Magda suitably festooned to meet local requirements

Season's first cast-offs poach on a lilac bush

It is said that you must wear each Martenitsa non-stop once your friend appends it to you. Failure to observe this stricture can result in dirty looks, hurt feelings, truncated friendships, and charges of your own personal responsibility for the delay of spring. Once you’re banded, you must keep wearing those Martenitsi until you see your first stork OR budding tree of spring. Once the target is acquired, you are then required to remove the Martenitsi, which by that time may have grown into your skin and which may or may not still be recognizably red and white, and tie them to a budding branch, preferably of a fruit tree. This last bit presents no difficulty at all as in this part of Sofia, at least, you can’t swing a dead cat without hitting multiple plum trees, whose shocks of white blossoms are the first real harbinger of spring right around the end of March, which, with any luck at all, has become slightly more lamb-like.

Plum trees make all the non-plums look like slobs

And, of course, with April finally under way, we enter the last month in the countdown to the fast-approaching first anniversary of shit in Alek’s pants.

Lonely plum tree Мартеница

1. If I don’t have a pen with me I die.
2. If you don’t have a pen with you, I wonder how you manage to sustain your life force.
3. Don’t ask to borrow my pen. Or if you do, don’t think it’s weird that I hold on to the cap.
4. I have this weird thing about backpacks, camera bags, courier bags, little mesh bags for sorting, lens cases, crampon pouches, map cases, dedicated zippered passport pockets, etc. It seems to be an illness.
5. I have a lot more neckties than is strictly necessary. But I also enjoy wearing them more than is probably healthy. I know a couple of different knots. Lately I’ve been all about the double Windsor.
6. I have some certain strongly-held theories about chili.
7. I have heard that if you feed apples to a pony and do not stop, the pony will continue eating apples until it is dead. I have never tried this, sadly, but it also holds true with me and stroopwafels.
8. Swiss army knife, see #1.
9. There is a part of me that is deeply sad to think that I will never be father to a daughter; another part of me is thoroughly convinced that I already have several more children than I can handle, so, whatever.
10. I have some poems in my wallet. The wallets soften, droop, collapse, and die, but the poems abide. Some have been there since the [GHW] Bush administration. I take them out from time to time and read them on airplanes, but after so long in various wallets they are as fragile as spiderwebs and equally useful.
11. If I don’t get to see the Treasury of Atreus and the deathmask of Agamemnon and whatnot pretty soon here I am going to blow a gasket.
12. I love music but listen to almost none whatsoever ever anymore. That said, if John Peel liked it, I probably do, too.
13. Wine.
14. Magda asked me tonight how I would handle being a vegetarian. Though meat has no particularly Svengalian hold over me these days, I’m still not interested in giving it up arbitrarily.
15. I do not like sweets much at all (though see #6).
16. Once, after I had left home for good and was back for a visit, I got extremely angry with my mother for having cleared the house of some books I once owned about World War II aircraft. For some reason on that particular night I just had to look up some vital detail about the Heinkel 111. This was before the internet. Obviously.

Oh, like your blog never got an STD.

The good news is two-fold: first, we’ve finally been forced into a positive change we would have happily put off forever, one which should make less likely any further webclap and 2) the upgrade penicillin actually worked, with only an hour or two of unforeseen friggery and relatively no swearing. This good news begets more good news, which is that since our ability to post has been retained where we were fully prepared for it to be lost forever, we now have a new appreciation for it and maybe a new perspective on the whole thing. The bad news, of course, is that the upgrade didn’t really work and now some serious maintenance needs to be done. This bad news generates more good news, which is 1) maybe now I’ll actually get around to doing the work which will make the site legible again and 2) if I’m going to do that I might also finally get around to the redesign (or at least a half-assed update to the look) which I have pointedly been not doing since August. The bad news is that I no longer have the ridiculous government job with almost no responsibilities whose vast oceans of utterly free time with unlimited internet access was responsible, more than anything except maybe Adam’s birth, for the genesis and growth of this site in the first place.

I don’t know when I’ll get around to doing this stuff I used to really enjoy doing, but the good news is that I do know I actually want to do it again, which is the first and most important part of the situation’s resolution.

Stand by, and hope your patience is rewarded rather than the other thing.

This autumn would be better with less antibiotics and more almost anything else besides antibiotics. Tacos, for example.

Sorry, can’t talk now.

This horror brought to you by Magda