Get out of the Country!

It seems like no country really wants me around....the other day I was in my friends house, just being a good little girl, minding my own business and watching Enchanted when another lady comes in the house and is very stressed because she had just hit a car. A red car. My car. This lady is very nice and knows the people whose house I am in, but she accidentally just backed into my car. She apologized about 500 times. It's not a big deal and very fixable, but these things just keep happening to me! (please reference the last blog!). So I have come to conclude that neither Norway or the USA wants me. First the pants-less man bids me adieu at the Oslo airport and then when I get back home, people steal my stuff, my car gets hit, and I'm in the middle of my second cold in 6 weeks. OR....maybe it's just Texas, YES, it's TEXAS that doesn't want me! Oh what a happy thought! Mutual dislike is always better than a one-sided dislike. I don't want Texas either! No offense to all my grand friends that live in the Lonestar State....I still like you guys. :) Now that I think about it, though, Utah didn't really want me either....I'm seeing a pattern here. Where to next?????! Who knows! I am known to change my mind on occasion....

Weird things happen....to me.

(this is me in the airport, in the middle of the night)

OK, picture this, a very tired Lindsey waking up in the Oslo airport after a restless night of sleeping on the airport benches waiting for her early flight. Only it's not just a very tired Lindsey, there are several people around sleeping on the benches and one in particular that I would like to note. After falling asleep around 2am I woke up around 4:30, got up and took a look around me at the few more people laying all around that weren't there a few hours before. Among these newcomers was one man laying on the bench across from me, this seemed to be a normal enough sleeping man, but there was something that was awfully wrong with this airport picture of him. He had NO pants on! Yes, ladies and gentlemen, this middle-aged man was pants-less, and not only that, but his pants were right next to him on the floor wadded up in a little pile. Now is the part were you can start making assumptions...based on the following information.....next to his wadded up pants there was also a LARGE puddle of liquid on the ground under the benches. I saw no spilled cup anywhere. All I saw was: wadded up pants, pants-less man, and a large puddle.....you do the math. There probably was a plausible explanation for this, but I decided when I saw this across from me, I would QUICKLY relocate myself to a different part of the airport. I almost took a picture....but I, and he, might be pretty embarrassed if the pants-less man woke up in the middle of the snapshot and asked me what I was doing. So, that was my goodbye present from Norway. I'm a lucky gal.

I've been back in the states now for a month and I've been having a grand time with family and friends. I never realized how nice it is to have only English spoken in the airport, and everywhere for that matter! I had a huge smile on my face when I flew into Chicago from Europe. I felt like my language was no longer confounded and I could talk to EVERYONE! And then to have men open doors for me was so nice too. I had found that Norwegian men do NOT open doors for woman normally, so it was nice to get back to the gentlemen of the USA. :) Thanks guys! It's great to be back....although not for long....

A couple days after I got back my brother Ben and I went to my storage unit to get some clothes for me to wear. As I turned the corner to go to my unit I ran over something and it was dragging behind me....well, much to Ben's amusement, it was a mattress. Yes, a queen size mattress. How I happened to NOT see it as I turned the corner is beyond me. Ben saw it and almost warned me, but then I just ran over it and he started laughing. Well, I tried to get in out from under my car, but it got stuck......

To get it unstuck, Ben almost got hurled into the storage unit wall as I put the car into reverse really fast while he held onto the mattress. Fun times with Lindsey. (I don't know why that's underlined, I have problems). The pic is of Ben before we tried to get the mattress out. :)

At this same storage unit a few weeks later, I went to get a suitcase out so I could go to my Mom's in Missouri and there was a different lock on my unit that I hadn't put there. It turned out that someone broke into my unit, stole my empty suitcases (which I needed), CDs, tapes, a box of books, another suitcase full of clothes, my toolbox, and 3 boxes of plates and bowls. Well, it is beyond me why you would steal empty suitcases and plates, but I guess whoever stole them REALLY needed them. They didn't steal everything, but they were probably planning on jacking the rest of it since they put their own lock on my unit. (I had to get it drilled off to get in). This happening was actually kind of coincidental. A week before I was telling everyone how I just want to get rid of all my stuff and not have anything to worry about.....well, I got my wish partly.

Thanksgiving was pretty great. I got to go with my Mom to Maryland, I had 2 turkey dinners, visited a ton of family, shopped for a few hours, and was headed back to Missouri within the 3rd day of being there. It was quite the whirlwind, but it was fantastic.

I'm headed back to Norway on New Year's Eve. The date stinks, but the price was right, so I had to make the sacrifice. Sacrifices are coming more often now....I bought some hiking boots the other day for $140....that was a bite. Good thing there's no tuition in Norway....If there were I'd probably have to go collect money with a big boot like the firemen do in the middle of the streets.