Birthday Bowling and Brr!

Just a quick note...Thursday night rambles...
it's close to midnight on a schoolnight, I'm on the upswing from a cold and Shannon is on the downslope. We had a great time last night for Shannon's birthday. Hopefully she can post a first-person account some time when she's not sniffling/grading/lecture preparing (all at once right now). Betsy made Shannon delicious flourless chocolate cupcakes (I'm just happy to get the leftovers!) and the girls from Pink House (Lindsay, Sarah, and Abby) generously cooked us (OK, Shannon, but I got to come along) a lovely dinner.

Shannon, Abby, Sarah, Lindsay, and Jess at B-day dinner

After that we managed to rally about 18 people on a school night for some crazy Birthday Bowling. I've now been bowling more in Bulgaria than I have in the US for the last 10 years, I think. Luckily, bowling seems cooler here. :) The bowling alleys have disco lights / music, and a less redneck-y crowd. (Although I'm not sure what a Bulgarian redneck would look like...)

B-day girl with Betsy and Adam

Carmine expressing his bowling joy

Birthday Girl showing perfect form (and fashion)

The weather finally turned this week too. We've had a beautifully mild September, with many days of clear skies and temps in the 60s and 70s F. Tuesday morning around 9 am the front came through, and temps dropped 20 degrees in about 20 minutes. Even though I know it has been cold for a while now other places, that knowledge doesn't make the sudden transition any less painful. Here comes winter! It got chilly (and damp...not used to the damp) and the very gusty winds sucked all the heat out of our apartment through the window we left cracked in the bathroom. I couldn't believe how cold it was in our apartment! We slept with all the covers we could find, plus our down sleeping bags on top. As Shannon wrote on her Facebook post, the best part of her birthday may have been that they turned the heat on in our apartments. We had been warned that this was government controlled and might not happen for several weeks. Hurrah for fossil fuels! Unfortunately, we've not been so lucky at school. It was in the 30s and 40s F here today, but no heat in the classrooms or offices! Everyone was wearing several layers of jackets and hats in class, and the draftiness of my office made it hard to type. I'm thankful I'm in a renovated building with "good" windows. I'm told that some other buildings are so drafty that papers blow across the room, even with the windows closed! I'm also thankful I wasn't around last winter when Vladimir Putin was playing chicken with the Ukraine over natural gas prices, so he shut off the pipes, making Bulgaria a shivering innocent bystander for 2 weeks (in February). These are things you just don't expect to happen in the US. The cold weather at least made for some pretty views, as seen below.

The view from the science building towards Mt. Vitosha - first snow of the season on the peak. Very pretty. I'm hoping to take my biology students on a field trip up the mountain next week to study biomes, but the weather may not cooperate. On the close-up (bottom) you can actually see the lift towers on the ridge coated in rime ice.

Shannon and I finally concluded our far-too-long-running cell-phone acquisition saga (6 trips to cell phone stores...many hours wasted online shopping). We're the proud new owners of some fancy-dancy little smartphones (she got the Nokia 5800, and I got the Nokia E55, for the gear-heads out there). Wi-fi, GPS, mp3 players, touchscreens (on hers), all the toys. We definitely didn't need them (we could have gotten a bare-bones phone for $10), but we felt like splurging. If we can't have heat, at least we can internet and music!

The crew exchanging cell phone numbers...very serious business.