Are there any News? Not a New.

Tanya decorated for Christmas today and the house looks quite festive.  Pictures to follow when our handy-dandy ISP works again. 

Today we are back to the old and slow one.  Groan.  Volodya, our tech who set up the new system, tried to get us running again Saturday but gave up.  He will come back tomorrow and do something. 

It is actually 0C as I write.  Maybe it will get cold tonight.  It has been so warm, a great many seeds have sprouted in the flower garden so Tanya dug up the seedlings and potted them inside for the winter.  She now has a head start on petunias and phlox for next spring.  The crocuses are even up.  Not good.

Friday I let the dogs out to run about 10:00 and they never came back as they usually do.  Bobik came limping home at 4:00, worse for the wear, bloodied from a gash on his front leg and a chewed ear. No Volk.  I went looking for him and this dog came running up to me and barked at me steady for a couple of minutes. 

Saw Volk briefly yesterday.  He had found himself a paramour.  The dog who barked at me.  Guess she was telling me to mind my own business.  Volk would come home when he was ready.  Or hungry.  He came home today.  Muddy and starved but if dogs can grin. . .  Now instead of Bobik sitting at the fence and crying to go out, they are both being mournful.

I'm trying to write an article for a Ukrainian livestock magazine and have had severe writers block.  I know what I want to say but HOW to say it in a fashion that won't get me deported or shot, yet will still have the desired impact. . . and not be 10 pages long.

The Old Slop Pail

Tanya's blood pressure is all back to normal again and hopefully will stay so.  I take her in every morning for her IV, (which reminds me of the red blood cell and the white blood cell whose love was in vein) come home and do up the dishes and clean up the kitchen before it is time to go back and get her.  With no drain for our sink, we carry the dishpan into the bathroom to dump and have a bucket to collect odds and ends, like half drunk coffee.  Reminds me a bit of the farm.

For most of my growing up years, until I left for University, we lived in an old house with no running water.  Water was carried in from the well.  In winter we kept a 45 gallon barrel by the stove and melted snow for soft water.  Water was heated on the stove to wash anything that needed washing.  Under the sink was a five gallon pail, into which small amounts of water were emptied.  Waste water was carried out and dumped in the ditch of the road that went very close by the north side of our house.  In summer, Dad ran a hose from the sink to the ditch so we were saved the carrying.  Needless to say, it smelled bad and drew flies.

Garbage disposal was well organized to minimize solid waste that needed to be hauled away.  Eggshells were crushed and fed back to the hens as a source of calcium.  Compostable scraps went to the chickens or the pigs.  Anything paper was burned.  The rest, mostly glass or cans went to a small but deep slough about 1/4 mile from the house.  Along with empty cans of weed spray, old batteries and other items which now make me shudder to think about.  We also piled rocks we picked off the field into the slough and when the municipality finally banned refuse dumps other than at specified sites, Dad filled the slough with dirt and covered it with topsoil and now it is invisible and farmed over. 

Pretty primitive but there are many many homes in rural Ukraine and Russia where water is still hauled in and out.  My sister-in-law in Beli Yar just got indoor plumbing this year.  I had threatened to set fire to their outhouse if they didn't.

Happy Thanksgiving, America

For those of you interested in such things, I recommend the book Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War by Nathaniel Philbrick.  It is a very readable history of the Pilgrims in New England.

 In the meantime, enjoy your family and the turkey.

My Kid Makes Me Proud

For those of you who sometimes question my children's parentage (How could HE be father to four such wonderful children?) I have this to say:  Pfffppttt!! Sometimes DNA triumphs over all the attempts of their mother, teachers and society at large to the contrary.  You can read about it here.

Sunday

Rained all night and again all day.  Slow soaking in kind.  I hope it doesn't freeze before the surface dries off a bit or it will be unfun driving the rest of the winter.

Tanya and I went to visit Tanya and Masha.  Andrei was in a billiard tournament.  I think that is one way he supports his family.  He doesn't lose often.  Masha showed us her new room which is quite nice, lacking only a computer which she will get when I get a new notebook.  The kitchen and hall are still to finish but it is home.

Masha brought out her English lessons and did her vocabulary for us.  She sounds the words out silently to herself.  It is cute that she phones every night to get me to say words for her that she has trouble with - purple, hippopotamus, orange are some she has called about.  She and the other students taking English have to go for private lessons as there is no English teacher in the public school she attends.  Given pay and other conditions at the school, it is a wonder there are any teachers at all. The private lesson books are much superior to the ones from the public school, too.

Too wet to walk the dogs today and I don't think they even came out of their room.  Kuchma goes outside only on demand (our demand) and the rest of the time stays curled up on the carpet.  Or chair.  He is towel trained in that if a chair or couch has a towel on it, he knows he can sleep on it.  If there are no towels on the furniture he sleeps where he wants, so it is up to us.  Last night Tanya was doing her nails and had a towel across her lap.  Kuchma is NOT a lap cat but he saw the towel, climbed onto her lap and went to sleep.

We've been doctoring this week.  Tanya's bronchitis finally cleared up but her blood pressure is bad again.  She is supposed to get an IV of something for 10 days once a year but had not bothered as she "felt fine".  So now she has had two infusions and goes again tomorrow for a third etc.  Takes about an hour and already she is feeling better.

If you haven't contributed to The Guy's effort to raise money for Prostate Cancer this November, it isn't too late.  The site is HERE.  I went for two more tests this week - blood test and ultrasound.  All good.  So after three tests if there is a problem with my prostate, no one has been able to put their finger on it.

Fall Cleaning

Today was fall cleaning at our house.  Walls, ceilings, corners, cracks and crevasses.  By 9:00 Katya was hard at work on the upstairs. After lunch, Lena and Tanya and Katya were all going full steam ahead.  I just ran taxi shuttle and tried to stay out of the way.  Kuchma just tried to stay out of the way. He got booted out at least once. I was lucky.

The house now shines like  new penny.  One is not allowed to live in a clean house in case it gets dirty again instantly (all men will understand that) but it is worth it.  The area rugs are unrolled for winter.  The summer drapes are down and winter ones are up.  The cobwebs are gone and the woodwork polished.  Ready for Christmas decorating.

Our kitchen sink has been plugged for months.  Drano didn't help.  A 10' snake helped a bit and it would drain slowly, so I would wash dishes until the sink filled with water then stop and let it drain.  I rinse with hot water.  Finding a plumber with a roto-rooter is a non-starter as we don't have plumbers in Ukraine as we know them in Canada.  Katya's husband Yuri found a guy who owned a 50' snake and so today he and Roman set out to see if they could unclog our sink drain.

It is about 25' to 30' from our sink to the corner of the house where the main sewer pipe to the septic tank is located.  The black iron pipe drain has been buried under the floor in concrete (or earth?) for over 20 years.  It may have corroded shut, collapsed or whatever, but there was no fixing the problem.  Yuri sweated at it for three or four hours but nothing doing.  The snake was not going through.  All that happened was enough gunk got stirred up that the drain is totally plugged now.

We have two choices - be shot or hanged.  Wait until spring and trench a new sewer line from the kitchen to the septic tank, independent of the one from the bathrooms.  Or run a white PVC line inside the house, along the living room wall, under the window and figure out what to do with the hot water register under the same window.  Chiseling the pipe into the wall is impossible as is jack hammering up the floor.

The 6 lb pork roast sure tasted good for supper.  There wasn't much left of it when the six of us got finished (seven counting Kuchma).

Kuchma thinks he is Emperor with all this carpet to himself

Joining the 21st Century

Today we changed our ISP and our hardware.  It isn't high-speed internet but it looks awfully good after what we have endured for so long.  We can use Skype without long pauses, garbled sound and frequent dropped calls.  I actually watched a video on YouTube without having to take 15 to 30 minutes to download it first.  Web pages load in seconds instead of minutes.  Not only that but we got a D-Link wireless so we can use our laptops anywhere in the house and only have one account.