Tuesday -- Good Bye, Jill!

Our prayers go out to the Gustafsons and all of you celebrating Jill this day. Thank you for your love, prayers and hard work in this time of sorrow and change.

Dale and I have class today. The students are all here and it appears that the place is running normally. It is sort of exciting to wake up and see what surprises are in store. Life in MN is gonna be very boring. Today's excitement is our weekly Maasai Milk Shake. Again, I have no idea why the guy at the counter has a Maasai uniform on but it is cool. The shop closes at 4 PM so our whole day revolves around getting to the Maasai guy before they close.

I met with my "Bachelor's Project" students this morning. Silly me, I assumed that the key to the room was close at hand and started the search at 9:30 for a 10:00 class. After a trip to the library and the IT department in the back, no key! The young woman in my office offered to get the key and showed up with it at 10:00. I waltzed into the room to find a room with computers and a projector. After putzing with the projector for 10 minutes, I got the image to come up on the screen and was able to bring up my syllabus. This course is the second year (I think) of a 2-year course to create a "senior paper". From the course description, they should have already chosen a "problem" and started to research a "solution". When I mentioned this -- no response! We talked about some problems (long lines at the Bank...) and solutions (more tellers...) but apparently no one has started their project. This is gonna be interesting. By the way, here most banks have lines of 10 or 20 to get to the teller. Quite the opposite in the U.S. where there are 3 tellers and 1 customer. Apparently the banks don't really need to compete for customers. The ATM has caught on here but most transactions are with the teller. They do have "SIM money" here. You deposit money with the phone company (it becomes associated with your SIM card in your phone). Then you can issue a text message to transfer that money to other phones or bank accounts. Cool. It is much simpler than going on line and giving 12 passwords and your cholesterol count and social security number of your first born the way we do on-line banking today.

Dale had no students in spite of the fact that these students should be first year students and have been here since last week. We found this announcement on the wall outside Dale's office. Please note that school started on October 8th!

Dale was able to arrange his office and get things ready for students. He found out that there should be 20 students in his New Testament class so he was able to get the copy machine warmed up and running. We will see how many show up on Wednesday. With Dale's spacious office he was able to spend some time counselling Elmer. Elmer misses his family and is wondering if he will ever see the farm again.

This evening we gathered at the Stiles apartment for Jill Gustafson's funeral. Thanks to Devon Mlinar for the excellent Skype coverage. I have to admit that Dale Stiles tried to keep our watching a secret, but Pastor Warner announced it because Erik Gustafson asked him to. We wanted not to make a big deal, but in the end it worked out well. We called it "Tobie cam" because we had a view from cushion of the front pew. Not the best view for seeing faces but we were able to identify most of you as you came up for communion. Thanks to all who participated and all who were part of Jill's life and the life of Fish Lake Lutheran.

This entry has become too long. We did make it for Milkshakes and more buying at the Maasai market. Right now Sharon had 3 suitcases full of stuff to bring back. (She has one suitcase.) This is an NP Complete problem (called bin packing) and if you want the computer science solution, you will have to come to my class in a couple of weeks where we discuss packing boxes into the UPS truck that fit exactly. (again you will have to ask a local geek for an explanation, but it is actually a problem we talk about in computer science.)