Maria needed to get some groceries and medicine for her parents who were sick and housebound in their apartment, and I wanted some groceries because we had company coming in the afternoon (which was why I was doing beds and cleaning). Our missionary friend Adam was coming to Dnepro to pick up his friend Issac who was flying in from Alberta Monday afternoon. He had visited us a couple years ago, the last time he was in Ukraine, so Adam had called asked if they could spend the night. Then Daryl asked to join the group Saturday and Adam phoned Sunday evening about an orphan friend of our Kolya who is going to university in Dnepro who'd like to come out too.
On the way to the city Garry explained what had happened with the ceiling. Shortly after the roof was put on, one of the students decided to throw rocks at the windows in the attic and broke them. They were never fixed and the attic had a pile of snow blow in which was melting with the warm weather. Garry had a couple of the guys go up to the attic to shovel snow out. Tuesday morning there was still water puddling on the tile floor in the classroom, hopefully things will dry out soon, looks like we will be replacing some of the water stained tiles in the drop ceiling.
We headed toward Maria's neighborhood, where Garry's first stop was at the sitdown shaslik place for lunch. Garry loves to eat the meat and veggie filled wraps, but normally you have to stand in the street to eat them, which is not easy. Then Maria needed to stop at an Aptenka (drugstore), but while we were eating, Garry mentioned how much he needed a haircut and she said she knew a good place, near some aptenkas. So we went there and parked along the street. 15 minutes later, Garry had his haircut and Maria had bought her drugs, so we were off to the grocery store.
Garry pushed one cart that I helped him fill with stuff we needed while Maria filled hers. It took us a few tries to weigh our potatoes and onions, some stores have numbers on the bins that you punch in to get your price stickers for your bags, but this grocery chain writes the names in Ukrainian and you hunt for them; so you have to remember which kind it is when you get to the machine. There were four kinds of onions and five or six types of potatoes, I went back to the potato bins more than once to look and try to remember what it was again. Then we couldn't figure out how to get the machine to print the label once we found the correct type, most scales have a button with a star or something on... and a red arrow pointing at the button, too, but this one seemed to just randomly spit one out... or not while we tried different things to make it work.
Garry drove home and I got the groceries unpacked while Maria had some soup from the fridge and Garry went to check on some stuff at the barn. He is really getting around well in his walking boot with his good foot in a rubber boot. Then he takes it off and walks around the house without it, which he insists is fine to do. He's supposed to wear the walking boot for a couple more weeks. At least he's wearing it when he goes outside.
Our company arrived around three pm, just after Garry had returned from getting the mill working. One of the girls had come to say there was no power to it when we got home, so she couldn't grind the corn for feeding cows (it goes in the TMR). So when Garry got back from the other barn, he went to check it out since we had power in the house and the breaker was not tripped. While he was there, he sent one of the boys in for the hammer and some nails to fix the heifer escaping problem since there were some boards right there to nail under the railing they were climbing under. It seems he is solving some problem everyday.
After some talking and coffee, Garry and the guys all went for a tour while I made the rest of dinner to go with the meat in the crockpot, which really smelled good when we got back from shopping. Peeled potatoes, put them in the oven, mixed up some apple tarts put them in muffin tins on the top rack and prepped my veggie mix and fried the sliced cabbage, mushrooms, chopped onions and grated carrots before they got back shortly after five pm with Kolya in tow. He told me he could just have some tea, but I told him we just needed another place setting and stool (my bench had been at the classroom since Christmas I'm told, I carried it home after class this (Tuesday) morning). Maria came in to join us for dinner.
After dinner we cleared the table Kolya's friend Roma thought the dishwasher was really cool, he and Adam helped me load it. Kolya and Maria left and Isaac got out a card game called Exploding Kittens, which Garry really enjoyed playing with the guys while I took a couple of video calls on facebook from Canada, one from our Max Boradin, who looked like he was studying hard and then my daily Jessica and Abby call. Abby who is six months old, is no longer looking in the hallway when she hears my voice like she did the first week we were back, Gramma is in the computer again, not at her house. At nine pm the younger guys went to check out evening milking, while Garry and Daryl talked and I got a few more crochet pieces done for an afghan I am working on. They got back from the barn, showered and everyone headed to bed by eleven pm, when I emptied and refilled the magic dishwasher and let it work while I slept.
In the morning it was quite foggy out, with the warm weather overnight (the water on the road did not ice over like Monday morning) and the melting snow. I got something going for breakfast and headed out to teach English while they ate, the guys left after Garry and Maria went to teach. Garry popped back in the house looking for his ziplock bags for the yeast experiment he wanted to do the day before, but he'd run out of time. It got put off until Tuesday because they talked so much about bacteria and showering.They have been reviewing what Maria taught them the two weeks before we returned. Garry says that they remembered more today than yesterday when he asked questions. Apparently Maria even highlighted one answer on the overhead and they still didn't give the answer. They are learning about cattle diseases now.
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