In a fog...

Garry going for yet another spare

 Garry is glad that they finished off the silage last week, as the weather has been rainy since. Yesterday we drove in Dnepropetroesk to go bowling and pick up a girl that may be coming to the trade school (see more on other blog) and it was a foggy day, as you'll see in the photos.

 I beat Garry in the second game with a 162, this is our 4th when we got the camera out, we get four games plus a couple frames in in an hour (you pay by the lane per hour) We like to get our money's worth and work up a sweat with the heavier balls.

Garry won this one - 191 to 145

 Part of the sidewalk outside the mall was blocked off with red and white tape because of this crane with a guy working on something in the bucket up there. We walked down the staircase we normally walk out and discovered tape across the bottom of the stairs...and had to walk back up and down a different one. Maybe the top of the stairs would have been a better place for the tape closing the stairs?

Foggy downtown

Foggy leaving the city

and on the highway outside the village, too!

Our trip with Yana

 Here they are finally, a photo montage of last week Saturday, when we drove Yana home with her bull calves in the back of the Lada for a couple hours, out past  the small city of Tokmak on a sunny fall day.

Last week the trees still looked amazing! There are fewer leaves now

Garry stopped on a bridge over the tracks so I could take this photo

Here is Garry, Max, Yana and her mother Jenia loading up the calves in the back of the car before we left in the morning.

Polo and Spotted Box (one of Box's Kitten)

You can see my reflection in the window and the calf looking out

The long ride over, Garry unties the calves

 The calves had a quiet trip, lots of padding back there, and only one made a pile as we were driving there, so not bad, and as you see they were happy to arrive at their new home.

The calves went to Yana's parents house

Yana's parents' house

 When we got there we were invited in for a bowl of borsht, made by Yana's father. Very meaty and filling. They had picked some hot peppers from the garden for Garry, he chopped up half one and put it in his soup and wow did he sweat! They also have wonderful bread from the neighbor magazine (store) We had some very tasty tea also, sitting in the little kitchen.

Next dorr they have an outdoor stove

Garry made friends with the dogs

Garry and Yana washing their hands before we ate.

 Before we left, Yana showed Garry the potbellied pig. They are very popular here, they make tasty meat, but eat like a goose we are told, they grow better than regular pigs on poor feed.

This duck was going into a bag.

 WE brought three bags of stuff back for Genia, Yana's mother, one with some stuff inclucing her reading glasses she had left the last time she was home, and two bags with a live duck in them.

Here is Yana's house a few blocks away

 Garry went in the fence to see a calf Yana bought last year. Yana's husband came out of the house when we dropped her off, she is staying for a week or two, someone else is helping her mother milk the cows, one of the local vets, who was working at the gas station before, but quit. We didn't know Yana was married until she had worked for us for a year.

 Tokmak

We drove around town a little and took some photos

cemetary

house with tile roof

Saw this bird on the drive back

It was a lovely day to take a drive

Election time

You might not know this, if you don't live in Ukraine, but tomorrow is election day. For months we have been looking at billboards for different parties---5 or 6 seem to have most of the advertising money, there are about 30 parties on the ballot, I think. Here's a sample:

seems more than half the billboards are political messages

Not for politics!

The Party of Regions have a lot of different billboards

 I took most of these back in August while driving back from Crimea

These ads seem to show "what we've done" for you

We have seen some campaigning done here in the village, the communist party people walked through the village shaking hands and talking to the pensioners (they want to lower the age for getting old age benefits on their platform) a couple weeks ago. 

opps the shutter stuck!

 the communist party advertising on the highway to Dnepro, right where every slows down for the police check

Happy family ad

We have gotten advertising in the mailbox, including this one from boxer (heavyweight world champion) Klitchko's party--I am told the party name means Punch and the slogan is something like We'll fight for you! We even saw a convoy of cars led by a van with a loudspeaker for that party driving through Dnepropetroesk yesterday, Garry was wondering with all the traffic jams in the city if that was well thought out, there were a couple snags as we drove through downtown, mostly caused by double parking and cars getting stuck in the intersection so the cross traffic doesn't move, and the fender benders where the cars stay in place and traffic tries to get around them, until the police arrive.

The end of the Nikolopolia day as we got back last week

Last week the party of regions (the president's party) drove around the village early Saturday on Nikolipolia Day saying they were providing free meat and vodka at the celebration. We missed it, since we were driving Yana home that day. They also have signs in the store, where one clerk is wearing one of their hats, and the story is all the town employees have been told they must vote for them if they want to keep their jobs.




Hopefully all goes well when the ballots are marked tomorrow, our church is meeting elsewhere because our normal rented auditorium is a voting place, cameras have been installed there to monitor the election.