Vlad The Impaler

Interesting day today which started off with a coffee meeting at 9:00 a.m. Went from there to softball practice in the burbs and then to see my folks in Naperville. Thanks for all of your concerns and well wishes. Mom seems to be doing fine and Pops is hanging in there as well (he has cataract surgery on Wednesday). Finished off the day with an eHarmony date with a Romanian! Yes, I'm very international. Ok, I didn't know that she was from Romania in advance, but interesting none-the-less.

While being single has it's ups and downs (frankly 2+ years of not being in a relationship is quite enough for me thank-you-very-much), one of the positives is the interesting people you CAN meet and the stories that can come out of those meetings/dates. Tonight we actually talked about life in Romania from when she lived there prior to 1991 or so. Pretty interesting stuff about how the leader of the country decided to try to pay off the country's debt at the expense of the livelihood of the citizens. Wikipedia has the history organized pretty well so you can look at just that period of time if you like. We didn't talk about the SovRom agreements which were in place during the Soviet occupation/control. The Soviet Union basically looted the country using sham businesses to funnel funds to the mother country. Ugh.

As I'm sure my very intelligent readers know, Romania is the home of Transylvania and Vlad the Impaler, AKA Vlad Dracula, who later became the inspiration for Bram Stoker's Dracula. The other week I actually saw a show (on the Travel Channel I believe) about Vlad, his life and his fortress. As a kid, his father gave him to The Ottoman Empire in exchange for them not invading. Can you imagine?? Your own dad selling you out like that? The Ottoman's kept him in prison, beat him and treated him like crap for much of his childhood. During that time, the show indicated, is when Vlad developed a fondness for impaling rats on pieces of timber stripped from his prison. Later in life after again being imprisoned, he relied on this "distraction" to help him get through his term. He impaled people of course too and Wikipedia describes one method pretty well. At one point, according to legend at least, the Ottomans were going to invade, but they were repulsed by the sight of 20,000 people impaled on stakes outside Vlad's castle and they turned away. Some of those impaled were his own countrymen (and women and children) of course, but many were from a previous war with the Turks. The dude was insane!