Argh, Call Me a Non-Pirate!

Gillian here:
We've become known as the piracy police around here. We are determined not to fall to the temptation to buy from Peru's abundance of pirated movies. I can't help but think - why do we feel so entitled to own them? I will admit being extremely tempted to buy "bamba" (pirated movies). They can cost as little as 4 soles (just over a dollar!). We've seldom bought movies for ourselves, but, yes we do have a good collection of original DVD's that have mostly come to us as gifts from relatives in the States. But in South Carolina, we also got by with borrowing movies from friends, the library, renting on occasion, or going without.

So now we are delighted to discover over the past months that we have two local solutions to feed our love of movies withOUT participating in bamba. 1. Our local DVD Drugstore rents out original DVD's for 7 Soles (A little over $3.00), and they have a great selection. 2. The boys' school rents them out for 5 soles (about $2.50), though they have a limited selection of donated movies. We don't get to own the movies, but we can enjoy them as a special family date night from time to time, AND we can support a local business doing honest work OR the boys' school. YAY!

CRASH IN THE NIGHT!

Gillian here...
We were sitting in the living room around 9:30pm on Saturday, Feb. 9. The boys had been tucked in for a couple of hours, when we suddenly heard HUGE shrieking, crashing, and glass breaking in our back patio. I was so startled, my glass of Coke dropped from my hand, and we flew to the back of our apartment. Fully expecting to see a body lying in our back patio, we flipped on the lights to find NO body (thank God), but definitely a room full of glass and destruction. A full 3x4 pane of glass window fell from the 4th floor down into our 1st floor patio. We called our landlord immediately, and she rushed over, and the couple who owns the 4th floor apartment(ironically it is the engineer who built the building and his wife), came down and helped us assess the damage and clean up the mess.
A few factors added to the craziness.

1. I had a nightmare a couple of weeks ago that one of the Engineer's small children fell into our patio, and I told Justin about it. Thus, when the window fell, and the engineer's wife screamed, Justin and I were terrified we would see a person in our patio. We were both RELIEVED when it was just glass but extremely shaken from the fear we had.

2. The window that fell was from above our boys' bedroom window and therefore crashed right outside it. Normally we have the window AND the Shade open to get air to circulate at night, and then we close them when we go to bed. On the night the window fell, however, we had the shade down. Weird. The window itself was open, but with the shade down, the glass just showered onto their windowsill. Only a few little pieces landed on the foot of our youngest's bed. The falling window even left a huge scratch down their window, but it didn't break it. We are thankful to our Father for His protection.

3. Just two nights earlier at that hour, Justin and I had been out on our patio playing Scrabble. It weirds me out that I was sitting where that window fell at that same time just a few nights earlier.

4. The problem with the window is a design flaw...we have problems with the panes coming off their track all the time, but we never imagined such grave ramifications from this...These windows are everywhere in our building.

So let's just hope this problem is solved quickly or we will have to find ourselves another place to live. We can't go out on our patios until all the windows are fixed, which is terribly sad for the boys because they had a little kiddy pool that we JUST set up for them last week. I've felt anxious the last couple of days, just waiting for something to crash again, but I know my anxiety will calm down in a few days. In the mean time, we're just waiting to hear how they plan to fix the building.

Sigh...okay, now I feel well-vented :)