Tree Number Two

This tree is upstairs in the room at at the end of the hallway. It has little lights like the downstairs tree but Tanya doesn't like them because they should be all blue, not multi-coloured. so she turned them off for the picture. Next year maybe we can buy strings of solid colour lights but this year at least we can buy lights!!!

Our First Christmas Tree

Tanya finished decorating our first tree in the front entry. About half the decorations including the lights were purchased locally, the other half came from Canada. She is now working on the upstairs tree. Kuchma walked around the tree and sniffed it, then went for a nap.

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.

Remembering Holodomor

The fourth Saturday in November has in many jurisdictions been marked as the official day of remembrance for people who died as a result of the 1932-33 Holodomor. Holodomor is the name given to the artificial famine created in Ukraine by the Stalinist regime in 1932 and 1933, in which some 7 million Ukrainians were deliberately starved to death to break the back of growing Ukrainian nationalism.

To date, the legislative bodies of Australia, Canada, Estonia, Georgia, Hungary, Lithuania, Poland, and the USA referred to the 1932–1933 Holodomor as Ukrainian genocide… The Senate of CANADA, on 19 June 2003, called on the Canadian Government “to recognize the Ukrainian Famine/Genocide of 1932–1933 and to condemn any attempt to deny this historical truth as being anything less than a genocide” 1.

Russian version of events is somewhat different as Putin re-establishes Stalin as a “Hero of Russia”. Indeed in a vote to establish the Greatest Russian, it is reported that Nicholas II and Stalin are tied for first place. According to a press release from the Ukrainian Canadian Congress the Ukrainian Embassy in Moscow received notice on October 6 from Russia's Foreign Ministry that commemorative events must fall in line with the Russian position on the famine or be cancelled. Russia continues to claim that the Holodomor was not a genocide and that Ukraine's effort to secure such recognition is "a political matter that is aimed against Russian interests."

There is no doubt that Ukraine was not alone in its suffering in that time. Many parts of the USSR were given the same treatment. Kazakhstan lost some 3 million people to starvation for the same reasons – to destroy any semblance of nationalist spirit and resistance to Stalinism. Some say that because everyone suffered it should not be labeled as specific genocide against Ukraine, though as other s point out the Jews were not the only group targeted by the Nazi’s for extinction yet it was no doubt genocide. Others claim that modern records show only 3.5 million starved to death in Ukraine as though somehow that makes it all right.

The Russians must have a guilty conscience over this because they are very defensive, yet no one is accusing the Russian people per se. It was “Stalin’s communist regime”, the “Soviet totalitarian regime”, “Communist policy”, the “totalitarian Bolshevik regime”, “Stalin’s Soviet regime”. It was the system, not the people. In Germany it was the Nazi system, not the people. For some reason, under terrible systems, people do terrible things. We need to be very careful that we do not allow terrible systems to emerge in our own countries, if it isn’t already too late.

1. from Holodomor – Ukrainian Genocide in the early 1930’s, The Ukrainian Institute of National Memory, 2007.

Windshield Washer Antifreeze

The warning light had been on for some time as we were running the windshield washer fluid (water, in this case) level low in preparation for cold weather. Today I asked Andrei what to put in the car. Only in Ukraine - 1 litre of cheap vodka (40% alcohol) and 1 litre of water. Cost about $3.00 for two liters of windshield washer fluid.

Wonder if I could cut it 1 vodka to 2 water? 20% alcohol vs 13% alcohol? If it got cold, I could just pour another bottle of vodka into the tank? Any chemical engineers out there?

Windshield washer fluid (winter) at Wal-Mart was running $3 to $4 for 4 litres, last time I checked. There must be windshield washer fluid in Ukraine!

Johnny Cake

We found cornmeal in the new grocery store, so tonight I decided to try my hand at Johnny Cake. Didn't have the family recipe so went to the internet and found one that looked simple enough. One of the recipes dirtied every dish in the house and consisted of folding and blending and sifting and... Good grief, Charlie Brown, some people don't have enough to do.

Had to make a couple of adjustments. Not enough butter so I used sunflower oil. No milk (used the last on the cornflakes yesterday morning and forgot to get some) but I found a can of sweetened condensed (like our Eagle brand for Christmas fudge) that Tanya bought for some other recipe and added a little water to bring it up to 1 1/2 cups. Also no 9" square pan but a 9x13 worked just as well.

The new ingredients made it heavier than I recall and much sweeter. But with lots of butter and real maple syrup, it was delicious. Tasted like the real McCoy.

Remembering the Farm - Our first tractor

While mechanization of Saskatchewan farm power had begun decades earlier with the big steam tractors, the final massive shift of farmers from horse power to tractor power took place after the War. Dad farmed with horses until 1950. At the age of eight years, the summer of 1930, he began working in the fields, helping my grandfather, summerfallowing with a six-horse team on a double-disc.
In 1950 Dad bought a used Massey Harris 44* for $600. The bank would loan two-thirds of the price so the dealer wrote dad a receipt for a $900 tractor of which $300 was paid. Dad borrowed the entire $600 price of the tractor.

Dad bought a used 12’ Massey Harris swather that same year and cut the crop with it that fall. This picture was taken when Dad was working close enough to home that Mom, with us kids in the wagon could take him his late afternoon lunch which would hold him until supper when he got home after dark. When I started running the swather, maybe by 1960, we still had the same one. The platform and the reels were raised and lowered by levers. The swather platform was too heavy for me to adjust so I pretty much cut it at whatever level dad set it. I could adjust the reels to the height of the crop if I used both hands. By the time I was big enough to handle it, we had bigger equipment, with hydraulic controls.
My brother and I went with Dad whenever we could, like this picture of hauling bundles of green oats home for cattle feed. Dad was pretty patient with us as long as we listened and stayed out of the way.

*I always remembered it as a Massey 33 but the website says they were only built after 1952. If any tractor buffs read this and can help identify the model of the tractor in the picture, I’d appreciate it.