Halfway down the Danube

Independence Day: Old School

Today is Armenian Independence Day.

Fifteen years ago -- September 21, 1991 -- the Soviet Republic of Armenia proclaimed its independence. The move came after a referendum in which 94% of the voters said "yes".

September, 1991: the last days of the Soviet Union. Just a month earlier, Soviet hardliners had attempted a coup against Mikhail Gorbachev. The coup succeeded in crippling Gorbachev but failed to revive the USSR; the big winner was Boris Yeltsin, the new President of Russia.

The dying USSR recognized the independence of the Baltic States on September 6. In November, Yeltsin banned the Communist Party. At the beginning of December, Ukraine declared independence, and a week or later Yeltsin and the leaders of Ukraine and Belarus formally dissolved the USSR.

Meanwhile, Armenians and Azeris had been killing each other in Nagorno-Karabakh for a couple of years. By September 1991, there'd been two waves of ethnic cleansing: Azeris out of Armenia, and Armenians out of Azerbaijan -- and two more waves were under way: an attempt by the Azeris to expel the Armenians from Karabakh (which would fail) and an attempt by the Armenians to expel the Azeris from Karabakh (which would succeed).

The Nagorno conflict would turn into full-fledged war in January 1992, with the Xocali Massacre (of a village full of Azeris) in February; the war would continue until April 1994.

(And where was I fifteen years ago? I was a young lawyer in the Northern Marianas Islands. I had followed the Gulf War with deep interest, but the ongoing collapse of the USSR made little impression on me. I was learning to scuba dive and waiting to hear if I'd passed the local bar exam. Armenian independence, I fear, went right past me.)

If I were Armenian, I might take this opportunity to contemplate what's happened since 1991... the good (Armenia maintaining its precarious independence, the gradual recovery of the economy, etc.) and the bad (Nagorno still unresolved, borders still closed, etc.).

But since I'm not Armenian, I'm just going to focus on one odd thing: the Independence Day Parade here in Yerevan.

If you're old enough to remember... back in the old days, the Soviet Union would hold these parades every May 1. There'd be a big box in front of the Kremlin, where the head Communist Party officials would sit. (Kremlinologists would have a field day, watching who was in the front row, who not.)

And then there would be this, like, six hour long parade in front of them. And it would be almost all military stuff: tanks, jeeps, missiles. The armed might of the masses, baby. It would just go on and on, while the Soviet leaders sat there stone-faced, and the drums in the military bands went boom boom boom.

So here today.

Oh, it wasn't quite the same. The reviewing stand was in Republic Square, next to the local Marriott Hotel. The designers did their best, but setting up next to a Marriott is just not going to inspire the same awe as Lenin's Tomb and Red Square. And the atmosphere was not really all that Soviet... thousands of people turned out to watch, with little kids on shoulders and videocameras and ice cream cones. It was a beautiful day, perfect for an outing, and the crowd was clearly having fun.

But the parade was still Old School: box full of politicians, watching emotionlessly as tanks and rocket launchers rolled by, while helicopters and low-flying jets roared by overhead. The only concession to the 21st century was a huge projection screen to one side.

I suppose the purpose of the Soviet parades was to impress, and this succeeded. I wasn't there for the whole parade -- had to go to the ofice -- but even a few minutes of watching made clear that Armenia has a lot of tanks, and some bloody huge missiles. If I were an Azerbaijani military analyst I'd be at least thoughtful. I don't know missiles, but those looked like they could reach the Azeri oil fields, no problem.

Anyway. There are probably a few other places that still do these old parades... some of the other former Soviet Republics, and maybe North Korea and Vietnam. But it still felt like a glimpse of a bygone world.

So how was your Independence Day?

Because pink is his favorite color, that's why

Or, my son tells me a bedtime story.

Alan (from the bed): Georgie and I have a secret passage. [Georgie is Alan's best friend.]

Me (from the floor): Is it in school?

Alan: No, it's under the ground. It goes to the Batcave.

Me: It's a tunnel?

Alan: Yes, a tunnel, and it goes, there are two Batcaves, one for me and one for Georgie. Mine is pink.

[pause]

[Alan stands up in bed, points to alphabet picture on wall] And Georgie's is this color.

Me: Orange?

Alan: Yes, orange. And John's is green and Frederick's is black. And they all have Batcopters and Batmobiles.

Me: Pink and orange and green and black Batmobiles?

Alan: Yes. And when we go out, there are all Batmobiles -- ten of them. And I am Number One, so mine is the fastest. [pause] Georgie is Number Two. John is Number Three and Frederick is Number Five.

Me: There should be a four in there. One, two, three, four.

Alan [ignoring me]: And the Batmobiles go together to make a robot.

Me: Wait, a giant robot?

Alan [a bit sternly]: No! A little robot.

Gah. I mean, argh.

Backing up the old computer in preparation for the new. Wow, my computer is so old...

The Pure Product of America: How old is it?

It's so old that the USB transfer to the back-up hard disk isn't compatible with my ancient operating system! [rimshot] Wait, that wasn't funny.

Anyway. I'm not dead. I am a little tired and bored with myself, to use a lyric I have been throwing around lately. I'm thinking about mirroring content elsewhere, so I can post those pictures of Lindsey Loh Denmark. Also, libel!

Additionally, if anyone knows of a way to download comments from Movable Type, lemme know. I'd want to keep the metadata, not just the HTML.

Never fear, I'm not going to leave Doug by himself. (What do they say these days? "Oh noes!")

Mornings

I used to hate mornings.

I like staying up late at night. I'm not even going to try defending or explaining that. The hours between 10 pm and 1 am are just a particularly sweet part of the day for me. Seems to be pretty deeply wired.

I like staying up late at night, and I like sleeping. If I don't get enough sleep, I get dopey and easily distracted. Also, I'm just unhappy. I miss getting enough sleep. I miss it like you miss... something you really miss a lot. You know. Like that.

So, hardwired night owl + need my sleep = don't much like getting up early in the morning. I can tolerate it if I can get a nap in the afternoon, but there's this thing called "work" that somewhat complicates that. Once in a while I can slink home for a long lunch hour, but, you know, when you're the boss that's actually harder. When you're an employee you just have to avoid the boss's attention. When you're the boss, you have to somehow avoid everyone's attention. I'm not complaining, just saying that the afternoon naps are not so easy to come by.

Up to now, having small children hasn't made any of this better.

But. The last couple of weeks, I've been taking Alan to the bus stop in the mornings. It's about a three, four block walk, a few hundred meters. We cross over the railroad tracks, sit on a bench outside a little dentist's office, and wait a few minutes for the school bus.

And, you know, the mornings recently have been nice. It's early autumn and the morning air is crisp, pleasantly cool. We leave the house right around sunrise, and damn if the sunrises haven't been consistently spectacular. Pink clouds and rays of glory in the east, Mount Ararat, snow-capped, like a fallen piece of heaven itself in the south. Doves coo and burble in the trees. Alan and I stop for a moment to look at rose hips, the thorns on a berry bush, the rusty spikes at the rail crossing. A building that's being torn down. Ants. Some hexagonal tiles on the ground. The waning half moon.

This is probably the longest period of time I've spent up in the early morning since... oh, college maybe? When I used to get up at 6 am to paint houses. (Long story.) Otherwise, I've spent much of my adult life avoiding situations that would consistently require me to be up with the sun, never mind before. I mean, avoiding early mornings was really a significant motivation in my life for a long, long time.

Brief digression here about Armenia: it's at the far west edge of its time zone. Like, way far west. Armenia should be in the same time zone as its neighbors Georgia and Turkey, but the Armenians do things differently, so they're an hour ahead. So 8 am here is really 7 am. (As witnessed by the fact that the sun is just coming up.)

So physically, biologically, I'm waking up around 6 and walking Alan to school around 7. Which, while not exactly farmers hours, is something new and different for an habitual night owl.

But, you know, it's not so bad.

I'm still tired: let's be clear on that. Still dopey and distracted. It's still damn hard for me to force myself to bed before midnight. Which means I steadily build up a sleep deficit all week... and that's in a best-case scenario, where no small child has a bad dream at 1 am, an accident in bed at 2 am, or just desperately needs to come into bed and snuggle with Mommy and Daddy at 4 am. Since stuff like that happens a lot, I'm dopey and sluggish more mornings than not.

Still: at the age of forty-two, I've discovered that it's not mornings I hate. No.

Mornings can be okay. Nice, even.

It's getting up in the morning that's the hard part.

Sofia, briefly

So I was in Sofia for three days.

My first time. We've visited Bulgaria before, but never the capital.

It was okay. About a million people, maybe? Not trashed by megalomaniacal Communism, like central Bucharest; not bombed flat twice, like Belgrade. So, more nice old buildings in the center. Several pleasant parks, with lots of fountains and statues.

In terms of economic development at-a-glance -- things like number of shops, variety of goods in shops, how many cars, how many new cars, how many McDonalds, how many cranes visible on the skyline -- I'd say it looked roughly equivalent to Bucharest. There's a nice pedestrian area, which Bucharest lacks. (Buch has a pedestrian area, but it isn't nice yet.) Bucharest has more cars; Sofia has better drivers.

Skirts are shorter, and styles are wilder. I saw at least a dozen young women with visible tattoos, which is more than I saw in a year in Romania. Not sure if this has any significance. Just... noticing.

There are several impressive Orthodox churches and one impressive mosque. (~10% of the population is Muslim.) Sofia is in a mountainous corner of the country, so it gets cool in the evenings. Very pleasant to walk down the main shopping street in the evening with an ice cream cone in hand, a cool breeze blowing, and a full moon rising over the mountains.

The macroeconomy is interestingly similar to Romania's. More about this anon.

Short version: I liked it just fine, and would go back. Recommended.

The Wall

It's good to be back.

Claudia has gone into some detail over on the other blog, so I needn't repeat it. Let's just say I agree. Bucharest has come a long way; it has a long way yet to go, but it's moving fast.

But here's an odd thing. The last couple of days have left us feeling very positive about Romania. I'm even cautiously optimistic about Romania joining the EU in January. (Not that they will join -- I'm almost certain of that -- but that it will work out okay, at least in the short-to-medium term.)

But not one Romanian I've talked to shares this optimism. Or any optimism at all. The wall of cynicism and pessimism remains unbroken.

Given Romania's recent history... no, wait, given pretty much all of Romania's history... this is understandable. But it does get a bit annoying sometimes.

The economy is plugging along, unemployment is falling, inflation is coming down. If you don't like the current government, you'll probably have a chance to vote them out soon. And y'all are joining the EU!

Is there no enthusiasm out there at all?

Bucharest again

So we're going to Bucharest.

I have a conference in Sofia, Bulgaria, and it's inconveniently in the middle of the week, Tuesday through Thursday. Since travel from Armenia to Bulgaria is not exactly quick, that means next week is pretty much a wipe.

So, Claudia and I decided we would bring the whole family to Bucharest. We haven't been back to Romania since we left in March, and we miss it. We'll rent a little apartment for a week, visit with friends, let the boys run around in the parks. We'll be there Saturday to Saturday, and I'll pop down to Sofia for three days in the middle. (It's a one-hour flight, a five-hour drive, or a ten-hour train ride.)

We'll post if time allows. Watch this space.

The Kitten Didn't Make It

The title says it all.

If you're not reading Claudia's blog, here's what happened: a couple of weeks ago, we found an injured kitten in our back yard. (The injuries looked like cat scratches. Best guess, a tom had attacked the litter.) Then, a bit later, we found its sibling -- the neighbor boy had it on the blade of a shovel. So we adopted the two kittens and tried to keep them alive.

Short version: It didn't work.

They were small -- maybe four weeks? Eyes still blue, ears still floppy. They didn't want to eat. We fed them different things -- recipes from the internet -- but they still showed no interest. The injured one developed a huge abscess, which we burst but which turned into an open wound that wouldn't close. They had ups and downs -- some days they were playful and lively -- but gradually they lost weight.

People do manage to keep kittens alive. Even kittens smaller than these. I don't know what went wrong. Were they sick or damaged in ways we couldn't see? Did we feed them something bad? We don't know.

The uninjured one died suddenly after a week. The injured one hung on and on, growing scrawnier and weaker but still clinging tenaciously to life. We tried everything we could think of, but nothing worked. It just got more emaciated and pathetic. By this morning it was barely able to stand. Then maggots turned up in its still-open wound.

We're all leaving on a trip tomorrow. We could have given the kitten to the housekeeper, but it was all too obvious where this was going.

We gave it Nyquil. A teaspoon will make a hundred-pound human woozy; we figured it would be enough to finish off a three-ounce kitten.

At this writing, the kitten is in a deep, non-responsive sleep, and barely breathing. We're hoping she just slides easily down.

And that's all.