Vacation within a vacation!

Without paying attention, without any intention, I somehow managed to take an entire week off work. Last Thursday I left Andrey Khlobystin's Nevsky Prospekt apartment and shoved art to the back of my mind, fully intending to get back in the saddle on Monday morning, but through a string of unrelated events, Monday arrived, and then Tuesday, and then Wednesday...Monday I spent half the day getting to and from the Smolny headquarters to return a library book and ask Elena, the asst. program director, if she had any leads on finding a transcriber for my interviews. I had just gotten home from the office, around 4 PM, and was preparing myself for a line of stilted introductory phone calls, when the rest of my day was suddenly consumed by a search for bicycle wheels--

Here I must pause and explain why, precisely, I was looking for bicycle wheels. Once, I had bicycle wheels. I even had a whole bicycle! When David said his bitter farewells to this godforsaken country--once and for all!--he bequeathed me his cell phone (borrowed from Smolny) and his ancient, forest-green, Soviet-issue collapsible bike. It needed some work before I could ride it, so I locked it up in my courtyard and forgot about it entirely apart from when I would see it entering and exiting my apartment each day. At least a week went by, probably more, and each time I saw the bicycle I remembered that I needed to find a wrench and tighten the handlebars. And then one day, I pushed the door open, greeted by the suddenly not-so-familiar sight of my bike, exactly as I had left it, only WITHOUT WHEELS.

Well, as things often go with me, it's taken at least another three weeks for my search for bicycle wheels to evolve past a half-assed, disinterested effort into a full-blown investigation. The best part of the investigation has to be the fact, uncovered when I drunkenly began asking my chainsmoking neighbors if they'd seen, "by chance" any bicycle wheels lying around, that someone in the building "just happens to have" a set of wheels he might be willing to sell.

Yeah. Please, sir, sell me back my bicycle wheels. Can I get a discount for not punching you in the teeth?

Anyway, the ordeal of tracking down a bike shop, learning it would cost me over $100 to replace my wheels, and enduring the heat (St. Petersburg is hard when you can't eat ice cream) had left me so exhausted that my day was done.

And yesterday I tried, I really tried to work! I called several artists I've been meaning to get in touch with, and again today, but everyone has left town for the week, and nobody will be back until early early August. So I've thrown it all to the wind and simply embraced my free time: I'm going to Novgorod on Friday and I plan to be absolutely useless for the rest of the week. Zach Hanson, friend & compatriot from last fall, is back in town, and we have a whole lot of being useless to do while he's around.