A Trifecta of Rarities

This past weekend was a strange one...first, Gjøvik was pelted by pea sized hail for a couple of minutes on Saturday. Our Norwegian friends said that they had never seen such big hail before--I guess the mountains generally protect this area of Norway from any kind of extreme weather. It wasn't big enough to damage the car, but the poor flowers took a beating!

The second unusual happening of the weekend made us dusty, gritty and a little sore. We got in touch with our inner stone masons and helped our friends build a wall. I'm talking mixing our own concrete in a big mixer (I was in charge of shoveling gravel into buckets to be added to mixing concrete), building up an iron framwork, and creating a stone facade for the outside of the wall . Kevin and I used to be DIY pros--we gutted our beautiful 1880 Victorian and spent the next 3 years restoring it. We (and when I say we, I mean Kevin) wired, plumbed, installed dry wall, swirled plaster ceilings and refinished hardwood floors. In my defense, I did most of the painting--that counts for something, right? Anyway, we did all that work, finally finished the house, and then promptly sold it and moved to Norway. Since moving here, other than refinishing the floors and painting the master bedroom and guest room last August, we haven't done one bit of DIY. It has been nice to relax on weekends (and I love the fact that my hands are super soft and uncalloused again!) but every once in a while, when we hear that someone else is tackling a home improvement project, we get a little nostalgic for back-breaking labor, and foolishly volunteer ourselves for the task. It was actually a lot of fun (I think a mid-afternoon waffle break is a tradition which we will have to bring back to the U.S. with us) and in the end, the project helped us to lighten our load of stuff to haul back to America.

Which brings me to rarity number three. Kevin and I have very different ideas of what should be thrown away and what should be moved from state to state, country to country. I am a minimalist at heart--I feel like if we haven't used something in the last 6 months, we should either give it away, recycle it or toss it. Kevin has been accumulating things for 35 years and believes that nothing should ever be thrown away, EVER, because what if one day you need it? Seriously, early in our marriage, I threw out a bunch of old, ratty, holey socks and T shirts...big mistake! "I could have used them for rags, how could you have gotten rid of them!" he complained. Occasionally, if I really believe that we are holding on to something completely worthless, something that he doesn't even remember having, I will sneak it out to the trash, but generally, I just watch the piles o'crap amass in the garage, the basement, the attic. Kevin has a big box of rocks which he collected during childhood, which has moved with him from Poughkeepsie, New York to Potsdam, New York to Iowa City, Iowa to Chicago, Illinois to Oriskany Falls, New York to Gjøvik, Norway. I have asked him several times, while packing for various moves, if he was planning to take the big box of rocks along again...the answer was always a resolute yes. But, now that our friends are building a stone wall, he has donated his box of rocks to them! And as he was explaining that he collected the rocks, many of which contain fossils, with his deceased grandfather, I felt like the biggest ass in the world for ever asking him to get rid of them! Anyway, our friends were touched that he would give them these interesting rocks that obviously meant so much to him, and they plan to use them at the top of the wall where they can be easily seen. And we don't have to haul the big box of rocks back with us! Everybody wins!!! Woohoo, what a weekend!