Halfway down the Danube

Dragging

Everybody is sick.

Alan is vomiting up everything we give him. We're trying to keep him hydrated, and he seems to be in good spirits, but he's such a skinny little kid that he has no reserves. So we worry.

Claudia seems to have been hit with the same virus the boys had over the weekend: fever, cough. She's not suffering as much as they did (yet), but it's definitely slowing her down.

I've got some incredibly persistent stomach bug. For the hell of it, I went off coffee on Tuesday. The reasoning here was that the misery of caffeine withdrawal would go unnoticed in the general fatigue and wretchedness. Oddly, this seems to be working, though I do get the cravings. If "cravings" is adequate to cover 'every cell in my body SCREAMING for coffee, every half hour or so.'

Not very entertaining, I know.

Let's see. On the plus side, I'm just finishing the second book of Olivia Manning's Balkan Trilogy. This is a thinly fictionalized autobiography of Manning herself as a young, newly married Englishwoman living in Bucharest in 1939-40.

The Balkan Trilogy is one of those works that everyone recommends but nobody seems to have actually read. I was expecting it to be mediocre, and so have been pleasantly surprised. It's well written, and has a lot of fascinating glimpses of prewar Romania. Liking it so far, and will blog about it when finished.

Romania's government is still collapsed, though the Ministers won't officially leave office until next week.

There's a girl in my office who loves Nirvana. Loves it. "Come As You Are" is playing as I write this. She plays that album every afternoon around this time. And that's fine, because there's a lot of really horrible pop music here in Romania, and we got a double dose of it at the seashore (where it was basically the five hit pop songs of summer '05 played over and over again).

Totally random: when I was 15 years old, my first job was washing dishes in a restaurant (the "Golden Harvest") just outside of Old Orchard Beach, in Maine. I would work from 4 pm until 1 am, running a big damn industrial dishwasher. Hose with near-scalding water and a spray handle, high pressure, would blast the food off the plates and into the garbage disposal. Then fill up a rack of dishes and slide it into the enormous machine, pull the lever to seal the door, eight minute cycle. When I came off shift, my hands would be all pink and numb and wrinkled.

Nine or ten hours a day, six days a week. I really liked getting overtime. I was 15 years old; I wanted to buy books. It was the seashore, it was a long hot July and then an August that went on forever. I slept until noon every day. Afternoons before work I would go to the boardwalk and buy pizza, go on some of the rides.

Anyway. The restaurant played a looping tape of that summer's hits. The tape was about 90 minutes long. (Which makes sense, right? Most diners are out in less time than that.) So, I got to listen to that tape six times per day, six days per week.

Songs on it included

"Heart of Glass" -- Blondie
"What a Fool Believes" -- The Doobie Brothers
"Do Ya Think I'm Sexy" -- Rod Stewart
"(You Can) Ring My Bell -- Anita Ward
"Chiquitita" -- Abba
"My Sharona" -- The Knack

To this day, I have strong feelings about those songs.

Nirvana still playing upstairs. "I love myself/better than you/I know it's wrong/what should I do."

I wonder what my little boys' summer soundtracks will be, sometime around 2018.

Posted by douglas at July 8, 2005 05:49 PM