Dial-Up

Our Internet has been down all weekend, which is one reason for my silence. Blogging on dial-up is about as fun and time consuming as trying to get your car un-registered in Russia.

Keith's latest mission has been to unregister our car in Ivanovo, so that he can properly register it here in Yaroslavl. He has made 4 trips to Ivanovo to simply get a document and temporary licence plate so that he can return to Yaroslavl and begin the ever so painful, time consuming and miserable process again!!! On the 2nd trip, he was informed that an O was actually suppose to be a Q on one of the documents that for the past 4 years no one had ever noticed. This did not mean that he could simply make the O a Q with a little line. It meant that he would have to return to the notary who 4 years ago created and notarized this document, so that it could be redone. If the notary was no longer employed, he would have to go through the ENTIRE process of registering the car in Ivanovo so that he could unregister it!!! Thankfully, the notary was still working and corrected the document. On his 3rd trip, the official discovered that his last name was also miss spelled, which required another trip to the notary clear across town, but when he returned to finalize the unregistration, he was 10 minutes late to turn in his documents...since they stop taking documents an hour before closing. Today is his 4th and hopefully final attempt at unregistering our car.

So back to dial-up! We were wanting to try out a new Internet service at home. We waited for over a month for the service men to come, drill holes in the wall, run wires, mess with the computer, return again the next day, make even a bigger mess...only to discover that they can not install the new service on our computer, but we need to take our computer to their service center, so other technicians can install the software. That's OK...we really did not want to try the new service that bad!!!

So, we discovered that our current Internet provider has a new plan that will provide us with unlimited Internet use...WOW!!! Well, this means that we have to reinstall somethings, which is usually no big deal...if you don't live in Russia!!! They failed to give us all of the info to do this...which means for the past 5 days we have been calling the service center and waiting for them to return our call...and waiting, and waiting!!!

So, please forgive my silence. I am now occupying all my new found free-time with a TV series on DVD. I am so addicted, I am already on the 15th episode!!! And, yes I am too embarrassed to reveal the name of the series for fear you will realize how weak and shallow I truely am!!!

We love you all and covet your words of encouragement and prayers!!!