over the top

This morning the house warmed up with the bright sun coming through the windows, and it even warmed up outside! The temperature rose to around zero, water dripped off the eaves and snow slid off the roof. As you can see in the picture, Needles the cat was fascinated by a large flock of crows on the street in front of the house. The big deep windowsills are also good for plants. I am not sure what they were eating but they were pecking away in the snow for about half an hour while the cat was on the alert in the front window.

Garry tells me he made a mistake the other day when I reported that the cows would go over the 400 liter a day mark, there were only 280 liters after two milkings, so the total for the day was only 391. Today the cows did give more than 400 liters with 428- impressive since the first day over 300 was 15 days ago.
Maxim was working on the block heater for the tractor but they didn’t get it on quite right so they will have to try again. Since the loader tractor is being kept inside the barn, it starts fine, so the other tractor is getting the help to start since it lives under the shed. Garry is hoping to get the manure spread as soon as both tractors are working.

Garry decided to turn on the cow trainers again today (cow trainers are supposed to get the cows to move back so they do not lay down in piles of manure.) After all Garry’s work currycombing the cows to clean them before we went home, he was very disappointed to discover that Maxim and the ladies had not brushed them while we were in Canada, and he had to start cleaning them up all over again. Ukrainians are not as worried about clean cows as Canadians. On Wednesday the visitor from Quebec with the Canadian-Ukrainian dairy commission said he would turn the trainers on, no matter the voltage (they are hooked up to an electric fencer power supply- the zap of power when they raise up to “go” is what makes them jump back) The fencers here in Ukraine are 220 volts (like all the electric power) instead of 110 (Garry is hoping to find something to step the power down) so the cows sometimes jump back so hard they get loose from their stall by breaking the chain tying them there.  Garry had the trainers on at times and off at others before we went home, so the cows would be encouraged to stand back in the stalls and stay cleaner. He is amazed that the cows will still reach up and lick the cow trainer bars over them- cows are pretty smart and you would think they would remember that those things hurt! After lunch he had to run out to the barn and tell the ladies to turn them off while they were milking this afternoon.

Garry and I took Marina (native Ukrainian missionary with the EFCCM) and her new husband Eugene (or Jenya) out to dinner tonight. We missed attended the wedding in December by a couple days, since he popped the question last summer- while our tickets home were booked in January 2010! Any way we had a lovely dinner at an Italian restaurant in downtown Dnepro, delicious food and good conversation.

On the way out of the village we picked up a lady walking out to the highway to catch a marshuka (vans that run regular routes) since see was heading toward Dnepropetroesk we took her along until she wanted to get out at a village halfway to the city-it looked like she’d be walking a ways- you can see it a mile or so off the highway. She insisted on paying him  5 grivina, and even knew Garry’s name. I think everyone in Nikolipolia knows who Garry is.