Yesterday we had duck for dinner. On the weekend Yana had brought in two dead-er dressed ducks for the fridge, and Victor took one home with him on Monday, but one was still sitting in the fridge. Garry had cooked one before I got back, and told me the guys liked it. He stuffed his like a chicken, but I marinated mine Tuesday night (while I was up at midnight, made the mistake of going to bed early) and baked it and glazed it. After I cut the meat off I gave the cats a thrill with a carcass to gnaw on- the baby kittens enjoyed it, as you can see in the photos.
After I got the duck in the oven, I washed up the dishes from the day before- they were on hold because we ran out of water in the cistern that supplies the house and the water truck had not come as planned on Tuesday, even though it was doing deliveries in the village, so no one got to shower Tuesday night either. It was here before nine am Wednesday morning, making everything easier, although the water was a little brown at times. It gets stirred up when it runs dry and you put more in.
I did make stuffing an hour before it was done, planning to put it in foil in the pan with the duck, but we had no aluminium foil in the drawer, so I cooked it in a pan, and made mashed potatoes with garlic and coleslaw. Max and Andrey said it was like a holiday feast.
What really sucks is I didn't bring back a box of foil from Canada, I had one but left it behind to save weight in the suitcase; because when the foil was empty the box must have been tossed. It was a Canadian box I had been refilling because the boxes here don't have metal tear strips and its really hard to cut your foil off on a piece of cardboard!
We are making about 500 liters of milk a day now, Garry hopes to be up to 600 soon.
Yesterday two cows calved, and both had red calves. Bull calves unfortunately. Yana was amazed because the mothers are black. I am sure the bull we were using is a red factor bull, two parents with the red recessive makes red calves. One of the the mothers was the sick cow who was in the pen the other day, she seemed to be better the last couple days, but after calving around noon (Max was late for duck dinner) she did so poorly that afternoon that they decided to sell her to the butcher around 8 pm last night. By 9:30 the cash was in the drawer- not a lot because she couldn't stand up again, but at least she didn't need to get buried.
Polo has been trying to stay in the house as much as he can today, it has been cold and windy all day. The kittens don't trust him, even though he just wants to be friends, as you can see. The reason he wants to stay in is the temperature- at 7 pm tonight as I write the thermometer reads minus 24 and the wind is howling. It's a little cool in the house, especially in our bedroom, which tends to be cold when the wind blows.
Unfortunately, the other place that gets cold when the wind blows is the barn. They guys spent hours this morning doing chores, thawing out the water lines took a while. While they were doing it somehow the little electric heater in the milkhouse got soaked with water and Garry brought it in the house to hopefully dry out. He went down to the village hardware store and bought the heater they had which was larger and more expensive than the previous model, because he was worried that the milkhouse would freeze up without one in this weather. Unfortunately before 4 pm, he was taking that heater back and trying out the old one, because the new one was so powerful it kept blowing the breaker.
This morning the guys wished they had gotten around to moving some brewers'g rain as planned- the tubes of brewers' grain were nearly frozen solid. Luckily when Victor phoned, we could get a load of fresh stuff delivered today, it arrived just after one while I was trying to finish up making soup for lunch. Here's a picture of the truck dumping it in the pit. You can see the mission car in the foreground, since Victor had come out to translate for the guests from a government farming office that had come out around 11 am for a barn tour. They came in for conversation, tea and some hot muffins I made before leaving, delaying the start of cooking lunch. Serving lunch was delayed because Garry had to go breed a cow for someone in the village, which turned out to be two cows, so it took longer than the ten minutes he thought.
I went out and took a few photos around 4:30 while Maxim and his brother Andrei were working on thawing out the waterlines again, because they had froze up again, and the cows needed to get another drink. It's tough for them to make a lot of milk when they don't get enough water to drink. Max was using the tiger torch to thaw the ice in the metal pipes. As you can see, the new puppy seems to be making herself at home in the barn, we'll have to get her a name I guess.
Garry is off in Dnepro playing basketball tonight, hopefully his knee holds up, it was sore after we went bowling last week. We'll see how many things are frozen in the barn tomorrow morning.
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