Needles the cat has decided to wander inside while the door was open- Victor's guests are leaving for their tour of the day. Last year Needles was Jonah's sickly kitten that one of the village girls gave him when Seth was gone in the summer. He got better, but was in the house all the time until this spring, when he decided that outdoors was nice (right after we got him fixed so he's not running around fathering kittens) and now he comes in every morning, eats some catfood, has a nap in one of the chairs and usually slips out the door and you don't see him until the aext morning. I assume he's going to be indoors most, or all the time aonce it gets cold or wet out. Now Polo has come in and he's sleeping under my feet. He knows he's the special dog, since Mint get tied to the dog house all day, and some nights too. Somedays I wish he didn't think that being the special dog means he needs to climb on my lap and lick my face, but I guess he misses Jonah, who used to let him do it.
Sunday we took Peter and Alice to church with us at Morningstar, after dropping off the milk at Victor's church. Afterwards she asked if church was always four hours, but I told her it was really only three. They enjoyed the praise singing and we were lucky that our friend the Nigerian medical student translated for all of us. He has a real gift for languages. We went to Puzata Hata for lunch and they had a place to take your picture outside at the one downtown, so here is Garry and I as Ukrainians! Thanks to Peter for buying lunch and taking the picture. Then we walked around at the central market before heading back to the village. Garry was supposed to be back by 3:30 because Johan Wiens was out with a crew doing video for the trade school/dairy barn project that Garry is involved with.
Sunday drive
When I was a kid, we'd often go for a Sunday afternoon drive. Not to visit someone, but to see what we could see, and so I thought I'd show you some sights along the road, all of which we even saw on Sunday. If you don't know, calling someone a Sunday driver is a bit of an insult- it means that you drive slower than other people, because you are looking at the scenery with time to spare, unlike that driver wanting to pass them, in a hurry to get where they are going. Of course if you are Garry you drive fast and watch the scenery.
As Seth and Jonah could tell you, most Sunday mornings we see a group of bikers that we call the pelaton on the highway as we drive to church. We used to see some with a chase car with Ukrainian triathlon team painted on the side, not sure if this is the same group.
For all farmers (everyone knows why they drive slowly down the road, they are checking out everyone else's crops) here's a winter wheat field turning a lovely green. Many of them are not this nice, it must have gotten that rain just right.
This week we saw a harvester in one of the pumpkin fields just outside the village. I plan to do a blog post soon about this interesting crop, Garry has visited some pumpkin farmers, and watched them processing the seed this fall.
This photo has a story, for a long time I have been going to take a photo of this sign we drive past everytime we go to Dnepro to add to my Soviet photo collection. You may wonder why, because until last month there was a hammer and sickle on top of that post. It seems that for Ukrainian Independence Day (August 24th) someone took it off and painted a nice Ukrainian flag on the rectangular part of the sign. It only took twenty years I guess.
Here's one for Stacy, who said she'd like to own one of these cars, its a Moskvee or Moskavitch, and this is an old one with an older licence plate (the next photo has and older one) and the name was in Russian too.
Whenever we see a car like this one (and we do a few times every month) I think of going with my dad in the early sixties to get my great-grandfather's car inspected, I can remember that it was exciting climbing in the back seat for this trip in Pappy's car, I think it was two-tone blue. I wasn't in school yet, so before 1964, and I don't remember what kind of car it was, but it looked very much like this one! Round headlights, big curves. Even though it looks like it could be from the 1940's Garry tells me that this kind of car was made until the 1980s. Like the Lada, they just kept making the same model for many years.
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