March 21-Today we worked to get ready for the upcoming visit of Shan's parents and his sister's family. They will stay at Bifröst for the first part of their visit, but since there are six of them, we are unable to put them all up in our apartment. The University is advertised as a hotel and rents out rooms during the summer, when vacationers flood into Iceland, so we talked to Sandra, who is in charge of housing here, a few weeks ago about getting my family a room. Since the floor we are on is mostly deserted, she suggested that we use apartment 312, which is right next to us. She gave us keys to it and to the other rooms on this floor so we could scavenge bedding and anything else that we may need from them. Subsequently, I became an honorary member of the housekeeping and maintenance staff for today. First, I changed out ten light bulbs that were burnt out in the apartment, which has not been occupied since November. Then, we got all of the bedding and linens, so we cleaned the apartment up a little, arranged the furniture, and made the beds. I even bled the air out of all of the wall heaters so they are working as well. We did not clean the silverware, dishes, or glasses. It would have been easy to do if there had been dishwashers in these apartments, but the decision was made not to include them when they built this apartment complex. We plan to clean that stuff as my family needs to use it.
This afternoon, Sally went to talks by her students about work they did in their Institutional Economics class. The way this course was taught, half of the semester was devoted to constructing an educational website that discusses the principles of Institutional Economics
through the use of lots of examples. Most of the faculty at Bifröst attended the talk. It seems to be an effective method to use when teaching an elective course.
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