A Toddler's Memories of Grandpa's Life Under Communism

My daughter remembers to this day sharp details of her visit to a communist country when she was four and half years old. Grandpa was excited to see her for the first time.

Bewildered after 23-hour long flights from Atlanta to New York, to London and to Bucharest, she arrived frazzled, tired, hungry, and thirsty in the Otopeni Airport of 1985 at the height of the brutal communist regime.

She remembers the heavily armed security police at the airport, the long passport lines and the family gathering waiting for us outside of arrivals where the doors were guarded by police with weapons drawn shouting at everybody to stay in line and at her for barely stepping out of the waiting line while holding my hand.

My daddy was overwhelmed and cried tears of happiness while my daughter was shy and scared and hid from everybody at first. After the one-hour ride to my hometown, we all arrived at daddy’s tiny Soviet era apartment which filled quickly with more relatives. There was no food prepared so we had to ride in my cousin’s ratty Dacia car to Maita’s village where all the aunts and cousins had prepared food for all of us. Everything looked foreign to Eileen, but she remembers the fried chicken and fries floating in grease which she liked.

To deal with her fear of the unknown, Eileen listened to Michael Jackson’s cassette tape on her Walkman until the batteries died. Grandpa could not stand seeing his granddaughter weep, so he left with one of my cousins, daddy’s chess player partner, and they searched all day until they found Romanian batteries on the black market. They lasted two hours of play and the acid leaked into the Walkman and ruined it. Eileen was so upset and still remembers the incident as music was her passion. She loved Michael Jackson and his album Bad.

To take her mind off her ruined Walkman, grandpa and cousin Mircea took us to Lake Snagov where Eileen swam with grandpa in a wooden box pool built on top of the lily pad root system. It was built so because the lake was so choked with roots and other vegetation, some swimmers had become tangled in them and drowned.

The next day, we took a bus downtown and sat by the water fountain in front of the City Hall. It was late spring, hot, and the water was inviting. Eileen jumped into the fountain fully dressed to cool off just like children do in the U.S. It was a mistake that I quickly rectified but it was too late. A group of men dressed in dark suits appeared out of nowhere threatening to arrest us all if I did not control my child. They even threatened her with arrest! The sad part was that she spoke Romanian fluently, but she had no idea what those mean men were talking about. Puscarie (jail) was not a word we taught her at all.

Going to meet my mamaia (grandma) at the farm was fun for my daughter because she liked her great-grandma and played at the water pump in the yard with all the animals underfoot and the clucking hens. Like mother, like daughter, we both love animals.

I took her to the creek in the middle of the village where I used to play as a child and catch fish, frogs, and leeches. She walked right in, fully dressed and started to play in the water. It was not deep but still teeming with life.

That creek is no longer there today - it has been diverted around the village because the local Communist Party decided that it was too expensive to build a solid bridge over the creek to eventually asphalt the road crossing it.

Eileen remembers the daily drive for six weeks to the Communist Party resort, passing by village after village, with homes flanking the highway, thirty miles away where, as a U.S. citizen, I could buy food for three adults and one child in U.S. dollars. I did not want daddy to spend all his time daily for six weeks standing in line just to provide us with food instead of visiting and enjoying each other’s company.

We took Eileen to the church where her dad and I got married seven years before and the marriage house where we received official marriage licenses from the Communist Party. They did not sanction just the church wedding; we had to do an official bureaucratic ceremony as well. She played in the beautiful yard and picked a few wildflowers. Decades after communism fell, that beautiful building was in terrible need of restoration, surrounded by a garden full of weeds.

St. John’s Orthodox Cathedral, on the other hand, had been restored to its original splendor and six thousand other churches had been built around the country since the “fall of communism.” (It did not really fall, it transformed into globalism, a new form of communism.) That fact angered the hard-core communists who supported the vile police state. They wanted to build more communist schools with the money, not churches. Atheists do not believe in God.

It amazes me to this day, four decades later, how many random details my daughter still remembers from our trip to Romania during communism:

-           She was hot everywhere

-           People were sad and smelled bad

-           Roads were bumpy

-           Everything was brown in contrast to her rose pink I love New York t-shirt

-           She feared people because they never smiled

-           She was scared of men in uniforms with guns because they yelled at                     people and she could not understand why

-           Grandpa’s apartment was so small, she could not play and run in it

-           Black Sea was full of dark weeds and was afraid to swim in it

-           She loved playing in the lake with her grandpa.

 

 

Taking Things for Granted Is Part of Life

How many things and people do we take for granted in life? And once they are gone, we miss them dearly and wish that we could go back in time to develop a larger appreciation for what we missed. But days continue to roll carefully and neatly into the ball of time, never to unravel again.

While rioting against the capitalist system, young people want to destroy the society which gives all of us necessities like clean water, plenty of good and affordable food, and shelter. They burn and loot the neighborhoods of poor people, often destroying their ability to feed and shelter their families. Electricity, heating, and hot water are things that these rioters take for granted and do not think about the consequences of having to survive without them.

People take for granted the ability to walk, to run, to swim, to exercise, to breathe without oxygen or medication. They are gifts that we never appreciate enough. Nor do we appreciate good health until it’s strained or endangered.

We take for granted friends, families, and loved ones. We have less time to spend with them and, when their support and companionship are gone, we realize how much we have lost because we were too busy to make time. We take for granted daily comforts and the small joys of life as if they will exist forever.

We never appreciate the freedom to make choices, to pursue an education, to travel, to have a job because we do not know how other people in the world live or whether they have the simplest joy of drinking clean water and having a place to sleep without the danger of being robbed by humans or attacked by wild animals.

We take for granted that our environment is safe and, when natural disasters strike, we are saddened by fear and loss, by the sudden destruction of what we used to call safe. We realized at that moment that the threat of natural disasters was not part of our lives, but it existed, nevertheless.  People in Venezuela were struck by two back-to-back earthquakes, and their lives became a nightmare. They thought Mother Nature would always be placid.

A near miss on the road and a close brush with a dangerous animal in the ocean or in the wilderness leaves us with a reeling horror because we took our lives and safety for granted.

Simple pleasures like feeling the warmth of sunlight, hearing the chirping of birds in the woods, watching the cotton clouds move in the blue sky, having a cup of tea on the porch on a frosty morning are often ignored in the rush of life.

We take for granted the ability to shower, to stand without feeling vertigo, to dress comfortably in clean clothes folded nicely in a drawer, smelling like soap and the summer wind.

Taking things for granted is part of life but we should stop and reconsider before it’s too late.

 

 

America and Soccer Fans Are the Best

Soccer in America has not caught on or amassed a huge fan base comparable to the beloved American football and baseball even though officials claim that there are 136 million soccer fans in North America.

European fans of soccer’s World Cup and Federation International de Football Association (FIFA) changed how Americans view soccer and how Europeans and other foreign nationals view America.

For decades, the mainstream press in Europe and in America always portrayed America as a violent and horrible place to visit and Americans as bumbling, uncultured, uneducated, loud, and mean spirited. Not anymore!

The 2026 World Cup became the biggest free advertising platform for the beauty of America and its lovely people. FIFA estimates that the Men’s World Cup attracted an audience of 3.5 billion people from the estimated 3.5-5 billion fans globally in South America, Africa, Australia, the Middle East, and Europe.

The Scots, with their large army of fans in kilts and bag pipe players, and the Viking fans with their rowing chants became the biggest free advertisers for America on social media platforms.

The Scots emptied bars of beer in Boston and Miami. The cheering for their team was infectious. They were happy that their team made it to the World Cup after 28 years. Many fans spent their lives’ savings coming to America for this event and were quite happy about it as a once in a lifetime occasion.

The Orange Legion, made up of passionate Dutch supporters has brought the Orange Bus to every European Championship and every World Cup since 1970s, sending the bus by ship to reach their destinations.

The Orange Bus is the central point of the Dutch rallies and has traveled to South Africa, Brazil, and Qatar. It arrived in America in Galveston and then traveled north to Houston. The fan group is known for high-energy marches, 2.5 miles or longer, and synchronized dancing.

The Vikings fans with their orange bus and the Scots who traveled across America from Boston, following their teams, taught Americans how to be devoted, highly entertaining and synchronized fans.

Once the bagpipes left the Boston area, the song, No Scotland, No Party, became the siren call of other game locations.

What did the European fans find out about America?

American people smile to strangers, are fun, friendly, welcoming, and happy.

America is vast and beautiful with majestic landscapes and long roads.

American healthcare is the best they have ever encountered.

American food is delicious and as varied as its diverse population. Portions are much larger than European ones. Buffets are everywhere. Waffle House serves food at 2 a.m. Yeast rolls and bagels are delicious.

Buc-ee’s is the best and largest gas station they have ever seen and the stores and restrooms are immaculately clean.

Parking lots are plentiful and found adjacent to the places Americans go to shop and eat, not miles away from a venue.

Americans love their cars and drive miles and miles to their favorite restaurants and stores. I am one of those Americans who used to drive 67 miles to a favorite mall and restaurant in the south.

America is young when compared to senescent Europe, but it showcases many well-preserved historical places, museums, amazing parks like the Grand Canyon and Yellowstone, and natural wonders with archeological sites.

More Americans own homes than Europeans do and Airbnb houses brought many international fans together.

European fans enjoyed American life in general and American hospitality, including that of police officers.

Novelties like the Bass Pro Shops and the ice machines were on the list of things Europeans loved.  I am not sure how much hunting and fishing there is in Europe. But, if you ask for ice, you are eventually offered two cubes per glass with an irritated face. They believe drinking anything cold is not good for your health.

European fans happily discovered that air conditioning is present everywhere and people do not develop pneumonia or sore throats from A/C like Europeans believe. Unlike Europe where electricity is expensive on purpose “to save the planet,” Americans can afford to run their air conditioners and other appliances at the same time, without short-circuiting the entire block.

The moral of the story about all the free and positive advertising America received? Never trust the mainstream media! People with similar cultures have more in common than the talking heads are allowed to think and speak. Americans are a proud and friendly people who love sports and a good party.

 

 

 

  

Electricity Was a Luxury under Communist Rule

Today, when I enter a public building or store where the lighting is dim, I am immediately transported to the depressing life we lived under communist rule. The immediate reaction is to exit the building.

My entire childhood, grandma’s house, six miles from the biggest refinery in the south, was illuminated by an anemic oil lamp. Years later, their village finally got electricity.

A 40 W bulb was dangling from the ceiling, too weak and inefficient to even light up grandma’s small bedroom. Things and people inside looked yellow and sickly.

The six-mile road from the city to the village remained a gravel road until the communists were dethroned. The rickety bus we traveled on to see grandma had a large hole in the floorboard and fumes and dust billowed inside. There was no running water and no septic tank, just an outhouse. We pumped water from a well.

We did not complain because there was nobody to complain to, the Communist Party bureaucrats ran everything, with the greatest ineptitude. They provided sporadically our electricity, water, hot water, gas, steam heat, food, health care, and concrete apartment housing in which we were forced to live. Their rules and governance were neither efficient nor humane.

When I left in late 1970s, people were desperate to escape the life of misery they endured under the boot of the Communist Party’s socialist republic regime, but few were able to. I considered myself lucky to leave even though I left behind everything I loved, my parents, my family, and my friends.

When people thought that life could not get any harder, it did. The dictator decided in 1981 that Romanians should sacrifice more and live by the light of candles and oil lamps - electricity was cut off daily at sunset. If people had refrigerators, food inside spoiled. Elevators for high rise apartments (nine stories) stopped between floors when the power was cut off, and the unlucky riders were left stranded inside.

In 1981 Ceausescu’s regime also invented a new program called “rational illumination.” According to this irrational program, a two-bedroom apartment could only have one 40 W bulb. An energy snitch was assigned to each bloc entry to check apartments for violators. If the bulb was 60W, a fine was given on the spot. TVs could only run two hours a day. The programs were not great, but it was the interdiction that angered the population.

This forced rationing of energy intensified in 1984-1985. It was bad enough that people had to ration food, water, gas, hot water, steam for heat, and even space, but energy? While the people tripped in the dark, Romania, a major producer of oil and gas, was exporting energy elsewhere so the country could pay its debt to the west.

Without electricity life was even harder in wintertime. Heating with steam was minimal at best. People slept with their clothes on. Windows were covered with comforters to stop the frigid air from coming in. The room temperature was 45 Fahrenheit, and people had to wash with freezing water, dress in darkness, and travel to work on streets without lights. The regime touted on its national radio the “bright accomplishments of socialism.”

Ever the survivalists, people bought large bags of candles and built a reserve in their closets. Students studied by candlelight or oil lamps inherited from their grandmas.

The bizarre situation of living in a modern city in high-rise apartments with elevators that did not work and older people stuck in their apartments because they were unable to climb stairs daily, was best described by the coined phrase “blindman’s Sunday.”

The communist system was so irrational that people kept mostly in darkness could watch their dear leader, during the two hours of television allowed, dedicate energy from power plants and hydropower plants for export while Romanians stayed in darkness and their food spoiled in refrigerators in the heat of summer. In winter, window sills became their refrigerators but had to fight the clever crows.

Restaurants and cafeterias were permitted to have three items on the menu. It is unclear why there were only three since the atheists did not believe in the Trinity. Food portions were weighed in grams and people were assigned specific caloric daily values according to the exertion in their professions. Customers ate in semi-darkness.

It is hard to imagine electricity as a luxury good or service, but it was. We take electricity for granted in this country, cheap and easily available energy. Considering the massive development of energy-gobbling data centers, we should not.

As Romania has proven, electricity was a luxury which the police state gave and took away as it pleased. One communist dictator kept twenty-three million humans in darkness for years, with light from candles, while exporting their energy abroad.

The moral of the story is, stay away from socialism, communism, and any other ism that guarantees free everything because there is no such thing as free, someone has to pay for it. 

Remember that there is no such thing as democratic socialism, it’s a Democrat Party invention, but there is socialism. The goal of socialism is communism. Communists lie and never deliver on their empty promises. Communism never ends well when their reign of misery and poverty grips peoples’ lives.

Life and Time

On any given day, there is a huge three-lane parking lot of cars moving at the speed of snail in both directions of I-95, while the two-lane EZ-Pass is almost empty because nobody can afford the confiscatory fees set by the “investors” who were given free reign to the taxpayer-built road. Time is money and life but on this suffocated road time seems still. Our lives ticktock away while we wait to move a few feet before we stop again as if we have all the time in the world.

Time has little significance when you wait in endless lines under socialist societies run by the Communist Party to buy bread and rationed kilos of flour, rice, oil, and sugar.

Time is not important when you visit the one doctor assigned to 10,000 patients in the area, wait in a crowded room the entire day, and receive a prescription for your temporary ailment, prescription that you cannot fill because the pharmacies are empty. Survival and the black market preoccupy us, not time.

What happens when immediate survival and looming starvation are most important variables? How do we view time then? Standing hours in long lines makes time unimportant.

How do we use our limited time on earth? It depends on each person’s idea of living, fast or slow. How do we frame time delays caused by life’s variables? How do people accept them?

Delays are not something people in western societies think much about in terms of time wasted that can never be brought back; we are always in a hurry, and delayed gratification is forgotten because we have so many choices that frame time and possibilities differently.

How people tolerate and react publicly to delays is another matter. Impatience and tolerance for delays are easy to see in people’s actions and in the incidence of sidewalk and highway rage.

Impatience to time wasted can be measured by the number of seconds of sound bites we are willing to listen to or watch. Yet people glare at inserted ads without questioning time wasted on those cumulative moments. Those trying to make money are robbing you of time.

Oliver Burkeman wrote that calculations have been made to determine how long a shopper is willing to wait on slow-loading pages on electronic devices. It was calculated that, “if Amazon’s front page loaded one second more slowly, the company would lose $1.6 billion in annual sales.” (p. 163, Oliver Burkeman, “Four Thousand Weeks, Time Management for Mortals, 2021)

Our impatience is strongly related to the realization that the average human lives a short 4,160 months if they live to be 80 years old?

Most people stopped reading books with the excuse that they have no time to read. There is a huge flood of information that requires their precious time. Yet they trap themselves on social media surfing for hours or playing games to escape reality.

Prior to 2008, we had to wait a long time for the dial-up modem. Before that we had cable and a myriad of channels, but Baby Boomers had a simpler life and four channels to waste time on.

We spend a third of our lives sleeping yet nobody stops to think what they could do with some of that time if our bodies did not need sleep to stay alive.

Are we “speed addicts” or just realize suddenly, thanks to technology, how limited our time on earth is? Perhaps we experienced a traumatic event, and it brought the realization of finite time, if nothing else bad happens?

Once this level of realization is reached, time seems to fly even faster. We appreciate time deeply, we tune in to surrounding nature, and a profound awareness of limitations vis-à-vis the remaining months of life. The tendency to distraction becomes smaller. “Being alive becomes the sum of everything to which you pay attention.”

Distraction is seen as divergence from your timed life, an accumulation of lapses in focus. Burkeman wrote about the “attention economy” which persuades you to direct your attention to things that are not important in your finite life.

Social media is a huge life interrupter and time stealer. It redirects your attention to “Reels,” sound and video bites, sometimes educational, but often worthless entertainment. Ads for that magical ingredient that might cure what ails you, traps you for forty minutes before you find out at the end what it is.

I often waste my time with amateur photography. I have taken over 24,000 photos and videos of museums and places I may never visit again. Instead of enjoying those moments more, I spent time capturing them on film so that I can re-visit them later which seldom comes. My husband jokes that, during our hikes through the woods, I have taken photos of the same trees, during different seasons.

We are all guilty of utilizing and wasting time in diverse ways based on our temperament, hobbies, habits, and skewed valuation of time on earth or lack thereof.

 

 

 

Data Centers, Smart Meters, Ring Cameras, AI, and Flock Cameras

In the rush to develop as many data centers as possible, taking prime land out of agricultural use, using massive amounts of water and electricity in those specific areas where the data centers are located, it is obvious that such massive centers are used for total AI surveillance of the population.

Data centers are most certainly related to the smart meters’ rollout in the last two decades, ring cameras on every house and apartment, and to the deployment of flock cameras as well.

A flock camera is an automated license plate reader (ALPR) camera which is installed with a solar panel above at intersections for “public safety” which capture 6-12 images of every car that crosses the intersection.

The reason the cameras are identified as flock cameras is because of Flock Safety, the company “that creates and sells access to highly connected video hardware and software.” According to some data, there are 80,000 flock cameras around the country.

Allegedly there are some companies that support Ring Community Requests which “allow law enforcement and other public agencies to access video recordings from Ring’s network of outdoor cameras if their owners allow it.”

It is claimed that flock’s customers are local governments. The capabilities of these cameras have been expanded. To learn more about them, go to Find Nearby ALPRs | DeFlock

According to this site, “automated license plate readers are AI-powered cameras that capture and analyze images of all passing vehicles, storing details like your car’s location, date, and time. They also capture your car’s make, model, color, and identifying features such as dents, roof racks, and bumper stickers, often turning these into searchable data points.”

The cameras record everybody regardless of whether the driver is suspected of a crime or not. Police can track criminals via cell phone data pinging cell towers, but they must have a warrant. Flock cameras do not require a warrant. The Creepy Reality Behind the License Plate Cameras in Your Town | PCMag

Benn Jordan wrote that “The municipality does not own the camera, Flock and Google own them and they get the data. They have drones and pan-tilt- zoom cameras that recognize people and zoom into their faces. You can even see what they are doing on their phone. Their ALPR cameras can recognize people. They do store pictures of people. I know this because I have accessed the footage and found pictures of myself. I am not a car or a license plate.” https://www.pcmag.com/explainers/the-creepy-reality-behind-the-license-plate-cameras-in-your-town

Highway patrol officers will not need to fine you for disobeying the traffic laws, the flock camera will record you and a ticket will be mailed to you. Every interstate in America will have these cameras, placed there without your consent. Flock camera fines will become the norm and not just a pilot program in places like I-95.The Creepy Reality Behind the License Plate Cameras in Your Town | PCMag

Smart Meters, with or without your consent, spy on customers without a warrant, recording from the Mother Ship called Utilities Companies, your electrical consumption, what devices you have in your home, which ones are being used, the times, and your peak consumption.

On the hottest or the coldest day of the year, they have the right to cut off your electricity or make your house colder in winter and hotter in the summer by re-setting the thermostat. Smart Meters can track your fridge, freezer, TV, and other electronic devices in your home. Water and gas consumption can also be tracked through Smart Meters attached to your home.

All the information collected, either via Smart Meters or via cameras, can not only be accessed by hackers but can also be sold to third parties without your knowledge and consent.

Last, but not least, there are health safety concerns about Smart Meters which are usually dismissed or ignored by utilities companies. https://emfsafetynetwork.org/smart-meters/smart-meter-health-complaints/

People living around data centers complain about the noise. Areas such as Lake Tahoe have been told to look for other energy suppliers for the 49,000 population because the current utility company will need to provide all their energy for the data center’s growing demand. https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/05/energy-supplier-abandons-lake-tahoe-residents-to-serve-data-centers/

These “improvements” in peoples’ lives are not really developed to make our lives easier and better; they are developed to fulfill the globalists’ narrative of total surveillance and population control because the planet is in danger from real or imaginary foes.

  

Tarpon in the Atlantic Ocean

Internet photo for size

Beach day was a thing of epic proportions as my daughter jokingly explained to my shocked husband who was standing on the shore, watching everything unfold. Not even Herman Melville could've predicted what I encountered in the crystal-clear, five-foot Atlantic water.

We knew we were swimming dangerously in the 300-foot proximity to a large fishing pier on Lake Worth Beach, a long extension from the famous Benny’s on the Beach restaurant. It is never a good idea to swim or play so close to fishermen who throw fishing chum in the water because large fish come for an opportunistic easy feed. Last time we were here, the emerald water was saturated with needlefish of all sizes and juveniles of other fish.

As I was standing in very calm ocean water, deep to my chin, the serenity of the beach was broken by the long shadow of a large creature whose fin was slicing quickly through the water in my direction; I froze as I knew that it was swimming quite fast and my feet were sinking in the yellow sand, capturing my water shoes like glue; I closed my eyes as the fish almost bumped into me but veered left at the last second before making contact with my left side. It had a greenish blue back, with shiny silver, armor-like scales, a large dorsal fin, and a pink mouth. In the moment, the fin traveling in the water could have been a shark – I would have never known the difference. I panicked to the point that my chest hurt, and I could hardly breathe when a man swimming rather closely with his two sons yelled shark.

My daughter was near me, however, when this man yelled shark, I panicked even worse. My ability to move fast through water was hampered by the sinking sand and by my teal water shoes. Ever since I was barbed by a sting ray, I always wear shoes in the water.

I was the only one who seemed to care that there was a shark in the water. My husband, watching from the shore as I flailed with my daughter, who was attempting to drag us to the shore, just stood there frozen. We got to the shore, and my pulse was racing like I had run a marathon, which is impossible because I'm handicapped.

My husband was still sitting there, perplexed as to what had happened. The lifeguard rode up on his scooter and told us that it was a large tarpon and we were safe. But safe is a relative term – safe from being attacked, safe from being bitten, safe from being bait for the tarpon’s apex predator, the shark?

The large eyes, the upturned lower jaw, the pink mouth, the large size of this predatory fish, the fact that it can breathe air, it has a swim bladder that functions as a lung, and two rows of upper teeth, can pose a serious risk if it feels threatened.

I cannot tell you the scars on my soul from feeling so lost in that water; I thought for sure we would be the next snack for this creature which was circling the water for food. We were no threat to this tarpon but I am positive that he did not know that; after all, we were invading his home, the beautiful ocean.

For the next hour or so, we watched this tarpon (Megalops atlanticus) chase two teenage swimmers who were bold enough to go in.

The moral of the story is, never bathe in the Atlantic Ocean but especially within sight of a fishing pier. I knew better but I did it anyway.