by If I’ve got it right, Mum and Dad have just arrived in Munich. Or at least their flight has. It was a 13-hour leg from Singapore. Yesterday I was tracking their progress across Australia on FlightRadar24 – one of the best sites out there. They were just west of a village called Camooweal (fun name; Australian outback placenames so often are) which was just west of the mining town of Mount Isa where Greg Norman and Pat Rafter come from, but of course nothing is just west of anything out there. Anyway, in a few hours I should actually see my parents. What state they’ll be in is anyone’s guess. I spent some of yesterday cooking for them. I’ve always wanted to make an enormous pizza covering the whole baking tray and bursting out the sides, and yesterday I did it using Mum’s recipe (Mum has always made very good pizzas). I also made a mix to go with pasta, using the 18-inch sausage I got from the market. So they shouldn’t go hungry. Another thing I did was to start the process of brewing elderflower cordial like I did last year, using 20 or so heads from Dorothy’s plants.
At 3:28 yesterday afternoon, just before I was about to start an online lesson with a young boy, my doorbell rang. God, who is it? It was a youngish man in a uniform. I opened the door. He was from PPC, the power company. “Look, I’ve literally got two minutes.” He told me that prices are going to shoot up because of something the government are doing, then he said a lot of other very fast Romanian that I struggled to keep up with, and he told me I had to sign a contract right there, right then, to get “120% cheaper” electricity. Jeez, 120% cheaper. They do all this mind-numbing abstract shit in maths classes here, you see, rather than anything vaguely practical like percentages. “But that’s impossible.” No, believe me. “No, it really is impossible. You’d be paying me to give me electricity. Anyway I have to work now so I can’t sign anything.” I had lessons until 8:30. The other residents – most of whom are retired – got a visit too. Just after 8:30 I went up to see Elena, the lady above me. I didn’t take Kitty like I normally do. She said I really did need to sign, otherwise my bills would indeed shoot up. Is there any way I could still sign? I’ll try and see someone at the PPC office on Friday, but this is one life admin thing I could do without.
Skype was killed earlier this week. I’d used it since way back, before it was taken over by Microsoft, and I already miss it. Skype had become a verb; Teams (its replacement) doesn’t work so well as a verb, even if it sounds vaguely like times which some kids do use as a verb in elementary maths – “I timesed it by seven and then minused four”. The good news is that they’ve transferred the Skype dial pad over to Teams, so I’m able to use Teams as a phone. Yesterday I had to call my web host (based in America) and that was the only way to do it. That was because plutoman.com is coming up for an automatic renewal but they had my old bank card on the system.
It was good to see Dorothy again before my parents come. As I tried to negotiate the deep potholes coming into her village, she said the tarmac on the road was put there ten years and two presidential elections ago. Vote for me and we’ll tarmac your road. Pork-barrel politics, I think they call that. But it was a crude, rushed job.
I was pleased to see Australia move away from anything vaguely Trumpian in their election. Albanese was re-elected by a surprising margin. It was similar in a way to what happened in Canada. But here in Romania we’re doing the exact opposite. Ten days until the second round.
My parents should arrive in Timișoara around 1:30 this afternoon.
Update: They’re just about to fly over Lake Balaton. Some weird codeshare thingy meant it took me a while to locate their flight from Munich. I’ll make my way to the airport pretty soon. It’s a wet day here; I doubt that’ll bother Mum and Dad too much.
