Hello, it's me...

 

I haven't written a post in a couple weeks, we were out at the cottage for a lot of the time. Garry even caught a few fish, and we enjoyed some family time. Last weekend Garry went to the mens retreat from church which was very near the cottage and I got to drive the truck (we had brought the snowmobile out to the cottage, it is finally working) into Winnipeg to watch the Flyers-Jets game. 

Apparently, I was lucky to make it back to the cottage, since the truck stopped and died on Garry Sunday afternoon on his way back to the cottage. He walked a mile, arriving just in time for kickoff of the NFC championship game. At halftime he tried starting it again (he took the snowmobile there) and after the game we both went to try it, it was bitterly cold, and it turned over but didn't keep running.

Monday afternoon someone came out from the farm and we loaded it up on a trailer and got a ride home. 

I spent a couple days getting some stuff done at the house before Garry dropped me off at the airport on Thursday, I am in New Jersey for a while, my dad is not doing well after about 13 years of fighting cancer.

So I am enjoying green grass, and starting today, temperatures above freezing outside (when I arrived it was nearly Manitoba cold). 

Back in Ukraine, things are safe in the village, however they have had some problems selling milk to the factory. If the factory has no electricity they can't process milk, so the truck might not come buy milk. They actually used the big cheese making equipment for the first time in our cheese making building, it has such a big motor they had to turn everything in the house off to run it from what Max said. They are making a new type of cheese to sell. They are still selling the cheeses, eggs and chicken meat via the internet to people in Dnipro. 

They finally got the rest of the corn combined (Garry discovered it wasn't all done as we'd supposed in the fall), it was very wet- 23%, too wet to store in the barns without heating up and spoiling, so it was sold for a very low price (50 dollars a ton, I think I heard), although if it had been dry the price in Ukraine wouldn't have been much better, compared to world price. Garry says this spring they will only plant what they need for corn silage.  Just a bit of snow over there, as you can see in this photo.