
Haakon and I just got back from visiting family and friends in Kansas and I tell you what, each time I return to that state, I’m more glad I don’t live there anymore. It just doesn’t feel like home and, even though it’s January, there was no snow on the ground.They got a trace of snow the first day I was there and then it melted and it was bare ground. Everything was just brown and flat.
I know, I know, the mounds of snow we currently have everywhere make it a little difficult to see when you’re driving. Our parking lot is now a lot narrower than it used to be thanks to the piles everywhere, but man it’s beautiful. We have 4 distinct seasons up here. Compared to Wichita– where “spring” consists of the 5 minutes between cold weather and hot weather– New Hampshire’s weather is really great.
The family was quite happy to see Haakon and everyone commented on what a happy, cute baby he is. And you know, he is a happy baby. Well, except when people scream, he’s hungry, wet or I’m not around or he rolls over on his belly and can’t move any more than that. Then he dissolves into tears of complete frustration. As for the cute factor, I also believe that’s true, but then again, I’m hardly impartial 
I’m not sure what Haakon thought of being in Wichita. I spent most of the trip worrying that he would miss his father a lot and would never be the same. The first night seemed to confirm my suspicions. I put him to bed then when to the bathroom and apparently he woke up, so my sister took him and when I got out, she gave him to me. Nothing but screams for at least an hour. He cried huge baby tears, his face turned red and he made that dreadful sound that sounds like he’s dying. His fists balled up and swung wildly, he arched his back and screamed like he’d never screamed before. It must have been the shock of waking up in a strange place with no mommy because I have no idea what else it could have been. But he recovered went to sleep eventually, but I felt horrible. The other nights were better, but he’s been comfort nursing a lot more since our trip and seems to need more reassurance than before.
He did enjoy my sister’s pets and laughed everytime Big Foot (Akita) liked him in the face, which was pretty much all the time. Then Big Foot liked him in the butt after he pooped and I began to have second thoughts about letting him like Haakon in the face like that…
The cats were even more fun, if only they would have stayed put a bit longer and let him grab at their whiskers and noses. They were not so fond of Haakon and would run away as soon as they made sure he wasn’t going to keep half their fur. I did not introduce him to the rabbit because of his scary claws. My sister, however, did and reported that he seemed to like him. Well, alright then.
My sister has two boys, my nephews, whom I’m sure I’ve mentioned and holy crap, those kids are loud. My youngest nephew, Tristan, discovered talking early and hasn’t shut up since. From the time he gets up to the time he goes to bed, it is one long stream of verbosity. He was reprimanded a few times at school for talking so much, so my sister thinks that he must be quiet at least a few minutes there. Topics are irrelevent and he flows from subject to subject like a river running over rapids. His new “thing” is art and his New Year Resolutions were “1. Get better at art. 2. Get better at inventing stuff. 3. Get better and not letting my pants fall down.” He’s definitely failing the last one. I held him up by his ankels several times and can report his pants fell off each and every time. He needs a belt.
My oldest nephew Zach is 13-years old and is mired in the Cool Stage. He wears a fake aura of Too Cool For You and sports skinny jeans and high tops. I asked him where his legwarmers were and he just stared at me. I guess I am just hopelessly uncool. Unfortunately for him, he’s started getting into trouble. He’s a good viola player and told my sister he would stay after school one day and do some stuff for Orchestra. Instead, he and three other kids went to a nearby church and some of them (not him, according to Zach) tried to break in, damaging a door in the process. Naturally they were caught and the church is making them pay. The bill is $105 per person. Or as my nephew told me, “It’s $420 total, so $120 per person.” And people wonder why I’m going to homeschool.
Schools really do suck. My sister got suckered into going to a lecture on standardized tests while I was there. She received an invitation for a Student Appreciation Breakfast at Zach’s middle school, so she took off work to be there at 8am with Zach. They handed out a few awards for things like “Improved Attendence” and then handed out Data Sheets on the standardized tests. Zach was meeting standard on reading, but approaching standard on math. Then the hosts launched into a long spiel about how they needed to get the standardized test scores up and how they needed to close the gap between white andd black students (an odd topic, considering my mixed-raced nephew has closed the gap between black and white) and how if only the parents would tell their kids they loved them, they would do better on the tests. Rich, considering they took Zach out of class for this lecture. Really, schools don’t give a shit about educating your kids. As long as they fill in the right bubbles on the standardized tests so the schools keep getting their federal funding, they couldn’t care less. I suppose it’s my fault for telling Zach earlier how I used to just make pretty patterns in the answer sheets when I took standardized tests. Whoops.
At any rate, my nephews were quite pleased with their cousin, though they never got over the drool. “Oh my god! He’s drooling all over me! Ewwwwww!!” they would shout, handing Haakon back to me. We did manage to get some cute pictures of all of them (plus my sister’s German foreign exchange student) together, although Zach would not put his legs around Tristan, saying it was “homo.” Somethings never change: when I was in middle school, it was also not socially acceptable to be gay. I’ll upload the pictures later, my computer hates me at the moment.
If anything, I’m just glad to be home. Wichita is a “nice place to live,” but it will never be anything more than that. It has redlight cameras everywhere and the voters just approved another bond issue, but it turns out the city might not get the funding for it they from the feds they promised the taxpayers they would get. So guess who gets stuck with the bill? The taxpayers, of course! If you live in Wichita, you should be feeling quite paranoid about your backdoor because I think you’re going to get screwed in a most unpleaasant way during this recession.
Filed under: Uncategorized
Sorry for the complete lack of updates lately. There are a few reasons for it: 1) I’m a lazy bastard and 2) WordPress redesigned their dashboard, making everything different enough that I’m not really sure where everything is. It takes me just long enough to find everything that I’d rather do something else. I’ve really just got to spend some time getting used to it, I guess.
At any rate, it’s a new year and while I don’t usually do resolutions, I do have a few this year.
1) I’m going to lose the last 15 lbs of baby weight that simply refuse to budge. Anyone who comes up to me and says, “but you’re breastfeeding! That burns an extra 500 calories a day…the weight will just melt off!” will be shot. It did melt off in the beginning (giving birth really helped with that) and I lost 29lbs in 7 weeks or so. But since then I’ve been pretty much stagnate. I think I’ve even regained some of the weight I lost and I still can’t fit into my prepregnancy clothes. So it’s time to knuckle down, get serious and just lose the friggin weight. To show my determination, I had cookies and tea for breakfast this morning.
2) I’m going to learn how to knit. I actually started trying to learn to knit last year after seeing all the beautiful things Poppins at Handmade Homeschool was knitting and learning one of my friends had learned how to knit. I wanted to make pretty things, too! I managed to learn the long-tail cast on and knit stitch but gave up when the purl stitch soundly kicked my ass and set it aside. Then after New Year’s I was confronted with Poppins’ year end knitting review and felt the same whine, “I want to make pretty stuff tooooooo!” so after discussing the purl stitch a bit more with my friend, watching more videos on knittinghelp.com, I picked it up again, struggled another day, set it aside, picked it up again yesterday and something clicked and I could purl. Yesterday everything was clicking with me and I just had a really good day. So I’m knitting, just for practice right now, trying to get the stitches even and trying different techniques. Eventually I might get some good yarn and knit Lasse a scarf and then move on to other cool projects. I’m not a crafty person, but since I had el bebe, I’ve certainly wanted to be one. We’ll see how it goes.
I had another one, but I can’t remember what it was. I suppose it should be “write more and better blog posts” but I don’t see that one sticking any time soon, so take what you can get.
Filed under: New Hampshire
Apparently the power outge in New England has been making the news around the world. I wouldn’t have known because we have been in the midst of it since 9:45 Thursday evening, when we lost power without warning. We just got it back on a few hours ago and I tell you it’s wonderful.
Is there a page in the baby book for "Baby's first power outage"?
Our apartment complex handled things wonderfully. They provided generators to keep the heat and hot water in the buildings–alternating the buildings every 8 hours or so, though last night they must have gotten enough for every building to have one because we had been on a generator since yesterday evening. That’s a lot better than a lot of New Hampshirites have. It’s been extremely cold here as well and a building will quickly get down to 20 F without any heat. Brrr!
It was fun in a way; my husband and I have started a running list of things we need to survive without electricity and renewed our determination to have our future house be as much off the grid as possible. When we have the money, we’re going to buy an electric lantern, some tall white candles (these sold out first and the flashlight section of the store was picked clean) along with some candle holders. More matches would also be useful.
At any rate, I hope the rest of the state gets power back soon. I’ve heard it will be a up to a week in some places, possibly longer. You’d think we were in some third world country with those estimates, but I guess that’s what happens when you have a rough, tree covered terrain and small windy roads.
We arrived back home on Thursday evevning and man, what a trip it was.
Haakon did very well on the airplane rides and I learned that having a baby who is screaming is a great way to get through security without a second glance. Now I wish I had smuggled somesort of weaponry with me. In Helsinki on the way home, we accidently smuggled a bottle of water through and felt very rebellious. At any rate, Haakon slept through the plane rides and didn’t really seem to care much about them, which was a relief for us since no one spent the whole flight glaring at us.
Lasse got his first “I’m back in Finland” shock shortly after the plane landed and we went outside the airport to catch a bus. He asked a bus driver if this bus went to the train station and the bus driver’s curt reply: “Can’t you read?” He then refused to load our luggage on, so we had to do it ourselves. Once we reached the train station, he didn’t unload it either, so Lasse ended up doing that, too, for us and the other passengers. We managed to just barely catch our train, but since it was a Friday evening, all the seats were full and we had to spend the whole ride in the corridor by the doors. That was bad enough, but there was a drunk on the train, too. He was in business class at first, but the conductor kicked him out of there because he didn’t have a business class ticket, so guess where he went! Into the corridor, where we were. And he stayed there the whole train ride, hasseling my husband, the two kids also riding in the corridor and any other passenger that went through there. Now, while other countries may have thrown him off the train, the Finns didn’t. They either ignored him, glared at him, laughed at him or tried to calm him down so that a fight wouldn’t break out. Fun times.
In case I haven’t mentioned it on the blog before, Lasse didn’t tell his family that we were expecting a baby, or that the baby was born, or anything regarding having a child. So, aside from visiting home and burying his grandpa, this trip was planned to tell his family he had a kid. Great plan eh? His sister surprised us by meeting us at the train station and immediately jumped on Lasse and gave him a hug and started crying because she missed him so much, so she didn’t notice the baby in his sling. Then Lasse pointed him out and she still didn’t get it because he was pretty well bundled up. I think she realized a little later, but the reaction was fairly anti-climatic.
His parents’ reactions were better. I was changing his diaper and throwing the dirty one away in the kitchen when he’s parents came in and his dad walked into the kitchen first and went, “Uhh, uuh, oooh….(something in Finnish I didn’t understand.”
His mom wasn’t in the kitchen, so she had no idea what was going on, and asked, “Mitä? Mitä? (what? what?)” followed by something else in Finnish I couldn’t understand. Then his dad replied, “Blah blah blah lapsi blah blah!” (something in Finnish I couldn’t understand child followed by more stuff I couldn’t understand). And then she walked into the kitchen and saw him and I felt very embarrassed.
On the whole, their reactions were good ones. No one yelled, screamed, or had a heart attack and his mom was quite taken with him. So was Lasse’s dad, but his mom moreso. She always held him, played with him, spoke to him a lot in Finnish and that sort of thing. “I hope Lasse will speak much Finnish to him so he will learn it!” So do I because man, I doubt I’m going to be speaking Finnish any time soon.
Another goal of our trip was to register Haakon as a Finnish citizen. For this purpose, we brought along his New Hampshire birth certificate as required by law and headed down to the magistrate in the town where Lasse’s parents lived. They were friendly and took all the stuff while Lasse explained what we wanted to do…and we hit a brick wall. “This doesn’t have the Haague Apostille on it.”
“Erm, the ‘62 Haague Convention Apostille?” Lasse guessed.
“Yes, that one. We need it in order to process this.”
“Oh, I didn’t know that…every place requires something else.”
“Well, that’s alright, we’ll just keep the birth certificate and we should be able to register him and then you can come by tomorrow once everything is in the system and apply for a passport for him.” Sounds good, right? Wrong! We went home and then got a phone call. “Sorry, we can’t actually process the application because you aren’t a resident of Pori. Your last listed residence in Finland is in Turku, so you have to register him in Turku. We called the Turku Magistrate and asked them if we could just send the paperwork over to them, but they said they wouldn’t register him without the Haague Apostille.”
So we’re back at square one. We can’t register him without the Haague thingy saying that this is indeed the official stamp of Manchester, NH that is on his birth certificate, etc. What a pain in the ass. Oh well.
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(Author’s Note: I was a foreign exchange student Aug. 2002 to June 2003. I believe I wrote this story in Jan. 2004 or so. I’m posting it here before I leave for Finland so that everyone will have a nice, lighthearted read while I’m away.)
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It was the first week I spent with my host family, which is generally known as the week the foreign exchange student spends trying to figure out his host family. What time they get up for breakfast, where to put one’s dirty laundry, whether or not one’s family consists of the nicest people in the world or if they’re just waiting for a chance to cut you up into little pieces and bury you in their backyard. Fortunately, my host family was not the latter. However, they did end up having an accidental penchant for cheese.
I was sitting in my room doing whatever it was I did while hiding out in my room (a pretty common occurrence that year, as it turns out) when my host brother came bounding into my bedroom. “Come and help with the cheese!” he bellowed at me. Not sure I heard him properly, I said, “What?”
“Come help with the cheese! Come on!” He plainly thought that this was explanation enough and left the room. I, thoroughly confused, followed. Matthias led me through the basement, out the door and up the outside stairs where, sitting on the walk, was a bunch of cheese. I’m not talking about the kind of packaged cheese you usually go and buy from Dillons. No, this cheese was huge. There were at least five half-a-meter in diameter rounds of cheese and about a dozen smaller (that is, only six inches in diameter) balls of cheese. I stared at it.
My host sister came up from the storage room in the basement and I looked at her in confusion, hoping for some sort of explanation that would make sense. “Come on, pick up some cheese! Help me with a round” She said, enthusiastically, as though this sort of thing happened regularly.
It turns out that it did. You see, I was in former East Germany and, although I didn’t know it yet, I was witnessing an example of what can only be called The Ossie Mentality. This is a result of 40 years of building socialism, when the average East German (Ossie) would be forced to queue up for hours to obtain the simplest household good. If the store happened to run out of what the Ossie in question was shopping for, no matter. He would simply take whatever was available and hope it would come in handy later, as a bartering tool, for example.
I didn’t know this then and became very worried when I lugged the round of cheese into the storage room to find my host parents rapidly emptying the downstairs mini-refrigerator. They were laughing and seemed to be having a wonderful time. “Just put it down in the bottom part of the fridge,” my host mom told me as more cheese came into the room. “We’ll have to put all of this other stuff in the upstairs fridge.”
“Where did all this cheese come from?” I asked, not daring to believe they’d bought all of it.
“Oh, a LKW [semi] got in an accident and the cheese was covered by insurance so everyone can just take however much they want!” They responded cheerfully, carrying in more cheese.
My host dad shoved some of the mini-rounds into the fridge and pretty soon the whole thing was stuffed with cheese and there was still a large round outside of it. This, I was told, would be part of dinner tonight. We would be eating cheese until the cows came home, whenever that might be. 1
My host family was feeling very chipper as we headed upstairs, clutching cheese and the food items that needed to be relocated. “Remember the time this happened with the semi transporting beer?” They reminisced. “Yeah, the whole cellar smelled like beer for months!” They all laughed and I suddenly knew the truth: I was going to be spending the next 10 months with a bunch of friendly, cheese-happy loons.
1 It turns out that the cows have not yet come home. My host family still has some of this cheese (as of this writing). Halfway into my stay it was cut into wedges and frozen to keep it good.
