The weekend

Friday morning Garry was busy trying to get the corn planter working correctly. He is not impressed with that monitor he bought this winter that he found at the farm show in Kiev, it does say whether it is planting seed, but not most of the other things one in Canada would about what is going wrong with the planting. One box was planting it's row of corn very, very deep until he fixed it yesterday. He's not sure it it come up, hopefully it was not doing it for all the fields! They are almost done with the corn planting, except for the field that will be irrigated.

Sunflowers will be planted next, the temperature has risen to a low of 10 C (50 F) and  high of 24 (75) now, I planted a big part of the garden in the last two days. Lots of beets and carrots, if we don't eat them, the students will. Some Ukrainians are even running around in their shirtsleeves and shorts. The older ladies are not, they are still wearing coats.

Saturday morning Garry was over at the barn, checking on milking and collecting some of the extra milk so he could make cheese. He was hoping to get milk that was still warm so he wouldn't have to warm it up before making cheese, but they had already cooled it in the milk tank.



Just before seven am, I heard a commotion out on the street and realized that the village herd was going out to the field for the first day. I snapped a couple of photos of the people and cows through the front window. As you can see, the cherry tree is blooming in the front yard.

Since Garry was busy with the planter yesterday morning, he did not get the Mercedes into Zaporosia to get the alternator fixed. We had to cancel our meeting for SEI at 7 pm, since it ends after dark and we can't run the van with the lights on until it's fixed. However, we needed to go to the bank and Garry had his other class to teach.

Box posing with the phone

He also bought a new phone with Victor's help, it's his first smart phone. The last phone he bought about 6 months ago broke. It is making a big black spot on the screen now (and was never very good anyway, it was always turning off in his pocket). The salesman tried to get him to buy a J5, but I talked him into the basic Samsung model. He's still figuring out how to operate it.


 Tonight Karina and Vika stopped in, apparently Karina's phone broke, so Garry said she could use his old one until she can save up for a new one. She helped him do some stuff on his new phone, after we switched it to Russian from English.

This morning Garry spent most of the morning making cheese, it went better than Wednesday night, and it was bigger, he had 80 liters of milk instead of 20.

buckets of milk all over the kitchen turning into curds and whey

There's the curds

I planted several rows in the garden while he was spilling milk and whey all over the kitchen... I mean making cheese.

We needed to leave for Dnepro by 12:30 because Garry had to drop me off to teach my English classes before he went to his. Before the Ford burned I would drop him off and then come back before he was finished with his classes; but today we had a new plan, I took the bus back to the center of the city where his class is with the help of the teachers at the school to find the right bus and where to catch it.
It was a little slower than driving- 45 minutes instead of 15, but it worked,(and only cost 25 cents) and for the second time we were home long before sunset.

Both days we had to turn the lights on as we approached the police checkpoint, and shut them off after so we didn't get pulled over. Only one more day and the October to May daylight headlights on the highway law is over for another year. We had retrofitted the Ford to turn the lights on when it started, but the Mercedes does not have that feature. The students who go to the evening school in the afternoon, remember to ask him if they are on after they got stopped 3 of 4 times at the checkstop one week with Garry driving them.




Box never touches food on the table, but water from a vase of flowers is irresistible. She dips her paw in and licks the water off.