I would say "I called a friend over to fix it." "I called in a friend to fix it." sounds unusual to me but not incorrect. It may be used in other English speaking areas.

My day

Hey Max
Today I woke up at 8 o'clock. It is much too early for me my conditions. I am one of these those people who needs to sleep a lot much. But today I have had to wake up that early beacuse because I had a football match. In the end, we won it, I think it was 9 to 1. Not all in of our team was happy because our enemy opponent was really bad. If we played better we could win it have won 15 to 0 (American slang: 15 zip). That is not the real problem in the end we won that is that what is important. But our enemy opponent (or the other team instead of our opponent for variety) was really aggressive and the reffe referee had some problems. Our opponent did much committed many fouls and did swallows. One of my teammates said to us that they had offend fouled us but the referee did not hear him that so it was useless. After we scored a goal, one from of them threw the ball in the face from of our teammate. He is easy to provoke so he wanted to go in fight. But we could were able to stop (restrain) him. Sometimes he is an idiot, we lead 8 to 1 and he wants to go in fight. But (then again) I am to would be really angry if that happened to me and maybe I would want to fight too go in to.
How was your day?
See you soon

War der andere Team amerikanisch? Ich hoffe nicht aber schlecht und aggressiv Fussball macht mir denken also.

Practice with new vocabulary - Day 2

I have a goal: Every day I must learn 7 new words and created a history story with this those words. This is my history at story from yesterday: (I hope you can help me! )
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Today, I woke up at 7:00 o'clock, and after a huge yawn I started my day. It started like any other day, but then I listened heard a strange noise in the kitchen. I ran hastily, and hold held my dog, and we tried to do silence be quiet. Suddenly I see saw a small stain on the floor! Then I approached to it and I saw a big, and furry tail! I was scared but my dog Dulce is braver than me! She barked very strong loudly and then I could see it! It was a cute mouse! I didn't don't understand why he didn't run;. So but I gently I Iifted him up and gave him a piece of cheese! :)
From that moment, Jerry (is his name) the mouse is became our new friends. Although sometimes Dulce does try to eat him!! But they love each other!

Disfruto esta historia.  ¿Que fue las siete nuevas palabras en inglés? (Corrija, por favor)

Leaning English and family relationships?

Is it possible that learning English can jeopardize your family relationships? Last time  Lately, I have been spending a lot of hours opposite with the computer to learn English. I read articles, watch documentary films and take part in italki activities. I forget about my daily responsibilities and I neglect my relationships with my family members (or simply my family). Learning English has become my new challenge which takes my whole time. For this reason, my wife is upset because we don't speak a lot (or much these days) and we don't spend enough time together. I am immersed in learning but in this case, it is not a good solution situation. Now I know that I should share my time between learning and responsibilities. So far But I didn't know that the commitment in to learning English can would create negative aspects of in my family life.

I understand your situation well.  It can be hard to find the right balance. 

1. need to be. "need be" is more conditional to my ear. I'd say +90% of the time "need be" is preceded by "if". "I know you have hired a moving company but if need be I could help you pack". Of course, if I really wanted to help, I wouldn't have added the "if need be". 2. This is a little tricky. If I were writing about discrete items, I could say: "My shopping cart contains neither oranges nor apples." I can also express the same concept as "My shopping cart does not contain oranges or apples". However, in your example with bands of proficiency, I would avoid the either/or/neither/nor constructs in favor of language that specifically describes the range. "Since the TEPOLI is not intended to grade low levels of proficiency, it's scale does not represent the range between zero proficiency and X level" (where X is the lowest level that the TEPOLI measures).

Today I found out something new (game of words).

Today I talked with my friend, Karen. She is from America, but now she lives in Belorussia, in Minsk. We talked about different things and I really don't remember how, but we started to talk about... BAD WORDS!!! Hahahah))) It was really funny. The fact is that there are a lot of bad words in the Russian language. We call it МАТ (mat, you know, like the checkmates hahah=)). Karen did not expect that there were in my language so many, how as she called it, swear words. And this is what surprised me! I mean the "swear words". Seriously, is it called so are they called that? I mean... ahahah))) "to swear" meaning, you know, vow or обещать, клясться, if you want it in Russian. In short, it was my today's wonder =)

Yes, indeed.  It is weird.

"You are a ******" "Don't swear at me you ****"

Also called "curse words", "blue language", "foul language",  etc

You may even hear this among people of a certain age: "Pardon my French but he is a ******"

My First Communion and the special stuffed animal.

It was Christmas, 2002 when I had my First Communion. I was 12 years old. After the ceremony is very common to have a reception (or party) to celebrate that special day with your family and friends. I had mine, although I didn’t want to have one because I was growing up to become a teenager, it made me feel a bit ashamed by then. (I had mine even though I didn't want to because I was becoming a teenager and embarrassed by the attention). Nevertheless, my reception was nice. I had a good time with my friends, relatives, and neighbors.

In a way, most of my friends that were around my age (my contemporaries) enjoyed the reception (including me). It was something like (Maybe it felt like) we were saying goodbye to those kinds of celebrations or doing things like breaking piñatas, to participate in games in front of our parents and friends, to enjoy little gifts at the end of the reception, and so on.

As you might imagine, I had (received) many gifts from my invitees. I opened up some of my gifts before midnight. I got clothes, purses, perfumes, a gold necklace that I still preserve have, a doll (haha) it was funny though. It was a doll who danced disco music. I remember a pair of shoes that I liked a lot, they were very groovy. There were many other gifts, but there is one that I will always remember, and maybe (perhaps) I will keep with me for my whole (the rest of my) life: a stuffed animal.

I used to see Zaboosito over my bed, and I just loved it. I sometimes slept with him, for example, when it was raining and became cold. I had to wash him from time to time because of his color which is very light (his light color showed the dirt). But, there was someone that didn’t like Zaboosito, my parrot “Enrriqueta”.

He liked to go to my bedroom (my sister named him Enrriqueta, and she didn’t know it was male) and take (peck) Zaboosito’s eyes off. My sister used to laugh every time it happened. As it happened very often, I kept some glue to stick his eyes back on over and over again. Finally, Enriqueta and his couple (mate?) Pícara got a new cage only to sleep (to sleep in). Therefore (After that), Zaboosito didn’t lose his eyes anymore.

I still preservekeep Zaboosito with me. Everyone in my house knows that I will never give him away. Well, perhaps if I have kids in the future, they will play with him as my niece and nephews have done so far.

What a awful journey!

Hi John,
Sorry for not writing earlier but we’ve had a lot of problems. In fact, I’m going to tell you about our adventure. Last week, we planned to go from Genova to Barcelona where we had rented a house. So we set off in the morning to try to avoid the traffic and we got using the motorway to get to Montecarlo. It should We would have taken about two hours but we had got stuck (alt. were delayed) because there was a great traffic jam. Not only that, whenwhile we were driving along the Monaco’s narrow streets, suddenly a wheel burst (US English tire blew out) and we had to stop the car. We had the wheel repaired by a tyre dealer and we restarted off our journey. Finally we arrived at the port where we had our boat. The next day, we left by boat to get to Barcelona. The first part of the journey was fine and we also stopped (were able to stop) the boat in front of a beach to relax and take a bath (bathe, sunbathe, swim?). The following day, although the weather forecast told us that it would have been good (predicted a good day), it was cloudy but always (and rather(?)) warm. At night (or That night), when while we’re sailing towards Nizza, the weather got worse, the worst I’ve ever seen. We’re in the middle of a terrible storm: it started raining, the wind blew hard and the sea became rough. WhereasWhile we’re trying to hold (control) the boat, the wind was blowing so hard that it broke our sails. Not only that (or Also or To top it all off), when we lowered the sails we realized that we had lost our satnav. We were going in the wrong direction and we didn’t know where we were! What an awful journey! Nevertheless, the violent storm calmed down very soon and the waves got smaller. The terrible storm had thrown our boat very faraway (far off course), but in the morning we could see where we were. As soon as we found our route, we thought to go back (got back on course to Barcelona(?)).
That’s all for now. Looking forward to hearing from you very soon.
Cheers

As you probably already know "We're" = "We are" and "We were".  It's just my opinion, but I would write "we were" in the places where you've written "we're".   I enjoyed reading your story.