What we've been doing lately

Teaching, hosting, buying plows, checking on the crops, bowling...

Garry with a giant puffball mushroom

Garry and I are both teaching Tuesdays and Thursdays at the trade school, Garry in the mornings and afternoons and I am doing an English class inbetween, before the lunch break. We are up to eight students, and I have a few extra ladies sitting in in my class. 

 Stewart from Saskatoon arrived on Saturday, he was on his first trip to Europe and came to Ukraine to check out his Mennonite roots, among other things. He was unique- our first B and B customer who drove into the yard, he had rented a car in Kiev and drove to Odessa, over to stay with us, and then back to Kiev today to catch a plane to Italy (he made it, no problems) I took a photo before he got into his car this morning to head off on the highway toward Kiev. He went for a walk every evening with Garry around the village.

 We parked across from this building when we went bowling last week, it is the home of the Cotton Jazz bar, but I never noticed walking past it on that side of the road that it is one of the buildings with an old facade, but the top floor is all new, if you check out the dates on the front of the building- 1897-2006. It looks really cool from across the street!

Look this time our names were in Russian

We have been bowling several times this month, last week I beat Garry one game, he tried to take a photo of my winning score, but he was too slow and it rest for the next game...it was the second game, you bowl by the hour, and we get 4 plus games in with the two of us bowling. Recently I have been bowling better, today we had two games where Garry only won by two pins, but then he had a 160 in the third game, and I barely broke a hundred!







Garry decided to buy a plow, he and Maxim went to a couple dealers, and arranged to have one delivered, it is a Ukrainian made one, cheaper, but it will be ours instead of borrowing one! Andrei was checking it out yesterday while Garry was assembling it, and he assumed it was used because it is very rusty looking. It came on a truck in parts.....

well actually these parts came on the second trip the truck made to the village. The first time Maxim and Garry rejected it because looked so bad, all the shares weren't even set the same distance apart, and had holes in. They phoned the dealer and they agreed that they could return it and pick out the parts they wanted for the plow. It turned out the parts closest to the door had been loaded on the truck from the pile that people buying plows had been sorting through....they picked out the ones they wanted and the ones left were pretty bad looking. They got some better ones but then Garry noticed a few smaller parts were missing, so they said they would get them from another place on the way. It arrived shortly after Garry did while he was discing up a garden for someone, after breeding a cow...he has been breeding cows almost every night lately.

Garry assembling his plow parts

Maxim, Garry and the rejected plow pieces in the truck

Sometimes here- one of ours or one someone brings a cow to the gate. One evening a guy brought one, and said he'd bring her back in the morning to be bred again. Garry said she really didn't need to be bred twice as she seemed to be in a good heat, but it turned out it was the idea of the babushka that owned her, so she was back in the morning. He bred one a couple weeks ago, the owner wanted to know what was wrong with the cow, she had been bred by the bull twice already. Garry said she seemed fine and in a good heat, he should have lots of business if she gets that one pregnant. He bred one in a village where the guy had two cows and sold his milk in the market in the city. He told Garry that it is extra work when he has to herd the cows (in their village herd) but he can make as much money as working at the gas station on the highway.

He bred one cow in the village where the owner proudly showed him two heifer calves from when Garry bred his cows last year, so it is just our cows having bull calves...wait, we had another heifer calf tonight!

Tonight Garry went to check on his prosso millet field and you can see it is getting tall, he brought a piece back to show me, and a bunch of little sunflowers for the table. It is almost 10 inches, or 25 cm tall now. The winter wheat is up. On Monday they were cleaning the manure from the barnyard and hauling it away past the wheat field, when they noticed the village herd was grazing in the green field! Maxim and Garry had a talk with the people herding the cows about keeping them out of our field. Lucky the millet field is further away!