The big news here, as in so many parts of the country, is the weather.  Tuesday we had exactly 13" of new snow.  Every university, school, government office, and church was closed--except Washburn.  Mohamed has an 8 o'clock class, so he, along with a few other hardy students and professors, braved the roads to go to school.  It wasn't long before Washburn realized the foolishness of staying open with ten more hours of snow on the way, so the university finally closed at midday, and those who had attended were sent back onto the roads.  Wednesday the school was more prudent and like every other NE Kansas institution canceled classes.  The wind chill was -18º yesterday morning.  Today we may hit the double digits above zero.  On the plus side, when I looked out the window Wednesday morning, our driveway had been plowed.  Neither of us had heard anything, but it was a pleasant surprise.  (I assume it was the guy who mows the lawn, since he also does snow removal, but he's never done it before, and there was no phone call.)

Three of the complaints about the Sochi Olympics sound familiar to someone who has lived two years in Eastern European countries (Skopje, Macedonia; Sofia, Bulgaria).  First are the missing manhole covers.  In both Skopje and Sofia, I had constantly to watch the ground when I walked, since manhole covers were routinely missing, and the danger of suddenly plunging into the sewer system was always present.  (In Skopje, people were constantly spitting, so I also had to watch out for flying sputum.)  People would steal the covers and sell them for scrap metal.  Once I was visiting a couple who were Fulbrighters in Sarajevo.  They said they had to take a couple of hours out on Saturday morning to attend a funeral of one of their colleagues, who, not watching where he was going, had fallen through a manhole.

Sofia, like Sochi, was also full of packs of wild dogs.  There was little point in putting garbage in the dumpster, since between the gypsies who rummaged through the trash and the wild dogs, all of it was going to end on the ground anyway.  The locals used to mourn the good old days when, because of the Communist ties, there were lots of Vietnamese students who, I was assured, ate the dogs, thus solving the problem.

And then there was the fact that in most places, including the university, you couldn't flush toilet paper and had to put it in a waste basket.  I taught at the major state university in a building which had once been very beautiful, but which was in sorry shape by the time I taught in Sofia.  There were perhaps a couple of thousand students in the building every day.  In the main part of the building, there was a unisex restroom with two stalls (and no urinals) on each floor.  The doors on the stalls had no closures on them, so you had to brace the door shut.  There was a waste basket for used toilet paper.  By the end of the day, the smell was not pleasant.  There was a sink in the restroom on my floor, but the pipes underneath weren't connected, so if you did turn on the water, it just ran out onto the floor.

Skopje, Sofia, Sochi--it all sounds familiar.

When I log into my BlogSpot account to write a new entry, I can also follow statistics on pageviews.  Mysteriously to me, the entry which has been viewed by far the most times is one I wrote on Frost's "Oven Bird" some time ago.  I don't even know exactly where it is in the 220+ entries, and I have no idea how or why other people find it.  There were nine pageviews of that entry yesterday alone. 

Monday we go to the Cancer Center in KC for full skeletal x-rays (it's been a while since they've been done) and CT scans.  We go back on Friday for blood work and the results of the tests.  Usually we can work them all in in one visit, but since Mohamed has morning classes, the consultation with Dr. Van has to wait till Friday.  If I don't post before, I'll certainly add an entry once the results are in.