Flu-cation

We interrupt these posts about our amazing trip to Egypt to bring you news from real life.
"Svinski Grip" (свински грип). 
That's what's going around these days. The good ol' H1N1 "Swine Flu."  It's enough of a problem that they canceled all classes in Bulgaria this week.  Our students weren't actually sick (almost no absences), but other schools got it.  Shannon's got it.
I wouldn't recommend it. Swine flu sucks. I've never seen her so sick (I'm also sure I've never personally been that sick myself, thankfully). She's now missed 5 days of work, and has only left the house twice in the last week, both times when I drove her to the doctor's.  Last week (when I decided she really needed to see a doctor) she told me "Every follicle hurts. Everything hurts."  A few times she actually broke down in tears from the pain and misery of it all. She had convinced herself that maybe the excruciating all-over pain was just the remnants of muscle pain from starting a new pre-work morning yoga routine, but she also had a fever of 103, so maybe she was just delirious.


So I've got a really sick wife and no students, but I am still supposed to go to work every day this week. This was supposed to be final exam week. It was going to be a busy week with proctoring, grading, writing comments, etc. Now there's a fair amount of thumb-twiddling. Waiting. Actually, it's been kind of nice. I had a real 2-day weekend. Didn't work at all. Left my sick wife at home (she really wasn't very good company...) and went out to dinner, went dancing, went skiing, practiced for Faculty Follies, slept in. Good stuff.
[I'm really not the heel I sound like here, I swear. I have been taking care of Shannon, but there's really not so much to do when all she wanted to do for most of the last week was sleep.]

So I'm using this flu-cation to my advantage. Catching up on end-of-the-semester grading. Applying for jobs. Getting the car fixed. Going to the pharmacy. I really don't know how I would handle things like getting the car fixed if I were working full-time this week. Well, I do know. I probably wouldn't get it fixed, which is why I just today got around to getting the winter tires installed.

Winter tires? They're required in Bulgaria from November to March, I think. I was pretty skeptical on the whole matter, considering I've only ever used "all-season" tires in Michigan, Montana, Chicago, etc, and did just fine. Well apparently all-season tires are a LOT better than summer tires. At least they're a lot better than MY summer tires. I had to push my car out of my parking spot yesterday because there was a wee bit of snow/ice. I had to reverse down a street a 1/4 mile because I couldn't get up the vaguely slippery hill after leaving the pharmacist. I barely could turn left onto the Ring Road, because my side of the intersection had a slight incline.
OK, so the summer tires had to go. But where are the winter tires? I asked Mike, whom we'd bought the car from (he told us last spring that there were winter tires). "They're in the basement." "Are they the only ones there?" No, but they're the ones straight in there." OK. They didn't really look any different than my current tires, except maybe older. I asked him again "Yeah, those are the ones we used, the ones Ian gave us." OK.

At the shop, the mechanic took one look at my "winter" tires and said "Those are summer tires. 10 years old. Put them in the trash." Awesome.
He did have 3 used winter tires he'd sell me for cheap, but not four, sadly. And he didn't have the equipment to install them, even though I'd called in advance and expressly asked about changing tires. He drew me a nice map to a friend that could install them (I probably drove past 13 other tire-change places en route to his friend, but no matter.)  I got to his friend's shop, but couldn't find the door. Seriously, no door. No glass door with a nice "OPEN" sign. No big garage door. One padlocked shut steel door. One this-can't-really-be-a-door crack in the steel wall. But there were barely visible lights on, so I knocked. Nothing. Knocked again. Wall opens. "Miro?" "Da." Luckily the first mechanic had called ahead, because this one spoke no English, but we communicated acceptably well and for 19 leva I had 2 new-used winter tires installed on the front.
Back to the first shop. Hadn't had a car check-up since Albania in August. "You don't have any brakes." Awesome. Not entirely true (I had been stopping, after all), but still disconcerting. I alredy knew I didn't have any shocks. I could feel that in my ass every time I drove anywhere.
Apparently there is a $30 accessory plastic cover that keeps dirt out of the shocks (I think this is standard in the US), but someone had been cheap and didn't install it, so enough dirt had gotten into the shocks to seize them up completely. "They don't move. It's like you don't have shocks at all." Tell me something I don't know. To fix the brakes and all the shocks would cost (even at dirt-cheap Bulgarian labor prices) 750 leva (about $500), which is about half the value of the car.  Not sure I want to do that, considering we're going to try to sell it in 6 months or less. I'll probably do the brakes and front shocks only, and see how that goes.
On the way home, with my new and improved winter tires ("now with traction!") I decided to try to go back to the pharmacy we visited yesterday to get Shannon's antibiotics. I didn't need any more drugs, just a "faktura," an official invoice that we can use to get reimbursed from our health insurance. They're a big pain in the ass. Whenever I ask for one it takes 10 minutes to fill it out. It's very official, with stamps and everything. Only about 1/2 the time can the pharmacist even give us one. Either they don't have the form, or the right person isn't there, or the special printer isn't working, or they just don't feel like it, I don't know. Yesterday I was told to "come back tomorrow" with my regular receipt, and they would upgrade it to the proper faktura. Today I used my best past-tense Bulgarian (which isn't very good), trying to explain that I was there yesterday and needed a faktura. After some attempts at responding in quick and complex Bulgarian, the flustered pharmacist responded loudly in English, "SIXTEEN-O-CLOCK. TOMORROW."  Sure...

You can't ever go to just one pharmacy in Bulgaria. Nothing like CVS or Wahlgreens or Rite-Aid exists. They are all smaller than an average US kitchen, packed floor-to-ceiling with one of everything. Well one of most things, except the particular brand of Vitamin C that the doctor prescribed you for the flu (yes, he did).The first one we tried yesterday was at our local Hit grocery store. The friendly man explained in English that though they were a pharmacy, they didn't yet have their license to sell prescriptions (they'd only been open a few weeks). So we tried a smaller one across the street. She had the drugs, but no fakturas, and these were expensive (by BG standards) drugs, so she insisted I go somewhere else that could provide me with a faktura. The third place also didn't have the fakturas, but I had a deliriously sick Shannon waiting in the car and at this point I didn't care, so I took her "please come back tomorrow for a faktura" at face value and fled. Or tried to flee, until I couldn't get my summer-tire'd car up the vaguely slippery incline. Which brought me to the car repair shop today, trying to replace my summer tires with even older summer tires.

I'm mighty glad I had several hours to kill today for these adventures in Bulgarian living. I'm also mighty glad I don't work in a Bulgarian car repair place, where it is apparently not standard to heat your work garage. Brr.
So there you have a rambling story from my flu-cation. I'm not really complaining. Campus is beautiful in the snow, skiing was fun, and having time to do grading is a blessing. It's just interesting. Last year we actually got days off of work when they cancelled school for the flu-cation, and we went to Italian Lakes -- amazing. This year...no actual vacation, an actual flu, and car repairs. You win some you lose some.  Get better soon, Shannon!