Just Thursday

Well, when I walked out this morning with Zelia wrapped on and on my way to Jacob's school before rehearsal I found the ground to be a little slippery. As I looked around I noticed some frozen puddles and some more snow on the mountains. We have not seen any more snow get to us, however. While at school I spoke with a woman about finding a spinning class (yarn not at the gym) and it turns out she knows how to do it. So she will ask her ex mother in law to borrow the material and she is going to teach me - yay!!!! In the course catalog there is a fiber arts class but it is offered in a town 4 hours away, so no go on that. I will keep looking for opportunities though.

Rehearsal went well and it has been so nice to have Zelia in the studio. She is getting to know Katri and just spends time exploring the space, climbing on me, and today she even took a nap in there:) We are making a lot of material and it will soon be time to get some structure and pieces out of it all. It turns out that Jukka, Katri's husband, is interested in making a piece. He is a lighting designer for dance and is interested in making a piece that is not choreographically centered but a whole piece of art with dance, music, lighting, costumes. I hope he will do it.

Zelia slept a lot today and took another nap when we got home. She hasn't been too interested in food these last few days and has wanted to nurse more. there is something going on in that little body, maybe a growth spurt. After her nap we met Sunna and Stephan for an afternoon nap. It was really nice that on the way to meet her I saw another woman from the swimming class who stopped to speak with me. She noticed Zelia's hat that I made a while ago and told me that on Monday nights there is a knitting group that gets together at the cafe. Yay...I will knit again and meet more people.

We are planning a pot luck for tomorrow night with Jacob's program, Katri and Jukka and Kari (a woman in Jacob's yoga) class and her boyfriend. It was funny that when Jacob was speaking to people in his program few people knew what a potluck is. Is this a totally American concept? Does anyone know? It will be great fun and an opportunity to hang out with everyone again. Jacob is making his chicken Marbella, yummm.

Speaking of Jacob's delicious cooking...he went fishing again last night with Trann and caught another cod. So for dinner tonight we had the most delicious soup(that's something Amama would say - "most delicious"), cod and corn chowder, made of course with his homemade fish broth. Since dinner he has been working with Tanja and Danielle on a class project and after putting Z to bed I have been studying my Icelandic. It was great to walk with Sunna and learn some more and practice some things.

Tomorrow early I am teaching pilates. It turns out more people have registered which is GREAT!!!! We will be swimming again and then heading to class while Zelia hangs out with her new babysitter.

So, yesterday Zelia touched the glass on the front of our oven which gets VERY VERY VERY hot. We didn't realize how hot. She screamed and then continued to scream for about 2 hours. It was very sad. Toward the end of the two hours the babysitter (sorry for not knowing her name, I have to hear the name several times here before I can repeat it) showed up to meet us and her and Zelia loved her immediately. She leaned toward her to be held and touched her face and hair, perfect! Tomorrow she will come with us to the school so that we will be close if she needs anything. Hopefully it won't take long before she can go and do whatever with her...

I met with Peter (director of the University Center) yesterday and he spoke a little about the crisis. He had been in Poland but said he had no problem getting money from the ATMs. In Denmark, Icelanders couldn't get money out anymore. The banks here have stopped the selling of krona, not that anyone wants to buy them. If, however, you go to the bank and show them a ticket for going abroad they will exchange 50,000 krona for you - not very much $500 more or less. Britain and Holland have given Iceland a HUGE loan which they hope will stabilize things some more. In the coming years, however, this will have to be paid back and so people know that taxes are going to get higher as a result. Also, you may have heard a report on NPR that there was a run on the grocery store. Nothing like that has happened here, maybe in Reykjavik. The run on the market was for imported goods which places will run out of eventually. No one will have the money to buy them anymore (I mean the stores). Icelanders can easily live on what is produced here. I have mentioned before that most of the veggies we buy are grown here and we actually have made an effort not to buy stuff that isn't. I spoke with Sunna about this on our walk and she feels the same way.

That's all for now.
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