You stole my kidney. Prepare to die.

We lost internet due to being flaky people who never ever paid our telephone bill (though in our defense, we never received a bill, or instructions on where to go to get it or pay for it). Our phone line is in the week-long process of being reconnected, so in the meantime we are getting acquainted with Wi-Fi options in Old Tbilisi. These are, happily, numerous, though not all connections are equal. The steadiest -- and easiest to get to -- signal has been at The Hanger Bar (expat sports fan hang-out of "Our Balls Are Bigger Than Yours!" fame).

I spent all of Saturday (which happened to be May 26 - Georgia's equivalent of July 4) at The Hanger, eating potato skins, drinking beer, and editing "The Georgian Times" while clowns, mummers, and men on stilts walked by outside.

Highlights of this week's GT included an article about stray-dog management in Tbilisi (the city dog-catchers snag the dogs with a back-breaking lasso, then crush their bones with "iron pinchers," *then* kill them with "electrical appliances" before pitching them into a hole at the local landfill) as well as a run-down of "theories" surrounding the recent murder of a nationalist former politician (these included a "Lost"-like scenario in which the murderer was taking revenge for a stolen kidney!). Let me just say: the beer helped me through it. I told the paper that I'll stop working for them on June 16, and am looking forward to a short month in Georgia of free of bizzarro copy-editing.

Yesterday C and I did a short hike up the hills around Tbilisi in the hot hot hot hot sun. The hike felt really good, but I found myself wishing I could do it in shorts. Capri pants and short skirts are commonplace in town, but no shorts on men or ladies, yet. People here are too fashionable for their own good. After few hours of tromping around in the scorching sun, we returned to town to attend the supra for a friend's new baby girl. So that was 5 hours of good wine and good food. Our friend Shane stayed with us over the weekend, and when we got home he was eating a big bowl of popcorn and taking shots of vodka. (This is not typical - I can only attribute it to the lack of internets). I too maybe two ill-considered shots of cheap, cheap vodka, and spent the rest of the night wishing I hadn't.

I woke up this morning at 6, cleaned the kitchen and took out the trash (I was hung-over, and anything with any kind of meek smell attached to it was making me ill), then went back to bed and dozed until noon. Then I convinced Chris to join me back at the expat rugby bar, where we have enjoyed some coffee and wi-fi, and are presently awaiting a modest platter of fried potato-skins while the Indy-500 blares from the adjacent room.

Ah... Life is okay.