windows – Shay Thomason

I got an email from our landlord the other day. The subject was “Wash exterior window sills” and the email read,

Hello Mrs. Bethany on Thursday morning ie. Oct. 16. 2014 at home?
You will need to wash again sills and you have a lot of work with children, so I ordered the lady who would at 9.30 pm. Washed it in the apartment.
Greetings to all .Thank you.
Musilová

What a great email. Not only is she very nice in how she words everything, but she paid for a lady to come and wash the window sills for us. I’ve shared before about the window sills, but they are big and there are a lot of them. With everyone not feeling great it’s been hard to get them cleaned. We were so thankful for the kindness of our landlady to do that for us. The only tricky part was the 9:30pm part. I assumed it was AM, and I was actually right, but she came today around 11. No biggie. We were home and she did an awesome job.

For lunch today we decided to get pizza to-go from a local place here in town. To give Bethany a little break, I took the kids with me. It’s a walkable distance, but with Titus and Avery it pretty much doubles the length of time I’m going to be gone. It was raining lightly when we left so I brought umbrellas which quickly turned in to “bumper umbrellas” as the kids kept running in to each other and laughing. The pizza guy speaks great English so I ordered and I told him we would be back in a few minutes and off we went to the bookstore.

I needed to look for some new Czech language books as we are pursuing a new teacher and she goes through different material. I was able to find the books after going through the store two times over. The only problem was they only had 1 set of the books in stock (there are 3 books in the series). When I got the checkout it proved very difficult to communicate that I needed another set. After a few minutes of trying to speak and trying to use my phone to translate I kind of got the gist: I think they needed to order more and would arrive in the future, maybe next week? Another lady in the store overheard me and the clerk trying to communicate and walked up and said, “Do you need help?” in perfect English. Score! I told her I think I know what’s going on but she was able to tell me that they are ordering the books and they will come tomorrow. Ah! “Tomorrow…” — that’s the word I confused as “next week.” Now they know why I need the books.

Tonight we got a babysitter and had a date night. It’s been a while since we’ve gotten away together just Bethany and I, so it was a blessing. We had originally planned to go to dinner with friends but I felt like we just needed some time to ourselves tonight. A girl from our church watch our kids and she was great. Bethany and I went to the mall in Ostrava and had–wait for it–Burger King for dinner. Don’t judge us. It actually sounded really good, is cheap, and just the small taste of America, fast food or otherwise, is a blessing. After dinner we just walked around and relaxed and ended up leaving earlier than we expected. It was a fun night together and I’m thankful for the focused time with my wife.

That’s all for today. Onward.

Czech Republic is a land that has history dating back as far as 870 AD. It’s an old place with old buildings and things, but the one thing that impresses me about Czechs is how they clean they can keep things. For the most part I find that they like their houses very tidy, clean, and well kept. This would include the yards too. Our landlord is no exception. Just the other day, we saw a cleaning lady out in the driveway meticulously sweeping the bricks and with a pickaxe she was scraping in between each individual brick removing dirt and moss!

Today our landlord left a note about the window sills on our place needing to be cleaned. Amazingly, Bethany actually had that on her list of things to do and had started on one side of the house today. She was halfway through cleaning them when she found the note on our doorstep (shown above). I’m positive our landlord using Google Translate to write us and it’s just funny how they sound. Bethany told me later that she took a photo of the window sills because she wanted people to see just how large they are (photo below). You can practically sit on them like a bench and they are definitely a chore to clean. I don’t think I’ve ever really seen anything like them in the States, but we’re happy to make sure they look nice.

My teammate John and I went to a little restaurant near the Josiah Venture offices today for lunch. Its a great little place that I’ve shared about before and we like it because for $4 you can get hot soup and a lunch entree. Only one time have I ordered anything but pizza there because I think it’s amazing. As we were doing our best to translate the menu today the waiter came over to us and motioned with his arm like a chicken. He was trying to tell us that the third item on the menu was chicken wing, but for some reason I was said, “Chicken breast?” and he nodded and smiled in affirmation. I don’t know what I was thinking and I definitely don’t think he understood me. A few minutes later he came over and in broken English said, “chicken?….” and was motioning with his arm like a chicken. Then I heard the words, “chicken breast?” come out of my mouth again and he got excited and ran over to another table and told them “Chicken breast.” There were some other native English speakers at a nearby table (which is rare) and our waiter was excited to speak English to him, I guess. Nevertheless I felt like a failure but his one-armed chicken wing motion still makes me giggle.

Speaking of chicken, Bethany made amazing chicken and dumplings tonight. She was really excited that she was able to get all of the ingredients at the store by herself and the meal was wonderful. Now she’s in the kitchen reading on how to make her own chicken stock! She tells me those are her chicken stock ingredients in the above photo. This girl has gone true Pioneer Woman and I like it! Watching Bethany adapt here is actually really fun and I think she’s risen to the occasion of being a foreign missionary, engaging newer things with a willing and able attitude.

Tomorrow is another early day for me but I’m hoping to spend the latter half of the day with Bethany and the kids as I’ve been plowing pretty hard this week with projects for Josiah Venture. God has been gracious with our health and energy during some busy days. Praise the Lord for how He continues to show his kindness to me and my family.