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.