Through the fields...

Late Friday afternoon, Garry had a cow to breed and asked me if I wanted to ride along. After checking on the guys in the field- they were getting ready to plant corn, spraying for weeds, spreading fertilizer, and disking- we were off.
He was telling me that this was one of the villages he has to drive through the fields to get to, since its on the border between the two oblasts (think of them as provinces, states or even counties, I guess, they are regions of Ukraine, and we live right on the edge of Zaporosia  and Dnepropetroesk regions). There are no main roads connecting villages to the other regions villages, I think it is or rather was a security thing.

Anyway we drove out the other end of the village (the road is really holey that way) onto the highway that goes to Nikopol (Unlike our village of Nikolaipolia, it's a city) and then turned onto a small paved road, got on an unpaved road, then a track along the fields, and finally found a paved road again in a little village in the Zaporosia oblast. Garry tells me it was Green Valley. No one came out to greet us, and Garry had to phone.

After a discussion in Russian with the man who had called that morning, we ended up going back to the highway and got on the highway toward Nikolaipolia and Dnepro. We turned onto the loop we take when going across the highway from our village toward Dnepro, and headed along the field road that starts by our field that's in winter wheat this year (it was an alfalfa field for years). Eventually we ended up in another tiny village, where Garry had, of course, "bred a cow here before".

Everyone is sure he remembers each place he's been, even if it was years ago, so sometimes he really does end up in the wrong village, after he says "Ya magoo" to breeding their cow, and he thinks he knows where they live after a discussion in Russian on the phone. There are so many little villages in the area, with similar sounding names and no street numbers that you can see, if they exist. I think he sometimes misses the days when people called Max Rudei and Max gave him directions!

The right village had some old Mennonites houses, and most unusually, we saw a flock of sheep out on pasture. Normally we see goats tied up in front of houses in villages, but sheep are not a common sight. Of course, I have a soft spot for flocks of sheep, because I had some as a teenager, and even after we were married, until we moved from New York to Ontario.

Afterwards, we headed into the city to pick up stuff to connect the new house to the irrigation water line, since we understood that both cities would be closed down for the Easter weekend. I convinced Garry to go to Dnepro, instead of Zap, so we had a romantic dinner of KFC in the parking lot after going through the drive-thru. The line was longer than when we go in the morning on a parts run. The was even a beautiful sunset as we drove home.

The house is almost ready for move in, I did some final trim painting Monday. Garry, Victor and company were checking and fixing water lines in the house in the afternoon. Victor had brought out one part they needed to get the water on in the house, I think it was a shutoff.

 They had a number of leaks where the students had done some plumbing.

Max was busy on Monday, because they started planting corn.