Ноябрь 05, 2008
Truck 100
11/5 15:04, Pushkin time
We finished it a little while ago, but decided to wait on taking the picture until it had quit raining outside. That happened Saturday.
We finished it a little while ago, but decided to wait on taking the picture until it had quit raining outside. That happened Saturday.
Октябрь 25, 2008
Strive Against Gapping
10/25 11:52, Pushkin time
I've had a guy from Pennsylvania (where American vampires come from) here doing a training course all this week -- and I get to play translator. So I've been dashing over to the plant for an hour before anyone else comes in and then trying to get in another hour after work hours have ended so I at least sort of keep up with the things I need to do. It's not really working, though things would be worse if I wasn't doing it, I guess. He's here until the 30th.
On the other hand, this month we have finally hit a more or less sustained rhythm of smooth working facilities, no crazy directives-from-on-high, and an adequate supply of parts; we've been at one truck a day for almost the entire time, and will likely maintain that for this last week of October. So finally our guys and we will start to see the nice, fat piece-rate money I've been promising since... oh... about last December. Next month and the one after are already pretty much in the bag, too. And we've got parts coming now that should cover us for January and a good chunk of February.
Of course, the dark side is that the depression in the US has rippled out a bit into the rest of the world. As it stands now, we've got customers for our stuff at least going forward a bit of a ways, but beyond those guys the situation is a bit less clear. Most likely we're in for a couple of tight months at least on our normal business side. Fortunately, we've got a ton of side projects that we are starting to ramp up to keep at least moving in a slightly forward direction. And as И says, in the spring once things have settled, we'll be in superb shape to be right out in front. Also it likely means (and we've already seen this starting to happen) that the prices for construction type stuff will come down. Which means we will be able to finish the house most likely for less than what we were previously expecting. Already the number of migrant workers in construction has dropped off sharply, and the ones that remain are starting to bid down against each other on price.
And in fact, the outfits that had extended themselves on credit are the ones taking it the hardest. They announced that the big tower GazProm was having built right in the middle of the historical city center won't be happening -- in fact, they say that likely by December, GazProm and several of the like companies snatched by the connected bandits and killers (who, as the last decade has shown to anyone who was looking, demonstrate that the skills required to shoot a competitor in the head and the ones required to run a successful company do not really overlap) in the 90s are going to be in the red. Several may actually fall, and have their assets be finally made available to maybe some less-sleazy scumbags. So there really are several silver linings to this whole thing.
In other things, the big news is that L has started talking. At long last. For quite some time, it's been clear that he understood what people were saying to him (in either language, for that matter) for example, without indicating with gestures or anything, if you asked him to bring you a specific thing, he would get it for you. But he used only his own noises for words until this last week, when he came out with a whole pile of words. With us at home, they're all english; but I'm planning to try him out with some of our friends (he's uncomfortable around new people still) and see if he's got any of their words, too.
I've had a guy from Pennsylvania (where American vampires come from) here doing a training course all this week -- and I get to play translator. So I've been dashing over to the plant for an hour before anyone else comes in and then trying to get in another hour after work hours have ended so I at least sort of keep up with the things I need to do. It's not really working, though things would be worse if I wasn't doing it, I guess. He's here until the 30th.
On the other hand, this month we have finally hit a more or less sustained rhythm of smooth working facilities, no crazy directives-from-on-high, and an adequate supply of parts; we've been at one truck a day for almost the entire time, and will likely maintain that for this last week of October. So finally our guys and we will start to see the nice, fat piece-rate money I've been promising since... oh... about last December. Next month and the one after are already pretty much in the bag, too. And we've got parts coming now that should cover us for January and a good chunk of February.
Of course, the dark side is that the depression in the US has rippled out a bit into the rest of the world. As it stands now, we've got customers for our stuff at least going forward a bit of a ways, but beyond those guys the situation is a bit less clear. Most likely we're in for a couple of tight months at least on our normal business side. Fortunately, we've got a ton of side projects that we are starting to ramp up to keep at least moving in a slightly forward direction. And as И says, in the spring once things have settled, we'll be in superb shape to be right out in front. Also it likely means (and we've already seen this starting to happen) that the prices for construction type stuff will come down. Which means we will be able to finish the house most likely for less than what we were previously expecting. Already the number of migrant workers in construction has dropped off sharply, and the ones that remain are starting to bid down against each other on price.
And in fact, the outfits that had extended themselves on credit are the ones taking it the hardest. They announced that the big tower GazProm was having built right in the middle of the historical city center won't be happening -- in fact, they say that likely by December, GazProm and several of the like companies snatched by the connected bandits and killers (who, as the last decade has shown to anyone who was looking, demonstrate that the skills required to shoot a competitor in the head and the ones required to run a successful company do not really overlap) in the 90s are going to be in the red. Several may actually fall, and have their assets be finally made available to maybe some less-sleazy scumbags. So there really are several silver linings to this whole thing.
In other things, the big news is that L has started talking. At long last. For quite some time, it's been clear that he understood what people were saying to him (in either language, for that matter) for example, without indicating with gestures or anything, if you asked him to bring you a specific thing, he would get it for you. But he used only his own noises for words until this last week, when he came out with a whole pile of words. With us at home, they're all english; but I'm planning to try him out with some of our friends (he's uncomfortable around new people still) and see if he's got any of their words, too.
Октябрь 18, 2008
Rolling along
10/18 19:51, Pushkin time
Seeing as how I used to post sometimes even more than once a day, I suppose the sense of accomplishment I'm getting in writing a second post less than a week spaced from the last is a bit irrational.
Anyway.
Z has now been attending for almost a full week the musical academy ("named for Anna Akhmatov") in Pushkin. We've been meaning to get him signed up there for after-school lessons for pretty close to a year now -- but it's Russia, and I work during the day, and those type of cold introductions-discovery-and-negotiations A feels unconfident in her ability to handle (I, having had the experience when we first got here of being able to muddle through even as a totally ignorant boob, have more faith in her than she has in herself on this matter, but that's not the point). So it had to go until I finally got sick of waiting, took off from work for a couple hours in the middle of the day, and took Z over to the school to meet with its director and People-of-Admissions.
Somewhat uunsurprisingly (though at the time, catching the both of us completely off guard), after the director and we had exchanged a couple words, he asked what instrument Z wanted to study.
Umm.
Uhh.
(and Z was no help there, either).
I finally tossed out piano as a potentially good one to start with. Fortunately, there was space in piano classes, so that's where he is for now. They offer pretty much every instrument possible; G has already declared his intention to do guitar there as soon as he turns six. For now, Z does choir/basic musical skills two days a week after school and piano one day a week after school. And thus far he's having a good time. The only thing left to set up for his is getting him into a swim group. Hopefully I'll be able to do that sometime before the school year ends.
And in other things, we picked up the first set of radiators for the house today. Our septic is dug and ready to be pooped in. We dropped our well pump in to try priming the well only to find out that not using a brand new well for a year has the unfortunate side-effect of causing it to sediment back in somewhat (ours was dug to 26 meters, and the pump only went down to like 17). So we'll have a guy out to blast the gunk out with air and then we'll make sure to follow after that better. The garbage dump that was behind our place has been all cleaned out -- I arranged for a neighbor with a horse-and-cart to take the stuff away for way cheaper than what dump truck drivers were asking. And so that's all moving along at some kind of speed.
And now, the kids want to watch a movie that's on our computer; A is giving me dirty looks for keeping them waiting. So I suppose that brings me to the end for now.
Seeing as how I used to post sometimes even more than once a day, I suppose the sense of accomplishment I'm getting in writing a second post less than a week spaced from the last is a bit irrational.
Anyway.
Z has now been attending for almost a full week the musical academy ("named for Anna Akhmatov") in Pushkin. We've been meaning to get him signed up there for after-school lessons for pretty close to a year now -- but it's Russia, and I work during the day, and those type of cold introductions-discovery-and-negotiations A feels unconfident in her ability to handle (I, having had the experience when we first got here of being able to muddle through even as a totally ignorant boob, have more faith in her than she has in herself on this matter, but that's not the point). So it had to go until I finally got sick of waiting, took off from work for a couple hours in the middle of the day, and took Z over to the school to meet with its director and People-of-Admissions.
Somewhat uunsurprisingly (though at the time, catching the both of us completely off guard), after the director and we had exchanged a couple words, he asked what instrument Z wanted to study.
Umm.
Uhh.
(and Z was no help there, either).
I finally tossed out piano as a potentially good one to start with. Fortunately, there was space in piano classes, so that's where he is for now. They offer pretty much every instrument possible; G has already declared his intention to do guitar there as soon as he turns six. For now, Z does choir/basic musical skills two days a week after school and piano one day a week after school. And thus far he's having a good time. The only thing left to set up for his is getting him into a swim group. Hopefully I'll be able to do that sometime before the school year ends.
And in other things, we picked up the first set of radiators for the house today. Our septic is dug and ready to be pooped in. We dropped our well pump in to try priming the well only to find out that not using a brand new well for a year has the unfortunate side-effect of causing it to sediment back in somewhat (ours was dug to 26 meters, and the pump only went down to like 17). So we'll have a guy out to blast the gunk out with air and then we'll make sure to follow after that better. The garbage dump that was behind our place has been all cleaned out -- I arranged for a neighbor with a horse-and-cart to take the stuff away for way cheaper than what dump truck drivers were asking. And so that's all moving along at some kind of speed.
And now, the kids want to watch a movie that's on our computer; A is giving me dirty looks for keeping them waiting. So I suppose that brings me to the end for now.
Октябрь 15, 2008
Stopping by
10/15 19:55, Pushkin time
Wow. Let's just say that it's been too long, and leave it at that.
It was not such an amazing summer, anyway. Stuff happened, other stuff didn't happen, I mainly kept busy. Really, only two majorly interesting things to note:
1) Hit A Pedestrian With My Car
Driving the boys to school one morning a few weeks ago, I was going with my green light towards the intersection right ahead of the Egyptian Gate. Just ahead of the crosswalk, a girl stepped right out in front of me, maybe fifteen feet in front of my car. I slammed my brakes and swerved to one side -- the sound of my skids caught her attention, she looked right at me, and jumped in the same direction I was swerving. I corrected, but there just wasn't quite enough time; so the next thing I know, she slams off the driver's quarter of the hood and I see her feet go flying to the side. I skidded to a stop and jumped out to do... something. I was frankly expecting to find an oozing body in the street.
It is, for the record, indescribeably more horrible than running over a cat or dog.
When I got to the girl, she was kind of shifting and muttering. Her legs were cocked kind of funny, but she fairly quickly came to some sort of sense and started to get up. I helped her up and helped her limp-hop to the curb, all the while monologuing a sort of, "ohmygodyou'rehurtohmygodyourheadholycrapthankgodyou'renotdead" and so forth. We got to the curb and I immediately told her we needed to go to the hospital; that there was no way she was alright. She declined repeatedly (though she did ask me to retrieve her shoe from where it had been blown off into the middle of the intersection. I sort of checked her over, all the time repeating my insistence that we take her to a hospital. But ultimately, she just said she wanted me to take her home (she had no visible damages, other than a scraped elbow, but she was hit by a freaking car...). I told her she needed to be looked after; she assured me that her husband was a doctor and he would take care of her at home, so I ended up loading her in the car (the boys, to their credit, sat quietly while I dealt with things) and took her to her place and then made sure she got to her door, and forced her to take my phone number so that if anything at all felt funny later on I could rush back and get her to help.
Then I got back to the car, got the kids to school and continued (more or less) with my day.
I got a call in the middle of that day from a guy claiming to be the husband of the girl I hit; that she had some sort of head injury that they were going to be taking her to the neurologist the next day to check out, that she was pregnant, and that, by the way, according to Statute such-and-such of the Rules of Road Transport, I was obligated to call her an ambulance and then wait for the police to come and fill out a report. I argued with the guy a little bit, to the extent that I offered her several times to call an ambulance or take her to the hospital myself, and then did exactly what she asked and took her to her home; that I was going the normal speed on the road (one of her shoes came off, and he was trying to claim that I 'must have been going' at least twice the legal speed for that to have happened); that she was not in the crosswalk, and that I had a green light when she stepped out in front of me. Plus, you could hardly say that I fled the scened of an accident, given the fact that he was able to contact me because I had given the girl my cell number. Ultimately, he offered to go straight to the cops and report me for hit-and-run, and I got him to agree instead to meet that evening to discuss things.
И went with me (stupid me, it was my idea to meet at 11:30PM in the shopping market parking lot), which was good since the guy had two friends with him, too. I let И do the bulk of the critical talking, since I'm really not that experienced in these kinds of negotiations. Ultimately, it came down to more or less what the guy had said; we asked him to name a price, and he gave 40,000 rubles. I knew enough to keep my mouth closed, and И muttered that that was hardly a fair number. The guy offered to call his lawyer (in fact, did call the guy and try to get me to talk to him on the phone). We ended up getting him to agree to give us until the next morning before going to the cops.
That next morning, we checked into all manners of Russian law. As it turns out, I did everything right -- including taking her to her house afterwards, as she had indicated that her husband was a doctor, which fulfilled my responsibility to 'take the injured in my own transport to a location where they can receive medical attention'. However, the law pretty much straight out says that in any case, I was obligated to come back to the scene of the accident, call the cops, wait for them to show up, and so forth. So I broke the law, pretty much unambiguously. As further interest, while the penalty for 'failing to fulfill my duties as a motor vehicle operator after an accident', until last year, was a fine or suspension of license, it was increased at the beginning of summer to suspension of license or 15 days jail time (administrative arrest, it's called). So the option of letting it go to court and then having И's friends in the police/courts regimes simply write me up for the fine instead of the serious penalty was off the table. We also looked up the exact legal definition of 'blackmail' (breaking the rules of the road is an 'administrative' offense; blackmail is a 'criminal' one) with the idea that we could turn the tables on this guy and intimidate him into backing off. But no luck there, either.
So, figuring I was going to end up getting tagged for the bulk of the requested 40K, since I didn't have any sort of leg to stand on, I had И call the guy up. Doing so, he got to show his genius. He gave the guy the line that, 'look, this guy is a foreigner. what does he care if his license gets suspended in Russia? He's leaving next month anyway. He wants to make some sort of offer to you out of the goodness of his heart and recognition that he's caused you trouble, but if you want to be a dick about it, go ahead and start the police report. He'll be gone before they even start looking for him." Then he named a sum of 20,000 rubles. The guy asked a few minutes to think it over.
Five minutes later he called back and agreed. I arranged to meet him that afternoon; as soon as i hung up, И cursed and said that we should have offered ten; the guy agreed too quickly.
So ultimately I ended up paying a guy about 800 bucks and getting in return a notarized letter from the girl I hit indicating that we had settled the issue between us to our mutual consent and that she had no claims against me.
So that's what it costs to have an idiot walk out in front of you in traffic. According to the Russian Rules of the Road, the driver is always at fault -- no matter what the pedestrian did, or what the other circumstances. A driver is considered the operator of a piece of "dangerous equipment", exactly the same legally as a guy holding a pistol or working with dynamite. Supposedly, if you could find multiple witnesses to confirm that a pedestrian looked at you coming, recognized that you were coming, and stepped in front of you anyway (I suppose, suicided themselves), you might be able to get away with having the responsibility not lay completely on you. But otherwise, you're screwed. So one big lesson both Andi and I got is, Watch Out For Pedestrians.
Oh, and by the way... If I hadn't been paying good attention, or had been speeding, there is no way I would have avoided hitting her straight on at speed. In the event that a pedestrian is killed by the operator of a vehicle, it is straight-to-jail. Given the speed at which the Russian bureaucracy works, И might have been able to pull enough strings fast enough to keep me from spending any time locked up, but no guarantees. So that's another little happy though for me as I drive.
2) Got Reported To The Authorities
Yesterday morning, I got a call from a person telling me that he had a "zayavleniye" (this can mean, 'application', 'request', and several other things; it holds the sense of an officially-documented something about something) regarding me, and that he would like to get together with me to go over it. Umm.. okay, whatever. So I told him we could get together at the house (since he identified me as the "Mr. Maroncelli from Pokrovskaya", it was a safe bet he knew where the house was) that evening at quarter to seven. He agreed, and I started to ask people what the hell that could have been about. Since the word is such a potentially general one, without any context -- and I had none at all, of course -- no one could say anything but, 'you'll find out tonight, I guess'.
As it turns out, I didn't. The guy never showed, never called, and we left after waiting for a reasonable time. He did ultimately call at like 10:30 at night, but by that point I had already figured, screw him; he can wait until morning.
So this morning, he called me again. First to apologize for missing out on meeting at the house (caught in traffic or something). Then to say that since he blew me off at the place convenient for him, he was happy to come to wherever was convenient for me. So I gave him the address of the factory. Maybe ten minutes later, our security guard called me to tell me a guy had shown up looking for me, and should he let him in. Since I was still a bit pissed at the guy for the previous night, I told the guard to let him wait and that I would be right out.
I opened the door to the security building, and saw in the entryway only two people -- the guard, and someone in a police uniform. Oh shit. And before I can react, the guard looks to me and says, 'here's the guy who was looking for you', gesturing at the cop.
Oh shit again.
So I introduce myself to the guy and we settle into the guard's office to go over the zayavleniye (in this case, I suppose I would say, 'complaint' or 'report'). He shows me a typed document consisting of about eight paragraphs. The first couple go over the border dispute we had with the people whose sheds we are tearing down; though it also at first glance seemed to be making some sort of claims about me personally. Then there was a section about our Roma neighbors (identified in the zayavleniye as 'burglars, murderers, and car thieves'), then back to something else about me making strong mention of my US citizenship, and then a bit that I didn't catch at all consisting primarily of the acronyms that Russians so love to use. Nothing really remarkably bad as far as I could tell, and the cop told me that it was basically bullshit, but that he was obligated to sit down with me and get an official response written up and filed. I called И over to give the paper a glance and to more or less consult before I got into making any kind of statement at all. He looked it over, started snickering, and then after briefly asking the cop a couple questions, told me it was definitely bullshit and that I should just do the response thing.
In more detail, the zayavleniye consisted of the following regarding me:
Addressed to the Governor of Leningradskaya Oblast, it identified the writer as a Russian citizen, long-time resident of Pokrovskaya. Recently, the plot of land neighboring his had been pruchased by an individual (me, by name) who was not only a citizen of the USA, but also, "in Russia for unclear reasons; having command of English, Italian, and Russian languages; of military bearing and specialized physical conditioning" [I know, that's the part where И started snickering; I've made all sorts of hay off that line today; A simply loves it.]
Said citizen proceeded to immediately wall off the impoverished Russian and his co-inhabitants from their access to fire safety equipment, fuel delivery, and toilet facilities; as well as tearing down sheds that they had been using for decades.
Then it proceeded to direct the Governor to, pursuant to her obligation to protect the citizens of the Russian Federation, determine exactly to what purpose the USA citizen had come to Russia, as well as taking whatever additional protective measures were appropriate. This was particularly critical, as the character of the individual in question and circumstances of his being in Russia were clearly indicative of an initiative on the part of the USA government -- noted as not being an ally of the Russian Federation, as evidenced by recent events -- in particular some form of Special Forces to take actions on in Russia on their behalf. Even more critical is the fact that the writer, as a scientist formerly associated with rocketry and other matters on a level of national security, is a likely target of this initiative, and if nothing is done, will be left on his own living right next door to said USA Special Forces Operative.
People have almost peed themselves laughing as I recapped that to them today. I asked the cop right away if I could have a copy of the letter for a souvenir. He was sort of confused by the request (as I said, 'you can't buy those kind of things, and no one has ever said that I had "specialized physical conditioning" before). Unfortunately, he wasn't empowered to do that, though he did give me the contact info for his chief, who most likely would have no problem giving me copy of the whole file if I wanted it.
Hell yes, I want it.
So anyway, I sat down with the cop and explained, no, I'm not a spy. No, I don't speak Italian. No, I'm a truck engineer, not a rocket engineer. Here's my US address. And so forth. And then read over his summary, signed it, and went off back to work to tell my tale. I'm not sure when I'll find the time, but there is no way I'm not going to get a copy of my police file.
Oh yeah, and as for the rocket scientist who wrote up the zayavleniye? Apparently, he's an old kook who peels off a half dozen or so of those every few months. The cop said it wastes an amazingly huge amount of his time chasing down all the people this guy names and interviewing them and so forth. The entire department basically despises the guy, but it's their job. And like he said, if we're going to be next to the guy, he'll come up with something to write on us. The last one before the one about me, he wrote about the inhabitants of the apartment across the way from him -- there was some sort of unusual smell coming from their apartment, and he was convinced they were either making dynamite or maybe narcotics there. And the Governor needed to send someone to check it out.
So, no harm done, and an amusing diversion for today.
[Hmmm... I wonder if they're organized enough to cross-index with my accidentally sneaking into the Kremlin several years back...
Naaahh..]
Wow. Let's just say that it's been too long, and leave it at that.
It was not such an amazing summer, anyway. Stuff happened, other stuff didn't happen, I mainly kept busy. Really, only two majorly interesting things to note:
1) Hit A Pedestrian With My Car
Driving the boys to school one morning a few weeks ago, I was going with my green light towards the intersection right ahead of the Egyptian Gate. Just ahead of the crosswalk, a girl stepped right out in front of me, maybe fifteen feet in front of my car. I slammed my brakes and swerved to one side -- the sound of my skids caught her attention, she looked right at me, and jumped in the same direction I was swerving. I corrected, but there just wasn't quite enough time; so the next thing I know, she slams off the driver's quarter of the hood and I see her feet go flying to the side. I skidded to a stop and jumped out to do... something. I was frankly expecting to find an oozing body in the street.
It is, for the record, indescribeably more horrible than running over a cat or dog.
When I got to the girl, she was kind of shifting and muttering. Her legs were cocked kind of funny, but she fairly quickly came to some sort of sense and started to get up. I helped her up and helped her limp-hop to the curb, all the while monologuing a sort of, "ohmygodyou'rehurtohmygodyourheadholycrapthankgodyou'renotdead" and so forth. We got to the curb and I immediately told her we needed to go to the hospital; that there was no way she was alright. She declined repeatedly (though she did ask me to retrieve her shoe from where it had been blown off into the middle of the intersection. I sort of checked her over, all the time repeating my insistence that we take her to a hospital. But ultimately, she just said she wanted me to take her home (she had no visible damages, other than a scraped elbow, but she was hit by a freaking car...). I told her she needed to be looked after; she assured me that her husband was a doctor and he would take care of her at home, so I ended up loading her in the car (the boys, to their credit, sat quietly while I dealt with things) and took her to her place and then made sure she got to her door, and forced her to take my phone number so that if anything at all felt funny later on I could rush back and get her to help.
Then I got back to the car, got the kids to school and continued (more or less) with my day.
I got a call in the middle of that day from a guy claiming to be the husband of the girl I hit; that she had some sort of head injury that they were going to be taking her to the neurologist the next day to check out, that she was pregnant, and that, by the way, according to Statute such-and-such of the Rules of Road Transport, I was obligated to call her an ambulance and then wait for the police to come and fill out a report. I argued with the guy a little bit, to the extent that I offered her several times to call an ambulance or take her to the hospital myself, and then did exactly what she asked and took her to her home; that I was going the normal speed on the road (one of her shoes came off, and he was trying to claim that I 'must have been going' at least twice the legal speed for that to have happened); that she was not in the crosswalk, and that I had a green light when she stepped out in front of me. Plus, you could hardly say that I fled the scened of an accident, given the fact that he was able to contact me because I had given the girl my cell number. Ultimately, he offered to go straight to the cops and report me for hit-and-run, and I got him to agree instead to meet that evening to discuss things.
И went with me (stupid me, it was my idea to meet at 11:30PM in the shopping market parking lot), which was good since the guy had two friends with him, too. I let И do the bulk of the critical talking, since I'm really not that experienced in these kinds of negotiations. Ultimately, it came down to more or less what the guy had said; we asked him to name a price, and he gave 40,000 rubles. I knew enough to keep my mouth closed, and И muttered that that was hardly a fair number. The guy offered to call his lawyer (in fact, did call the guy and try to get me to talk to him on the phone). We ended up getting him to agree to give us until the next morning before going to the cops.
That next morning, we checked into all manners of Russian law. As it turns out, I did everything right -- including taking her to her house afterwards, as she had indicated that her husband was a doctor, which fulfilled my responsibility to 'take the injured in my own transport to a location where they can receive medical attention'. However, the law pretty much straight out says that in any case, I was obligated to come back to the scene of the accident, call the cops, wait for them to show up, and so forth. So I broke the law, pretty much unambiguously. As further interest, while the penalty for 'failing to fulfill my duties as a motor vehicle operator after an accident', until last year, was a fine or suspension of license, it was increased at the beginning of summer to suspension of license or 15 days jail time (administrative arrest, it's called). So the option of letting it go to court and then having И's friends in the police/courts regimes simply write me up for the fine instead of the serious penalty was off the table. We also looked up the exact legal definition of 'blackmail' (breaking the rules of the road is an 'administrative' offense; blackmail is a 'criminal' one) with the idea that we could turn the tables on this guy and intimidate him into backing off. But no luck there, either.
So, figuring I was going to end up getting tagged for the bulk of the requested 40K, since I didn't have any sort of leg to stand on, I had И call the guy up. Doing so, he got to show his genius. He gave the guy the line that, 'look, this guy is a foreigner. what does he care if his license gets suspended in Russia? He's leaving next month anyway. He wants to make some sort of offer to you out of the goodness of his heart and recognition that he's caused you trouble, but if you want to be a dick about it, go ahead and start the police report. He'll be gone before they even start looking for him." Then he named a sum of 20,000 rubles. The guy asked a few minutes to think it over.
Five minutes later he called back and agreed. I arranged to meet him that afternoon; as soon as i hung up, И cursed and said that we should have offered ten; the guy agreed too quickly.
So ultimately I ended up paying a guy about 800 bucks and getting in return a notarized letter from the girl I hit indicating that we had settled the issue between us to our mutual consent and that she had no claims against me.
So that's what it costs to have an idiot walk out in front of you in traffic. According to the Russian Rules of the Road, the driver is always at fault -- no matter what the pedestrian did, or what the other circumstances. A driver is considered the operator of a piece of "dangerous equipment", exactly the same legally as a guy holding a pistol or working with dynamite. Supposedly, if you could find multiple witnesses to confirm that a pedestrian looked at you coming, recognized that you were coming, and stepped in front of you anyway (I suppose, suicided themselves), you might be able to get away with having the responsibility not lay completely on you. But otherwise, you're screwed. So one big lesson both Andi and I got is, Watch Out For Pedestrians.
Oh, and by the way... If I hadn't been paying good attention, or had been speeding, there is no way I would have avoided hitting her straight on at speed. In the event that a pedestrian is killed by the operator of a vehicle, it is straight-to-jail. Given the speed at which the Russian bureaucracy works, И might have been able to pull enough strings fast enough to keep me from spending any time locked up, but no guarantees. So that's another little happy though for me as I drive.
2) Got Reported To The Authorities
Yesterday morning, I got a call from a person telling me that he had a "zayavleniye" (this can mean, 'application', 'request', and several other things; it holds the sense of an officially-documented something about something) regarding me, and that he would like to get together with me to go over it. Umm.. okay, whatever. So I told him we could get together at the house (since he identified me as the "Mr. Maroncelli from Pokrovskaya", it was a safe bet he knew where the house was) that evening at quarter to seven. He agreed, and I started to ask people what the hell that could have been about. Since the word is such a potentially general one, without any context -- and I had none at all, of course -- no one could say anything but, 'you'll find out tonight, I guess'.
As it turns out, I didn't. The guy never showed, never called, and we left after waiting for a reasonable time. He did ultimately call at like 10:30 at night, but by that point I had already figured, screw him; he can wait until morning.
So this morning, he called me again. First to apologize for missing out on meeting at the house (caught in traffic or something). Then to say that since he blew me off at the place convenient for him, he was happy to come to wherever was convenient for me. So I gave him the address of the factory. Maybe ten minutes later, our security guard called me to tell me a guy had shown up looking for me, and should he let him in. Since I was still a bit pissed at the guy for the previous night, I told the guard to let him wait and that I would be right out.
I opened the door to the security building, and saw in the entryway only two people -- the guard, and someone in a police uniform. Oh shit. And before I can react, the guard looks to me and says, 'here's the guy who was looking for you', gesturing at the cop.
Oh shit again.
So I introduce myself to the guy and we settle into the guard's office to go over the zayavleniye (in this case, I suppose I would say, 'complaint' or 'report'). He shows me a typed document consisting of about eight paragraphs. The first couple go over the border dispute we had with the people whose sheds we are tearing down; though it also at first glance seemed to be making some sort of claims about me personally. Then there was a section about our Roma neighbors (identified in the zayavleniye as 'burglars, murderers, and car thieves'), then back to something else about me making strong mention of my US citizenship, and then a bit that I didn't catch at all consisting primarily of the acronyms that Russians so love to use. Nothing really remarkably bad as far as I could tell, and the cop told me that it was basically bullshit, but that he was obligated to sit down with me and get an official response written up and filed. I called И over to give the paper a glance and to more or less consult before I got into making any kind of statement at all. He looked it over, started snickering, and then after briefly asking the cop a couple questions, told me it was definitely bullshit and that I should just do the response thing.
In more detail, the zayavleniye consisted of the following regarding me:
Addressed to the Governor of Leningradskaya Oblast, it identified the writer as a Russian citizen, long-time resident of Pokrovskaya. Recently, the plot of land neighboring his had been pruchased by an individual (me, by name) who was not only a citizen of the USA, but also, "in Russia for unclear reasons; having command of English, Italian, and Russian languages; of military bearing and specialized physical conditioning" [I know, that's the part where И started snickering; I've made all sorts of hay off that line today; A simply loves it.]
Said citizen proceeded to immediately wall off the impoverished Russian and his co-inhabitants from their access to fire safety equipment, fuel delivery, and toilet facilities; as well as tearing down sheds that they had been using for decades.
Then it proceeded to direct the Governor to, pursuant to her obligation to protect the citizens of the Russian Federation, determine exactly to what purpose the USA citizen had come to Russia, as well as taking whatever additional protective measures were appropriate. This was particularly critical, as the character of the individual in question and circumstances of his being in Russia were clearly indicative of an initiative on the part of the USA government -- noted as not being an ally of the Russian Federation, as evidenced by recent events -- in particular some form of Special Forces to take actions on in Russia on their behalf. Even more critical is the fact that the writer, as a scientist formerly associated with rocketry and other matters on a level of national security, is a likely target of this initiative, and if nothing is done, will be left on his own living right next door to said USA Special Forces Operative.
People have almost peed themselves laughing as I recapped that to them today. I asked the cop right away if I could have a copy of the letter for a souvenir. He was sort of confused by the request (as I said, 'you can't buy those kind of things, and no one has ever said that I had "specialized physical conditioning" before). Unfortunately, he wasn't empowered to do that, though he did give me the contact info for his chief, who most likely would have no problem giving me copy of the whole file if I wanted it.
Hell yes, I want it.
So anyway, I sat down with the cop and explained, no, I'm not a spy. No, I don't speak Italian. No, I'm a truck engineer, not a rocket engineer. Here's my US address. And so forth. And then read over his summary, signed it, and went off back to work to tell my tale. I'm not sure when I'll find the time, but there is no way I'm not going to get a copy of my police file.
Oh yeah, and as for the rocket scientist who wrote up the zayavleniye? Apparently, he's an old kook who peels off a half dozen or so of those every few months. The cop said it wastes an amazingly huge amount of his time chasing down all the people this guy names and interviewing them and so forth. The entire department basically despises the guy, but it's their job. And like he said, if we're going to be next to the guy, he'll come up with something to write on us. The last one before the one about me, he wrote about the inhabitants of the apartment across the way from him -- there was some sort of unusual smell coming from their apartment, and he was convinced they were either making dynamite or maybe narcotics there. And the Governor needed to send someone to check it out.
So, no harm done, and an amusing diversion for today.
[Hmmm... I wonder if they're organized enough to cross-index with my accidentally sneaking into the Kremlin several years back...
Naaahh..]
Май 26, 2008
Got got got got no time...
5/27 0741, Pushkin time
So wow. More than a month between postings. My last dry spell of that length was back when I was still working out of Portland and only posting on my trips.
On the other hand, things are busier here than they ever were there. In addition to A and the boys -- and we have even one more of those now than we had back when I was business-tripping -- we recently stepped up to a promise we had made some time back and got ourselves a great dane puppy. She's from a very good kennel and was already 95% domesticated when we got her, but still being as how she's only four months old, it's a chunk of time to expend.
Plus, since our dry spell -- that is, due to incompetence and/or fear on the part of several of our US partners, our complete lack of parts with which to build anything -- ended a couple weeks ago, П and I have had our hands more than full ramping back up to normal speed on top of the already-expected getting our new option packages implemented at the exact same time as we will be massively expanding our plant facilities and re-doing our entire assembly process (with all the construction-related grief that comes with that). Plus, periodically, either he or I need to do something related to the rest of the organization which takes us out of action for a day. Fortunately, we were recently granted a secretary, who will certainly be a big help to us once we have finished walking her through all the stuff we invented over the past six months so she can take it over on her own.
Oh yeah, and by the end of summer, we're committed to upping production by 50%. So yeah, it's kind of busy.
And then, of course, the house is moving along. In the last month, a brigade of Tajiks moved in and have added a couple of posts we really needed to take some spring out of our floors, gotten the floor decking all in (though for right now just tacked-with-nails, since we still don't have the power to run the screw guns for the final install), and the floors and ceilings insulated. They've also put in all the internal walls as well as the foundation and much of the brickwork for under our deck. I also had them set in two meters deep of concrete access-ring around the well as well as digging out the trenches in which our well pipe and our sewer pipes will run to the house and putting those particular hunks of piping in the ground.
After getting quotes from a few electricians ranging on the order of 150000rubles for labor alone(!!!!) to wire up our house, I was granted a one-month usage of our plant electrician (while he is on vacation) to get things done. The word is халтура [khaltura -- 'side-work']. And I'm a big fan of it now. In addition to covering the twenty-rubles-a-day it costs him to take the bus to our place and back, I'll probably end up paying no more than 30000 all told for his labor. And since he's doing the work for someone he knows, there's a bit more motivation, too. The slight down side is that I have to keep him supplied with materials, which has meant in the last couple days buying up all of the stock of ВВГп 3x1.5 wire (that is, solid copper wire, three strands, each 1.5mm diameter, insulated separately and then all in an outer insulation - the п means the package is flat as opposed to round) in two hardware stores in town and a good chunk of what was available from a third. Plus as well a meter and boxes, and in the neighborhood of forty circuit breakers of various sizes (though mostly 6A; remember, we're on 220V). As of yesterday evening, we have pretty much the entire second and first-and-a-half floors wired up; today and likely tomorrow he's going to get the upper floor breaker box put together, and then maybe another week for the first floor and garage level.
As for water/sewer/heating (they do water-radiator heat here almost exclusively), the quotes for labor on that are more on the order of 500000rubles. So I'm looking to халтура for that, too. It's a bit tougher to find, it seems; though since that side is a fair sight simpler than electrical, I'm strongly looking toward the possibility of at least getting the behind-the-walls work done myself (Z will probably help, if it goes that way) this coming weekend. With И advising, it should be fairly straightforward. And once we've gotten the wall work done, the Tajiks can come behind us and insulate and sheetrock. Then water/sewer (or maybe we do that ourselves, too, on another weekend) and then subflooring.
We've ordered our windows -- 23 of them, priced in euros; ouch. They should be brought and installed sometime in the next week-and-a-half. I'm ordering our furnace out of Moscow this week; since we have drivers going down that way all the time, getting it up here will be no problem. The only major item that remains slightly unclear at this point is the installation of the sewer device itself. We're pretty solidly against the hole-in-the-ground technique (we do get our water from a well, you know), but it's a bit tough finding an outfit that knows how to install the mini sewage processing stations that you can get here. We'll find someone for sure (or have the Tajiks dig and put it in ourselves, I suppose), but it's still a bit up in the air. Everything else is more or less on some sort of track.
And finally, as for paperwork. We should finally have our building permit in our hands on Wednesday/Thursday. That was the last snag we hit in getting our semi-legal (that is, set up and approved by the head of the local energy department, but not, strictly speaking, done according to any sort of rules) power strung out -- we've needed that for several months now, and the Tajiks are happy to hear that it is not far off. The final delay in getting the building permits was the sign-off from the office of the fire chief. The building codes require a 15-meter minimum spacing between wooden structures. Anyone who's seen our place and can imagine a meter could see that we don't quite make that at all -- primarily because of the wooden construction in our neighbor's yard right up against the property line. But we do have a reasonable spacing (I'd say on the order of 5-6 meters, which is plenty, compared to the 5 feet you frequently see in Portland), and the fire chief proved to be someone with whom a deal could be made. So, last hurdle jumped on that, and we should have power inside of the next two weeks. That's a big one -- particularly considering we will have gotten it done in less than a full year, which is way under par.
Of course that means we'll be that much busier.
So wow. More than a month between postings. My last dry spell of that length was back when I was still working out of Portland and only posting on my trips.
On the other hand, things are busier here than they ever were there. In addition to A and the boys -- and we have even one more of those now than we had back when I was business-tripping -- we recently stepped up to a promise we had made some time back and got ourselves a great dane puppy. She's from a very good kennel and was already 95% domesticated when we got her, but still being as how she's only four months old, it's a chunk of time to expend.
Plus, since our dry spell -- that is, due to incompetence and/or fear on the part of several of our US partners, our complete lack of parts with which to build anything -- ended a couple weeks ago, П and I have had our hands more than full ramping back up to normal speed on top of the already-expected getting our new option packages implemented at the exact same time as we will be massively expanding our plant facilities and re-doing our entire assembly process (with all the construction-related grief that comes with that). Plus, periodically, either he or I need to do something related to the rest of the organization which takes us out of action for a day. Fortunately, we were recently granted a secretary, who will certainly be a big help to us once we have finished walking her through all the stuff we invented over the past six months so she can take it over on her own.
Oh yeah, and by the end of summer, we're committed to upping production by 50%. So yeah, it's kind of busy.
And then, of course, the house is moving along. In the last month, a brigade of Tajiks moved in and have added a couple of posts we really needed to take some spring out of our floors, gotten the floor decking all in (though for right now just tacked-with-nails, since we still don't have the power to run the screw guns for the final install), and the floors and ceilings insulated. They've also put in all the internal walls as well as the foundation and much of the brickwork for under our deck. I also had them set in two meters deep of concrete access-ring around the well as well as digging out the trenches in which our well pipe and our sewer pipes will run to the house and putting those particular hunks of piping in the ground.
After getting quotes from a few electricians ranging on the order of 150000rubles for labor alone(!!!!) to wire up our house, I was granted a one-month usage of our plant electrician (while he is on vacation) to get things done. The word is халтура [khaltura -- 'side-work']. And I'm a big fan of it now. In addition to covering the twenty-rubles-a-day it costs him to take the bus to our place and back, I'll probably end up paying no more than 30000 all told for his labor. And since he's doing the work for someone he knows, there's a bit more motivation, too. The slight down side is that I have to keep him supplied with materials, which has meant in the last couple days buying up all of the stock of ВВГп 3x1.5 wire (that is, solid copper wire, three strands, each 1.5mm diameter, insulated separately and then all in an outer insulation - the п means the package is flat as opposed to round) in two hardware stores in town and a good chunk of what was available from a third. Plus as well a meter and boxes, and in the neighborhood of forty circuit breakers of various sizes (though mostly 6A; remember, we're on 220V). As of yesterday evening, we have pretty much the entire second and first-and-a-half floors wired up; today and likely tomorrow he's going to get the upper floor breaker box put together, and then maybe another week for the first floor and garage level.
As for water/sewer/heating (they do water-radiator heat here almost exclusively), the quotes for labor on that are more on the order of 500000rubles. So I'm looking to халтура for that, too. It's a bit tougher to find, it seems; though since that side is a fair sight simpler than electrical, I'm strongly looking toward the possibility of at least getting the behind-the-walls work done myself (Z will probably help, if it goes that way) this coming weekend. With И advising, it should be fairly straightforward. And once we've gotten the wall work done, the Tajiks can come behind us and insulate and sheetrock. Then water/sewer (or maybe we do that ourselves, too, on another weekend) and then subflooring.
We've ordered our windows -- 23 of them, priced in euros; ouch. They should be brought and installed sometime in the next week-and-a-half. I'm ordering our furnace out of Moscow this week; since we have drivers going down that way all the time, getting it up here will be no problem. The only major item that remains slightly unclear at this point is the installation of the sewer device itself. We're pretty solidly against the hole-in-the-ground technique (we do get our water from a well, you know), but it's a bit tough finding an outfit that knows how to install the mini sewage processing stations that you can get here. We'll find someone for sure (or have the Tajiks dig and put it in ourselves, I suppose), but it's still a bit up in the air. Everything else is more or less on some sort of track.
And finally, as for paperwork. We should finally have our building permit in our hands on Wednesday/Thursday. That was the last snag we hit in getting our semi-legal (that is, set up and approved by the head of the local energy department, but not, strictly speaking, done according to any sort of rules) power strung out -- we've needed that for several months now, and the Tajiks are happy to hear that it is not far off. The final delay in getting the building permits was the sign-off from the office of the fire chief. The building codes require a 15-meter minimum spacing between wooden structures. Anyone who's seen our place and can imagine a meter could see that we don't quite make that at all -- primarily because of the wooden construction in our neighbor's yard right up against the property line. But we do have a reasonable spacing (I'd say on the order of 5-6 meters, which is plenty, compared to the 5 feet you frequently see in Portland), and the fire chief proved to be someone with whom a deal could be made. So, last hurdle jumped on that, and we should have power inside of the next two weeks. That's a big one -- particularly considering we will have gotten it done in less than a full year, which is way under par.
Of course that means we'll be that much busier.
Апрель 17, 2008
The Hunt
4/17 20:05, Pushkin time
A full month. -sigh-
Anyway, I make time to stop in and relate a relatively recent happening (and then likely disappear again for a time; perhaps not terribly unexpectedly, plant-managing is a fairly time-consuming endeavor). After making a year's worth of inquiries, I finally a couple months ago located in a friend of С С's a person who goes hunting. Last weekend I got to go out for my first time.
Friday evening С С and I bailed from work an hour early and I followed him down the Moscow highway into the Valday mountain range and then off to the right a ways to the city of Demyansk, Novgorodskaya Oblast. Though about five hours long, the drive was not particularly bad -- up until the 80km or so once we got onto the Demyansk road. This stretch we did in the already-dark, made even the more exciting by the constant appearance and passing of sections of road so badly potholed that only the fairly regular occurrence of chunks of asphalt paid any kind of evidence to the fact that we were still on a 'paved' road. As for the Valday themselves, coming out of the Petersburg flats, they were adequately mountain-looking, and had at least a few river-rapids-type things to look at.
Anyway, after an hour driving through increasingly-demoralizing road and roadside decay-of-things-modern, all of a sudden we popped over a bridge and jarred right back into civilization. Demyansk is, after all, a Russian equivalent of a county seat. Plus in the civilized part of the country, so really not so stone age as the drive out led me to fear.
And navigating into Demyansk itself, we found our way to the house of С С's friend, Viktor. We had a quick dinner, some vodka, and hopped into his sauna for a bit before hitting the hay. Viktor, it turns out, is no casual hunter. He and his crew pull something between seven and nineteen wolves out of the woods and bogs around Demyansk and the surrounding villages every winter -- in large part, they are the only people hunting several hundred square miles of wilderness. Not only do the wolves fetch them good money (the bounty is 5000rubles for a male, and 6500 for a female, which is better than $200 and almost $300, respectively -- wolves are apparently a serious issue in this part of the world; wintertime in the Demyansk region alone, they lose a person every other year or so on average to wolfpacks, and in the villages around people do not go outside at night, armed or not, when it's likely the wolves have had hard luck hunting), but they have gained them a sort of privileged position with the local game wardens. Which was good, since we were going to be hunting the local bird (глухарь -- call it 'glukhar', not an animal for which there is an english name) about a week before the season started. This was in large part necessitated by the fact that the spring thaw came on very early, and even at the time we were going out, the majority of the birds would have already mated and moved on. So we were going to be going on a 'Tsar's hunt' as Viktor called it (which is to say, on our own hunting grounds as we damn well felt was the time to go out. We'd get only the bare minimum of grief if we were caught, but still it was best to keep as inconspicuous as possible.
The next morning started at about nine with a breakfast of noodles and cheese, vegetables, and vodka (Viktor's wife scolded him for drinking so early, and I suppose me, too; but... russian hunting...). Then around about ten, Viktor's brother Sasha showed up with another of their party, Oleg. Sasha is a longtime Demyansk hunter. Oleg is a Korean-by-descent from Uzbekistan doctor who owns his own private clinic in Petersburg. His parents were less-than-legal inhabitants of what turned out to be Russian territory out on the Amur at the time Stalin decided to do some exile-swapping. All the ethnic Koreans in the Amur area got rounded up and sent to Uzbekistan, and a whole bunch of Ukranians-or-something got deported to the far east taigas to sort of take their place. That crazy Stalin... But you run into stories like that. Oleg speaks Korean and his son is actually married a girl from Korea that he met while he was there on a student-exchange thing.
Anyway, we piled into Sasha's UAZ (a russian jeep with the well-earned reputation of being able to go anywhere) and scooted out to a nearby village (see picture) to pick up our fifth, Ivan. He has also been hunting for a long time. I got to see pictures, later on, of the two sets of bear cubs that he and his family ended up raising (the first set's mother he killed, then found them and took them home; the second set's mother was killed by a guy he was with). Pretty cool for his kids, that. They had them from the size of maybe five inches long until they were maybe forty pounds each; four bear cubs as pets. Then he gave the first set to zoos, and the second set to a wildlife-release program.
Anyway, that kind of hunter.
And then from Ivan's house, we set out in the UAZ, with Viktor in a tractor following, down the road to the hunting spot. We took the UAZ as far as it could manage. When the road started getting to like like this, we ditched the UAZ and four of us piled into the trailer behind the tractor while Viktor drove us another hour into the woods.
Since these guys are the only ones who hunt these woods, the road is their own, and we did a fair bit of on-the-spot maintenance and otherwise driving over and around stuff. Made our own roads where it looked like even the tractor might not get through (mind you, the tractor went through three-foot-deep mud and water pits without so much as blinking).
We went through moose and boar-hunting grounds as well as a part of what they consider to be really good places to get wolves. And then eventually (though not soon enough for my and Oleg's aching ass-bones) we came to the point where even the tractor could go no further, parked it, got our stuff off, pulled up our swamp-boots (not quite crotch-high) and set off to slog the last two miles through the swamp to our campsite. Russian nature at its finest, up above your knees in ten inches of water and under that another who-knows-how-deep liquid muck. With a backpack and a shotgun . For two miles.
So eventually, we got to the campsite only to find that a recent windstorm had blown a big tree over right onto the lean-to that they use. Which made agenda item #1 - build a new shelter. Fortunately, along with the other necessaries, both Viktor and Sasha had brought along chainsaws, and Ivan had ported a hatchet and nails. So over the course of a couple hours, we de-forested a goodly size area and had put together a place to sleep in the more or less dry and warm.
In between chainsaw and hatchet work and hauling, of course, we took the time to have lunch (and drink vodka), and Viktor sort of talked me through what the hunt was going to be about and what I needed to keep in mind.
Plus, of course, during the building we drank all the non-alcoholic liquids we had brought with us. More on that in a bit.
During the rest of the early afternoon, Ivan took me a little ways out from the camp to show why they called this spot the "Seven Airplanes". During the war, Demyansk, which sits in a valley in the Valday not too far by air from Moscow or Peter, was mostly taken by the Germans and used as a forward airbase. Of course, this meant that the Soviets bombed the crap out of it pretty much constantly, as well as making at least one major parachute-drop assault -- into the middle of a wolf- and bear-infested swamp, if you dig... Anyways, of course during the course of this, several Soviet planes were downed.
And in fact, our campsite sat near the remains of a couple of them -- one plane, an ИЛ-2, a scant several hundred yard away, in fact. And this being a bog and all, the crater where it hit is still pretty much as it was, and chunks of it were still available (to the fellow equipped with a metal-detector as was Ivan) for pulling-out. On most of those, the paint was even still intact (again, thanks to the bog). So we played around there for a bit until it came time for Viktor and I to scout out our hunting grounds for the next morning.
We walked out in a general direction -- something I learned about bogs and myself; I make all my direction-estimates almost exactly 180 degrees off. Thank goodness I stayed with someone who knew what they were doing and had a compass. I asked at one point what would be the best way to get out if one got lost. Sasha's response was to find one of the rivers that ran through the area and follow it downstream until you got to the nearest inhabited area. That is, for close to 200km through bogs and marshes until you got to Velikiy Novgorod. In other words, if you get lost, you are well and truly fucked. See ya. So I stayed as much as possible glued to someone the whole time.
Anyway, Viktor and I went for about an hour, cutting marks in trees on the way to find our path back and then out again in the dark the next morning, until we got to the bog-proper (apparently, we had only been on the 'outskirts'). Then another half-hour into the bog and we found a spot. There we stayed until late dusk, listening and watching the глухари come in for the night. And in the later minutes, listening to the moose squish-squishing their way here and there.
A note, a moose makes less noise moving through a bog that I do. Significantly less.
And in the dark we made our way back. And -- for a surprise -- found it with no problems at all.
Then dinner and more to drink and sleep. We got up at 3AM, had a bite and more vodka (hmmm...) and then set out back into the bog. Viktor was optimistic (again, hmm....) and even though it was pitch-dark, and the middle of a freaking bog a freaking hundred miles if you were lucky enough to choose the right path from anything inhabited, decided to take a different route than the one we had marked to the hunting grounds. Okay, fine.
So we walked.
And walked.
And squished.
And squished.
After a time, Viktor started stopping to check his compass rather often.
Then he started banging on his compass every so often.
Then, when he stopped to check and thwap his compass, to curse to himself under his breath.
And of course, with my 180-degree-off sense of direction, every course correction he made -- and there were a lot of them -- seemed to be the totally wrong direction. Somehow, the sun started to come up and we were in a part of the bog (or some other bog... how the hell was I to know??) that was not totally unlike the hunting grounds we had scouted out. And the глухарь started to come in.
To hunt this animal, you have to follow the souds to it before it gets light enough for him to see you. Since they also have really good hearing, it is important to only move when they are making the very last part of their call (a sort drawn-out of belching sound). In the time they are doing this, an experienced bog-walker can manage maybe three steps. Frequently, I was able to extract a single foot from the muck before the song stopped and I had to freeze as my full weight, resting on only half the surface area, sunk me other foot deeper and deeper. It was actually a really good time.
Eventually, we got right up to one of them. In what would have been the last chorus of his last song, I took a single step to move into what I thought was hiding. But what turned out to be right in front of him in full view. The bird loo-ooked at me. And I presume considered whether it was really possible that something so obviously retarded could possibly pose a threat. Shortly it decided upon the course of prudence and flew away.
After cursing me thoroughly, Viktor allowed for the fact that I had done very well for someone on their first hunt -- especially considering my serious handicap of making more noise moving through a bog than the average freight train. Most people don't even get close enough to see a глухарь their first time out, and here I was able to get right out in front of him. For what that was worth.
Anyway, by that time, the morning was over, the birds had moved on, and it was time to pack it in. So back to camp, we waited for Oleg and Sasha, who had gone out to a different ground to hunt, to return. Which they did, having successfully bagged one as shown. While waiting, Ivan, Viktor, and I were finally thirsty enough to drink bog water (no pot to boil it, which was why we had waited so long). We discarded the first stuff we found, which was a dark brown color and had tadpoles in it, for a lighter-brown, otherwise-clear stuff. Considering it only gave me the craps for a couple days afterwards, I'd say we made the right choice.
Anyway, we packed everything in (after finishing off the vodka in celebration, natch), and slogged our way back to the tractor, which slogged its way back to the UAZ, which made its way back to my Ford, parked at Viktor's house. Then five and a half hours later, I was home and dry.
It is my intention to go out again at least this coming winter and get a wolf or two. How can you turn down an opportunity like that?? Viktor has said I am welcome out anytime, and that if A's dad (for example) wanted to come out, the best time for boar is fall, for moose and wolf, winter, and he has never gone out without bringing back at least one of whatever he's going for. And don't sweat the whole weapons permits and hunting license thing. They're his woods, after all...
A full month. -sigh-
Anyway, I make time to stop in and relate a relatively recent happening (and then likely disappear again for a time; perhaps not terribly unexpectedly, plant-managing is a fairly time-consuming endeavor). After making a year's worth of inquiries, I finally a couple months ago located in a friend of С С's a person who goes hunting. Last weekend I got to go out for my first time.
Friday evening С С and I bailed from work an hour early and I followed him down the Moscow highway into the Valday mountain range and then off to the right a ways to the city of Demyansk, Novgorodskaya Oblast. Though about five hours long, the drive was not particularly bad -- up until the 80km or so once we got onto the Demyansk road. This stretch we did in the already-dark, made even the more exciting by the constant appearance and passing of sections of road so badly potholed that only the fairly regular occurrence of chunks of asphalt paid any kind of evidence to the fact that we were still on a 'paved' road. As for the Valday themselves, coming out of the Petersburg flats, they were adequately mountain-looking, and had at least a few river-rapids-type things to look at.
Anyway, after an hour driving through increasingly-demoralizing road and roadside decay-of-things-modern, all of a sudden we popped over a bridge and jarred right back into civilization. Demyansk is, after all, a Russian equivalent of a county seat. Plus in the civilized part of the country, so really not so stone age as the drive out led me to fear.
And navigating into Demyansk itself, we found our way to the house of С С's friend, Viktor. We had a quick dinner, some vodka, and hopped into his sauna for a bit before hitting the hay. Viktor, it turns out, is no casual hunter. He and his crew pull something between seven and nineteen wolves out of the woods and bogs around Demyansk and the surrounding villages every winter -- in large part, they are the only people hunting several hundred square miles of wilderness. Not only do the wolves fetch them good money (the bounty is 5000rubles for a male, and 6500 for a female, which is better than $200 and almost $300, respectively -- wolves are apparently a serious issue in this part of the world; wintertime in the Demyansk region alone, they lose a person every other year or so on average to wolfpacks, and in the villages around people do not go outside at night, armed or not, when it's likely the wolves have had hard luck hunting), but they have gained them a sort of privileged position with the local game wardens. Which was good, since we were going to be hunting the local bird (глухарь -- call it 'glukhar', not an animal for which there is an english name) about a week before the season started. This was in large part necessitated by the fact that the spring thaw came on very early, and even at the time we were going out, the majority of the birds would have already mated and moved on. So we were going to be going on a 'Tsar's hunt' as Viktor called it (which is to say, on our own hunting grounds as we damn well felt was the time to go out. We'd get only the bare minimum of grief if we were caught, but still it was best to keep as inconspicuous as possible.
The next morning started at about nine with a breakfast of noodles and cheese, vegetables, and vodka (Viktor's wife scolded him for drinking so early, and I suppose me, too; but... russian hunting...). Then around about ten, Viktor's brother Sasha showed up with another of their party, Oleg. Sasha is a longtime Demyansk hunter. Oleg is a Korean-by-descent from Uzbekistan doctor who owns his own private clinic in Petersburg. His parents were less-than-legal inhabitants of what turned out to be Russian territory out on the Amur at the time Stalin decided to do some exile-swapping. All the ethnic Koreans in the Amur area got rounded up and sent to Uzbekistan, and a whole bunch of Ukranians-or-something got deported to the far east taigas to sort of take their place. That crazy Stalin... But you run into stories like that. Oleg speaks Korean and his son is actually married a girl from Korea that he met while he was there on a student-exchange thing.
Anyway, we piled into Sasha's UAZ (a russian jeep with the well-earned reputation of being able to go anywhere) and scooted out to a nearby village (see picture) to pick up our fifth, Ivan. He has also been hunting for a long time. I got to see pictures, later on, of the two sets of bear cubs that he and his family ended up raising (the first set's mother he killed, then found them and took them home; the second set's mother was killed by a guy he was with). Pretty cool for his kids, that. They had them from the size of maybe five inches long until they were maybe forty pounds each; four bear cubs as pets. Then he gave the first set to zoos, and the second set to a wildlife-release program.
Anyway, that kind of hunter.
And then from Ivan's house, we set out in the UAZ, with Viktor in a tractor following, down the road to the hunting spot. We took the UAZ as far as it could manage. When the road started getting to like like this, we ditched the UAZ and four of us piled into the trailer behind the tractor while Viktor drove us another hour into the woods.
Since these guys are the only ones who hunt these woods, the road is their own, and we did a fair bit of on-the-spot maintenance and otherwise driving over and around stuff. Made our own roads where it looked like even the tractor might not get through (mind you, the tractor went through three-foot-deep mud and water pits without so much as blinking).
We went through moose and boar-hunting grounds as well as a part of what they consider to be really good places to get wolves. And then eventually (though not soon enough for my and Oleg's aching ass-bones) we came to the point where even the tractor could go no further, parked it, got our stuff off, pulled up our swamp-boots (not quite crotch-high) and set off to slog the last two miles through the swamp to our campsite. Russian nature at its finest, up above your knees in ten inches of water and under that another who-knows-how-deep liquid muck. With a backpack and a shotgun . For two miles.
So eventually, we got to the campsite only to find that a recent windstorm had blown a big tree over right onto the lean-to that they use. Which made agenda item #1 - build a new shelter. Fortunately, along with the other necessaries, both Viktor and Sasha had brought along chainsaws, and Ivan had ported a hatchet and nails. So over the course of a couple hours, we de-forested a goodly size area and had put together a place to sleep in the more or less dry and warm.
In between chainsaw and hatchet work and hauling, of course, we took the time to have lunch (and drink vodka), and Viktor sort of talked me through what the hunt was going to be about and what I needed to keep in mind.
Plus, of course, during the building we drank all the non-alcoholic liquids we had brought with us. More on that in a bit.During the rest of the early afternoon, Ivan took me a little ways out from the camp to show why they called this spot the "Seven Airplanes". During the war, Demyansk, which sits in a valley in the Valday not too far by air from Moscow or Peter, was mostly taken by the Germans and used as a forward airbase. Of course, this meant that the Soviets bombed the crap out of it pretty much constantly, as well as making at least one major parachute-drop assault -- into the middle of a wolf- and bear-infested swamp, if you dig... Anyways, of course during the course of this, several Soviet planes were downed.
And in fact, our campsite sat near the remains of a couple of them -- one plane, an ИЛ-2, a scant several hundred yard away, in fact. And this being a bog and all, the crater where it hit is still pretty much as it was, and chunks of it were still available (to the fellow equipped with a metal-detector as was Ivan) for pulling-out. On most of those, the paint was even still intact (again, thanks to the bog). So we played around there for a bit until it came time for Viktor and I to scout out our hunting grounds for the next morning.We walked out in a general direction -- something I learned about bogs and myself; I make all my direction-estimates almost exactly 180 degrees off. Thank goodness I stayed with someone who knew what they were doing and had a compass. I asked at one point what would be the best way to get out if one got lost. Sasha's response was to find one of the rivers that ran through the area and follow it downstream until you got to the nearest inhabited area. That is, for close to 200km through bogs and marshes until you got to Velikiy Novgorod. In other words, if you get lost, you are well and truly fucked. See ya. So I stayed as much as possible glued to someone the whole time.
Anyway, Viktor and I went for about an hour, cutting marks in trees on the way to find our path back and then out again in the dark the next morning, until we got to the bog-proper (apparently, we had only been on the 'outskirts'). Then another half-hour into the bog and we found a spot. There we stayed until late dusk, listening and watching the глухари come in for the night. And in the later minutes, listening to the moose squish-squishing their way here and there.
A note, a moose makes less noise moving through a bog that I do. Significantly less.
And in the dark we made our way back. And -- for a surprise -- found it with no problems at all.
Then dinner and more to drink and sleep. We got up at 3AM, had a bite and more vodka (hmmm...) and then set out back into the bog. Viktor was optimistic (again, hmm....) and even though it was pitch-dark, and the middle of a freaking bog a freaking hundred miles if you were lucky enough to choose the right path from anything inhabited, decided to take a different route than the one we had marked to the hunting grounds. Okay, fine.
So we walked.
And walked.
And squished.
And squished.
After a time, Viktor started stopping to check his compass rather often.
Then he started banging on his compass every so often.
Then, when he stopped to check and thwap his compass, to curse to himself under his breath.
And of course, with my 180-degree-off sense of direction, every course correction he made -- and there were a lot of them -- seemed to be the totally wrong direction. Somehow, the sun started to come up and we were in a part of the bog (or some other bog... how the hell was I to know??) that was not totally unlike the hunting grounds we had scouted out. And the глухарь started to come in.
To hunt this animal, you have to follow the souds to it before it gets light enough for him to see you. Since they also have really good hearing, it is important to only move when they are making the very last part of their call (a sort drawn-out of belching sound). In the time they are doing this, an experienced bog-walker can manage maybe three steps. Frequently, I was able to extract a single foot from the muck before the song stopped and I had to freeze as my full weight, resting on only half the surface area, sunk me other foot deeper and deeper. It was actually a really good time.
Eventually, we got right up to one of them. In what would have been the last chorus of his last song, I took a single step to move into what I thought was hiding. But what turned out to be right in front of him in full view. The bird loo-ooked at me. And I presume considered whether it was really possible that something so obviously retarded could possibly pose a threat. Shortly it decided upon the course of prudence and flew away.
After cursing me thoroughly, Viktor allowed for the fact that I had done very well for someone on their first hunt -- especially considering my serious handicap of making more noise moving through a bog than the average freight train. Most people don't even get close enough to see a глухарь their first time out, and here I was able to get right out in front of him. For what that was worth.
Anyway, by that time, the morning was over, the birds had moved on, and it was time to pack it in. So back to camp, we waited for Oleg and Sasha, who had gone out to a different ground to hunt, to return. Which they did, having successfully bagged one as shown. While waiting, Ivan, Viktor, and I were finally thirsty enough to drink bog water (no pot to boil it, which was why we had waited so long). We discarded the first stuff we found, which was a dark brown color and had tadpoles in it, for a lighter-brown, otherwise-clear stuff. Considering it only gave me the craps for a couple days afterwards, I'd say we made the right choice.
Anyway, we packed everything in (after finishing off the vodka in celebration, natch), and slogged our way back to the tractor, which slogged its way back to the UAZ, which made its way back to my Ford, parked at Viktor's house. Then five and a half hours later, I was home and dry.
It is my intention to go out again at least this coming winter and get a wolf or two. How can you turn down an opportunity like that?? Viktor has said I am welcome out anytime, and that if A's dad (for example) wanted to come out, the best time for boar is fall, for moose and wolf, winter, and he has never gone out without bringing back at least one of whatever he's going for. And don't sweat the whole weapons permits and hunting license thing. They're his woods, after all...
Март 18, 2008
Articles (first two)
3/18 19:07, Pushkin time
I finally got the time (and got around to it) to get a couple of the better articles-that-have-come-out-so-far scanned and formatted and so forth.
This first is more about the trucks, from the major magazine, AutoReview (translated, of course). These are the guys who tore apart the dump trucks we made several months back -- not that it was anything to horrible; the magazine has a reputation for being reliable in large part due to how harsh they can be; so the compliments we got in that issue, though few, were sweet. With that as a baseline, the smaller piece they put out for our opening is practically glowing. They make a few rude comments about the age of the truck model, and the fact that the spec we are building is a bit 'budget'. Plus they have an irrational bias towards European trucks (also accounted for). So we're actually pretty happy with that first article.
Here's that one (it's big, ~3MB)
The second was a little blurb in the Business Petersburg (again, translated) newspaper. They put out that day a twelve-page insert specifically about the automotive factories that are being brought to life all around Petersburg. And we got a whole page of that (more than Toyota!). Of course, most amusing for insiders is the photo at the bottom center-left, identifying the plant manager. The question of, 'which one is he?' has already started to get old for everyone except all the people I show the article to. But that's cool. L got to be in the paper, so we'll keep a copy of that for him.
Here's that one (just <1MB)
I finally got the time (and got around to it) to get a couple of the better articles-that-have-come-out-so-far scanned and formatted and so forth.
This first is more about the trucks, from the major magazine, AutoReview (translated, of course). These are the guys who tore apart the dump trucks we made several months back -- not that it was anything to horrible; the magazine has a reputation for being reliable in large part due to how harsh they can be; so the compliments we got in that issue, though few, were sweet. With that as a baseline, the smaller piece they put out for our opening is practically glowing. They make a few rude comments about the age of the truck model, and the fact that the spec we are building is a bit 'budget'. Plus they have an irrational bias towards European trucks (also accounted for). So we're actually pretty happy with that first article.
Here's that one (it's big, ~3MB)
The second was a little blurb in the Business Petersburg (again, translated) newspaper. They put out that day a twelve-page insert specifically about the automotive factories that are being brought to life all around Petersburg. And we got a whole page of that (more than Toyota!). Of course, most amusing for insiders is the photo at the bottom center-left, identifying the plant manager. The question of, 'which one is he?' has already started to get old for everyone except all the people I show the article to. But that's cool. L got to be in the paper, so we'll keep a copy of that for him.
Here's that one (just <1MB)
Март 14, 2008
Big day for Z's class
3/14 18:45, Pushkin time
Last week at the plant we turned out 5 trucks; this week, 4 (Monday was a holiday). So we are officially now at our 1/day target. The bigger articles from the opening are starting to come out, too. My intention is to spend a bit of time scanning them and to put them up, too, before too long.
Anyway, today A got caught in traffic coming back from the store and called me to say that she wasn't going to make Z's ordinary noon pickup time. So I rushed over to get him, which was fortunate, as he had neglected to mention to us that today was a big celebration day for the 1st-classers. They make a big production out of the kids finishing with their penmanship books all the way through the 33 letters (in capital and lower case). Singing, dancing, and so forth. And if it hadn't have been for some bureaucrat deciding to take a drive through Pushkin, A would have gotten to see it instead of me (as it was, she ended up seeing more than half of it). Everyone turned out -- most kids' parents were clearly taking time off work to come by; A's friend T's husband was there; И's neighbor C; pretty much everyone we've met in town seems to have a kid represented in one of the three 1st class groups.
At the beginning of the celebration, the director of the school put the question to the parents, how many of them remembered their 'literacy celebration'. Most, of course. As it was remarked, this has been one of the traditional rites for Russian schooling for many, many generations. It was gratifying the be able to pick up all of the puns and plays-on-words that made for the bulk of what they did.
Z got to sing, among other things, the Russian alphabet song. I couldn't place the tune at first, until just now when he repeated it for his little brother. It's done to the "Welcome to Duloc" tune from Shrek (which is almost certainly from somewhere else, but that's what I relate it to).
And at the end, the 4th-classers got to present the freshly-penmanship-literate kids with bookmarks they had made to go with the very first books they will be jumping into for the "reading" class that is half of the replacement for the "penmanship" one just completed (the other half is, of course, "Russian Language" -- as in grammar, spelling, punctuation... the standard fare). The book the freshly-literate will be starting with? Золотое Руно [That is, The Golden Fleece]. Apparently, the starting book is different every year, but always something from the Greek classics. Z is pretty stoked.
Last week at the plant we turned out 5 trucks; this week, 4 (Monday was a holiday). So we are officially now at our 1/day target. The bigger articles from the opening are starting to come out, too. My intention is to spend a bit of time scanning them and to put them up, too, before too long.
Anyway, today A got caught in traffic coming back from the store and called me to say that she wasn't going to make Z's ordinary noon pickup time. So I rushed over to get him, which was fortunate, as he had neglected to mention to us that today was a big celebration day for the 1st-classers. They make a big production out of the kids finishing with their penmanship books all the way through the 33 letters (in capital and lower case). Singing, dancing, and so forth. And if it hadn't have been for some bureaucrat deciding to take a drive through Pushkin, A would have gotten to see it instead of me (as it was, she ended up seeing more than half of it). Everyone turned out -- most kids' parents were clearly taking time off work to come by; A's friend T's husband was there; И's neighbor C; pretty much everyone we've met in town seems to have a kid represented in one of the three 1st class groups.
At the beginning of the celebration, the director of the school put the question to the parents, how many of them remembered their 'literacy celebration'. Most, of course. As it was remarked, this has been one of the traditional rites for Russian schooling for many, many generations. It was gratifying the be able to pick up all of the puns and plays-on-words that made for the bulk of what they did.
Z got to sing, among other things, the Russian alphabet song. I couldn't place the tune at first, until just now when he repeated it for his little brother. It's done to the "Welcome to Duloc" tune from Shrek (which is almost certainly from somewhere else, but that's what I relate it to).
And at the end, the 4th-classers got to present the freshly-penmanship-literate kids with bookmarks they had made to go with the very first books they will be jumping into for the "reading" class that is half of the replacement for the "penmanship" one just completed (the other half is, of course, "Russian Language" -- as in grammar, spelling, punctuation... the standard fare). The book the freshly-literate will be starting with? Золотое Руно [That is, The Golden Fleece]. Apparently, the starting book is different every year, but always something from the Greek classics. Z is pretty stoked.
Март 06, 2008
Peter Spring
3/7 08:08, Pushkin time
It's been snowing pretty much straight the last ten days (with a tiny sunbreak yesterday for a couple hours -- enough to grow some cool icicles everywhere). February in all was hardly even cold enough to rate a decent autumn, but March is coming off so far at least a bit closer to normal. We're not getting anything particularly cold (I think minus 7 was the furthest it got one night), but cool-and-snowy is at least considered expected for this time of year.
The biggest trouble in keeping writing regularly is finding a way to set aside time on a regular basis. Since the plant got started, the three of us who constitute 'management' (that's myself, personnel guy П К, and our quality guy С С) have seen a pretty much unbroken streak of business. For me it's gone so far as to have brought on a new guy back at the main office to work under me (though for now actually supervised by Е П, since I'm hardly ever actually at the office) to take care of the dealer-related stuff that I was doing prior to the factory launch. So once I'm ready to let him start doing some of that stuff himself, I get to swap my "trainer" hat for a "head of Training Department" hat. That is, to go with my "Plant Manager" hat and my "Project Engineer" hat (and the often-used, rarely advertised "Guy-Who-Speaks-Good-English" hat). Which is all kind of funny, since I only ever actually wear my orange hunting hat; and for this past winter, it's been warm enough that I haven't really even used it that much.
G is doing well with the reading and writing at his preschool, as well as with the reading (though a bit slower with the writing) in English at home. He recently got invited to come over to a new friend's place; A took him and said they both had a very good time -- the new friend's mom is a dentist, and they had lived for a few months in San Francisco not too long back, so she may be the first friend A's made who can actually sympathize with the language and culture issues and have a good idea of what to do to minimize them.
Z's class have finished the alphabet in their penmanship and are now doing words and sentences (much of it poetry -- we do live in Pushkin, after all...). His vocabulary is exploding. They've also passed out recorder-type instruments and he's gotten into making music.
L is not quite walking yet (A figures it's because we don't have carpet, so he is terrified of falling and bonking himself), but is getting into things at a walking-level. We've decided to take the route we did with G and start him communicating in sign-language so he can have at least some way to communicate with us until he gets to talking. And he's picking the signs up just as quickly as G did.
In other things, С С yesterday at lunch finally declared 'Enough' and took the time to teach me how to hold my spoon properly (that is, properly for Russia). It's something everyone is taught in preschool here -- G does it right -- and it just got to be too much for him to have an adult conversation every day with a person who didn't even use his utensils properly. I will say that using a spoon in a different manner is significantly more difficult than taking to chopsticks. Most likely, because I had no 'wrong' way to unlearn with chopsticks. But give it a few more days and I will eliminate one more barbarian mannerism from my regular habit.
It's been snowing pretty much straight the last ten days (with a tiny sunbreak yesterday for a couple hours -- enough to grow some cool icicles everywhere). February in all was hardly even cold enough to rate a decent autumn, but March is coming off so far at least a bit closer to normal. We're not getting anything particularly cold (I think minus 7 was the furthest it got one night), but cool-and-snowy is at least considered expected for this time of year.
The biggest trouble in keeping writing regularly is finding a way to set aside time on a regular basis. Since the plant got started, the three of us who constitute 'management' (that's myself, personnel guy П К, and our quality guy С С) have seen a pretty much unbroken streak of business. For me it's gone so far as to have brought on a new guy back at the main office to work under me (though for now actually supervised by Е П, since I'm hardly ever actually at the office) to take care of the dealer-related stuff that I was doing prior to the factory launch. So once I'm ready to let him start doing some of that stuff himself, I get to swap my "trainer" hat for a "head of Training Department" hat. That is, to go with my "Plant Manager" hat and my "Project Engineer" hat (and the often-used, rarely advertised "Guy-Who-Speaks-Good-English" hat). Which is all kind of funny, since I only ever actually wear my orange hunting hat; and for this past winter, it's been warm enough that I haven't really even used it that much.
G is doing well with the reading and writing at his preschool, as well as with the reading (though a bit slower with the writing) in English at home. He recently got invited to come over to a new friend's place; A took him and said they both had a very good time -- the new friend's mom is a dentist, and they had lived for a few months in San Francisco not too long back, so she may be the first friend A's made who can actually sympathize with the language and culture issues and have a good idea of what to do to minimize them.
Z's class have finished the alphabet in their penmanship and are now doing words and sentences (much of it poetry -- we do live in Pushkin, after all...). His vocabulary is exploding. They've also passed out recorder-type instruments and he's gotten into making music.
L is not quite walking yet (A figures it's because we don't have carpet, so he is terrified of falling and bonking himself), but is getting into things at a walking-level. We've decided to take the route we did with G and start him communicating in sign-language so he can have at least some way to communicate with us until he gets to talking. And he's picking the signs up just as quickly as G did.
In other things, С С yesterday at lunch finally declared 'Enough' and took the time to teach me how to hold my spoon properly (that is, properly for Russia). It's something everyone is taught in preschool here -- G does it right -- and it just got to be too much for him to have an adult conversation every day with a person who didn't even use his utensils properly. I will say that using a spoon in a different manner is significantly more difficult than taking to chopsticks. Most likely, because I had no 'wrong' way to unlearn with chopsticks. But give it a few more days and I will eliminate one more barbarian mannerism from my regular habit.
Февраль 22, 2008
Stupid flu
2/23 10:09, Pushkin time
The title, I suppose, says it all. The boys have all been sick for pretty much the last week-and-a-half, and it seems that is just over the maximum amount of time my immune system can fight exposure. Crap.
Today is Defenders of the Homeland Day here (previously Red Army Day; the anniversary of the day Lenin signed the order creating the Red Army, as I was informed yesterday -- Russians prefer to simply re-name, rather than give up their days off entirely). In practice it's more or less a "Mens' day", the perhaps unique Russian counterpart to the May 8 "Womens' Day" (which is celebrated pretty much everywhere in the world I've been/been in contact with). So all the guys at work got gifts yesterday from all the women, and as they do here, since the holiday falls on a weekend, we get the Monday off. G made me a tank at his preschool (Z has simply had this past week off).
And as for work, we've got eight trucks off the end of the build process (with the exception of one major piece that the jerks in the US left out of the first shipment of parts and then ended up sticking in the very last container from the second shipment of parts). We probably won't make 1/day this coming week -- I've got a training course to run all week, and those last containers are coming in and will need to be unloaded. But as of March, we will be at that level. A tad bit late, but so it goes; at least we'll be there.
Then in other things, one of the lawyers finally got word back from the Russian immigration folks regarding the possibility of us getting the temporary-resident permits. One necessary piece of documentation that we provide them is a document indicating that we have no US criminal records. We got something along those lines a while ago from the FBI. But documents issued by one country have no validity in another country without a certification-type addendum made by the issuing place's Secretary of State (called an 'apostille'). We tried to get this on our FBI statements, but were told that the US federal government doesn't apostille FBI papers(?!?) and that the State of Oregon, where we live[d] doesn't either. So we submitted the papers without. And of course, the Russian bureaucrats rejected them. A series of calls to the US Consulate (in Moscow, not the lying jerks in Petersburg) finally tracked down the problem. FBI papers are apostilled by the Secretary of State of West Virginia (where, I presume, the FBI headquarters is located). So we're sending the papers out that way for the one more addition.
Another problem came in the Russian translations. Of course, all the documents we submit must be accompanied by Official (that is, done by the one licensed outfit in the city) Russian translations. We were already aware of the fact that the morons who do our visa applications can't spell our last name the same way twice in a row (the 'c' is alternately given as a Russian 'k' or 's' -- as far as we're concerned, the 's' is correct; it's what we had put on L's birth certificate and our land titles, the only actually Russian documents we have). That's not a problem as far as visas are concerned, since each one of those is treated individually. But when we try to apply for something as a family, the fact that our last names don't agree becomes more of an issue -- A had to do a bit of brief explaining when she and L flew out of the country that first time. And the fact that, for example, the translation of our marriage certificate has the last name spelled with the letter 'ch' in that apparently-ambiguous position. The Immigration people basically told the lawyer to come back with a group of documents about all the same people.
So, we're having the translations re-done with better supervision. The only thing that really sticks is our visas now. The solution to which is going to be to get one more set of them, also issued under much closer supervision. Everything has to agree (don't even ask about what the translators do to Z's name...), and then it actually looks like the permits will be a done deal -- for money, of course; this is Russia...
The title, I suppose, says it all. The boys have all been sick for pretty much the last week-and-a-half, and it seems that is just over the maximum amount of time my immune system can fight exposure. Crap.
Today is Defenders of the Homeland Day here (previously Red Army Day; the anniversary of the day Lenin signed the order creating the Red Army, as I was informed yesterday -- Russians prefer to simply re-name, rather than give up their days off entirely). In practice it's more or less a "Mens' day", the perhaps unique Russian counterpart to the May 8 "Womens' Day" (which is celebrated pretty much everywhere in the world I've been/been in contact with). So all the guys at work got gifts yesterday from all the women, and as they do here, since the holiday falls on a weekend, we get the Monday off. G made me a tank at his preschool (Z has simply had this past week off).
And as for work, we've got eight trucks off the end of the build process (with the exception of one major piece that the jerks in the US left out of the first shipment of parts and then ended up sticking in the very last container from the second shipment of parts). We probably won't make 1/day this coming week -- I've got a training course to run all week, and those last containers are coming in and will need to be unloaded. But as of March, we will be at that level. A tad bit late, but so it goes; at least we'll be there.Then in other things, one of the lawyers finally got word back from the Russian immigration folks regarding the possibility of us getting the temporary-resident permits. One necessary piece of documentation that we provide them is a document indicating that we have no US criminal records. We got something along those lines a while ago from the FBI. But documents issued by one country have no validity in another country without a certification-type addendum made by the issuing place's Secretary of State (called an 'apostille'). We tried to get this on our FBI statements, but were told that the US federal government doesn't apostille FBI papers(?!?) and that the State of Oregon, where we live[d] doesn't either. So we submitted the papers without. And of course, the Russian bureaucrats rejected them. A series of calls to the US Consulate (in Moscow, not the lying jerks in Petersburg) finally tracked down the problem. FBI papers are apostilled by the Secretary of State of West Virginia (where, I presume, the FBI headquarters is located). So we're sending the papers out that way for the one more addition.
Another problem came in the Russian translations. Of course, all the documents we submit must be accompanied by Official (that is, done by the one licensed outfit in the city) Russian translations. We were already aware of the fact that the morons who do our visa applications can't spell our last name the same way twice in a row (the 'c' is alternately given as a Russian 'k' or 's' -- as far as we're concerned, the 's' is correct; it's what we had put on L's birth certificate and our land titles, the only actually Russian documents we have). That's not a problem as far as visas are concerned, since each one of those is treated individually. But when we try to apply for something as a family, the fact that our last names don't agree becomes more of an issue -- A had to do a bit of brief explaining when she and L flew out of the country that first time. And the fact that, for example, the translation of our marriage certificate has the last name spelled with the letter 'ch' in that apparently-ambiguous position. The Immigration people basically told the lawyer to come back with a group of documents about all the same people.
So, we're having the translations re-done with better supervision. The only thing that really sticks is our visas now. The solution to which is going to be to get one more set of them, also issued under much closer supervision. Everything has to agree (don't even ask about what the translators do to Z's name...), and then it actually looks like the permits will be a done deal -- for money, of course; this is Russia...
Февраль 17, 2008
Papering
2/18 08:00, Pushkin time
Another spin across the Finnish border this past Saturday -- this time in the Ford. Now both our cars are legal to remain in Russia for as long as until next February. Now it remains only to get our personal registrations sorted out, waste a full day in the city at the customs broker place, and we will have once again fully-formalized temporary-import vehicles (until we leave / our visas end in August).
Two trips in as many weeks -- not that they were particularly bad, thanks to L, our 'without lines' pass for a couple months more -- has us getting pretty well sick of doing the temporary-import dance. A and I have more or less decided that when the Ford gives out, we'll replace it with a car on which we will have a Russian title. The amount of hassle that will save is actually quite impressive.
The Brusnichnoye/Nuijaama border folks were decent again, though (there is that, at least). On the way out, apparently the Russian contingent was being 'visited' by a boss, so the small bit of waiting that is unavoidable no matter what special privileges you bring with you turned out to be a decent chunk of time. And then the capper -- the passport lady, after checking all our stuff out told us to pull up to the other side of the control booths and wait while she brought our passports into the office for 'review'. So we sit. And wait. And finally, she brings them back to me and shows me the orange stamps they have just now put in them.(!!!!) I know enough by now to get concerned when a bureaucrat does something unexpected, and as we had only really supplied-up for a twenty-minute stay in Finland, the prospect of some sort of special stamp being applied to us was... disconcerting.
Turns out (of course, here I am, sitting and typing) they just changed the colors that day; most likely that was what the boss was visiting to oversee. And the delay leaving Russia meant that we got to enter Russia right about the time the boss must have been having lunch, because all of a sudden the line on return started moving light-speed; the guards and bureaucrats were smiley-chatty, and one could almost have called the entire thing pleasant.
We had a good snow on Friday, and another one pretty much all day yesterday. Since the temp dipped enough, the ice patch outside has been maintained and Z has been spending a good chunk of his time skating and beginner-hockeying. He's got a school break this week, which will work out really well, since it looks like skating will be feasible through at least Thursday. G's friend M (the kid whose dad is a Virginian from Philip-Morris) got back this last week from whatever vacation they were on, so G's been in raptures. L has started letting go of things -- and mainly falling on his butt after a second's wobble, but it's the courage that counts for right now. He's not talking yet, though he does make a lot of different noises. Discussing with A, even though we talk to him in english exclusively, he does spend his time in a two-language environment (in fact, his first two weeks of life were spent in an almost exclusively Russian-speaking environment, you may recall), and supposedly kids who are so exposed do take a bit longer to start talking. So no worries.
Another spin across the Finnish border this past Saturday -- this time in the Ford. Now both our cars are legal to remain in Russia for as long as until next February. Now it remains only to get our personal registrations sorted out, waste a full day in the city at the customs broker place, and we will have once again fully-formalized temporary-import vehicles (until we leave / our visas end in August).
Two trips in as many weeks -- not that they were particularly bad, thanks to L, our 'without lines' pass for a couple months more -- has us getting pretty well sick of doing the temporary-import dance. A and I have more or less decided that when the Ford gives out, we'll replace it with a car on which we will have a Russian title. The amount of hassle that will save is actually quite impressive.
The Brusnichnoye/Nuijaama border folks were decent again, though (there is that, at least). On the way out, apparently the Russian contingent was being 'visited' by a boss, so the small bit of waiting that is unavoidable no matter what special privileges you bring with you turned out to be a decent chunk of time. And then the capper -- the passport lady, after checking all our stuff out told us to pull up to the other side of the control booths and wait while she brought our passports into the office for 'review'. So we sit. And wait. And finally, she brings them back to me and shows me the orange stamps they have just now put in them.(!!!!) I know enough by now to get concerned when a bureaucrat does something unexpected, and as we had only really supplied-up for a twenty-minute stay in Finland, the prospect of some sort of special stamp being applied to us was... disconcerting.
Turns out (of course, here I am, sitting and typing) they just changed the colors that day; most likely that was what the boss was visiting to oversee. And the delay leaving Russia meant that we got to enter Russia right about the time the boss must have been having lunch, because all of a sudden the line on return started moving light-speed; the guards and bureaucrats were smiley-chatty, and one could almost have called the entire thing pleasant.
We had a good snow on Friday, and another one pretty much all day yesterday. Since the temp dipped enough, the ice patch outside has been maintained and Z has been spending a good chunk of his time skating and beginner-hockeying. He's got a school break this week, which will work out really well, since it looks like skating will be feasible through at least Thursday. G's friend M (the kid whose dad is a Virginian from Philip-Morris) got back this last week from whatever vacation they were on, so G's been in raptures. L has started letting go of things -- and mainly falling on his butt after a second's wobble, but it's the courage that counts for right now. He's not talking yet, though he does make a lot of different noises. Discussing with A, even though we talk to him in english exclusively, he does spend his time in a two-language environment (in fact, his first two weeks of life were spent in an almost exclusively Russian-speaking environment, you may recall), and supposedly kids who are so exposed do take a bit longer to start talking. So no worries.
Февраль 14, 2008
Maybe?
2/14 19:30, Pushkin time
It chilled down a little today. We've got perhaps as low as the near-freezing minuses, but nothing spectacular. And this very well could be the last 'blast' of 'winter' this year.
We're running into some difficulties with our registration this time around. When we returned in January, we were told that due to some sort of internal dispute in the immigration department, we would only be able to get a one-month registration issued. After which point we would, technically/legally be required to leave the country again to be able to re-enter and thus be able to register ourselves anew -- this opposed to the normal six-month registration we have so far been getting. Rather than go through all that, we simply stayed on our old registrations (not, strictly speaking, following the letter of the immigration law; but they failed to collect our old registrations when we left, and they were actually issued for until the middle of February). Then we took that trip to Finland last weekend, got fresh migrant cards, and took them to get our next six months -- with which we would be able to get our temporary imports on our cars extended for the same period.
But now, we are told that the same internal issues are now limiting everyone to getting no more than a two-month registration. This is actually much worse than the first time we went by, since it means that our cars would only be granted that same two-month temporary import period. It's all quite painful.
The people at the registration broker place indicated -- and И more or less agrees -- that this new thing (quite contrary to the laws, by the way; not that this necessarily poses any impediment to the at least temporary implementation of a new policy) is almost certainly associated with the upcoming (early March) presidential elections. Everyone figures Russia, recognizing that people come here all the time under semi-false pretenses, has caused being here to be somewhat more painful for foreigners in an effort to exert at least some level of control over who is here. The same rumor-hypotheses have the situation loosening up in a month or so.
We'll see.
It chilled down a little today. We've got perhaps as low as the near-freezing minuses, but nothing spectacular. And this very well could be the last 'blast' of 'winter' this year.
We're running into some difficulties with our registration this time around. When we returned in January, we were told that due to some sort of internal dispute in the immigration department, we would only be able to get a one-month registration issued. After which point we would, technically/legally be required to leave the country again to be able to re-enter and thus be able to register ourselves anew -- this opposed to the normal six-month registration we have so far been getting. Rather than go through all that, we simply stayed on our old registrations (not, strictly speaking, following the letter of the immigration law; but they failed to collect our old registrations when we left, and they were actually issued for until the middle of February). Then we took that trip to Finland last weekend, got fresh migrant cards, and took them to get our next six months -- with which we would be able to get our temporary imports on our cars extended for the same period.
But now, we are told that the same internal issues are now limiting everyone to getting no more than a two-month registration. This is actually much worse than the first time we went by, since it means that our cars would only be granted that same two-month temporary import period. It's all quite painful.
The people at the registration broker place indicated -- and И more or less agrees -- that this new thing (quite contrary to the laws, by the way; not that this necessarily poses any impediment to the at least temporary implementation of a new policy) is almost certainly associated with the upcoming (early March) presidential elections. Everyone figures Russia, recognizing that people come here all the time under semi-false pretenses, has caused being here to be somewhat more painful for foreigners in an effort to exert at least some level of control over who is here. The same rumor-hypotheses have the situation loosening up in a month or so.
We'll see.
