Is there a typical day this week?

 So this week we started classes at the trade school (see more about this if you click on the birds) which means that Garry is busy teaching from 9 am to 12:30 pm except when I teach English for about 45 minutes at 10:15 before cooking dinner, then he is busy catching up with everything else going on.

Monday I bailed on English class so he had to teach the whole morning while I got our celebratory luncheon ready. The day was a little disappointing as he only had three guys show up for class. The two who had gone away for the weekend did not make it back, one did show up that night and the other says he is not coming, although we are hopeful he will change his mind and return next week. For some reason, the girls' house mother  turned off her cell phone, she had decided to let Nastya learn to get up on her own on the first day of school and Garry had to send one of the boys over to the house at 10 am to get her (day two Nastya showed up hours early for class, she was so worried about being late.) Late Monday afternoon we drove to Dnepropetroesk to the bus station to pick up the other two girls who were considering coming to the trade school form Kiroy Rog. We left early to get in an hour of bowling before they arrived, and then had trouble finding the girls. Forty minutes later, after phoning Maria, who would phone them to try to figure out where they were and translate; and having checked out other places the marshutka (route vans) from Kirvoy Rog could have come to, he found them behind the bus station instead of in front of it. We got them some Mc Donalds drive thru food and dropped them off at the girls house for the night, then Garry had to go breed a cow for a lady in a different village before bedtime.

Tuesday morning Garry went outside early because he knew that they needed to move some corn silage from the bunk near the new barn to this barn in one of the wagons in order to feed the cows, and Maxim Boradin was going into Zaporosia on the 9 o'clock bus for one of his English classes that morning (he is furthering his education after finishing his grade 9 or 10 high school certificate last year.) This tractor was hooked to a full manure spreader, so he drove it out to the field to empty it... and ran out of fuel. He walked back to the house, and had Andrey, who was going out with the other tractor, take him back with a plastic jug of diesel to get it going again. Then he drove back, got a wagon, drove to the other farm, unhooked it got silage out with the loader on the tractor, had a flat tire on the wagon, walked back to the house again, found out the air pump was over where he had come from (although not where he had looked)  when he talked to Maxim Rudei, went back, got the tire pumped up, and brought the silage back to feed, all before school started at nine am.

the girls house

 He got a quick shower and started teaching. At break time, he discovered the girls had not had any breakfast, because they had left the house so early since Nastya was worried about being late (someone was supposed to make them breakfast at 7:30 but apparently they were already gone when she got up) so he went to the store and bought cookies so they had something to eat before lunchtime. The girls seemed to enjoy classes although one was worried because she had been told that she had to quit smoking if she wanted to attend school (more about this in the other blog.) Garry and Maria talked to them a bit more after class before they walked back to the girls house for lunch, we were going to pick them up there at 3 pm to drive them back to Dnepropetroesk to catch their ride back to the dormitory we visited last week.

Garry went over to the trade school barn after lunch, Maria caught the 1:30 bus back to Zaporosia (there are bus stops in the village for it). The metal structure that the factory in Zaporosia that made the freestalls constructed was delivered to the barn. He paid for the rest of it, he had put a big deposit down for them to purchase the metal to make it. He says it is like a giant 400 piece jigsaw puzzle to put together.

 Garry decided we could go bowling two days in a row (turns out we are not quite as good on day two) and checked out the menu at the KFC that just opened at the MOCT city centre (mall). We tried several things to figure out what they were, the snack wrap Zinger comes in either a cheese or kiss flavor (it had a red sauce almost a salsa), there is a snack box with chicken fingers and french fries- the girl couldn't understand me even though I could see it spelled snack box in Russian, then I remembered to say B-ok-S -with more emphasis on the end and she understood. We tried the hot wings, which were actually hot and spicy. There were a number of people ordering little buckets and eating them, and it seemed the just opened KFC was as busy as the Mc Donalds at the other end of the food court (it  always has a line, the rest of the food places never do).

What should we order? 

These four guys had 3 buckets (the signage says they are for 2-3 people)

On the way home, Garry forgot to get money from the bank to pay for the furnace. We had decided to install a different gas heater this spring, one that would not require a chimney as the one we had going up through the summer kitchen bathroom was constantly dripping water onto the bathroom floor and causing mold problems there, and damaging the ceiling too. This system heats both the summer kitchen and the big house, and when we were working on the reno early in the year it was still being used to heat both, so nothing was done then.

Garry and Max B at work on Wednesday at 6 pm

 Of course one of the advantages of the new system, besides taking up less floor space would be that all the heat pipes in the foyer of the summer kitchen could be put under the floor instead of on top of it, before we tiled that part of the summer kitchen to match the main room. No more stepping over (or ducking under) pipes, or trying to sweep dirt around (under, over) them when cleaning.

Now that it is September it will be time to turn the heat on in a month or so, so it was time it went in, so the summer kitchen was undergoing reno on Wednesday afternoon to get it put in and the guys, including Garry, were digging a trench for running the new pipe over to the main house. Maxim Boradin worked on making it deeper on Thursday.

Garry had to go visit the bank machine before school on Thursday so he picked Maria up at her apartment, instead of her taking the bus, so she did not have to get up at 5 am.  Of course we had a full slate of classes on Thursday, Garry even gave them their first quiz on body parts of cows. The furnace guys were not back on Thursday, so we had no problems with noise, just had to step over a deep trench to get there.
 Today Tolik (our student who left us) joined us for class, since he had returned to pick up his documents, apparently he is going to attend a driving school. Garry says it's a shame, because he is the only student who has ever milked a cow when he asked today.

Then the students joined Garry at the new barn this afternoon to help assemble the parlor framework. I got some photos as they were getting started after lunch.

At least 400 pieces to put together

Starting the assembly of the parlor

Then Stacy, who had come out with Victor for the afternoon, and Maria and I walked back to the house and had a pleasant afternoon talking, before Garry had a meeting with Maria and the group home parents about how things are going (it will be a weekly thing.) Then we drove around to see how the corn combining was going, because Garry had gotten a phone call from Maxim Rudei to say he'd finally got one to do a load. They have been trying all week, so they could get some to grind daily for the cows, since they remaining wheat is for planting, the cows had been cut way back on grain this week, and dropped off in milk production as you would expect.

A sunflower header is not good for corn but it was all they could get now
they will get a real corn combine for the harvest (the rain drops were sprinkles)

 We dropped Maria back in Zaporosia at her place before grabbing a dinner of sharuma; Ukrainian street food, a wrap with chicken and veggies and ketchup and mayo, (we ask for the chili version and tonight's was actually spicy!) before going to an English Bible study with some Canadian and American missionaries in an apartment. We left about nine pm, drove home to the village, and Garry was snoring by 10:30 pm.

Friday, we will not have classroom classes and three of the male students have medical and passport appointment in the city in the morning, the two remaining students will be working over at the barn with the parlor assembling. Saturday we have to go back to Dnepropetroesk to pick up the two female students who did decide to join us and a guy from their dorm who would like to come to see our program, if he joins us we will be at eight students.