Milestones

A Happy Birthday to my younger brother!  Dan is now 58.  He and Maggie are moving into a new place in Maple Valley, WA.  My older brother (64!) is looking for a house in So. California.  But I, being the middle brother and thus more stable and grounded, have been in Albania for two months, counting the month in London.  I can only hope my brothers can settle down soon.

I am home waiting on a man from the embassy to come and install an AFN decoder box for our TV.  I can't wait to see what sort of programming Armed Forces Network provides.  He is also going to hook up the antenna for our cable TV.  I bought it from Digitalb, and now I need a UHF antenna.  The cable is broadcast from the top of Mt. Dajti and we catch it and run a cable to the box.  I have been to every Digitalb store I know of in Tirana.  One had an antenna, but none had the mounting hardware.  The Albanians seem to be learning the American style of capitalism -- that it's cheaper to tell the customer to come back next week than it is to stock a full complement of parts.  

It could be that since the company owner was killed a couple of weeks ago that things are not running smoothly in his company.  He lost control of his Ferrari at about 110 MPH in the early morning hours and crashed into a tree on the main street in town.  He and his girlfriend were killed.  Digitalb was closed for about four days.   I haven't been out on the street at two in the morning, but I'm reasonably certain it is pretty devoid of auto traffic.  One couldn't possibly get up to that kind of speed during the day time.  40 seems fast.  There are very few traffic lights, and most of them seem advisory.  The way to turn left across oncoming traffic is to wait until there's a little space, pull into it, at which time the oncoming car will slow, and you can try the next lane until you force that oncoming lane to stop, and so on until you make your turn.  No one gets angry about it, it's just the way the system works.  There is a lot of honking, but little of it seems to be angry.  It is more a messaging system:  I'm passing you on the left, don't pull over.  It is sort of a merge and be merged system.  I've only seen one little fender-bender so far.  Cindy describes herself as an aggressive defensive driver, which if you can wrap your mind around that idea, you understand the system.  She asked me what kind of vehicle I would feel safe riding with her in, and I pointed out a Mercedes 10-wheel dumptruck.  She sees so little humor in some of my observations.