Fall cleaning, Karen and Dave arrive

Saturday started with us picking up three big packages from Paolo which had arrived the day before. All were for the Institute: two of them were full of paper towel packages and one of liquid soap. Had I known how big they were, we would have dropped by Friday afternoon to get them on the way into town. The church is changing paper towel systems, so we can't buy the old kind any more, but the new stuff isn't available yet. So Dee found the exact same kind online and ordered a bunch. On Sunday we will take five packs of paper towels to church, since Ugo had "borrowed" some from there when we were running low, and now the chapel is out.

We also tried the keys we got from the office to see if any of them fit our storage room in the basement, but no luck. The keys down there are skeleton keys, and we have nothing similar. In the late morning I went down to Conad for some food and the Chinese store to buy another plumbing snake. The shower in my bathroom has occasionally leaked onto the floor. We have never been able to figure out what causes it, as it is very intermittent and does not come from around the shower curtain. After the success last weekend with the clean-out in Dee's bathroom, I decided to give mine a try. Since we have limited storage, we just chucked the old snake last week, so I bought a new one for 3€. There was definitely some buildup inside the line going down to the outside, and the snake seemed to clear it out some, so we will see.

Dee spent basically all day cleaning and reorganizing for Karen and Dave's arrival. Her energy is back! She did all the floors and fixtures, and we tossed a bunch of stuff: three trips to the trash bins for me. The place looks really good now, though the dust starts coming back within minutes after she mops, but that is the nature of the air here. I tried the very inexpensive windshield wiper replacements we got at the Chinese store, but they didn't fit. So I looked harder on Amazon and think I found some Bosch replacements; hopefully the third time is the charm.

I spent a bunch of time in the afternoon working on my Sunday School lesson: Isaiah 1-6. In addition, I caught up on various accounting tasks and other (digital) paperwork. This is Fast Sunday for our stake. September 30 would have seemed much more logical to us, but this is how they do it here. When I made my weekly call to my mom, my sister Colleen was there staying with her, and it was good to chat.

About 6:30pm I left for the airport to pick up Karen & Dave from London, stopping along the way to vacuum the inside of the car, which really needed it. Traffic was light, and their flight was about half an hour late, which I knew ahead of time. Anyway, we got back home around 9pm. They were hungry, so we pulled out sandwich fixings and watched them eat. Dee loved showing them interesting cheeses, cookies, and other stuff. They also brought us a package of handmade greeting cards from Wendy and a bottle of 500 acetaminophen tablets. We love having visitors (and their loot!) and look forward to a great time together.

 

After they ate, we had a nice visit for a while in our living room, which Dee had miraculously cleared out. Not sure where it went, but I think the stuff ended up in some other universe. Hopefully we can get it back, but I'm not sure that we need much of it 😏

I found a cousin through FS, on our Dutch side. She is related through Levi Moses Fles. It was fun to talk with her for a few minutes on the phone. She and her husband managed 107 family history centers in Scandinavia on their mission.

Karen and Dave are open to new things and enjoyed trying new tastes like paprika shoestring potatoes, amaretti cookies and white potato crisps. We'll have fun seeing things together over the next few days. I love having them here.

Yes, it was miraculous to find a place to put everything away. The house is so much nicer when it's tidy, but it usually seems easier to let things pile up. It took a lot of energy to clean up, but I would love to have those results more often.