Almost summer

It's been so nice out the last two days we have been debating whether to plant the tomato plants in the garden. Garry says the forecast for next week is calling for a rainy week (not that it means it will really rain, but it might drizzle and be cloudy) so we should try it. I guess we'll just be ready to cover them if it turns colder. The corn is planted and the sunflowers are going in the ground again today.

The bees are buzzing in the fruit trees in the yard, you can hear them as you walk past. Definitely spring and that can become summer weather quickly here in Ukraine. It's 19 C (66F) at one o'clock in the afternoon, with a breeze that's sometimes shaking the flower petals out of the trees and across the yard.

This morning Nikolai and I helped Garry catch a couple cows to preg check. I thought we were doing them yesterday, but Garry was too busy yesterday morning. He was trying to get all the tractors out it the fields working, so he had the guys bring the rest of the trusses over here to the building site (the same lot as the house we've been building this spring). Just before lunch, he discovered he needed a hitch for the loader tractor they'd been using with the trusses, so he zipped over to Solone (nearest village with a tractor supply store) to see if they had one.

They did, he was excited to get all four tractors out in the field at the same time, so they could plant sunflowers and Max could spray at the same time, since the part for the GPS had come in. I was supposed to bring that back from Canada, but of course, we didn't go so they had to pay about four times as much when they located the part for the lightbar here.

They were also digging holes for the posts for the drive shed. Jessica's post hole auger got a through fixing from Max, he had it all apart and put in some new parts but he says in English that it's "not strong" so they are still doing a lot of digging by hand.

The boys are still digging the cistern at Scott and Shannon's house, they aren't going to measure it until Friday, but it looks pretty deep already. Of course, then Nikolai and whoever is helping mix cement and bucket it down to him will be busy for at least another week.

 I had to stop typing a couple paragraphs ago, Alona came in to beg for water to drink for the guys working over there. It took me a couple seconds to figure out what she wanted, she talks fast and uses more words than I can understand, so my mind had to pick out what I knew before I could say yes and fill a bottle for them.  Right after Garry came in to get some hotdogs out of the fridge for Sasha Borchuck, whose helping in the field, filling the planter with bags of sunflowers and fertilizer. Right out of the fridge, if you are wondering, Ukrainians eat them cold often. He even took some ketchup for them. He was going to buy him a bottle of Coke to wash them down.