The Charlie Bug

It’s Day Seventeen here in Kazakhstan! I have caught “The Charlie Bug” and am nursing a really bad cold. I know that it is the exact same illness that all the kids at the baby house had, because I have the same rosy cheeks that they all developed. I tried to buy some tea to soothe my symptoms, but everything here tastes different. I bought orange-lemon tea, and it is a weird pink color and tastes very bitter. We found sugar in one of our apartment cupboards, so I added some of it to my tea only to discover (after taking a sip) that it was SALT, not sugar.


Shortly thereafter, Stan started to cook our dinner of scrambled eggs and Bolen potatoes, and quickly discovered that the three eggs we bought yesterday were hard-boiled! So, we had hard-boiled eggs and Bolen potatoes. (Bolen potatoes are hash browns prepared the way Jeromy Bolen prepares them. Yummy!) We were very happy that the potatoes really were potatoes.


After that, I decided to try some more tea and just go with hot water and lemon. This tasted great, and I drank two cups. Then the heartburn came. And I am all out of Tums. I do have these strange lozenges that we bought at the pharmacy. They taste like peppermint and wintergreen mixed together. Have you ever brushed your teeth right after you were chewing gum? Not good. Mints should not be mixed. But the heartburn was atrocious, so I had to suck on the yucky mixed-mint medicine lozenges. They work ok, but they taste horrible.


After that, it was time for Stan to take his bath. With Pasha and Ken. I’ll let him tell you more about that in his next edition of chronicles.


I stayed home and watched an old black and white movie, The Bishop’s Wife. I don’t really know if I liked it or not, because I fell asleep right at the epiphany of the film. Actually, I think this movie was some kind of rip off of It’s a Wonderful Life, because it was all about an angel who comes down from heaven to help a man whose life has gotten all mixed up. Except in Bishop the angel is Carey Grant and in Wonderful, the angel is Clarence (a cute old butterball of a man). Basically, Carey Grant seduces the bishop’s wife (mentally/emotionally, not physically), but since Carey Grant is an angel, he’s just not good enough for the wife, because she is a real woman and real women need real men. And this was the angel’s plan all along. Something like that. And two of the child actors were also in It’s a Wonderful Life. The daughter of the bishop is also one of George Bailey’s daughters. And the little boy throwing snowballs at the park with the bishop’s daughter is also the young George Bailey who saves his brother Harry when he falls through the ice. I think he was wearing the same exact coat in both films.


Let’s move on to Charlie news. Charlie is virtually all better. Here is a picture of him eating some kind of beet porridge. This stuff has beets, mashed potatoes, and meat in it. Charlie actually liked it, and almost ate his whole bowl. Take a look at how big the spoons are!!







We haven’t found out our court date yet, but we might get that information today. I’ll post again if we do. We did, however, find out that all of four of the first-wave families will see the same judge and that she is a nice/fair judge who supports international adoption. This is great news. We are on our way! The earliest possible court date would be Tuesday, as today is Friday in Kazakhstan and Monday is Eid al-Adha, an Islamic holiday.