Um, Brrr

I believe the current cold snap in Georgia is worth a short post. It's been absolutely frigid since I got back from Armenia, so maybe this is like The Neverending Story and it won't go away until I name my enemy-- it's the cold front in Fantasia, Bastian!

- To mark the occasion, the temperature in my bedroom reached a record low of 33.8 degrees Farenheit. I'm sure Peace Corps volunteers in Mongolia wish for such an unseasonably warm day, but as for us in the temperate rainforests of Samtredia, that's too cold.

- The major water pipes are mostly frozen, so I poured buckets of water from the sink into our family's washing machine at intervals that seemed to resemble its usual cycles. Rather than hang the clean laundry on the clothesline to freeze, I hung it throughout the kitchen, where the gas burner on the stove is constantly running. While it would be nicer if my host family trusted me to run the woodstove in their absence, the open flame did turn out to be an efficient clothes dryer. Only a couple of burn marks.

- The start of school in Tbilisi was postponed due to the cold. My theory is that if the Tbilisi schools with their heaters and furnaces had to postpone, perhaps Samtredia with its nothing* will follow suit. If you're wondering why school has yet to start, by the way, then you must be reminded that Monday the 14th is Old New Year on the Orthodox calendar, and one cannot attend school before Old New Year. Happy Old New Year!



* There's no heating devices of any kind, except for in two classrooms, one of which is the English room. We have a small woodstove, which-- I may have mentioned when it happened-- melted its own smokepipe last year and keeled over, belching flames from the blazing inferno of its centerpiece. Fortunately, the 7th graders were there to carry the firy, rusty container outside.