Visiting Dasha on a Rainy Afternoon

Masha, Tanya, the two kittens and I sat on the front landing for over an hour watching the rain.  It was the second good rain we have had this summer and the air was cool and fresh.  A swallow sat on a wire overhead enjoying the impromptu shower, ruffling her feathers and preening herself.

The flies were very annoying.  Tanya said they like me because I am warm.  I thought it was because I smelled like something they could lay eggs on.

The kittens moved from lap to lap, watching the rain and listening to the thunder for a while, then climbed on my tummy and went to sleep.  Bonya was more or less vertical with his chin on my shoulder and Tigritsa horizontal on my arm with her chin on her brother.  Holding still is only fun for so long but they were quite good about me putting them down.

We think we lost another neighbour; the funeral bus from Lina's company went by filled with people, headed down our street.  Big Victor told Tanya this spring he had cancer and we had not seen him for a while.  Working in the mines claims another victim and our street has another old widow.

We decided to take Masha home (she was here for the night) and go visit Dasha.  Tomorrow is our last day home for a while and I had not seen Dasha for almost a month.  She is growing and very active, waving arms, kicking feet and clenching and unclenching her fingers and toes.  She will be three months on July 25th and weighs about 5.8 kg (12 lbs, 12 oz.).  She smiled and cooed as long as we didn't try to pick her up.  Then suddenly she got tired and it was nap time.  Tania bundled her tight, rolled her on her side and she went to sleep

Our little Dasha

 Tomorrow night I catch the Monday 1:00 am train to Kyiv and a 10:00 flight to Athens.  I will be there two weeks on a project. I got my documents the other day including one for a car rental.  Heart attack time.  I am supposed to drive from the airport in Thessaloniki, the second largest city in Greece across Chalkidiki peninsula??  And read Greek road signs??  I emailed that I hoped they had good insurance and learned that no, the translator would meet me in at the airport and do the driving.  OK, I can breath now...

Monday morning, Andrei will drive Tania, Lina and Masha to Kyrylivka south of Melitopol on the Azov Sea for 9 days.  The sea is relatively shallow, warm and beaches are sandy.  Great for kids.

Tanya and I are going back to Greece in Sept for two weeks and friends from Saskatchewan are joining us.  We will be staying in Athens and looking forward to exploring a new country. Tanya thinks we should rent a car...

Love and Marriage; Part Two

Too much truth in this story.

There was a group of women at a seminar on how to live in a loving relationship with your husband.
The women were asked, "How many of you love your husbands?" 
All the women raised their hands. 
Then they were asked, "When was the last time you told your husband you loved him?"
Some women answered today, some yesterday, some didn't remember. 
The women were then told to take their phones and send the following text: "I love you, sweetheart." 
Then the women were told to exchange phones and read the responding text messages. 
Here are some of the replies:
1. Who is this?
2. Eh, mother of my children, are you sick?
3. I love you too.
4. What now? Did you crash the car again?
5. I don't understand what you mean?
6. What did you do now?
7. ?!?
8. Don't beat about the bush, just tell me how much you need?
9. Am I dreaming?
10. If you don't tell me who this message is actually for, someone will die.
11. I thought we agreed we would not drink during the day.
12. Your mother is coming to stay, isn't she??

Software things NOT to do: Delta Search

Some days, I am dumber than two sacks of hammers.  Today being one of those days.  Being a sucker for freeware I clicked on something I shouldn't have ought to clicked on.  Downloaded it and installed it to see what it did.  It was a PDF manager or some useless thing.

Actually I was trying to download a PDF file from a site that said I needed this first.  I trust everybody and when Winnie Mandela emails or Skypes me to help her get $47 million safely out of South Africa I am going to help her.

The program didn't amount to anything so I quickly uninstalled it but when I went to Google Chrome I found myself taken over by Delta Search which had been packaged with it.  I am too quick on the "next" button and don't read the fine print in the software licence agreement.  Or even read it at all. The Software Licence Agreement and The Bible have in common that people really don't read it, they just scroll to the bottom and click "I accept".

Delta Search is a phoney search engine that brings up fake results, directing you to websites you do not wish to visit so they can sell you something you do not wish to buy.  I went to Google Desktop (yes, I still use it) and used it to search the internet.

Learned a few more things there too.  

Do all the usual on Chrome first:

• Go to Customize and Control, 
• First, Tools, Extensions and remove anything that looks like Delta search - it may have other names.
• Then Settings, On Startup Open specific pages - open and delete Delta anything
• Also on Settings, Appearance Show Home Button change - delete anything Delta
• Also on Settings, Search - reset default then open Manage Search Engines and delete anything that looks like Delta.
• Close and reopen Chrome.  You MAY have solved your problem...or not.

If not:
Download adwcleaner and run it (Search then Delete), then run Malware Bytes Anti-Malware which you can get for free and should have on your computer anyhow. I have the Pro version which costs but has saved me many times.

That should solve your problem BUT be careful.  If you Google "uninstall Delta Search", some of the sites that will come up are also fakes and while they will tell you the above they will then suggest downloading and running something like SpyHunter or SpyWare Doctor which will "identify" all sorts of stuff on your computer and make you buy it to get rid of it.  I read several different pages of instructions before I did anything and lucked out because two of the first links I opened were fakes promoting the two Spy programs.

In Praise of a Good Product

Disclaimer:  No one is paying me for this though they certainly ought to!

I have a consulting project in Greece, much of which will be done online or by pouring through documents provided by the client or others.  Most of these documents are in Greek, which as William Shakespeare noted, are Greek to me.

Translation is a big problem.  If I have no idea what the document says, I do not know if it is important enough to have it translated, so I need something quick and dirty.  Google Translate works well enough to get the gist of it, though of course agricultural terms are not well translated in many (most) cases.  And it does some languages better than others.

Working with Russian, Ukrainian, Turkish or German documents has not been a problem to date.  Whether the document was in Word, Excel or PDF format, normally, I could cut and paste enough into Google Translate. But it would not work for Greek, pasting from a PDF into GT or into Word.  Some letters came out as little boxes other letters were misread and replaced with a wrong letter, sometimes from another alphabet.  I had all the right fonts but...  Panic.

Kostas and Chrisa are the two people the client has assigned to work with me and emails have been going back and forth since July 1. Three days ago, Chrisa suggested ABBYY FineReader.  What a life saver!

I have used other OCR (Optical Character Recognition) software in the past but  nothing that worked on other than English.  FineReader works in 24 languages and it LOVES Greek.  I can load an 18 page Greek PDF document and in a couple of minutes I have a perfect replica Word Document, complete with pictures, tables, everything. Load that into Google Translate and ipso-presto, it is fully translated for a quick read (but needs a great deal of formatting cleanup to be passable as a document).

Interface Languages

Sometimes a PDF is not created in scannable format or the information might be in image format. No problem. FineReader just read a photo I took in 2007 of a descriptive sign at a 15th century castle in Crimea.  The sign was in Russian but in a minute I had a reasonable English translation.  Good for labeling pictures of the castle to put on-line.  (Someday).

I knew about ABBYY long ago but didn't know they were into OCR.  To me they are Dictionaries.  I have a Russian-Ukrainian-English digital dictionary I bought in 2008 but they have been around for much longer than that and have many languages in some of their dictionaries.

FineReader is an excellent purchase if you do any amount of document scanning and need it in clear clean type face, whether to read in Google Translate or simply to save as  a document.  It works great!!

Divide and Conquer: The History of White Privilege.

This is a superb 10 minute presentation of how our skin colour got to be more important than our economic situation.

Guest post: And then its head popped off

Post authored by my daughter May-B once writer of Buggering Crap Monkies

I often come upon adventure when I take my dog, Monty, for a walk.  You would think we would avoid getting into trouble on one of the three routes we take daily, but more often than not, that isn't the case.  There was the time a pack of dogs left their yard and circled Monty doing nothing to him while he screamed as though being murdered.  There was the time he chased a small car into a snow bank and then looked back to me as though he had caught me a great prize.  He weighs 18 lbs, but he gets me into more trouble than most full grown people I know.

But I digress.  This tale is not about Monty, although he was present, it's about another animal. A bird.

A bird I had to kill.

Monty and I were on our walk, minding our own business (as we do), when a City truck drove by.  I thought nothing of it and carried on my way until the truck slammed on his brakes and swerved to the side.  I turned to look and saw a small bird lay on the road.  The two had obviously collided leaving a clear winner.

A middle aged man stepped out of the truck with panic on his face.  He looked like a 70s hippy throw-back with long silver hair and handlebar mustache.  He warily approached the bird and explained he had tried to avoid her, but the bird had swooped right into his tires. 

She was a small robin with a mottled brown chest and a badly damaged lower half.  She breathed heavily, gasping for air, as she lay dying in front of us.  The city worker's eyes began to mist and a single tear rolled down his cheek as he offered to take her to the Humane Society for help.  I assured him it was too late for that.  She was in her last moments. 

The man was overwrought and stood dumbfounded at the little life ending in front of him.  He looked to me for guidance and I found myself offering to take care of her.  To end her suffering so as to end his.  He agreed to hold Monty's leash (thank God the dog had not decided to be brave and eat the poor bird.  I think that would have been the end of the man altogether.)

I had two waste bags in my pocket for the dog and used them because I'd always been told birds carry disease.  I contemplated the fact I had no idea if this was true, but I wasn't taking the chance.  I draped one bag over her body and one over her head.  I picked her up gently and decided the most humane thing was to break her neck.

Being a city girl, I have never done this before. I assumed it would be simple.

I gently twisted.  And twisted.  And twisted.  The bird's head just kept turning while she just kept living. 

I started to panic. Not only was I not helping to end the bird's suffering, I was just torturing the poor thing.  

I was about to give up when I pulled out instead of twisted.

POP! The head came clear off the bird. 

I quickly put the bags back together so the tormented man wouldn't see the mess I made and ran to the garbage bin a block away to disperse of the corpse I had mutilated.  I returned, assured the man it all went well and was not his fault, and walked as fast as I could away from the dump site.

I immediately messaged my sisters to tell them of the horror.  They assured me I was a hero, despite the decapitation.

Next up, chickens.

Once Parted, Now Departed

Went for a haircut today.  While not ready for a comb-over by any stretch, I have to admit, I have not seen a stand that thin since the Drought of '61.

I have the same amount of hair but when you get old it grows out of your nose and ears. As Jeff Foxworthy (or possibly Dave Barry?) noted, "Pull on a nose hair and you can watch a guy's hairline recede".

Yulia has been cutting my hair for over 6 years.  She is a very nice lady and I quite like her.  She is closer to 60 than 50, barely able to see over the top of my head when I am sitting in her chair, but VERY meticulous. I tell her "Kak vsigda" (like always) and end up with a perfectly coiffed Yanukovych haircut.  It could be worse, I suppose; a Donald Trump haircut.


The hair salon is located on the second floor of an older Soviet style strip mall called Devyatka (9), anchored by a grocery store where we sometimes shop.  I think it must be a cooperative of some kind as there doesn't appear to be an owner per se.  There are private beauty salons, as Tanya has had manicures/pedicures from two of them but you can always tell who is the owner/boss.

There is a partition down the middle with five work stations on each side.  One side is men's haircuts, the other, women's. My Tanya's hairdresser, another Tanya, is on the end, just around the corner from Yulia so the three of them can converse while we are getting our haircuts and Tanya can approve Yulia's handiwork

Last time I got a haircut in Canada, it was $25 plus a $5 tip.  And a good haircut it was, too. Yulia charges me $5 (40 UAH) so I give her a $5 tip too.