Our micro-climate

More evidence that Csikszereda is in its very own micro-climate. A couple of days ago we had a very heavy snowfall (I think most of Romanian just got sustained pissing rain), leaving us a 30 cm addition to the already fairly deep levels around town. Then yesterday it suddenly got warm. When I say warm I mean above zero, but in the grand scheme of things that's warm. Today it was up to 5 degrees (Plus 5), which meant, among other things, that walking around involved a particularly dangeorus game of Romanian Roulette. This is the dangerous activity of walking along the pavement while large wet slabs of snow fall from the rooves of apartment buildings and come crashing down on to the pathologically unlucky.

Then I drove to Udvarhely to pick up the birth certificate and had a very strange experience. About half way - somehere around Vlahiţa - the landscape changes from completely white to completely non-white. Udvarhely had absolutely no snow in it. And it's only 50 kms away from here. It's baffling. Just to rub salt into the wound, on the way back, just as I got to the top of the pass, it started snowing and back here in the depression it was starting to fill up again.

(Vlahiţa, by the way, is an interesting place. Despite, along with most places round here, being more or less entirely Hungarian , it's generally known by it's Romanian name. I'm not sure why, but I think it has something to with the Hungarian name being repressed as being too religious. It's called Szentegyhaza in Magyarul, which means Holy One House, or House of the One Holy One, or something, and may, I strongly suspect, be a direct reference to the Catholic church. No idea why this particular name-repression took root and people stopped bothering with the Hungarian, but I have friends from there and they all call it Vlahiţa. Maybe it's just easier.)

Colic

Colic sounds like an illness. We even use it as if it is "My baby has colic", and so on. But when you start reading about it (because your baby has it), you discover that it is no such thing and it is just a symptom. And then you get lots of half-arsed medical advice to get over it "Try cutting out citrus fruit from the mother's diet", ""wind down before the evening starts, rather than do stimulating things". Because no-one knows what causes it. It's basically a procedure by which your baby becomes nocturnal, and stays up between midnight and 6am crying, and then sleeps happily all day. It's a right bastard of a symptom, and I wish the medical profession would get their act together to solve it because it's driving me insane.

On the plus side, Paula has already learned how to throw all the hand shapes required of a major hip-hop recording artiste - and she's only 2 weeks old. Put together some rhymes and she's away.