Smooth sailing

This week we are not teaching classes, so Garry is trying to get to every milking (three a day) to make sure the transition to the new parlor is going smoothly. So far he has been pleased, although he complained that they had started milking before nine o'clock for the evening milking on Sunday night. He wanted to have the milkings evenly spaced, so they have decided on 5 am, 1 pm and 9 pm. Monday night he went over at nine and they were just getting ready to start.

Everything seems to be going well, the cows are moving into the parlor from the holding area more easily now. Garry was upset when they had 15 cows squeezed in on one side on Sunday. One cow fell down and could have been injured, and it's crazy to put that many in, because there are only ten milking machines. Now they are trying to count carefully and only get ten cows in at a time. The vacuum pump is only running for about 40 minutes per milking now, and best of all only one cow is pooping in the parlor on average as the cows and people are all calmer during the milking process after the first week. The first week everyone was getting very dirty as one of the things that nervous cows do is raise their tail and manure was flying into the parlor and onto everyone. Some students and milker ladies got manure plopped right on their heads. There are still four or five cows that are lying in the aisle instead of the stalls, so they are dirtier that they should be... and less comfortable than they could be if they would lie in the right place.

Garry and I both seem to have caught colds over the weekend, he was feeling under the weather on Sunday but soldiered on through the day. We left the village a couple minutes after he'd planned, we were almost out of the village when Andrey the vet student remembered that he'd left his phone in the house, so we turned around to get it. He and Alina asked if they could come out next weekend again. They had found and treated with some of the students some heifers with a skin problem, just like they had in the spring. After re-locking the door, Garry backed out of the driveway again. Max and tractorist Sasha waved us down on the street. They had one of the bobcat (skid steer) tires, it had popped off the rim and deflated while someone was scraping the barn and they couldn't re-inflate it with the compressor, so they rearranged the back of the car to fit it in with the milk jugs.

We dropped off the vet students with the milk at Victor's church, and signed our application papers for our residency papers for Ukraine, Victor takes care of standing in line for us and making sure it's all correct. Then we drove back to our church for the service. Afterwards we had to find a place to re-inflate the tire. It took some driving around and a few different shino-montages before we found one that would do it. Then we were off to find a place to get new passport photos taken because Victor needed one for Garry's application. He had an old one that worked for me but not a good one for Garry. We found a place downtown and got them done so we could drop them off at Victor's house when we left the city.

Garry was off from teaching his English classes this week, but I had said I'd go to Lena's class that afternoon so we did it together, after getting a little lunch, and picking up some groceries. I was completely out of flour after making pizza again Saturday night.

On Monday Garry was feeling better, although I am still going through tissues like crazy, we should have bought a couple boxes on Sunday! I told Garry that I had decided to make apple pie when he came in to get his wallet around 10:30, he was on his way to find another shino-montage  because someone had hit that something scraping the barn again and had popped the tire off the rim again! I started making pie but stopped work on something for dinner (we eat around noon usually) since it was already noon, but I figured he'd be later than normal and made stir fry and rice. Garry ended up not coming home until two, after the tire, he'd stopped in to check on milking, too. Dinner was still warm and the pie was half-made, so he was looking forward to having it for supper.

 Then he spent the rest of the afternoon on his latest project, taping and finishing the drywall on Luda's addition while Max works on getting the heat reinstalled (they had cut through the pipes when working on the doorway to the addition and need to put radiators in the new rooms and connect them) They are putting in an electric hot water heater at that house (since the water was heated by the furnace, but they want to not have the salty well water going through the system this winter) and they need to hook up the new well (with the salty water) they drilled in the spring now that winter is coming there will be no more village water soon.

There was leftover rice so we had sushi when Garry got home before the pie, (he was off breeding a cow for someone in another village, he said he saw the biggest cow he'd ever seen in Ukraine tied up next to the one he was breeding) and then watched a little TV before he ran over to check on milking at nine. He showered and went to bed at 9:30 hoping to catch the Jays game in the early morning (a 8 EST game starts at 3 am here) on television. He woke up but was disappointed in the outcome, he missed an inning and a half when he went over to check on morning milking, and got home in time to watch them lose.

Then today was like yesterday, he worked on finishing the drywall around the two windows at Luda's while I made tortillas for a taco Tuesday lunch. In the afternoon Victor came in, he'd been to Zaporosia to see about upgrading the electric service at the apartments. He was working on his rewiring of some of the bedrooms in our house. Garry went back to Luda's house to work and then was off to find a lady in one of the villages across the highway with a cow to breed that had phoned him.

I'm just sitting here blowing my nose, crocheting and listening to mice moving in for the winter. Hopefully they meet up with Box or Needles, they seem to be on the hunt lately.