Essentially lost the day to that schedule change that came out of nowhere and extended into the early morning. Fardels.
Must return to being more robust about those sorts of things. There's a bellum omnium contra omnes on.
A bit like finding a hotel in the mountain away from the front line and forgetting to keep your mind on the larger picture. Restful, at first, but there are trenchant engagements elsewhere, and one might have to go over the top someday.
For all the talk about the southern Balkans (which, strictly speaking are the central Balkans, geographically), the people lead very comfort-filled, if not comfortable, lives without the stream of disposable goods. Long coffees in idyllic courtyards outside the apartment. In some countries, second homes in the country are the norm. I've enjoyed these villages qua capital cities, but hopefully, the intensity hasn't vanished, as the village mentality doesn't always fare well when thrust into the larger fight. As in a short story of the Greek-Catholic Romanian priest whose statue I found in the neighborhood, and whose works I later tracked down in the research library, in times of war, they simply vanish from the villages at a more or less constant rate.
I do envy all of the housing that they build here (think the opening credits to 'Irony of Fate'). They see it as a social obligation to build sufficient housing for the community. Massive Brutalist concrete structures in which one could keep immense libraries of paperbacks -- Hegel, Solzhenitsyn, Kant -- from the ubiquitous bookshops. (Americans, statistically speaking, read less than one book per person per year; the numbers are much different here. My kind of folks.)