Back in Vienna
After 10 weeks in the US over the summer we arrived back in Vienna on August 30th. It was a Whirl wind tour of all our supporting churches. It was good to reconnect with many good friends and meet some new people.
Kati is just completing her first week of second grade today and she is excited. This week her class is beginning to write in cursive and is very proud of what she is learning. Elena is going through Kati withdrawl and is at loose ends while Kati is away at school. Christy and myself have rearranged our apartment to better accommodate our needs, we rearranged the bedrooms and office space.
We are glad to be back in Vienna and are praying this next school year is good for our family and for the various minstries we are do. This past week I was in on two meetings that got me back into the swing of things quickly. The Evangelical Academy had a faculty training day and the day after we had some meetings with a large Bible school from Germany. I am excited about both and will write more about them next week.
I just wanted to get my feet wet blogging and want post more consistently.
Easter Vacation
Last week Kati had a week off of school and we took advantage of the time as a family. We were able to enjoy some sights outside of Vienna which we hardly get time to do. I think it is always good to continue to learn as much as we can about Austria in order to help us live and minister more effectively.
I have posted some random pictures of the kids and some cool places we visited. One day we met up with some good friends, the Perrys, and Dawn made a comment that struck me. She said something like, “Isn’t it amazing that this town and the buildings we see are older than the United States.” It really puts things into perspective as to how long of a tradition people have been building upon.
One day we went to Enns, the oldest recognized city in Austria April 22nd 1212! I found the old part of the city rather facinating because in most towns we visit the center of town is a church and in this case it was not but the city tower. There was a church on the other side of town but the main part seemed to be the tower and city hall.
Day at the Kids Museum
One of the many neat things about living in Vienna is all the museums it has. Even cooler is that starting this year kids get to go free to a few of the more well known museums.
Last Saturday we decided to take advantage of this cool deal and go to the Zoom kids museum. We signed up to learn about everything that flys. To our great surprise kids and adults were free. We enjoyed our time.
The displays were really well done and everything was kid friendly. There were coustumes to try on not just the ones in the picture album but costumes to do with airplanes, pilots uniforms, air controllers (the guys who direct the airplane once on the ground), etc…
There was a flight simulator, a paper airplane section where we could make different paper airplanes and see how far they could go, a hot air balloon, a place to draw/trace different insects or flying machines and many more cool things to see, touch and try.
We all agreed it was a fun time. Kati’s favorite (and mine) was the paper airplanes.
By the way, please keep the information about our family being “Super” just between us. If our identities got out our lives would never be the same.
Sitcom or Reality
Last Friday I felt like we were part of prime time sitcom. So many things happened it was almost too funny to be true.
For starters early in the morning Elena woke up crying for no apparent reason and had to be held a bit before she went back to sleep (Being a deep sleeper Christy told me this in the morning).
We woke up to a house that didn’t have heat. Our boiler stopped working in the night which was why Elena cried she was too cold.
We called the maintenance man and he told us the water pressure was o and we needed to just fill it, well since we grew up in America and haven’t been exposed to their type of boilers we didn’t know how to do this and their is no instruction booklet to be found so he said he would stop by before noon.
I, Eric, had planned to get rid of our old refrigerator which decided to stop keeping things cool about 3 months after we lugged it up three flights of stair. My long-time friend came over to take it to the recycling depot.
Not 20 minuets after my return from the recycling depot I was in the living room getting ready to do some office work when I heard Christy calling from the kitchen, “Eric” “Eric” “ERIC”.
I walked to the kitchen and Christy looked at me with wide eyes and pointed to our kitchen wall cabinets and said, “it’s moving toward me”. And sure enough it was. Thursday night Christy said she noticed a few pieces of small plaster and dust falling when she was using the kitchen machine. But today she saw the whole cabinet lurch toward her.
I got on the counter to and to my horror saw that the anchors which held the (two) bolts for each cabinet were almost completely out of the wall. We quickly took all our dishes, glasses and mugs out and went to work taking the cabinets completely down.
Fortunately, all that was needed was to put larger anchors and larger screws in the same position as the old ones. Now they are back up and actually look good. We realize that they were never really in even when we moved in!
Oh, yeah and Kati was really sick too, did I mention that. Christy just got back taking her to the doctor and found out that she has a really bad case of bronchiticus.
Now that I type it all out it doesn’t seem that crazy but on Friday it felt like one thing after the other was happening to us.
Oh yeah the maintenance man did come, a little after noon oh about 4 ish if I remember correctly. I am sure glad I didn’t try to find a place to fill it with water because he hooked up a hose from our bathroom and filled the water directly to one of our heaters (not through the boiler). We have heat now and Elena is sleeping comfortably.
Just thought I’d share a slice of our life with you today.
