Very quickly…  I am in the last-ditch, “where the hell is it?” editing phase now.  If it weren’t for the one week deadline extension that I lobbied for and received back in March after suffering several delays due to bad weather and bureaucratic impasses, I’d be in the LP gallows right now, as my original deadline was last Friday. There’s just some pokey, tedious formatting stuff and notes to complete and I’m done.

If you haven’t read and memorized every word in this blog (and if so, why not?), you might not be aware of the strange editorial pinch I’m in.  I’m writing about Romania and Moldova for three books, ‘Europe on a Shoestring’, ‘Eastern Europe’ and ‘Romania and Moldova’, each one with more content than the last. The first two are due right now, the last one, the one requiring the most work, isn’t due until September.  However, in order to complete the first two, I kinda have to finish the last one, so I can copy all the updated and new material from it, abbreviate everything and paste it into the EOAS and EEU books.  Finely planned, eh? All part of the fun folks!

Not wanting to have even a minute to breath (or drink heavily), I’ve accepted a tiny additional assignment from LP, 750 words on the Danube Delta for yet another book, that’s due June 5th.  No problemo, as long as they’re not adverse to thinly veiled paraphrasing from the material in the Romania and Moldova book.

After that I have an assignment for two non-travel articles for a business traveller magazine that I’ll need to dive into almost right away, but not before I crack open that last bottle of Moldovan wine and drink it all in one sitting, because I deserve it.

On the bird flu front, they’ve found some suspicious dead birds in Bacau, less than two hours southwest of my city, Iasi.  Despite all the media hype, the Romanian Latin-caliber over-reactions and the daily news footage of people spraying down every square inch of surface area with poison, they don’t seem to be making any headway in containing it. I suppose I’ll have to stop sleeping in the chicken coop now.

Meanwhile, putting the words ‘Romania’ and ‘bird flu’ in the same sentence has been doing wonders for my hit-count statistics.  So, if you’ll oblige me…

(sung to the tune of ‘Old MacDonald Had a Farm’)

Weeeeelllllll…

Old Romania had a tourism season, ee-i-ee-i-o!!

And during that tourism season they had some bird flu, ee-i-ee-i-o!!

With a bird flu here and a bird flu there,

Here-a flu, there-a flu, everywhere a BIRD FLU,

Old Romania had a tourism season, ee-i-ee-i-o!!

And so on and so forth.