Zhovti Vody in better times

Zhovti Vody (Ukrainian) or Zholti Vody (Russian) in better times before the disintegration of the USSR, was a thriving city of about 80,000.  It had several uranium mines and possibly other ores too but am not sure and two large factories making electronics for the Soviet military. As such, it was a closed city in that you could not come here without clearance, if even then.  I don't know how that works but I know that Russia still uses the closed city system.

These pictures are from the website Odnoclassniki, sort of  a Facebook for pictures and messaging.  Tanya has found many of her old school chums and we have looked at pictures from all over Russia.

No idea where this fountain went

Memorial to the Great Patriotic War

Petrovskovo St before the trees grew

The Zhovti Vody bus depot

The theatre before the trees grew

Everyone headed for the football game. Local team was the Avant Garde. Shashlik and bliney took the place of hot dogs and hamburgers

The movie theatre in the days when it showed movies.

The main of three hospitals

Khmelnitskovo Blvd before they put up Bogdan's statue

The far end of Khmelnitskovo blvd.

Leaving Zhovti Vody for Krivii Rih (Ukrainian) Krivoi Rog (Russian). 

Note: I corrected the mix-up of names from the original post as I had the Ukrainian Zhovti as Russian and the Russian Zholti as Ukrainian.

Where have you been?

The answer to that, from Wayne and Shuster's "Dr Jekyll and Mrs Hyde" was "I've been a broad".  I think they wrote the entire skit around that line.

I have been crunching numbers by the thousands, reorganizing them sixteen ways to breakfast and drawing nice pictures to see if any of them will tell me anything. when you have, just as one section, one country, one state, six counties and 43 vegetables, over 11 years, price and production, you can see how the numbers add or rather multiply.  And there are four or five sections. I am slowly getting close to a first draft, at least.

By the time night came I was too tired to blog or read blogs or think about blogs. So tired I was making stupid mistakes like copying one year's set of data into another year or one crop's data into another crop.  Stuff like that is catch-able and easily fixed but it takes time.

My computer had been acting up for some time and I was sure I had a virus but Kaspersky couldn't find it. When your msconfig file is missing, that is a sure sign something is rotten  in the state of Dellmark. Checked the internet and found SUPERAnti-SpyWare highly recommended.  So I tried it.  Found one serious something and things are running a bit better. When I have time, I will explore further.

Snowed yesterday.  And well it should have, since much of Europe was pretty much shut down and Kyiv got 70 cm.  We got 4 cm of wet snow only and then +1C temps, enough to melt and make everything either slushy or icy depending on where the salt trucks had been.  We have two shiny new sanding and snowplow trucks in our fair city.  AND a new real garbage truck on our route; no more tractor and wagon or old beater 3 ton.  Things are looking up.

We were late getting our garbage to the curb on Tuesday and had a fair bit as we had cleaned out the attic.  Tanya called the driver who turned around and came back for us.  That kind of service you don't get in North America, I bet. Cost us a whole dollar tip.

Went to town for groceries today.  Hadn't been for three days.  Timing was awesome.  Bread, donuts and such were warm from the oven/deep fryer.  Cheaper to buy food from the deli than go to a restaurant. Same benefit - no cooking and no dishes.

I will catch up on my blog reading as I miss my regulars, but it will be a few more days.

Playing with words.

A friend sent me this.  Said she didn't want credit unless it was a line of credit.  They have been around before but just in case you missed them, here they are again. (Sort of BOHICA). Washington Post is supposedly the source but who knows after five or ten years.

Take any word from the dictionary, alter it by adding, subtracting, or changing one letter, and supply a new definition.

  1. Cashtration (n.): The act of buying a house, which renders the subject financially impotent for an indefinite period of time.

2. Ignoranus : A person who's both stupid and an asshole.
3. Intaxicaton : Euphoria at getting a tax refund, which lasts until you realize it was your money to start with.

4. Reintarnation : Coming back to life as a hillbilly.

5. Bozone ( n.): The substance surrounding stupid people that stops bright ideas from penetrating. The bozone layer, unfortunately, shows little sign of breaking down in the near future.

6. Foreploy: Any misrepresentation about yourself for the purpose of getting laid.
7. Giraffiti : Vandalism spray-painted very, very high
8. Sarchasm : The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the person who doesn't get it.

9. Inoculatte : To take coffee intravenously when you are running late.

10. Osteopornosis : A degenerate disease. (This one got extra credit.)

11. Karmageddon : It's like, when everybody is sending off all these really bad vibes, right? And then, like, the Earth explodes and it's like, a serious bummer.

12. Decafalon (n.): The grueling event of getting through the day consuming only things that are good for you.

13. Glibido : All talk and no action.
14. Dopeler Effect: The tendency of stupid ideas to seem smarter when they come at you rapidly.
15. Arachnoleptic Fit (n.): The frantic dance performed just after you've accidentally walked through a spider web.

16. Beelzebug (n.): Satan in the form of a mosquito, that gets into your bedroom at three in the morning and cannot be cast out.

17. Caterpallor ( n.): The color you turn after finding half a worm in the fruit you're eating.

Alternate meanings for common words.

1. Coffee, n. The person upon whom one coughs.

2. Flabbergasted, adj. Appalled by discovering how much weight one has gained.

3. Abdicate, v. To give up all hope of ever having a flat stomach.

4. Esplanade, v. To attempt an explanation while drunk.
5. Willy-nilly, adj. Impotent.
6. Negligent, adj. Absentmindedly answering the door when wearing only a nightgown.

7. Lymph, v.. To walk with a lisp.

8. Gargoyle, n. Olive-flavored mouthwash.

9. Flatulence, n. Emergency vehicle that picks up someone who has been run over by a steamroller.

10. Balderdash, n. A rapidly receding hairline.
11. Testicle, n. A humorous question on an exam.
12. Rectitude, n. The formal, dignified bearing adopted by proctologists.
13. Pokemon, n. A Rastafarian proctologist.

14. Oyster, n. A person who sprinkles his conversation with Yiddishisms.
15. Frisbeetarianism, n. The belief that, after death, the soul flies up onto the roof and gets stuck there.
16. Circumvent, n. An opening in the front of boxer shorts worn by Jewish men

The Brown Bear in the Bar in Brock

My late Uncle Vince was a master story teller and the Shaggy Dog story was his forte.  For the uninitiated, a Shaggy Dog story, as I know it, is a long, usually boring windup with a very bad pun as a fast breaking punch line.  They usually need to be told, not read.  Uncle Vince's  stories were so long you wanted to shoot him to finish them and the punch lines so bad, you wished you had shot him.  This particular story, much abridged, was one of his.

A brown bear walked into the bar in Brock and ordered a beer. The bartender said "No, sorry.  We don't serve beer to brown bears here in the bar in Brock".

The next several minutes of story can be inserted as you wish, but no matter how hard the brown bear pleads his case, the answer is always the same. "No, sorry.  We don't serve beer to brown bears here in the bar in Brock".

Finally the brown bears snaps.  He has had it. "You see that woman sitting at the end of the bar? If you don't give me a beer, I will devour her!"  The bartender says, "No, sorry.  We don't serve beer to brown bears here in the bar in Brock".

The brown bear roars at the woman, kills her with a blow from his paw and proceeds to munch her down.  He comes back to the bartender and says "NOW, GIVE ME A BEER".   The bartender says, "No, sorry.  We don't serve beer to brown bears here in the bar in Brock and we definitely don't serve drug addicts".


"Drug addict?  What are you talking about?", says the brown bear.
"That was the barbituate".

Stars of the 21st Century

This weekend, an adjudicated multi-city dance festival was held in Zhovti Vody at the Theatre.  There were dance teams ages from 5 to about 17 years from nine cities.  Tanya and I went Sunday from 10:00 to 1:00. We saw at least 30 dance routines in that time and these kids were amazing.  The work that had gone into training, choreography and costumes left us in awe of the teachers and students.

One of the good things to carry over from the Soviet Union is the availability in small cities of professional quality dance and voice instructors.  In Soviet times attention was paid to culture.  There were culture halls in every town and village where kids went to learn performance arts and good instructors for each.

Of the dances we saw, there were traditional dances with traditional costumes; modern dances with modern costumes and fun dances with fun costumes.  Our favourite was about 20 five-year-olds in zebra costumes with a teen age clown and a teen age ring master.

Some performances had four different age groups in four different costume sets doing four different routines all intertwined at high speed.  Fifty kids dancing their hearts out and no collisions. First time I had ever been to such an event and it was interesting for me to see how the difficulty of the movements and of the choreography were adjusted to the ages and abilities of the kids.

Masha had a solo dance - a Turkish belly dance - and was judged best in her age group (she is 9).  Tanya and I had seen a professional at one of the Turkish nights at our hotel when we were on holidays.  Masha had the basic moves down cold.  She had one year of physiotherapy between ages 1 and 2 before she could even walk, so watching her dance is pretty special.  She still doesn't have all the flexibility in her one leg that other kids may have but it doesn't slow her down.  And her dance routine certainly showed the rest of her was flexible. She even made the local paper.

Tanya took her camera which ran out of battery about 45 minutes in so we didn't get many pictures.  Shooting in a large hall with a small camera is a problem any time. The picture of Masha is professionally done and her mother paid for it.

Zhovti Vody - some pictures

Someone posted some great pictures of Zhovti Vody on Odnoklassniki, the Russian version of Facebook which is much more user friendly and superb for pictures.  http://www.odnoklassniki.ru .  If you can translate the web pages (I use Google Chrome so it is easy), you can likely sign up and surf pictures of people and places to your hearts content.  Tanya has used it to find many of the people she went to school with or to spend all day looking at other people's flower gardens.

Anyhow, here are a few pictures of our town.

This is looking east-northeast (NOTHING is square with the world) down Petrovskovo Blvd.  The new electronics and appliance store (Comfy) and grocery supermarket (Velika Kshenia  - Big Spoon in Ukrainian) are to the right.  To the right of them are apartment blocks and in the distance are three 16 story apartment blocks.

This is looking in the exact opposite direction from high over the town square.  the building is the Theatre.  This weekend there was a two day children's dance festival with hundreds of students from several cities.  We went today for three hours and I will blog about that when I get the pictures looked at. The yellow buildings are older apartments.

Theatre at Night

This is the opposite side of the square from the Theatre.  the building with the arches was a movie theatre in Soviet days but has fallen on hard times.  The yellow buildings are apartments.

Bogdan Khmelnitsky is the local hero.  In 1648 he and his Cossacks freed Ukraine from Polish rule at the Battle of Yellow River about 35 km from here.  Of course in 1653 he had to sign over to the Russians to keep the Poles from making a comeback.

Bogdan's statue has been different colours over the years so some wag made a composite

Bogdan's statue in the park on a foggy evening

Economics University

Commemorating the beginning of Uranium mining in the city

One of many bus stops

Russian Orthodox Church 

There are literally thousands of trees in the city.
Tree planting was a priority in industrial towns and cities

Our newest restaurant.  Not bad food.  Pricey, though.

One of many parks

Railway bridge over the Yellow River (I think)

Soccer pitch is well used.

The realities of life in the Soviet style apartment buildings.

Sandbox Training the Cat.

Andrei was here Thursday afternoon and using our electric chainsaw, helped Tanya cut down a dead apple tree and trim up a number of others.  I worked on my report so I could ship a chunk of it out Friday.  I have used chainsaws but they terrify me.  Along with pressure cookers and deep fat fryers.  When you make Clumsy Carp seem like Rudolph Nureyev, you should avoid things that have potential to wreak grievous harm to yourself and others.

Friday morning I helped Tanya clean up all the branches and haul them to a burning pile over on the abandoned lot because it was threatening rain and could have turned to winter before it dried out enough.  The burning pile will still wait for spring as most of it is too damp.  There was a barrel of garbage in the dogs' yard that hadn't been burned in two years.  Mostly dog hair and food bags but likely other stuff too.  I didn't tell Tanya but dumped some BBQ starter on it and lit it just before I went in the house.

It caught and burned as I could see smoke drifting by our north window.  In a couple hours the sky cleared up and the day brightened.  We were both upstairs on our computers when we heard this awful "BOOM".  I said it must be thunder.  Guess there was something in the barrel I didn't know about.  Good thing the dogs were gone.

I had let them out in the morning for a run and they disappeared until this morning.  They were happy to come home and were so tired they could hardly wag their tails.  They are still young enough to stay out all night.  

And such a nice night it was.  The temperature had gone up to +15C (60F) Thursday night and the wind howled all night.  Friday and Friday night it stayed +15C which broke a more than 100 year record in Ukraine.  There are actually lilacs blooming in southeastern Ukraine near the Azov Sea. Crazy weather.

So the flower garden is all ready for winter, if it ever comes.  Earlier in the week we banked loose soil around the bases of the rose bushes and raked most of the leaves and dead flowers off.  I was allowed to help though I almost wrecked it and cut off one of the small stems of a clematis.  Normal for me.

Kuchma is getting old so we will try to keep him in the house most of the winter instead of booting him out at night.  Which means we have to train a 12 year old cat to use a litter box.  I locked him in the passageway between the house and outbuilding with the litter box.  It worked.  He used it.  And didn't use one of Tanya's boxes of dirt covered bulbs and roots.

So I tried it again some time later. He used it again; but only half in the box and half over the edge on the floor.  This presented him with a problem as to covering it so he dragged a floor rag to cover his deposit in box and on floor.  Not very accurate but can't fault him for neatness.