Manitoba bound

Garry has booked a plane ticket to join me in Manitoba for two weeks, since he is not busy next week and will stay until after Jonah's high school graduation as planned, and then we will be flying back to Ukraine on our wedding anniversary (otherwise known as Canada Day- no fireworks this year.) He has been busy breeding cows in Ukraine, as many as six a day in different villages, he said it was convenient to have to go breed a cow just as they started unloading hay wagons, so the guys had to work harder. They also repainted the picket fence last week, when hay was done, keeping everything tidy for the summer visitors.

I arrived from NJ on Wednesday afternoon, and went to the doctor with my poison ivy rash Thursday- the next day- and got some steroids to take for a week (its Saturday and I am hoping that the itchy-ness is getting less. It looks pretty bad, worse than when I took that photo on Monday. As a bonus, I got a long overdue checkup, so Friday morning I was back in Steinbach for blood work. That took a while as she had trouble finding a vein with the rash, after 20 minutes she took it from my hand. To be fair, they normally have some trouble finding my veins anyway, and the insides of my elbows have turned very red.

Sunset behind the barn on my last night in New Jersey

I have not heard from Garry today, I am hoping to have some wedding pictures from Maxim Rudei's wedding (our right hand man on the farm in Ukraine) Today was the big family wedding, photos and dinner at a restaurant with 65 guests. Last Saturday, he and Yulia got married in church in Zaporosia - he wore his new suit Garry tells me, but Yulia did not wear her wedding dress, she saved it for today. They got married in an official government ceremony the Monday before at the wedding office, and had their passports stamped. They plan to move into their house after this third wedding!

Maxim and Yulia in October 2011

 All Ukrainians carry official government passports they get at age 16 (not the same passport to travel out of the country) and when you get married, it needs to be stamped to say so. Max had to have his copy stamped as his passport was stolen, along with his driving licence and about 100 grivna (less than 10 dollars) that was in his man-purse that went missing from his van beside the house one day about six weeks ago. So far Max has spent some money trying to replace these items- when your passport goes missing you have to advertise for its return in the local paper for several weeks. His brother Andrei had to drive the van back home to the village the family lives in near Kherson when their father needed it back to drive workers out to work in the vegetable fields ( in the winter he works in Moscow as a mechanic changing oil in cars in a shop) Max got a replacement (maybe temporary) drivers licence a couple weeks ago for a 1000 grivna charge, so he could legally drive, if he was stopped for a police check. That's how he found out his documents were gone six weeks ago, he got stopped at the police check and his documents were not behind the seat where they were supposed to be. Luckily he found out since he had a  copy of his passport he could still get married on June 8th as scheduled last fall, they will stamp the new passport at the office when he gets it.