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.
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