SAD and PAD

Hello Everyone! Laba diena!

The view toward our church steeple from our bathroom skylight pretty much tells the tale. After a month of delightfully cold and snowy days we are now in the clammy grip of rain, freezing rain, rain/snow mix, etc., with temperatures a degree above or below freezing.

How ungrateful to complain about moderating temperatures and melting sidewalks. . .

Another thing: today, more than ten days after the solstice, sunrise is still only 8:40 and sunset 4:05. Seven and a half hours of what cannot even be called daylight!

The diagnosis: speaking for myself, since Liz refuses to be anything but relentlessly upbeat, I think we have at least mild cases of both SAD and PAD. One disease is well-known: SAD is "seasonal affective disorder," lack of sunlight causing depression or at least some restless grumpiness. The other disease is an ailment that I have just diagnosed today: PAD, "proximity aversion derangement," characterized by much bumping into each other in our tiny kitchen and comments such as "I think we need some milk, why don't you go out and get some, and while you're out, take a ten-mile hike." In other words, I love you, but at the moment I can't stand the sight of you! Go somewhere! Give me some space!

So I'll be going out soon to get some milk.

And Liz just got back a little while ago from a solo shopping trip to Marks and Spencer, a little bit of London in Vilnius.

We will be fine. . .

Liz deals with the above problems by plunging into cleaning the flat from top to bottom. Her special project has been sorting through the books, pamphlets, maps, guides, envelopes of currencies, etc. that have been piling up in this tiny place. How many Lithuanian-English dictionaries do we need? And how many one-cent Lithuanian, Latvian, Estonian, Polish coins do we have to save? All of us who have been here for one to three months have brought our dictionaries and our paperbacks and so on, and then we leave them in case our successor needs them. Liz would like to pitch most of it. Of course, I'm more cautious and say we should leave it to the next person to decide. (Another reason her case of PAD is especially severe!)

But wait - before you give up on this depressing blog - we have actually done some things!!

Last Saturday we got out of the house and walked some of the best little streets we had yet seen. This town has them everywhere, these streets with one lane of traffic and one-person sidewalks. Charming. We found a  small restaurant with no name, above, went in and made a reservation for a little later. Walked some more, and then came back for some very exceptional lasagna. Liz, who makes exceptional lasagna herself, said it was some of the best - not too tomato-y, and nicely crusty on top. Preceded by small crisp salads. We had no room for the tiramisu, but we promised that we'd be back. (And we did come back - on New Year's Day - for a very light tiramisu, coffee, and cappucino.) And we asked for the name of the place: Piccolo. Very appropriate for a cafe with five tables. They've been there only two years. And they only offer two salads, two main courses, two desserts, etc. And no alcohol. So far they're surviving, and serving great stuff.

Around the corner -

are two trees that have been wrapped in sweaters for the winter.

And close by, at the churches of St. Anne and St. Bernardine -

is an enormous statue of poet Adam Mickiewicz, born in the early 1800s in Vilnius (or, some say, near Vilnius). Confusion about his birthplace is appropriate, because the story continues to be confusing. This Polish poet wrote the national poem of Poland, which begins with the line: "Oh Lithuania, my fatherland!" (Sort of like "The Star-Spangled Banner" beginning with the words, "O Canada!") Seems like there has been a lot of back and forth between Lithuania and Poland through the centuries, with marriages between the royal families and merged power structures and empires for periods of time. Yet their languages have virtually nothing in common.

Because of my cold, or whatever it is, on New Year's Eve we didn't go to some friends' home for dessert and watching the town's fireworks. Instead we tried to turn in a bit early - but at midnight the fireworks erupted all around the neighborhood (we could see some of them through our skylights) and our church bell rang in the New Year for a full fifteen minutes. Welcome 2013!

On a recent day when the rain had stopped we walked up to the top of Gediminas Hill, the old fort next to the cathedral. Some slippery cobblestones, but we and many others made it on a pleasant, almost sunny late afternoon.

And we went home on New Year's Day to enjoy the BBC's presentation of the Edinburgh Military Tattoo, the famous gathering of pipes and drums and bands.

A few days ago Liz said I had to go see a doctor. I'd been coughing through much of the night, and, of course, neither of us has any other bedroom to escape to. One of our church members is married to a doctor and they live close by. I called and even though she was on vacation she said come on over. She decided I should have an antibiotic as well as some strong cough medicine, and in the five days since then I've been better and better. Hope to be perfect soon. . .

Well, we are sure that after some low moments of SAD and PAD we are getting back to RAD: "recovering and discovering," enjoying for the all-too-brief time we have here the good friends and sidestreet delights that make it so worthwhile to be spending winter in Vilnius.