Snow Slowing Things Down

The guys had been letting some extra cats in the house while we were gone, to eat and warm up including old Mooska, who came in this afternoon and decided to take a nap in a basket. The old girl is hanging in, in spite of being rather blind. Her hearing is still pretty good. She could hang out in the house more, if she ever learned to use a litter pan, but she's getting lots of good cat food to eat now. (The inside cats get the good stuff.)

The weather is still well below freezing here, the guys only have the water turned on for the cows during the day, so the pipes don't freeze and break things- last week when it was even colder, they were watering them with a hose and buckets. They are looking forward to the warmer weather coming, much less work, and warmer to fork silage outside and feed the cows!

Yesterday Garry was off to Zaporosia for the afternoon, and got back just around dark. He said the road was better on the side where they plowed it later (see previous post) but they were still doing some work on it.  He is determined to get right back into his routine and is planning to start his "How to Win Friends... " English group discussions up on this Friday night, and next Wednesday for the other group. He is sure the roads will all be good then, for even night driving.... I may stay home in the village, the only thing scarier than driving in Ukraine is driving at night and on bad roads to boot.

He disappeared for a more than an hour, it turned out that he had gone with Max Rudei to breed a cow. Max had bred the same cow while he was gone, so he knew where to go. Unfortunately they got to about 4 kilometers from the village where the cow was waiting, and the road was not plowed, so they had to go back out to the highway and go around the long way to the village. Garry was so tired that he fell asleep shortly after getting back at 8 pm.

This afternoon there was a cow to breed in another village, and they had the same problem, the short way to the village from here was not plowed, so they had to go all the way to Salonie and go around the very long way. Garry artificially inseminates cows in about six nearby villages, most of which are closeby, but not if you have to take the highway instead of the roads through the fields. We are right on the edge of two different oblasts (like states or provinces) which is why some of the villages are hard to get to when it is snowy or muddy and the dirt roads are impassable.

The neighbor Serosiah, the guy with the big payloader, opened the roads to six villages since the storm, and worked on removing snow from the highway too.

I put together a condensed look at our drive on the highway on Saturday and the snowblower machine we saw on the way in action. The good news is plus 8 C is coming later this week according to the forecast, so the piles of snow should start to melt.

Now if I could just get back on Ukrainian time, it's 4 am and I've hardly slept tonight... but the internet works really well when the whole village is sleeping!