Thursday

 Thursday was another day of rolling blackouts for the village, Garry said they did get some more welding done when the power was on. They need to get the rest of the steel up on the gables yet, they got the last five sheets up on the roof on Tuesday. The plan is to have it finished before Garry leaves in a little less than two weeks.

 Garry's doing the usual, trying to get the feed ration set for the cows and heifers. This year there's no problem with having enough feed to last until spring/summer. He tells me there's twice as much hay as last year, thanks to the rain. They planted more corn this year, so there's about 50% more corn silage. 

Garry said he (and Max) got very muddy this morning chasing heifers in the lot so they could preg check them. These were the large (fat) older heifers in the dry cow lot with the bull. Garry said there are a lot of them (and dry cows), so he was going to preg check them to see if any are not pregnant and candidates to be sold. Luckily, only two were open (not pregnant). He said some of them were short bred (only a couple months pregnant) so he had to check those with the ultrasound machine. I think he plans to check the dry cows yet. 

Once again the power was out at suppertime so he couldn't cook. He bought ice cream at the village store, bananas, chocolate sauce, and imitation m&ms, with some walnuts, they made banana splits or sundaes I guess instead. They also had sandwiches with lots of mayo, Garry had bought a can of tuna. 

Unfortunately, our Sasha Borchuk was picked up by the army today while walking from the shop where he grinds grain everyday back to the boys' house on the road. It's only a couple hundred feet. We can hope that they let him go, as they did earlier in the war, because he is handicapped by fetal alcohol syndrome. However Andrey has been in the army for two years now, and is not normal either. He recently called Max when he was off the front lines and told a story where they were under fire and had to pull back and he was the one who called for help. You may have seen the photo of Sasha in his shirt I sent for his birthday next week. Good thing Garry accidently gave it to him early.