Why we need a Greenhouse

Tanya went to Dnipropetrovs'k today to pick up my invitation from her sister in Abakan. It was sent by DHL to the tune of $50 which is an improvement over last time when it was $100. DHL has an office in Dnipro and do not do inter country delivery, so we have to pick it up. I will head out at 11:30 tonight for Kyiv to put in my application for a Russian visa.

I would love to know what takes a month to get a personal invitation from a family member? The application for an invitation went to the local OVIR which is the police department that registers all residents, permanent or if foreign, temporary. Since Luda is no longer working outside the home, the invitation had to be done by my brother in law. Do they check out Luda and Valerie? Do they check me out more thoroughly than if I were simply a tourist or going on business? In the latter situations ostensibly you are under the "control" of a tourist agency or an approved business.

It is comforting to know that Russian xenophobia is many centuries old and not just a carry over from Soviet times. Also, I just learned from another book I am reading "Holy Madness - Romantics, Patriots and Revolutionaries 1776-1871" by Adam Zamoyski, that the idea that the West is plotting against Russia is also at least a couple of centuries old. "From the early 1840's, the Slavophiles propagated the twin notions of a great Western Conspiracy to crush Russia and of a noxious Western 'disease' threatening to undermine her spirituality." So it isn't Nicholas, Stalin, nor Putin.  It is Mother Russia.

We will be gone to the end of April and Tanya is worried about her garden.  She moved most of her plants to the passageway between the house and outbuilding where they are cold but not freezing, just to delay their growth.  The tomatoes are shooting upwards and all the other tiny plants are doing well too so it may look like  jungle when we get back.  Katya and Yuri will stay here while we are away.  Katya will look after the plants and Yuri will be repairing our kitchen sink drain which plugged solid or collapsed a few months back and has been waiting for spring to repair. He will have to run an entirely new pipe.  Above ground and above the cement.  Pictures later I hope.

Here is why we need a greenhouse.  We are looking for the person in Zhovti Vody who builds them but he moved and we haven't found his new location yet.

Plants are started in a flat box covered with plastic wrap then transplanted
into individual cups when they are big enough

They were growing very well in the front entry by the window and radiator. 
Too well to last until May to put in the garden.

Some of the tomatoes

The black stacking crates were 50 cents so we bought 13 (all they had).

The community garden area.  It was cold, foggy and wet this morning. 
Snow from last night still on the ground in patches.

Collected Quotations

Years back I started collecting quotations I found written down someplace and didn't want to lose. Now Google will find every quotation ever recorded. I was interested to see which quotations had caught my fancy at the time and that I took the energy to actually type out (being a 20 word a minute man makes for tough sledding on the keyboard).

I had actually planned on a well researched and brilliantly written blog post on risk but got tired out after digging out the references. You are stuck with this as I can just cut and paste.

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"It is my feeling that as we grow older we should become not less radical but more so. I do not, of course, mean this in any political-party sense, but in a willingness to struggle for those things in which we passionately believe." - Margaret Laurence

"I try to take one day at a time, but sometimes several days attack me at once." - Jennifer Unlimited

"If you can't be a good example, then you'll just have to be a horrible warning." -Catherine Aird

"The pure and simple truth is rarely pure and never simple." Oscar Wilde

The average pencil is seven inches long, with just a half-inch eraser - in case you thought optimism was dead. -Robert Brault, software developer, writer

"He has all the virtues I dislike and none of the vices I admire." - Winston Churchill

"I have never killed a man, but I have read many obituaries with great pleasure." -- Clarence Darrow

"He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary." -- William Faulkner (about Ernest Hemingway)

"I've had a perfectly wonderful evening. But this wasn't it."-- Groucho Marx

"I didn't attend the funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying I approved of it." - Mark Twain

"He has no enemies, but is intensely disliked by his friends." - Oscar Wilde

"I am enclosing two tickets to the first night of my new play; bring a friend... If you have one." -- George Bernard Shaw to Winston Churchill...followed by Churchill's response: "Cannot possibly attend first night, will attend second, if there is one." -- Winston Churchill

Man that is born of a woman Hath but a short time to live, And is full of misery. He cometh up, and is cut down like a flow’r; He fleeth as it were a shadow, And ne’er continueth in one stay. Job 14:1,2 KJV

"What is ominous is the ease with which some people go from saying that they don't like something to saying that the government should forbid it. When you go down that road don't expect freedom to survive very long." - Thomas Sowell

Management is about getting the best out of existing resources, under given constraints, whereas leadership is about moving beyond constraints and redefining what success means.

"A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it worth the effort." Herm Albright

Kind words can be short and easy to speak, but their echoes are truly endless. ~ Mother Teresa

"A loving heart is the truest wisdom." Charles Dickens

"The greatest pleasure I know is to do a good action by stealth, and to have it found out by accident." Charles Lamb

"Pure love and suspicion cannot dwell together: at the door where the latter enters, the former makes its exit." Alexandre Dumas

"I don’t know how old I am because the goat ate the bible that had my birth certificate in it. The goat lived to be twenty-seven." Satchel Paige.

"If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we should find in each man’s life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility." Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

"I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forego their use." Galileo Galilei.

"When you say that you agree to a thing on principle, you mean that you have not the slightest intention of carrying it out in practice." Otto Von Bismarck.

"Faced with the choice between changing one’s mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof." John Kenneth Gabraith

"As you go through life, you will have many opportunities to keep your mouth shut.
Take advantage of all of them." My Mother

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More another time. I have pages and pages of them, saved over 40 odd years.

Finished

I finished off the business plan last night and emailed everything to my colleague whom I hope is still my friend after he reviews it. It was 11:00 pm. I slept until 9:00 this morning and again all after noon. I shall go to bed early tonight, too.

Now to concentrate on some stuff for another friend and colleague that needed to be done two weeks ago. He is firing up his consulting business after a four year hiatus and developing all new material, website etc. Some of the work I have been most proud of, I have done working with Wayne and his clients.

Tanya and Lena worked in the garden this afternoon. All the local gardens have been raked over, smoothed out and a few brave souls are already planting. Potatoes, mostly thoug the ground is hardly warm enough for anything to grow. Tanya planted lettuce today. It is supposed to be +17 next week. Our first spring rain fell this afternoon driving them from the garden. The mini-crocuses are blooming furiously in the front yard, trying to be noticed. The tulips and irises are showing green shoots. I heard a song bird of some kind two days ago. It is spring. Tonight we change our clocks to DST, I think.

A Christmas package from my daughter in BC arrived this week. She mailed it early in the new year. Two and a half months. I expect the last month was getting from the main PO in Kyiv to our little village PO. When we drove out to pick it up, I got thinking that these people are most likely descendents of people who were once serfs 150 years ago.

Winter Fishing in Saskatchewan

My friend, Wayne who now lives on Vancouver Island, was born and raised on a farm near Big River Saskatchewan, where his father John, still lives. John was a logger, farmer and in the winter ice-fisherman.  He has run nets in Delaronde Lake for decades and in his early 80's is still running the nets.  Only now, the money raised from the sale of whitefish goes to the local hockey rink or some other charity. A couple of winters ago, Wayne decided to video the process of laying the nets under the ice.  This is his first ever edited video, which he finally posted on YouTube.

A great website about Russia

I just found the Russian Sphinx blog site with the most awesome graphics of information about Russia and the rest of the world too. Pays to read the comments on The Economist articles.  The Daily Chart was of arms exporters and importers and one of the commenters linked to this http://russiansphinx.blogspot.com/2011/03/military-budgets-by-country-and-for.html

Other posts this month:  Even if you don't care about Russia check out the graphics

• The geography of Russian marriage and divorce
• Men vs. Women on Facebook
• Demographics profile (Russia's regions and countri...
• Demographics profile

Sometimes they don't

Demeur: Life before unions

Demeur: Life before unions