Mixing Metaphors

The 17-year-old daughter of the Moldovan family I stayed with wrote me last week, extremely excited by an invitation from Tony Hawks (British comedian/writer) and Sir Tim Rice to come on an all-expense paid trip to London.
"I'm on Cloud 7 and haven't come down yet," she wrote.
I thought she was being a bit uppity to only be on Cloud 7, and not all the way to 9.
Then I realized she was probably in Ninth Heaven.

Not wanting to waste an incredibly hard-won travel visa, she'll also visit me for a week or two.

Who Needs Mail?

I went to my chiropractor this morning, who works out of her house in Loimersdorf.
I noticed, for the first time, that her house is No. 7, and the houses on the other side of the street are numbered in the 100s. I'll have to ask her about this.
In the Republic of Georgia, numbers are arbitrary. No. 23 is right next to No. 245, which is right next to No. 8. Sort of like sports jerseys.
It doesn't matter, though, since Georgia has no home delivery of mail.
And the taxi drivers can't see through their broken windshields anyway, so a system would be lost on them, too.

Black Cab, Black Sheep

It's time for transporting Gloria's pet sheep again. She groaned when I mentioned it the other day. And rolled her eyes.
A couple of years ago they broke outta the farm they usually spend the winter at, and were found wandering the train station in the neighboring village. I suppose they were hoping to get a free ride back to Hainburg. They did, because a cop came round and managed to load them all--a fat mama sheep named Molly and her twin boys--into the back of a VW Golf.

The next time we needed to bring them back to the farm, we used Sir George, and all went well, which lulled me into a very false impression about how easy it is to get sheep into a London taxi.
It is not for the feint of heart.
One morning last spring we spent the better part of the morning trying to coax three sheep into a Black Cab. I offered them half fare, but they still baaaahed, pooed, and mostly ran around the farmyard avoiding capture.
We got fat mama Molly. Good. If we can get her and heave her up into the taxi, the other sheep--being sheep--will follow.
We heaved, and she was in. Doors slammed solidly shut behind her.
But she was pissed, and started thrashing and crashing around, rocking the taxi, presumably trying to roll it over.

No time to worry about that.
We go back to the farmyard, trying to corral the twins into a corner trap. But Max and Mauritz were at full speed, dodging, darting, and jumping over Gloria in acrobatic feats that rivaled the best circus acts.
Gloria was in hot pursuit. After having my foot stomped on by one of them, I was pretty much in warm pursuit, figuring a Good Cop/Bad Cop scenario might impress them, anyhow.

We tried the soothing voice thing, the food thing, the outrunning thing, and then we got some rope. More akin to string than rope, but I didn't wanna bring that up, since it was Gloria's find and Gloria's sheep, and Gloria's patience running thin.
So we had this stringy, rope thing that we tried to lasso around them. When one would run past, I'd grab onto the wool and briefly cling, before the sheep wrestled free of my grip.
But Gloria was just lunging at them, at one point throwing herself at one of them, only to have it duck away and leap over both of us, leaving us in a heap on the ground; Max and Mauritz did the 100-yard dash in record time, the finish line being in an outbuilding behind the tractor.

After about 40 minutes we gave up, got a still-angry Molly from the taxi and put her back in the barnyard, then headed to the car wash to REALLY remove Molly from the taxi with a thorough interior washing of the taxi.

In the evening, we tried again. The farmer was home this time and, again, Molly went into the taxi without too much trouble. But the evil twins were still a problem. Yet, Gloria managed with one more lunge. She went for the angriest, strongest, most troublesome, and surprised herself by catching him. He kept right on running, though, galloping, really--trying to shake her off, but she was hanging on behind him, clinging to his sides, shoes skidding through the mud.
She bounces along and looks up at me in disbelief. Skid, skid, I ca't believe I still have hold, skid, skid.

Anyhow, it was something like a rodeo. Except with sheep.
In the end, the sheep were duly moved from Point A to Point B, and I'm sure there're lots of fish stories from lots of locals about seeing a sheep-filled Black Cab in Austria.

Bratislava on my (mental) mind

Father, it's been a week since my last confes... blog.

This morning I had an interview in Bratislava with a psychiatrist who's heading up a conference on mental health care there. I must have been missing my shock treatments myself when I agreed to meet him at the train station at 6:45 am (he lives in Eastern Slovakia, about 25 miles SW of Whyislifesohardovce). Up at 5, revved up Sir George at nearly 6, just in time to idle behind farming equipment for 22 minutes (what?! A passing lane? Du bist verruckt!)
Lots of nice little cafes have popped up in Bratislava over the last 10 years, many of them favoring the Viennese coffeehouses that are so famous. We, however, drank Turkish grinds from a plastic cup while seated on hard, wooden benches in the echoing, concrete lobby of a Slovak hospital.
The dr. chatted happily, excitedly, about his innovative mental health care program. I asked him if he could put me in touch with a patient who had successfully been treated, so he got on the line with Lola, jabbered a bit in Slovak, then put his hand over the phone and whispered "she's too depressed to talk to you right now..."