A Silver Lining to Every Cloud?

I’m sure I had something unbelievably profound to write yesterday…until I arrived home to find myself without electricity or gas. I suppose if I were a really dedicated blogger, I would have hooked up my laptop to my cell phone and written anyway. But, frankly, I allowed the 2 foot wide, 6 foot deep trench dug all the way around my apartment building (and into the neighboring streets) to steal anything positive I had to say for a few hours!

Before that, the day had been productive (still one of my criteria for a good day). My colleagues and I all descended upon our office armed with dustrags, mops, and buckets. Time for spring cleaning! A little late for spring cleaning, you might say. But not in our crazy Team Romania world…this is the first chance we’ve all had to get together and tackle the job. Windows washed, furniture polished, floors mopped, clean rugs laid – I love the smell of cleaning products mingled together (not to mention the satisfaction of getting the job done!). And cleaning as a group activity is so much more fun than cleaning my apartment by myself…I’m going to try to remember that when it’s time for spring cleaning at my house next year! Maybe we’ll establish the round-robin spring cleaning team and tackle one house a day until all of our homes are finished. Cleaning accomplished, I was inspired to sort through the taking-on-a-life-its-own pile of papers on my desk. Yeah! I can at least return to my illusion of organization.

In the midst of the craziness, I discovered one of the benefits of living in a post-Communist country. For reasons that I have never been able to understand, water heaters are still rare in Eastern Europe; water is heated at a factory and then pumped to homes. So, even when there is no electricity or gas, I still have hot water. Always a silver lining…