Cake or Death?

It's continued to snow every day, with temperatures at or below freezing. That has not stopped Io and me from running out to do errands, though. Well, actually, today it did -- we got halfway to the bus stop and turned around to head back to bed and jammies and Civilization V. But other days we totally braved the cold. Martisor, the big March 1 celebration, is tomorrow. I went out to get Io a Martisor charm. Her totem animal is an owl, so I was looking for one of those. In California People of Windsurf U.S., owls are seen as gentle, wise creatures. You think of your classic owls from fiction, your Bubo, your Hedwig, your Mister Owl the tootise pop professor, and they're all pretty well-respected. Disney even made an entire CGI movie about heroic owls recently. Americans like their owls.

Unfortunately owls are not so well-respected in Romania. According to Io, out here owls are viewed as dirty, loud, and annoying, the way Americans view vultures or Frenchmen. Because of that, I came up completely empty in my search for owl-themed Martisor charms, despite checking like four places.

Which is irritating, because apparently spiders, toads, and rats all somehow make the cut, despite the fact nobody in their right mind would want to cuddle up to any of those things. Owls don't bother us during the day and keep us pest-free at night. In my book that is better than being poisoned, covered with warts, or having your entire city decimated by the Black Death. But what do I know.

Tania and Gagi came back from their trip to Constanta, where I guess all the ceremonies went well. They also brought back a Romanian, uh...thing, whose name I forget so I will just call it Death Cake. It's this traditional dessert that Romanians make only for funerals and other rites for the dead. Io called it a "cake," but it's actually more of a mash. According to Io, traditional Romanian Death Cake is boiled grains, sugar, and walnuts.

In a macabre twist, Io loves Death Cake and the joy in her face when she found out Tania was bringing some back was positively ghoulish. You definitely get the feeling that late at night when only Io and the vampires and werewolves are awake, she lies in bed secretly hoping that someone will die so all of us can have Death Cake.

That is, all of us but one person.

Now, I think we all know by this point that I'm not one to throw stones at another culture, but I am just saying that if it were me, I would not make a tradition in which my untimely death has definite up-sides. But that's Romania for you. Unfortunately, the Death Cake that Tania brought back from Constanta was the traditional ingredients plus coconut and raisins, which Ioana furiously dismissed as Death Cake made "by fucking Turks," whatever that means. You can take the girl out of Castle Dracula, but you can't take the Castle Dracula out of the girl.

Constantly weighing your continued living against tasty cake

The end of the month is also the time in this blog when we Take Stock. So far, so good. The pregnancy's going well and everyone's healthy. Finances were kept to $500 spent in Romania again this month, although only because expenses were offset by ESL classes. Still, we're way under budget. And I haven't starved or gone insane or anything like that, so I count myself ahead of the curve. Next month, needless to say, things should get pretty interesting.

Book reviews from February:

Dracula: The Un-Dead by Dacre Stoker. This book answers a question as old as human thought: when someone buys you a book, how much of it do you have to read before you're allowed to declare it garbage and stop? It turns out the answer is seventeen chapters.

Jingo, by Terry Pratchett. Terry Pratchett is like the Danielle Steele or Stephen King of light fantasy novels. He churns out books by the truckload (I think usually 1 or 2 a year). Wikipedia lists 39 books in his "Discworld" series, which is the main stuff he writes. These books are all set in the same fantasy world and are all about the same large cast of characters (although each book focuses on a subset of the large cast). They're comedic, usually satires of the real world, and they are all light, pleasant, not challenging, and good for at least a dozen chuckles each. Pratchett is deeply libertarian, a cause close to my dark and flinty heart, and I've always looked at his writing as a limitless well of enjoyable, throwaway stories: the perfect thing for a plane ride or a vacation, a day at the beach or a rainy day on the couch. He's hugely popular, so you can go to any bookstore that has a sci-fi/fantasy section and be guaranteed a large selection of Pratchett books. He's the perfect go-to author, with an inexhaustible supply of new story ideas and unlimited energy and enthusiasm for writing them. One of the most warm and familiar reassuring presences in my reading life.

A couple of years ago Pratchett announced that he's suffering from early-onset Alzheimer's disease. He has a rare variant called "posterior cortical atrophy," which has progressed to the point where he can think and come up with stories, but can neither read out loud nor write. He's dictating new stories to an assistant as long as his condition permits. The existing stock of Pratchett books has suddenly become much more precious.

The books are written in chronological order, but I tend to grab them at random off of store bookshelves or Amazon. Jingo is I think one of the early-to-mid books, and it's good and worth reading, but not as good as most of his other books. It's funny and interesting, but the best of his books have something important to say underneath the comedy, like all good satire does. This one is basically about the meaninglessness of war, but somehow it doesn't quite hit home like a lot of his other books do. Still, a good way to spend a couple of weeks.

Over The River And Through The Woods

The week started clear but very, very cold -- around freezing most days. Our main errand this week was heading out to Grandma and Grandpa Negru's place to drop off new eyeglasses for the both of them. Since we had Gagi around, we were able to go by car, which is a little faster than going by train and bus. It involves shooting around the outskirts of Bucharest rather than driving through the middle.

Grandma and Grandpa seemed to be in fine spirits. The new glasses worked pretty well. Both of them seemed mostly concerned with whether or not they could read their Bibles and their Orthodox calendars. I suppose if I were 90 I might feel the same way. I mean, really, what's the next big thing that's going to happen in your life at this point? Exactly.

Since then, we've been in fairly constant snowstorms. Some days it snows heavily, others not so much, but there's snow every day. The sidewalks and streets are covered again, which is OK for now because it's all powder, but is going to be hell once things freeze into ice again. We've gone out on occasional errands (food for Grandma Gomiou and the cat) but have mostly been battened down inside the house.

Gagi and Tania left town for the weekend. It's the seventh anniversary of the death of one of Tania's closest friends, and Romanian tradition provides that the closest living survivors conduct certain rites and ceremonies on the anniversary. You light candles and give away food and gifts to the poor in the name of the person who died. The recipients of the gifts have to use or eat them -- giving them to someone else or throwing them out is considered extremely bad luck. They also ritually ask you about the person who died, what they were like, what their death was like, etc. Tania took a couple days off work and cooked up a huge pot of stuffed cabbage leaves ("sarmale"), and they loaded the car with that and some other stuff they bought, and braved the snowy roads to Constanta (the dead person's home-town), because you're supposed to light the candles at the graveyard.

Io and I have spent our week mostly teaching ESL classes and hanging around the house. Teaching ESL has been a pretty interesting experience. You have no idea how many things are confusing about English until you start teaching it to someone else, and particularly when they start asking questions like "Why?" or when to use one word versus another. Is there any reason I say I go to the movie, but that I go to work, and that I go home? If there is, I don't know it. So far our students have been game, though, and it seems to be going fine. I whipped up a batch of metric chip cookies for one set of students and promised them all there would be cookies at least once a month. That's the kind of value you get from America. F YEAH!

Other than that, we mostly hung around the house and waited for Gabriel to be born. Less than four weeks to go!

Pasta and Io's delicious home-made bolognese sauce. YUM!

We also had a sober afternoon yesterday, because it was the third anniversary of the death of Io's close friend Mike. Although we're not close enough to do the anniversary rites at his cemetery (thanks again, INS), you're allowed to light the candles at the church and give away food to the local poor. This is the structure for candles for the dead at Io's local church. (The other side has similar vestibules with "Vii" signs, for candles and prayers for the living.) I didn't want to take any photos of the actual rite, but Io lit candles for Mike and then we gave food to some local gypsies, who went through the ceremonial questions even though they had to come out to the cold and snow to do it.

And now, we're just preparing another ESL class and waiting out the winter. It's a cold and difficult time all around, but spring will be here soon.

Well, A Double Dumb-Ass On You!

Today I present another in my occasional series I call Pointless Discursions About Romania. Today's topic: Rudeness.

Romania apparently has a reputation for being super-rude. Recurring blog-character Em told me that Romania was voted the second-rudest country in the world (presumably after France, which was rude enough to show an entire ethnic group the door for being too dusky).

Rudeness, of course, is in the eye of the beholder. For example, I remember reading about an American tourist in Japan ordering a cup of coffee:

Tourist: I'd like some toast and a cup of coffee, please.

Waiter: Toast and coffee, right away sir. Or would you prefer tea?

Tourist: No, coffee, please.

Waiter: Very well. Although I should mention that our establishment is quite famous for its wonderful teas.

Tourist: Maybe next time. Today I'd prefer coffee. Please.

Waiter: Of course. Right away. Only, on a day such as today, a tea would be most refreshing!

Tourist: Okay, but I don't want tea. I want coffee.

He eventually realizes that the waiter is trying to tell him that they don't have coffee at that restaurant, but is doing it in the Japanese way -- and that by Japanese standards, the customer is being shockingly rude in his responses. So the point is, rudeness is really an arbitrary cultural measure, and as long as nobody's getting injured or having their civil rights violated, this is more of a tomato-tomahto thing than one culture being objectively better than the other, except for American culture which is definitely better than everyone else's.

After living here for a couple of months, I think there are three main reasons Romania has a reputation for rudeness:

1. Romanians are really rude. Out on the street, there's just very little cultural impetus towards politeness. If you give up your seat for an elderly lady on the bus, she just sits down without even looking at you, much less saying "Thanks." If someone needs to get by you in a crowd, they just shove you aside or push past. No "Excuse me" beforehand, no "Sorry" afterwards, just a Walter Payton stiff-arm and on they go. It's just the way things are done here among strangers. Among friends and family, though, there tends to be a lot more "Please" and "Thank you" and "Excuse me," for some reason.

2. Romanians are very honest and direct. Especially older or more provincial Romanians. My first trip here, one of Ioana's relatives came over for dinner and said she couldn't believe how fat I was considering how little I ate. She's not being a jerk, that's just Romanian culture. It didn't really bother me -- nobody knows better than I do that I need to eat better and exercise more --but it's the sort of thing that would send a lot of Americans over a cliff. And even if you're not bothered by it, the natural American reaction is to assume the person is deliberately insulting you. Because in America, they would be. But in Romania, they're making pleasant conversation. It's just a difference in cultural mores. And really, an argument can be made that the Romanian way is the natural one. We've all seen young kids go "Mommy, she's fat!" at the grocery store. It takes years of whispered scolding to get them to stop. Not that being naturally uninhibited and free is necessarily better, though. Those kids also poop in their pants.

3. Romanians sound like they're arguing all the time. When Romanians are having a conversation, the norm is for two people to be talking at once. They just both talk right over each other, and somehow (I assume) they both listen to each other while simultaneously talking to one another. In America, if two people end up talking at once, one of them immediately stops talking. Often both of them do, leading to that "Go ahead" "No, you go ahead" nonsense. If two people are both talking it's a sign that they're seriously pissed at each other. On top of that, Romanian voices tend to go up in volume and pitch the longer the sentence goes. In America, that's a sign that someone is getting really worked up. In Romania, it's meaningless. So as you walk down the street, it sounds like everyone is getting into a pistols-at-dawn argument with each other, yelling and speaking over the other person. In reality, everyone is just having a pleasant day's conversation about metric football.

In the end, pretty much all of this stuff comes down to harmless cultural differences, which are sort of nice to see. In an increasingly globalized and standardized world, where I can travel behind the Iron Curtain and still find lots of signs written in unintelligible English, it's good to know that we still retain some distinction in our cultures and that there are new things to see and experience. We are, truly, the world.

And by "We," I mean America.

What's In A Name?

So, first off, for those who haven't yet heard, we've settled on a name for the baby. I thought naming a baby would be pretty easy. After all, I've named lots of guys in World of Warcraft. But this turned out to be a little more difficult than anticipated, because you want a perfect name that you both like that works in English and Romanian and doesn't remind anyone of anything bad or weird or significant other people in their lives. There was a lot of "How about Nicholas?" "Uh, that's the name of the dictator we executed a few years back." "Oh, right." "How about Adolf?" "Uh...probably not." "OK. What about Damien?"

After many months of wrangling, we have finally figured out the new boy's name: around March 22, we will welcome Batman Yoda Aragorn Williams into the world. At least, that was my vote. Io's vote for Gabriel Negru Williams is probably going to end up on his birth certificate, though.

This past week the weather has turned colder and wetter, alas. That didn't stop Io and I from heading out on a bevy of errands. First off, this week was Stem Cell Week in the Williams family. It turns out that when you have a baby -- which we are doing -- you have to make all these decisions. One of them is what to do with the blood from the umbilical cord. The traditional answer was "wash it down the drain," but now everyone has found out that this blood is full of miraculous stem cells.

To be honest, they're not actually that miraculous. At present they don't really do, um...anything. But they are filled with promise for the future, just like little Batman Yoda Aragorn himself. Assuming, of course, that the U.S. someday gets its head out of its ass and allows scientists to figure out how to make them work. I am investing (heavily, it turns out) in the assumption that that will eventually happen. So we did a bunch of internet research, narrowed it down to two possible blood banks, and then met with representatives from both of them. That was a our major project this week. That picture on the left has nothing to do with stem cells, though. That's us stopping by to drop off groceries for Grandma Gomiou, on the way back from stem cell meeting #2. So I guess it has a little to do with stem cells.

This was also the week that aliens visited the Negru household. To be technical about it there is already an alien here, but I mean a space alien. I had been hoping to pick up a toaster oven, mostly for cooking and reheating small things during the week when electricity is super-expensive and the oven is off-limits. Gagi grabbed the reins of this project and ran with it. It turns out toaster ovens are pretty hard to find here, but futuristic halogen ovens are not. This is some wacky European gadget that cooks food using Space Age technologies that are beyond my ken. I call it "The UFO."

It's actually a pretty slick little gadget, although a bit of overkill compared to what I was looking for. It can cook an entire chicken and roast potatoes in like 30 minutes for a fraction of the electricity it would take to cook it in an oven. The UFO has been quite the hit around here. Since we got it, we've had UFO chicken, UFO pizza, UFO pork chops, and UFO reheated leftovers. Wow.

Thanks, UFO!

Io and I also headed out on the town this weekend. It's gotten colder every day, and wetter every day, so this seemed like a good time to go out on a date before things got any worse. We headed across Bucharest to the mall for dinner and a movie: The King's Speech (great!) and some wood-fired pizza.

Along the way we ran into preparations for spring celebrations. March 1 is a holiday called Martisor, a major Romanian celebration for the start of springtime that dates back to pre-Christian times. People buy each other special red-and-white woven bracelets (basically the same as the friendship bracelets that were all the rage in the US when I was in high school) with a little charm attached. Romanians are not about to miss out on their hard-earned capitalism, and there are tons of street vendors downtown hawking Martisor stuff.

Traditional Romanian Hannah Montana Martisor charms

Today, we're mostly staying inside. Snow has started falling and looks like it's going to continue all day. We've spent most of the day cleaning out the bedroom and rearranging furniture in there to get ready for the baby. We're not done yet (not even close, really), but by the end of the day I hope to have the project done or at least mostly done. Then it's time to buckle down for some more long weeks of winter.

Fear Is For The Long Night

I know I sort of promised an action-packed weekend, but it ended up being a little less action-packed than anticipated. Exciting plans to haul couches around again ended up getting postponed, and plans to visit Io's friend Madeline had to be put off because of an outbreak of scarlet fever at her place. No joke. It's like the Wild West out here.

The weather stayed warm through the weekend, though, so we went out walking and doing errands. The warmer weather has brought out lots of people after a long winter cooped up inside.

Hanging around outside is like a national pastime in Romania. During the non-winter months, groups of people hang out in the street all hours of the day and night. People play soccer, they hang out and talk, smoke, throw dice, and every single block, guys are out washing their cars.

Car-washing is a huge deal here in Bucharest for some reason. Romanians wash their cars like Americans drink Starbucks. You go down the streets of Bucharest and literally every block there's a carwash. I have no idea why. I mean, for clean cars, obviously, but it's like an obsession.

The warmer weather also saw a return of Romania's stray cats. And I don't mean the kind fronted by Brian Setzer. Winter is hard on Bucharest's population of strays, particularly small animals. You'll notice in all my winter photos, there are no small stray dogs. That's because they've all frozen to death. Io tells me that the cats, though, tend to find their ways into basements or other warm places, and re-emerge once the weather turns warm.

The warmth also brought out Bucharest's first crop of snowdrops. These flowers are considered the harbingers of spring. Io says their distinctive scent always means the end of winter for her. They grow wild in the area outside of Bucharest, and gypsies pick them and sell little bundles of them in the city.

Unfortunately for myself, and the snowdrops, and the cats, the weather plunged back to near-freezing temperatures once the weekend was over. Really cold. My hopes that winter was on its way out have been dashed, although as yet there's been no new snow. I think I can deal with the cold, as long as we don't have ice covering everything making it impossible to get around. To people who live here, though, this is nothing, and if I start going "Wow it's cold" I know I'll get an earful about the winter of ought-seven or whatever, so I don't.

Today we headed out to the godparents' place to pick up some baby stuff. Although technically it's bad luck in Romania to get baby stuff before the baby's born, I guess we made an exception here. Cati and Ovi had lots of great hand-me-downs from Anna, so we scored a car seat, two rocker chairs, a sack of clothes, a baby bed, a couple of mobiles, and a bunch of other stuff.

By the time we left, the car was packed full with baby things. Thanks, godparents! In that photo we see Ovi the bicycling fiend. Ovi and Cati have no car, but Ovi is such a demon on the bike (and Bucharest's traffic so crowded and crazy) that he was getting places as fast or faster than we were.

The rest of the week should be pretty chill. Ha ha! That's wintertime humor. We've got a couple more ESL classes to teach hopefully, and some more errands to run, but nothing major on the schedule. Sort of the calm before the storm as we prepare for the arrival of the new baby.

This Is A Song About Springtime

Well, another mostly lazy week here in Romania. Io went back to her nursing job at least a few days, although we had to take a couple days off during the week for baby-related medical appointments. All systems go, they tell us. Delivery date is now centering around March 22, and not a day too soon, I think.

The weather has warmed up quite a bit, occasionally cracking 50 degrees. Most of the snow and ice has melted away, and with any luck it won't return and winter is on its way out. We'll see, though. It's so great being able to walk places at a brisk pace rather than shuffling over the ice. There's still ice in some places, but for the most part streets and sidewalks are clear, which makes everything in life happen much faster and more efficiently. After nearly 20 years in LA, it's weird to have life so beholden to the elements.

The warmer temperatures also mean the return of running season, although I haven't taken advantage of that yet. But I will! Honest. Someday.

But it's just nice to be able to go out without having to put on 500 layers of clothing. Spring is around the corner.

Io and I taught our first ESL class this week. I should have taken memorial photographs but forgot. So, more kittens:

Teaching the ESL class was fun. I've never done anything like it before, so it was an interesting learning experience. It was great "working" with Io and generally went pretty well. We would make a hell of a teaching team if there were any way to make a living at it. The two students both said they'd be back next week, and we have another pair of students starting next week as well. How this is going to work once the baby is born, I have no clue, but it's fun for now.

Now a new weekend dawns, with much excitement in store. But I don't want to spoil anything, so you'll just have to wait for the next blog update. I started the weekend off right, though: Tania whipped up a batch of gogoas, which are a different kind of donuts from the papanas she made before, sort of similar to sassy donuts (which I love). That makes four kinds of donuts here in Romania. You know how they say Eskimos have nine different words for snow? Imagine a society that invents four kinds of donuts. Just try. You can't do it. But I am living that dream.

So there you go. Not much for six days since the last update, right? I promise to be interesting and funny next time.

Right after I start running.

Yo Ho, Yo Ho

It's been an outstandingly exciting weekend here in Bucharest. This is more exciting than a car trip to Auchan. I mean, really action-packed.

First off, on Saturday we had Grandma Gomiou (Gagi's mother) over for dinner and cake, because it was her birthday. La multi ani! Experienced readers of this blog looking at the photo at right will realize that Ioana doesn't even know how old her own grandmother is. (For the record, one of mine is eighty-something, and the other one I have never met.) Tania made this pretty amazing pineapple cake with orange, kiwi, and chocolate garnish and home-made whipped cream frosting. Wow. Grandma said she didn't like the sofa-bed we hauled over there a couple weeks ago and would like us to come take it back. We told her to go to hell.

After that Io and I had a rousing game of World of Warcraft with our pals in America. Then came what was surely the most exciting part of an already exciting weekend: that is my mother-in-law hard at work in the kitchen, and standing next to her is my wife, triumphantly holding aloft home-made papanas. Holy crow! That is papanas twice in two days, and these ones are made from scratch! Amazing. How lucky am I?

Pretty goddamn lucky, is what.

Today dawned bright and surprisingly warm. After weeks of sub-freezing, sometimes sub-zero temperatures, a high of something like 40 or 45 degrees felt downright balmy. Io and I took advantage of being able to go out in only three layers of clothes instead of four, and went for a long walk. I unfortunately forgot my camera at home, so no pictures. Which is too bad, because there were some nice bits on a snowy road through some woods or something, and then a park that was full of kids at play and included a local priest with his family. To make up for forgetting my camera, I've uploaded a generic picture of a snowy road I found on the internet to help you visualize. And then as an extra sorry I also uploaded a picture of a kitten.

"A priest with his family" is still a sort of weird thing to me. Not only do Romanian Orthodox priests get married and have kids, you're actually not allowed to be a priest until you're married. So there's lots of pressure on the guys in Orthodox Priest school to find a wife, and toot-sweet. Although the RO church allows divorce, priests aren't allowed to get divorced, so really sort of a lot of pressure there.

When we got back, it was finally time for me to make good on my week-old promise to make chocolate chip cookies for poor, cookie-less Romania. This ended up being a lot harder than you might expect, because it turns out that in the metric system not only do they not use regular units of measurement like everyone else in the world (by which I mean, the only part of the world that matters, i.e. America), but they measure cooking ingredients by weight rather than volume.

In other words, in America your cookies might need a teaspoon of baking soda and three cups of flour. But you won't find any measuring cups or spoons, of any kind, in Romania -- because when they cook they measure out all their ingredients in grams, by weighing them on a digital scale. In America, if you have a digital metric scale it means you're a drug dealer. In Romania, it means you're a chef.

Fortunately, my long relationship with the Los Angeles drug-dealing community means I'm quite familiar with the operation of digital metric scales. That part of it was fine. The part that was not fine is that there's no good way to do the conversion. Unlike doing, say, kilometers to miles or dollars to lei, you can't just multiply things by some constant in your head to figure out how much you're supposed to be using. How much does one cup of flour weigh? Do any of you know? Yeah, somehow they forgot to cover the specific weight of vanilla in my chemistry classes. Luckily, even though none of you know how much a cup of flour weighs and are therefore useless to me, the all-knowing Internet had the answer ready to hand. So I wrote down a bunch of metric weights for a cup of flour, butter, etc. and off to the kitchen I went.

Before you know it, I had all the conversions done and had even dealt with the fact that Romanians have no word for "mixing bowl," and whipped up a batch of my now world-famous Metric Chip Cookies. They were well-received by Tania and Gagi. As with the hamburgers, I think they could be better with more adjustment to local ingredients (we cut up chocolate bars for chips, but I still haven't figured out the best way around Romania's lack of fine-grained brown sugar). Hooray for chocolate chip cookies!

With cookies done, it was time to sit down and make sure I could watch the Super Bowl. This bloc couldn't be more American tonight if I went out and invaded someone. The game started at 1:30 in the morning here, but I can't remember the last time I missed watching a Super Bowl and I wasn't about to start now. Fortunately, I had done all the legwork for watching the NFL online a couple of weeks ago for the Bears-Packers game. I headed over to my trusty site rebroadcasting the Swedish TV feed, and was greeted with this:

All right, federal government. You took my wife away for two years. I am willing to live with that. You're keeping me away for the first part of my son's life. I can deal. But now you're taking the Super Bowl?

"This far, no farther!"

I spent about an hour looking around for other sources for the game, running into the "Seized by the government" graphic a couple of more times. As the opening ceremonies started, I found a Chilean feed of the game I could watch in Spanish, but then right at kickoff I screwed up something with the connection and lost it. I found someone streaming it peer-to-peer about five minutes into the game, which lasted for about 30 minutes before the NFL shut it down -- but the guy immediately tweeted a new URL for the feed and everyone just moved to this new domain. Suck it, NFL! Information wants to be free!

In all seriousness, though, I did not understand what the NFL was doing. I get it when copyright-holders shut down pirated movies or music, but here's something maybe the NFL doesn't realize: watching the Super Bowl is free. Even when you watch it legitimately, you don't have to pay for it! I know, right?! All the money comes from advertising. And I watched the ads, just like everyone else (my MVP vote: the Darth Vader kid and the car. Notice how I don't remember what kind of car it was. Nice job, advertisers!). Maybe the deal is that I'm watching a feed with local ads from a market I'm not in, but why not just have a dedicated internet feed with internet-specific ads where the local ads go? You make more money, you get to claim more viewers, more of us get to watch the Super Bowl without having to feel like dirty, dirty pirates, everyone wins. I honestly have no idea what the deal is with this.

Anyway, so we watched the game until 4:30am, when the Packers widened their lead to 11 points again with 10 minutes to go, and then we just called it and hit the sack. Stupid Packers. Oh how I hate them.