Shopping trip to the City

Tanya and I drove Roman back to the city today. He had bussed out on Wednesday to attend his uncle's funeral where he learned his father, Tanya's Ex, was in intensive care in the ZV hospital. It was strictly no visitors. So Roman and Andrei went to see his doctor both Wednesday and Thursday to learn how he was doing. The next few days will tell, I guess. Roman will come back next week again if he can have visitors.

This shopping trip was for buying drapery material for our living room window which has been withut curtains of any kind since we moved in and for our master bedroom, which has only had sheers. I said the neighbours will complain if we put up drapes but Tanya said they are compaining that we don't have drapes. I'll post pictures when we get them done, which will be a the next couple of weeks. We will take the material to a sewing shop in town here that does good work.

More and more stores are stocking "western" style christmas decorations (no, NOT cowboy) so we found a few more to aul home along with a couple of medium artifical trees. First time in my life for artifical trees. One tree goes in the front entry and one in my office. We will find a big artificial tree for the front room. Yes, the house will look like Festival of Trees but we won't charge you $10 to come and see them.

We also went to the huge book market, several dozen stalls of all kinds of books from computer manuals to English language self learning books, to novels and so on. Readers' Heaven. Tanya bought four novels aand two English books recommended by our friend in Moscow who teaches English at a Russian University there. We also bought Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Anderson fairy tale books for Masha. Beautiful illustrations. She'll be reading them within a year as she is in Kindergarten.

This past week was also Maxim's 8th birthday so we found an encyclopedia of house plants for him. The kid is a master at starting African violets so we figure he can come and help Tanya slip some of her 40 odd houseplants and start little ones for sale in the spring.

Masha-ism of the week:
Scenario - It is snowing in Zhovti Vody which we do not know as it is raining in our neighbourhood about 5 km away. Masha phones Tanya.
Babushka, look outside. It is snowing.
I don't see any snow.
Babushka, you are old, you don't see anything.