Conversation overheard between two cousins during our family vacation.
5-year-old: “Do you have Noggin?”
6-year-old:“Umm, no. [pause] Do you have Google?”
No, we’re not here, but we passed through St. Louis on our trip up.
More pictures and details to come. Gotta post this before I lose Internet connection agai…
Question: What is, what’s happening where we plan to go on vacation, Alex? Because we are cursed. Cursed, Alex, when it comes to vacations.
See that? That’s how much the Kristiansund Hospital in Norway wants for one overnight stay for my daughter in December. That’s NOK 9750,00 (Norwegian kroner) or about $1,780. That brings our running tab for this vacation to almost $14,000. For three weeks — and one day (thanks, Haris) — in Norway. Next time a Norwegian says they have “free” health care? Don’t believe it. I never have. Paying a 50-percent income tax rate when we lived in Norway was enough to make me believe that nothing is free.
So, dear Norwegian Consulate in Houston, can you help a mother out? (Or anyone? Please?) It apparently doesn’t matter that our daughter has dual citizenship, a Norwegian passport and a Norwegian identification number. I know she doesn’t live in Norway, but this was an emergency.
I suppose it wasn’t great timing for the hospital stay, considering all the news about Gro Harlem Brundtland at the time. Norwegians were all up in arms about her use of the Norwegian health-care system. She’s a former Norwegian prime minister. She’s also a physician and former head of the World Health Organization. (Sorta ironic, no?) She’s retired now and lives in France, and Norwegians weren’t about to let her get “free” health care that included a hip operation. Never mind that she probably paid up to half of her lifetime salary in taxes to pay for Norway’s “free” health care. And never mind that she’s one of those people Norway’s system is supposed to care for in its cradle-to-grave “safety net.”
…
*I meant this Guinness.
But a few of these wouldn’t hurt. (Although, who has money for beer? Sigh.)
P.S. The bill arrived today. I’m afraid to check my mail anymore.
Well, it doesn’t rise so much as circle. It appears from behind one side of the mountain and disappears behind the other.
It didn’t snow while we were there. So we drove a bit and found some. It was old, hard and icy, but the kids didn’t care.
See?
Can’t beat that with a stick.
More winter wonders …
Should I be worried that she looks so happy with a lethal weapon in her hands?
So I need to call my credit-card company tomorrow and see if someone there will turn on the spigot again. Said someone apparently thinks another someone stole our credit card to buy plane tickets to exactly the destination we so desperately wanted to reach. I guess it’s not completly out of the realm of possibility that some thievin’ Scandihoovian might want to visit Disney World on my tab. But, really. If you were to steal a credit card and buy plane tickets, wouldn’t you pick somewhere like, oh, I don’t know … somewhere other than the same place the person you stole it from lives?
Dammitanyway. I’ve got to figure out what this is all about. Maybe I exceeded my quota of plane tickets.
Update: Oops. I’m an idiot. After a conversation that went something like, “You’re over your credit limit.” ”But … but … no, I’m not.” Umm, yes. I am. I apparently missed that the parentheses around the “available credit limit” means the number is, ahem, a negative. Yeah, so I’m the only person alive with such a teeny-tiny credit limit (and only one credit card) that five plane tickets can max it out and break the bank. Sigh. Well, I don’t have TiVo or one of those iPod thingies either. So there.
