февраля 28, 2007
Re-Up
2/28 12:17, Pushkin time
Yesterday, going through my pockets (as I have learned to do periodically) I discovered that our registrations with the immigration folks here run out on this Sunday. And of course, as our cars were temporary-admitted only for the course of our registration, so does that. So yesterday we hooked up again with И В to wait in line at the offices -- the ones that are open two days a week, for two hours each day -- in the hopes of renewing. And success was grabbed from us; the hours on Tuesdays are from four to six. At six, we were maybe fourth in line. The last person to be called in before six was let out a couple minutes later, but by the time the guy at the head of the line peeked into the registration office, whatever clerks there were working there had already bailed (I joked about a window being open, but they actually have a back door) And while we were milling around in semi-line formation after learning this fact, a secuirty guy came up and basically told us all to get the hell out. Since the next working hours are on Thursday from ten to noon, I'll be getting there bright and early to establish and get my name on a list.
Of course, by this point, we're pretty sure we're not going to get our new regs in time to turn around and go to the customs place before our cars become only semi-legal. A most likely will elect not to drive anywhere on Monday, but as I have no choice, the opportunity arises for me to donate another nice round sum of cash to the hungry family of a traffic cop. Of course, I have been getting passed over a bit of late, so maybe they've gotten to the point that they recognize me and don't want to waste their time. Heh heh...
The other thing of the last couple days: yesterday Z got his first translating gig. Unpaid of course -- call it an apprenticeship -- but he talked of little else last evening besides getting to explain an english-language storybook to one of the girls in his class.
And it started snowing again. Four inches overnight; another three since I got to work. On top of it being much lighter out now at the end of February, the white re-covering of everything nearly makes everyone all squinty. But it sure beats the black-brown sludge that is sure to follow. A good thing I didn't get around to washing the cars last weekend...
Yesterday, going through my pockets (as I have learned to do periodically) I discovered that our registrations with the immigration folks here run out on this Sunday. And of course, as our cars were temporary-admitted only for the course of our registration, so does that. So yesterday we hooked up again with И В to wait in line at the offices -- the ones that are open two days a week, for two hours each day -- in the hopes of renewing. And success was grabbed from us; the hours on Tuesdays are from four to six. At six, we were maybe fourth in line. The last person to be called in before six was let out a couple minutes later, but by the time the guy at the head of the line peeked into the registration office, whatever clerks there were working there had already bailed (I joked about a window being open, but they actually have a back door) And while we were milling around in semi-line formation after learning this fact, a secuirty guy came up and basically told us all to get the hell out. Since the next working hours are on Thursday from ten to noon, I'll be getting there bright and early to establish and get my name on a list.
Of course, by this point, we're pretty sure we're not going to get our new regs in time to turn around and go to the customs place before our cars become only semi-legal. A most likely will elect not to drive anywhere on Monday, but as I have no choice, the opportunity arises for me to donate another nice round sum of cash to the hungry family of a traffic cop. Of course, I have been getting passed over a bit of late, so maybe they've gotten to the point that they recognize me and don't want to waste their time. Heh heh...
The other thing of the last couple days: yesterday Z got his first translating gig. Unpaid of course -- call it an apprenticeship -- but he talked of little else last evening besides getting to explain an english-language storybook to one of the girls in his class.
And it started snowing again. Four inches overnight; another three since I got to work. On top of it being much lighter out now at the end of February, the white re-covering of everything nearly makes everyone all squinty. But it sure beats the black-brown sludge that is sure to follow. A good thing I didn't get around to washing the cars last weekend...
февраля 26, 2007
Grr
2/26 12:37, Pushkin time
This morning the good folks at Blogger decided to no longer allow me to run this via my original access, and have forced (as an alternative to simply not using the product anymore) me to obtain yet another email-address-linked account; this one through Google. And they've -- horrors! -- changed my interface...
Dogs.
Anyway, this weekend we spent doing pretty much nothing at all. That would be the first such weekend since we got here. The days are noticeably longer (we're going to break the 8AM sunrise this week), and unfortunately, G in particular seems to be ill-adapted to handle sleeping in the light. This is exacerbated by the spate of clear, blue-skies weather we've been having; though they are calling for clouds to roll in today and for fifteen degrees warmer (that is, up to minus five) and pretty much constant snowfall starting any time now and running out the week.
I just thought to check, and confirmed that our registrations (and thus the legal status of our cars) run out this Sunday. So I have another project this week. Of course, since we'll have our cars and whatnot the whole time, it won't be as painful as the first time around with the multiple trips in and out of the city and the uncertainty. Nope. This time, we know it will be a drawn-out process full of dead ends. And then at the end of the summer, repeat again!
This morning the good folks at Blogger decided to no longer allow me to run this via my original access, and have forced (as an alternative to simply not using the product anymore) me to obtain yet another email-address-linked account; this one through Google. And they've -- horrors! -- changed my interface...
Dogs.
Anyway, this weekend we spent doing pretty much nothing at all. That would be the first such weekend since we got here. The days are noticeably longer (we're going to break the 8AM sunrise this week), and unfortunately, G in particular seems to be ill-adapted to handle sleeping in the light. This is exacerbated by the spate of clear, blue-skies weather we've been having; though they are calling for clouds to roll in today and for fifteen degrees warmer (that is, up to minus five) and pretty much constant snowfall starting any time now and running out the week.
I just thought to check, and confirmed that our registrations (and thus the legal status of our cars) run out this Sunday. So I have another project this week. Of course, since we'll have our cars and whatnot the whole time, it won't be as painful as the first time around with the multiple trips in and out of the city and the uncertainty. Nope. This time, we know it will be a drawn-out process full of dead ends. And then at the end of the summer, repeat again!
февраля 22, 2007
Done
2/23 10:44, Pushkin time
Today is a national holiday, so having already fulfilled my morning responsibilities, it seems a good time to catch things back up here.
It appears that the last time I wrote was more than a week ago. What happened right after then?... think think think...
Oh yes.
That weekend (that is, last weekend) Z and I took a trip out to Pokrovskaya to go poke around our chunk-o-land and to get things started with М as far as getting the debris cleared off it. With the excuse that A wasn't feeling up to the trip, М and Л (and their one-year-older-than-Z daughter А) set to feeding and socializing with us while we talked plans and whatnot. Eventually, М mentioned that he knew a builder in Kommunar -- the bigger neighborhood a bit further south from us -- that had done work on his house and that was currently engaged in a tear down/rebuild of Л's parents. It seemed as good a place as any to start collecting bids on our place, so off we went (Z hung back to play with А and harass the livestock). I got to meet the builder, a couple of guys from his crew (and by 'meet', I mean, 'shake hands, exchange names, immediately forget name, move to next'). As well as Л's mother, father, and two sisters who, hearing that a foreigner was snooping around, came to gawk. In a very friendly manner, of course. For me, the high point -- non business-related -- of the time was when one of Л's sisters asked me what part of Germany I was from.
Umm.. the part that isn't in Germany?...
Fortunately, as it was a business call, we were in and out very quickly (that is, maybe a half hour total time) with the builder asking for some layouts so he can start looking at materials and the definite need to get my hands around the state of the foundation that sits under rubble now.
We got back to Pokrovskaya and I had to almost literally drag Z away from playing. М joked that Z and А could swap teaching languages. She could learn English from him and he could learn Tsygan (aka Romani, of which the family is, ethnically, even if having lived in the Petersburg region for more than ten generations) from her. An interesting offer. For sure they'll pick up some kid words and the like from each other.
Then the week began. I had scheduled to run two training courses at work for the whole length of the week (one two-day, and then one three-day). And then early Friday morning, discovered that the week of the training was only four working days long. So right at the end I rearranged things to run the first course as normal, and to run the second one in two 1.5-days, from 8AM to 8PM. And, since the process of opening up the building first thing in the morning and closing it down at night (having now observed both twice) is a fair bit more involved than just keys and an alarm code-pad, I had to arrange with someone else -- two as it ended up being -- to also disarrange themselves in the wee hours of morning and evening to accommodate the schedule. But as it turned out, the classes came off alright. For the first one there was a very small turnout (these are, after all, not offered for free -- where would I get my percentage from?...), one guy from near Perm, and two guys from Ulan-Ude. That's out behind Baikal, not quite to Khabarovsk, call it six hours' time difference if I recall correctly. Nice enough guys and very forgiving of the disorganization that comes from the first-run of any enterprise. It was cold enough outside that we pretty much forewent almost all of the demonstration parts of the class, which helped keep things moving along comfortably. Relatively, that is; I had to run off in the early part of Monday to the factory down the street to meet with their main engineer to answer ten more minutes worth of questions about another project they will be working on with us; Е was able to cover for that interval.
Then the second set of days, another two guys -- these from Nizhny Novgorod (NN, practically everyone calls it; even in Russian it is kind of an awkward word-pair to wrap your mouth around) and three guys from the shop downstairs. And for this class, not only did the weather decide to get colder (we sat at minus fifteen-seventeen for pretty much all day both days), but the streetside demonstrations and practical work really can't be made optional. So we spent a lot of time being very cold. Even the guys from Ulan-Ude, where they've not seen above minus 35 since December, were cold here -- the humidity, they say. I still can't get my head around the concept of humidity at well-sub-zero air temperatures. When I see the condensation in my breath falling out as a small shower of snow onto the dash of my car in the morning on my way to work, the concept of 'wet air' seems sort of.. bizarre.
But nevertheless, the courses went off well, and for the effort, my commission-chunk this month (based wholly off this one week) will be close to 20% of my base pay. And next month we have two weeks scheduled, and will have a lot more students. And the month after, on top of that, several of my projects will be completed and start to sell. Not that living here is anything but inexpensive, but more is certainly better. And we do have house construction to think about.
Speaking of which, on Tuesday evening -- after getting shanghaied at the end of the day to play the translator for И В and two other guys from the office who had guests in from the US and Germany and a customary translator who was out sick (something going around; Z got it, G got it, A got it and still has it; If I got it, it passed quickly) -- I swung back out to Pokrovskaya to meet with М, take a look at the progress of debris-clearage, and with a concrete guy and a well guy check out the situation on the old foundation.
To no surprise on anyone's part, most of the effort from that day had been spent just getting past the three feet of accumulated snow. A fairly sizeable pile of burned structural logs (each fifteen feet or so in length) had been cleared and a corner of the foundation had been exposed. Unfortunately, what we see if just enough to tell us that we can't see enough yet. To supplement the gravel aggregate, the original pourers appear to have tossed in pretty much whatever hard things were handy. We can see broken bricks, chunks of metal, chunks of broken concrete, etc. Which isn't in itself necessarily a bad thing, but it does indicate perhaps that the foundation might be a rather deep one (one and a half to two meters would be par for one type of foundation). Which, if it is, presents us with the issue of how to tie in to it -- since no way in hell are we going to pay to have a five hundred square foot by six foot deep chunk of concrete broken up and taken away -- with the new foundation we need to lay. The issue is that when the ground freezes and expands a bit, concrete in the ground does not. So if there is a significant difference between the thicknesses of two foundation slabs, the thinner one will travel more vertically than the thicker one. Maybe not a huge amount, but houses don't really handle even a little bit of lateral torque-displacement all that well. So we are going to have to clear off the whole thing, possibly drill or dig a hole alongside it to figure out its depth, and then see what to do next.
There are several possible routes to take -- no big worries there. There are things we could do under our new slab to cushion against the ground movement; there are things we could do on top of the old slab (after having broken down only two feet of its depth in the place we want to build, rather than the entire thing) that would counteract its damping of the ground movement; there are alternate methods of foundationing we could use that are not slab-based. We just need to understand what we have so we can figure out what to do with it. It's all part of the fun.
Which brings me back to the end of the week. Wednesday Z's class invited specifically the dads over for an event that turns out to have been related to the holiday for which we are all not working today. I had no idea what it was, and, being too lazy to actually do anything like check the Internet (the vast majority of Russian calendars indicate that a day is a holiday, but I have yet to see one that tells people which one it is...) or ask someone, was reduced to guessing based on evidence. The fact that Z got a card from one of the girls in his class helped a bit. The copy inside the card was along the lines of appreciation for men. And since Valentine's was over, and there was this dads-invited festival at the preschool (to which, sadly, I was not able to go due to the aforementioned all-week training), it stood to reason that this was some sort of 'Men's day" -- Russia celebrating, along with the rest of the world, less USA, the International Women's Day, it stood to reason that maybe such another holiday existed. The question was finally answered yesterday afternoon when we took a brief break from training to assemble with the entire staff at work and for the women to give every guy there presents after a brief comment of appreciation. Today, it seems, is 'Defenders of the Fatherland' day (that is, День Защитников Отечества). A bit of a snicker as a foreigner was among those celebrated, though it was pointed out that I do own land here now and one of my kids is going to be born here. It would maybe be like a Veteran's day, except that, their actually having been invaded, the Russian holiday sort of recognizes that when it comes to actual defense, everyone fights. Not just the guys in uniform. So while it's not explicitly an all-men's day, it kind of is; they just call it something a bit different. And the army guys have their own holiday some other time in the year.
-whew- Long enough?
Today is a national holiday, so having already fulfilled my morning responsibilities, it seems a good time to catch things back up here.
It appears that the last time I wrote was more than a week ago. What happened right after then?... think think think...
Oh yes.
That weekend (that is, last weekend) Z and I took a trip out to Pokrovskaya to go poke around our chunk-o-land and to get things started with М as far as getting the debris cleared off it. With the excuse that A wasn't feeling up to the trip, М and Л (and their one-year-older-than-Z daughter А) set to feeding and socializing with us while we talked plans and whatnot. Eventually, М mentioned that he knew a builder in Kommunar -- the bigger neighborhood a bit further south from us -- that had done work on his house and that was currently engaged in a tear down/rebuild of Л's parents. It seemed as good a place as any to start collecting bids on our place, so off we went (Z hung back to play with А and harass the livestock). I got to meet the builder, a couple of guys from his crew (and by 'meet', I mean, 'shake hands, exchange names, immediately forget name, move to next'). As well as Л's mother, father, and two sisters who, hearing that a foreigner was snooping around, came to gawk. In a very friendly manner, of course. For me, the high point -- non business-related -- of the time was when one of Л's sisters asked me what part of Germany I was from.
Umm.. the part that isn't in Germany?...
Fortunately, as it was a business call, we were in and out very quickly (that is, maybe a half hour total time) with the builder asking for some layouts so he can start looking at materials and the definite need to get my hands around the state of the foundation that sits under rubble now.
We got back to Pokrovskaya and I had to almost literally drag Z away from playing. М joked that Z and А could swap teaching languages. She could learn English from him and he could learn Tsygan (aka Romani, of which the family is, ethnically, even if having lived in the Petersburg region for more than ten generations) from her. An interesting offer. For sure they'll pick up some kid words and the like from each other.
Then the week began. I had scheduled to run two training courses at work for the whole length of the week (one two-day, and then one three-day). And then early Friday morning, discovered that the week of the training was only four working days long. So right at the end I rearranged things to run the first course as normal, and to run the second one in two 1.5-days, from 8AM to 8PM. And, since the process of opening up the building first thing in the morning and closing it down at night (having now observed both twice) is a fair bit more involved than just keys and an alarm code-pad, I had to arrange with someone else -- two as it ended up being -- to also disarrange themselves in the wee hours of morning and evening to accommodate the schedule. But as it turned out, the classes came off alright. For the first one there was a very small turnout (these are, after all, not offered for free -- where would I get my percentage from?...), one guy from near Perm, and two guys from Ulan-Ude. That's out behind Baikal, not quite to Khabarovsk, call it six hours' time difference if I recall correctly. Nice enough guys and very forgiving of the disorganization that comes from the first-run of any enterprise. It was cold enough outside that we pretty much forewent almost all of the demonstration parts of the class, which helped keep things moving along comfortably. Relatively, that is; I had to run off in the early part of Monday to the factory down the street to meet with their main engineer to answer ten more minutes worth of questions about another project they will be working on with us; Е was able to cover for that interval.
Then the second set of days, another two guys -- these from Nizhny Novgorod (NN, practically everyone calls it; even in Russian it is kind of an awkward word-pair to wrap your mouth around) and three guys from the shop downstairs. And for this class, not only did the weather decide to get colder (we sat at minus fifteen-seventeen for pretty much all day both days), but the streetside demonstrations and practical work really can't be made optional. So we spent a lot of time being very cold. Even the guys from Ulan-Ude, where they've not seen above minus 35 since December, were cold here -- the humidity, they say. I still can't get my head around the concept of humidity at well-sub-zero air temperatures. When I see the condensation in my breath falling out as a small shower of snow onto the dash of my car in the morning on my way to work, the concept of 'wet air' seems sort of.. bizarre.
But nevertheless, the courses went off well, and for the effort, my commission-chunk this month (based wholly off this one week) will be close to 20% of my base pay. And next month we have two weeks scheduled, and will have a lot more students. And the month after, on top of that, several of my projects will be completed and start to sell. Not that living here is anything but inexpensive, but more is certainly better. And we do have house construction to think about.
Speaking of which, on Tuesday evening -- after getting shanghaied at the end of the day to play the translator for И В and two other guys from the office who had guests in from the US and Germany and a customary translator who was out sick (something going around; Z got it, G got it, A got it and still has it; If I got it, it passed quickly) -- I swung back out to Pokrovskaya to meet with М, take a look at the progress of debris-clearage, and with a concrete guy and a well guy check out the situation on the old foundation.
To no surprise on anyone's part, most of the effort from that day had been spent just getting past the three feet of accumulated snow. A fairly sizeable pile of burned structural logs (each fifteen feet or so in length) had been cleared and a corner of the foundation had been exposed. Unfortunately, what we see if just enough to tell us that we can't see enough yet. To supplement the gravel aggregate, the original pourers appear to have tossed in pretty much whatever hard things were handy. We can see broken bricks, chunks of metal, chunks of broken concrete, etc. Which isn't in itself necessarily a bad thing, but it does indicate perhaps that the foundation might be a rather deep one (one and a half to two meters would be par for one type of foundation). Which, if it is, presents us with the issue of how to tie in to it -- since no way in hell are we going to pay to have a five hundred square foot by six foot deep chunk of concrete broken up and taken away -- with the new foundation we need to lay. The issue is that when the ground freezes and expands a bit, concrete in the ground does not. So if there is a significant difference between the thicknesses of two foundation slabs, the thinner one will travel more vertically than the thicker one. Maybe not a huge amount, but houses don't really handle even a little bit of lateral torque-displacement all that well. So we are going to have to clear off the whole thing, possibly drill or dig a hole alongside it to figure out its depth, and then see what to do next.
There are several possible routes to take -- no big worries there. There are things we could do under our new slab to cushion against the ground movement; there are things we could do on top of the old slab (after having broken down only two feet of its depth in the place we want to build, rather than the entire thing) that would counteract its damping of the ground movement; there are alternate methods of foundationing we could use that are not slab-based. We just need to understand what we have so we can figure out what to do with it. It's all part of the fun.
Which brings me back to the end of the week. Wednesday Z's class invited specifically the dads over for an event that turns out to have been related to the holiday for which we are all not working today. I had no idea what it was, and, being too lazy to actually do anything like check the Internet (the vast majority of Russian calendars indicate that a day is a holiday, but I have yet to see one that tells people which one it is...) or ask someone, was reduced to guessing based on evidence. The fact that Z got a card from one of the girls in his class helped a bit. The copy inside the card was along the lines of appreciation for men. And since Valentine's was over, and there was this dads-invited festival at the preschool (to which, sadly, I was not able to go due to the aforementioned all-week training), it stood to reason that this was some sort of 'Men's day" -- Russia celebrating, along with the rest of the world, less USA, the International Women's Day, it stood to reason that maybe such another holiday existed. The question was finally answered yesterday afternoon when we took a brief break from training to assemble with the entire staff at work and for the women to give every guy there presents after a brief comment of appreciation. Today, it seems, is 'Defenders of the Fatherland' day (that is, День Защитников Отечества). A bit of a snicker as a foreigner was among those celebrated, though it was pointed out that I do own land here now and one of my kids is going to be born here. It would maybe be like a Veteran's day, except that, their actually having been invaded, the Russian holiday sort of recognizes that when it comes to actual defense, everyone fights. Not just the guys in uniform. So while it's not explicitly an all-men's day, it kind of is; they just call it something a bit different. And the army guys have their own holiday some other time in the year.
-whew- Long enough?
февраля 20, 2007
Excuse
2/20 17:00, Pushkin time
I'm running training all this week; from 8 to 8 every day. No time for anything else. Sorry.
I'm running training all this week; from 8 to 8 every day. No time for anything else. Sorry.
февраля 13, 2007
Moldavian Architect
2/14 09:48, Pushkin time
More busy days.
Monday went by in a flash; yesterday morning I dropped by what will be Z's new school to meet with the director and begin discussions towards getting him signed up there. And of course, the time I elected to drop in, she was busy. But I did manage to both set up a meeting for today and discover that one of our neighbors works in the school's bookkeeping office. Then I headed out to the factory site to help reload our stuff from the refrigerator trailer in which it has been thus far stored into a shipping container. Which process ended up taking the better part of 2.5 hours. Out in the wind and cold, and since I hadn't been expecting to be out the whole time, I was insufficiently dressed. So I spent pretty much the rest of the day shivering.
During the course of which, I finally got to meet and shake hands with the Moldavian architect that И has recommended to us for getting work started on our house. I showed him the plan that A and I had, after long searching and discussion, finally agreed upon. He looked over it, asked, "this is all in inches and feet?", and then basically explained to me why it might not be a good idea simply to rework it. The main reason being, not just the fact that the sizes of the materials available here aren't the same (the load bearing are of a 2x4 is enough different from the load bearing area of a 5cm-10cm board, and the bending properties are even moreso), but the fact that the type and quality of wood around which the american construction is based would almost certainly be different from the wood they use in Russia -- he says that the pine here is denser by some amount, for example. So at a certain point, fudging the sizes a bit here and there becomes unfeasible, and rather than doing a complete rework, he recommended a few russian house plan websites, and just called me this morning with a catalogue-CD with several thousand plans on it. We've started checking them out, and some seem promising; though it would have been maybe good to have thought of the issue of materials earlier.
Oh well, it's too frozen out to start work right now anyway.
And today I met with the school director, and got the issue of Z's school hammered right out. Even better than I was expecting (I think), as I figured on being asked to buy something for the school or otherwise justify his 'sponsored' spot, but the director seemed excited enough to have a foreign kid at her school that the issue of reciprocal-favors never came up. We're getting together again mid-April, so it may come up then, but nonetheless, the issue of Z's school is, as far as it goes, settled. Which is good; Z really likes going to his school, and the teacher of the 'prep' course says that he is definitely ready to start.
And on an even happier note, A decided to set the kids up with valentine's day stuff (regardless whether or not russians celebrate it -- though it turns out they sort of do) for their groups. Since I was busy at the other school, she took the boys to the preschool and had to explain to G's teacher what she had and what it was for. Which she did, as she happily related, in russian -- even being able to comprehend and answer a question asked back of her. Not totally comprehend, as she told me, but definitely enough to understand and respond correctly. So, progress all around!
More busy days.
Monday went by in a flash; yesterday morning I dropped by what will be Z's new school to meet with the director and begin discussions towards getting him signed up there. And of course, the time I elected to drop in, she was busy. But I did manage to both set up a meeting for today and discover that one of our neighbors works in the school's bookkeeping office. Then I headed out to the factory site to help reload our stuff from the refrigerator trailer in which it has been thus far stored into a shipping container. Which process ended up taking the better part of 2.5 hours. Out in the wind and cold, and since I hadn't been expecting to be out the whole time, I was insufficiently dressed. So I spent pretty much the rest of the day shivering.
During the course of which, I finally got to meet and shake hands with the Moldavian architect that И has recommended to us for getting work started on our house. I showed him the plan that A and I had, after long searching and discussion, finally agreed upon. He looked over it, asked, "this is all in inches and feet?", and then basically explained to me why it might not be a good idea simply to rework it. The main reason being, not just the fact that the sizes of the materials available here aren't the same (the load bearing are of a 2x4 is enough different from the load bearing area of a 5cm-10cm board, and the bending properties are even moreso), but the fact that the type and quality of wood around which the american construction is based would almost certainly be different from the wood they use in Russia -- he says that the pine here is denser by some amount, for example. So at a certain point, fudging the sizes a bit here and there becomes unfeasible, and rather than doing a complete rework, he recommended a few russian house plan websites, and just called me this morning with a catalogue-CD with several thousand plans on it. We've started checking them out, and some seem promising; though it would have been maybe good to have thought of the issue of materials earlier.
Oh well, it's too frozen out to start work right now anyway.
And today I met with the school director, and got the issue of Z's school hammered right out. Even better than I was expecting (I think), as I figured on being asked to buy something for the school or otherwise justify his 'sponsored' spot, but the director seemed excited enough to have a foreign kid at her school that the issue of reciprocal-favors never came up. We're getting together again mid-April, so it may come up then, but nonetheless, the issue of Z's school is, as far as it goes, settled. Which is good; Z really likes going to his school, and the teacher of the 'prep' course says that he is definitely ready to start.
And on an even happier note, A decided to set the kids up with valentine's day stuff (regardless whether or not russians celebrate it -- though it turns out they sort of do) for their groups. Since I was busy at the other school, she took the boys to the preschool and had to explain to G's teacher what she had and what it was for. Which she did, as she happily related, in russian -- even being able to comprehend and answer a question asked back of her. Not totally comprehend, as she told me, but definitely enough to understand and respond correctly. So, progress all around!
февраля 11, 2007
Neighbors
2/11 17:52, Pushkin time
Z observed to me on Friday when I picked him and his brother up that it is "just like White Nights" now. As we walked in the not-quite-full pre-7PM dark, I asked why. Because, he said, it was light out even when they went out to play in the afternoon! I assured him that it will get even lighter still. I wonder from their reactions to this whether the kids believe me, or if they think of Russia as, "the place where the sun hardly ever shines". I suppose if we had arrived in the spring they would have the exact opposite misimpression.
Yesterday we took both cars into the city to drop the caravan off at the shop (and leave me still with a ride home, under the assumption that we'd be one-carring it for at least the weekend). The guys at the shop -- not nearly as far away as I had been led to expect; that Russian sense of scale again, I suppose -- pulled it right into a bay, hoisted it up, poked and wiggled a few things, and zeroed right into the problem. Not a shock absorber, or even a shock mount bushing (as I was best-case-scenario hoping), but the set of rubber isolators holding a cross-tie stabilizer rod running between the front wheels. The rubbers had been squashed enough that there was a bit of a gap between their inside holes and the metal tube that ran through them -- hence the knocking sound as the tube bounced from side to side inside. All the parts were there, and when they hoisted, they found an ooze-leak in the transmission pan (we needed to get the oil changed anyway, and the new seal, they pointed out, is part of the filters-and-whatnot kit that comes with a tranny oil change). And when we had our hands around what they were needing to do and I asked how long they figured it would be, the foreman told me an hour to maybe as long as two.
!!!
So rather than heading home, we took the Ford into the city a bit further to get some more unexpected essentials -- in this case, a set of inside sneakers for Z; at school, of course, they don't wear slipper like at the preschool, but they really aren't supposed to wear their snow boots either. He got away with it on the first day, as they fear barefootedness here even more than they hate mud-tracks, but I picked him up with strict instructions to make sure he came properly equipped in the future. We figured after that on hitting some other stores just to kill time, but by the time we had made it into the second shop, my phone rang with the news that the caravan was done and ready to pick up (!!!). We dashed back and the whole thing ended up costing less than 8000rubles (call it $300) for parts, labor, diagnostics, and whatnot. Of course, the bulk of the cost was in parts, as we are driving expensive, exotic imports, and parts for those are never cheap. Still, having mentally budgeted a grand for getting the car fixed, we got off cheap enough to justify hitting our favorite Chinese place for lunch on the way back. It's not American chinese, but there's still good stuff to like. Mmm. Lapsha and pampushkiy and sweet-and-bitter chicken with tomatoes. Mmmm...
Today we had set aside, now that the car was running without distressing noises, to go out to our -- now officially, title deeds in hand, in our name, and registered at the Gatchina region Department-of-Land-and-Stuff -- chunk of land to show it to the boys, check out the winter conditions there and on the roads, and see if w could find someone to arrange to get the debris of the previous building cleared up. This last turned out to be a fair bit easier than even I had expected. I figured on knocking on a few neighbors' doors and getting to know my way around the people, looking for someone into odd jobs. As it turned out, our next-door neighbor came out while we were checking out the land and asked if we were the people who were "thinking about buying it". Of course, I corrected him that we are the people who just bought it and were his new neighbors.
And -- what else would I have expected? -- he insisted that we all come in to his place and have some tea and munchies and get to know each other.
So we did.
I could spend a long time describing М (we were visiting for almost two hours). But A put into words as we were driving home what I had only semi-formed myself. He's basically Fred (our old neighbor from Portland), only Russian. М even looks a fair bit like Fred -- though that may just come down to the middle-asian features, moustache, and Texas-sized belt; I'd have to do a side-by-side to say for sure. М and his wife, Л, have two kids, a daughter aged late-seven and a son aged nine, and are in the midst of "overhauling" (as Л put it) their half of the house neighboring us on the Petersburg side. Of course, they had us in for tea/coffee, cookies for the kids, a fish-based cold meatloaf thing (I would choose it over coagulated pig's blood, but not over, say, a day's worth of beatings), potatoes, bread, sauerkraut, pickled tomatoes (absolutely awesome; Л does all the stuff herself, and they were just superb), and chunks off a pig that М had butchered 'a week ago' and cured. The chunks came both fried like bacon and also in graham-cracker-sized chunks of what basically amounted to salted lard and was stuck cold on top of bread slices like (and in lieu of) butter. Really, other than the fish stuff, everything was quite good. A had a very difficult time getting herself to eat the salted lard; even when I told her just to imagine it was butter, she said it was too late, and that she already knew what it was. But although we had just had a big breakfast maybe an hour ago, I am glad to say that everyone handled themselves well. A did a bit of talking, the boys did a lot of talking (as I am coming to be accustomed to, shortly after Z started, one of the adults commented on what good, clean Russian he speaks), and М and I got the clean-up for our lot arranged.
The sit-down (and literal 'chew-the-fat', I suppose...) came to an abrupt end when G decided to answer the ages-old question, "I wonder how hot that thing in the corner with the fire inside it is?" and gave himself a pretty good burn on all five fingertips and the upper palm of his right hand. To calm his yelling after Л had soaked olive oil onto his wounds, М suggested that maybe we should go out and see his horse and pigs (yes, they have a horse and pigs and chickens and the whole deal). Which worked like a charm for G until he learned his second important lesson of the day -- animals stink. So he dashed out of the barn as quickly as he went in and amused himself in the snow while we checked out the livestock. Z has already been promised horse riding and helping with pig-slaughtering once the weather improves a bit. And he and М and Л's daughter hit it off great. Good deal.
Z observed to me on Friday when I picked him and his brother up that it is "just like White Nights" now. As we walked in the not-quite-full pre-7PM dark, I asked why. Because, he said, it was light out even when they went out to play in the afternoon! I assured him that it will get even lighter still. I wonder from their reactions to this whether the kids believe me, or if they think of Russia as, "the place where the sun hardly ever shines". I suppose if we had arrived in the spring they would have the exact opposite misimpression.
Yesterday we took both cars into the city to drop the caravan off at the shop (and leave me still with a ride home, under the assumption that we'd be one-carring it for at least the weekend). The guys at the shop -- not nearly as far away as I had been led to expect; that Russian sense of scale again, I suppose -- pulled it right into a bay, hoisted it up, poked and wiggled a few things, and zeroed right into the problem. Not a shock absorber, or even a shock mount bushing (as I was best-case-scenario hoping), but the set of rubber isolators holding a cross-tie stabilizer rod running between the front wheels. The rubbers had been squashed enough that there was a bit of a gap between their inside holes and the metal tube that ran through them -- hence the knocking sound as the tube bounced from side to side inside. All the parts were there, and when they hoisted, they found an ooze-leak in the transmission pan (we needed to get the oil changed anyway, and the new seal, they pointed out, is part of the filters-and-whatnot kit that comes with a tranny oil change). And when we had our hands around what they were needing to do and I asked how long they figured it would be, the foreman told me an hour to maybe as long as two.
!!!
So rather than heading home, we took the Ford into the city a bit further to get some more unexpected essentials -- in this case, a set of inside sneakers for Z; at school, of course, they don't wear slipper like at the preschool, but they really aren't supposed to wear their snow boots either. He got away with it on the first day, as they fear barefootedness here even more than they hate mud-tracks, but I picked him up with strict instructions to make sure he came properly equipped in the future. We figured after that on hitting some other stores just to kill time, but by the time we had made it into the second shop, my phone rang with the news that the caravan was done and ready to pick up (!!!). We dashed back and the whole thing ended up costing less than 8000rubles (call it $300) for parts, labor, diagnostics, and whatnot. Of course, the bulk of the cost was in parts, as we are driving expensive, exotic imports, and parts for those are never cheap. Still, having mentally budgeted a grand for getting the car fixed, we got off cheap enough to justify hitting our favorite Chinese place for lunch on the way back. It's not American chinese, but there's still good stuff to like. Mmm. Lapsha and pampushkiy and sweet-and-bitter chicken with tomatoes. Mmmm...
Today we had set aside, now that the car was running without distressing noises, to go out to our -- now officially, title deeds in hand, in our name, and registered at the Gatchina region Department-of-Land-and-Stuff -- chunk of land to show it to the boys, check out the winter conditions there and on the roads, and see if w could find someone to arrange to get the debris of the previous building cleared up. This last turned out to be a fair bit easier than even I had expected. I figured on knocking on a few neighbors' doors and getting to know my way around the people, looking for someone into odd jobs. As it turned out, our next-door neighbor came out while we were checking out the land and asked if we were the people who were "thinking about buying it". Of course, I corrected him that we are the people who just bought it and were his new neighbors.
And -- what else would I have expected? -- he insisted that we all come in to his place and have some tea and munchies and get to know each other.
So we did.
I could spend a long time describing М (we were visiting for almost two hours). But A put into words as we were driving home what I had only semi-formed myself. He's basically Fred (our old neighbor from Portland), only Russian. М even looks a fair bit like Fred -- though that may just come down to the middle-asian features, moustache, and Texas-sized belt; I'd have to do a side-by-side to say for sure. М and his wife, Л, have two kids, a daughter aged late-seven and a son aged nine, and are in the midst of "overhauling" (as Л put it) their half of the house neighboring us on the Petersburg side. Of course, they had us in for tea/coffee, cookies for the kids, a fish-based cold meatloaf thing (I would choose it over coagulated pig's blood, but not over, say, a day's worth of beatings), potatoes, bread, sauerkraut, pickled tomatoes (absolutely awesome; Л does all the stuff herself, and they were just superb), and chunks off a pig that М had butchered 'a week ago' and cured. The chunks came both fried like bacon and also in graham-cracker-sized chunks of what basically amounted to salted lard and was stuck cold on top of bread slices like (and in lieu of) butter. Really, other than the fish stuff, everything was quite good. A had a very difficult time getting herself to eat the salted lard; even when I told her just to imagine it was butter, she said it was too late, and that she already knew what it was. But although we had just had a big breakfast maybe an hour ago, I am glad to say that everyone handled themselves well. A did a bit of talking, the boys did a lot of talking (as I am coming to be accustomed to, shortly after Z started, one of the adults commented on what good, clean Russian he speaks), and М and I got the clean-up for our lot arranged.
The sit-down (and literal 'chew-the-fat', I suppose...) came to an abrupt end when G decided to answer the ages-old question, "I wonder how hot that thing in the corner with the fire inside it is?" and gave himself a pretty good burn on all five fingertips and the upper palm of his right hand. To calm his yelling after Л had soaked olive oil onto his wounds, М suggested that maybe we should go out and see his horse and pigs (yes, they have a horse and pigs and chickens and the whole deal). Which worked like a charm for G until he learned his second important lesson of the day -- animals stink. So he dashed out of the barn as quickly as he went in and amused himself in the snow while we checked out the livestock. Z has already been promised horse riding and helping with pig-slaughtering once the weather improves a bit. And he and М and Л's daughter hit it off great. Good deal.
февраля 09, 2007
Rush
2/9 12:26, Pushkin time
So yesterday at about this time I typed in a whole sentence, then got pulled away to do some stuff; maybe at about four I got back and wrote another sentence before something else came up; and then at six fifteen I got back to the computer long enough to turn it off and rush to go pick the kids up. So I'm holding myself blameless for at least these last 24 hours' worth of hiatus.
Anyway, A's plane left Frankfurt an hour late, but made it to Pulkovo only maybe twenty minutes behind schedule. The kids and I delivered the cat and hat we had brought (necessary; it was getting windy, in addition to being minus twelve or so). At this point, she's almost recovered from the jet lag and general tiredness of the past to weeks of constant activity. A week is pretty good time; that's about how long it took me to recover from my trips, too. And since then, snow has dumped, and temperatures have settled into a minus 25-30 nighttime and minus 12-20 daytime. I even, on Wednesday, broke out my arctic coat to spend two hours outside coordinating the unloading of several dump truck bodies off a flatbed (one of my first projects coming close now to realization). The coat is way too warm for standard use; over minus ten, I start to sweat in it, even with only a tee shirt or polo underneath, but in minus 25 and wind -- when even my big bulky ski gloves aren't really helping as much as I would like, and my eyeballs are starting to burn from the cold -- it does good. So I now have two coats at work and I change back and forth every time I go outside. Which makes me much closer to normal here as far as those things go.
It has been good to successfully prove out the capabilities of our cars, too. At minus 30, the Ford takes a bit of cranking, and the first couple spins are slow, but even it starts up fine even then. And whatever ice I don't scrape off the windows is pretty much still intact even after fifteen minutes of driving with the heater blazing inside. In fact, another new lesson I've learned involves frosting on the inside surfaces of the car windows. Just the bit of warming the heater achieves (and that's not much; there is still snow on the floor from Saturday) is enough that the air inside absorbs a significantly higher quantity of moisture from the breathing of driver and passengers than does street-side-temperature air. And when the car is closed up still warm, and the temperature equalizes, you get frost on both sides. And I found out that ice scrapers are subtly curved to match the contours of the outside of glass, which makes them almost useless on the inside. So now we stand for a couple of minutes with all the doors hanging open every time we leave the car for a while to let the inside air get flushed out. And then again, when we get in in the morning, if I breathe directly on the glass, part of my breath-cloud freezes out of the air immediately and falls as a sort of ice-dust on the dash, and the rest hits the glass and solidifies there in an opaque sheet right in front of my eyes. So I've gotten good at breathing only towards my lap.
As for everything else? Catching up:
Tuesday was Z's first session of classes at his real school. A took him; I had showed her where the place was, and since Z and I had met the teacher (briefly) the week before, i figured he would recognize her. No luck. I remembered that her name was Olga [something], which is slightly less common a name here than is, for example, Maria in Mexico. But of course, when A told the security guy at the school that she was looking for an Olga, he answered with "Olga А-вна?" which didn't really decide anything. Fortunately they got it worked out and Z to class. When I picked him up, I was surprised to see that the director of the school had come by pretty much exclusively to check out how he was doing. She was very impressed with his reading and writing skills, and said that the mistakes he makes speaking aren't terribly serious -- that there are Russian kids who make the same mistakes. Next week, A and I will go to the school ourselves and figure out what needs to be done to get him into school next year.
Wednesday not much (other than general business). Yesterday, dropping the kids off, G's teacher informed me that their heating had been knocked out by some sort of accident and that the city was saying it wouldn't be back on for most of the day. Continuing to work, I saw where the problem had occurred, as a two-block section of street was closed and steam was pouring out from what appeared to be a big hole in the asphalt. Apparently, I found out later, a big pressure spike at the supply end of the city hot water system had made its way to Pushkin at just the right time as demands were starting their daytime fluctuations. An old pipe had burst under the street, and the hot water had eroded away a big part of the frozen ground under the road before the pipe was able to get shut off. They had the hot back to the school by 6 in the evening, but it looks as of this morning like the street is going to be closed for a bit. As I understand it, asphalt can't even be laid down when it is this cold. It happens.
So yesterday at about this time I typed in a whole sentence, then got pulled away to do some stuff; maybe at about four I got back and wrote another sentence before something else came up; and then at six fifteen I got back to the computer long enough to turn it off and rush to go pick the kids up. So I'm holding myself blameless for at least these last 24 hours' worth of hiatus.
Anyway, A's plane left Frankfurt an hour late, but made it to Pulkovo only maybe twenty minutes behind schedule. The kids and I delivered the cat and hat we had brought (necessary; it was getting windy, in addition to being minus twelve or so). At this point, she's almost recovered from the jet lag and general tiredness of the past to weeks of constant activity. A week is pretty good time; that's about how long it took me to recover from my trips, too. And since then, snow has dumped, and temperatures have settled into a minus 25-30 nighttime and minus 12-20 daytime. I even, on Wednesday, broke out my arctic coat to spend two hours outside coordinating the unloading of several dump truck bodies off a flatbed (one of my first projects coming close now to realization). The coat is way too warm for standard use; over minus ten, I start to sweat in it, even with only a tee shirt or polo underneath, but in minus 25 and wind -- when even my big bulky ski gloves aren't really helping as much as I would like, and my eyeballs are starting to burn from the cold -- it does good. So I now have two coats at work and I change back and forth every time I go outside. Which makes me much closer to normal here as far as those things go.
It has been good to successfully prove out the capabilities of our cars, too. At minus 30, the Ford takes a bit of cranking, and the first couple spins are slow, but even it starts up fine even then. And whatever ice I don't scrape off the windows is pretty much still intact even after fifteen minutes of driving with the heater blazing inside. In fact, another new lesson I've learned involves frosting on the inside surfaces of the car windows. Just the bit of warming the heater achieves (and that's not much; there is still snow on the floor from Saturday) is enough that the air inside absorbs a significantly higher quantity of moisture from the breathing of driver and passengers than does street-side-temperature air. And when the car is closed up still warm, and the temperature equalizes, you get frost on both sides. And I found out that ice scrapers are subtly curved to match the contours of the outside of glass, which makes them almost useless on the inside. So now we stand for a couple of minutes with all the doors hanging open every time we leave the car for a while to let the inside air get flushed out. And then again, when we get in in the morning, if I breathe directly on the glass, part of my breath-cloud freezes out of the air immediately and falls as a sort of ice-dust on the dash, and the rest hits the glass and solidifies there in an opaque sheet right in front of my eyes. So I've gotten good at breathing only towards my lap.
As for everything else? Catching up:
Tuesday was Z's first session of classes at his real school. A took him; I had showed her where the place was, and since Z and I had met the teacher (briefly) the week before, i figured he would recognize her. No luck. I remembered that her name was Olga [something], which is slightly less common a name here than is, for example, Maria in Mexico. But of course, when A told the security guy at the school that she was looking for an Olga, he answered with "Olga А-вна?" which didn't really decide anything. Fortunately they got it worked out and Z to class. When I picked him up, I was surprised to see that the director of the school had come by pretty much exclusively to check out how he was doing. She was very impressed with his reading and writing skills, and said that the mistakes he makes speaking aren't terribly serious -- that there are Russian kids who make the same mistakes. Next week, A and I will go to the school ourselves and figure out what needs to be done to get him into school next year.
Wednesday not much (other than general business). Yesterday, dropping the kids off, G's teacher informed me that their heating had been knocked out by some sort of accident and that the city was saying it wouldn't be back on for most of the day. Continuing to work, I saw where the problem had occurred, as a two-block section of street was closed and steam was pouring out from what appeared to be a big hole in the asphalt. Apparently, I found out later, a big pressure spike at the supply end of the city hot water system had made its way to Pushkin at just the right time as demands were starting their daytime fluctuations. An old pipe had burst under the street, and the hot water had eroded away a big part of the frozen ground under the road before the pipe was able to get shut off. They had the hot back to the school by 6 in the evening, but it looks as of this morning like the street is going to be closed for a bit. As I understand it, asphalt can't even be laid down when it is this cold. It happens.
февраля 05, 2007
Wild Swings
2/5 13:57, Pushkin time
Yesterday A called and asked, among other things, how the weather was looking for her return. Of course, I told her it had warmed up significantly -- there was even a bit of a melt-off on Saturday evening. This morning, another foot of snow had fallen and more was (and still is) coming. All the forecasts now are saying that it is going to be very cold this week -- minus 29 on Wednesday; after this morning, the temperatures shouldn't be above minus 12 for as far out as it goes... Oops.
A foot of snow, by the way, is enough to get a caravan stuck temporarily if the driver is foolish enough to try to pathbreak through it and then park in the middle to take kids to their school. It's falling fast enough that even the main roads in Pushkin don't have the chance to get dirty-looking. I'm pretty keen to get out to Pokrovskaya and see what it looks like under snow.
Yesterday A called and asked, among other things, how the weather was looking for her return. Of course, I told her it had warmed up significantly -- there was even a bit of a melt-off on Saturday evening. This morning, another foot of snow had fallen and more was (and still is) coming. All the forecasts now are saying that it is going to be very cold this week -- minus 29 on Wednesday; after this morning, the temperatures shouldn't be above minus 12 for as far out as it goes... Oops.
A foot of snow, by the way, is enough to get a caravan stuck temporarily if the driver is foolish enough to try to pathbreak through it and then park in the middle to take kids to their school. It's falling fast enough that even the main roads in Pushkin don't have the chance to get dirty-looking. I'm pretty keen to get out to Pokrovskaya and see what it looks like under snow.
февраля 03, 2007
Pavlovsk Park
2/3 19:51, Pushkin time
Last night it started warming up; all the way to zero for much of today (a bit over, even, if all the dripping meant what I think it did), and a good eight inches of new snow were added overnight to the maybe four that we already had wherever it hadn't been tromped down or scraped up.
So not particularly cold, but with a bunch of new snow, we made our trip to the sledding park recommended to me. The park is enormous, surrounding the Pavlovsk palace (in the Petersburg suburb by the name of Pavlovsk), and has a large creek, several ponds, and three lakes as well as forests and some pretty good hills. We parked near the southeastern corner right by the LenOblast border, right near the one gate to the park that lacks a pay-admission booth. Heh heh.
Of course, cheapskates have a bit of a hike to get to the sledding areas, but we have a sleigh-type sled with pull-cord, so the hike ended up being mainly mine -- dragging the boys behind me for the mile in and then back out.
Once we got there, though, the sledding was pretty good. There was one slope in particular that dropped down steeply for thirty or so yards, flattened out just enough the slow you down a bit, then dumped you down a sharp drop-off to skid along the surface of the creek. Z went five times. G made it halfway down once before flipping end-over-end on a bump of some sort, then gave the whole sledding thing up.
And of course, once we were done with that, on the way back we found a statuary area back in the woods at the top of the rise. And the boys got to put their remaining energy to use building snowmen. I took pictures of both boys' creations, but seemingly only G's shot came out worth a damn. On the other hand, one of the less-important pictures I took came out great. Go figure.
I didn't really check out any of the statues in the spot we had found for snowmen making. But my interest was piqued when a group of kids came up while the boys were working; one of them said, "boy, he looks cold", and they all snickered uncontrollably.
I see what she meant...
Last night it started warming up; all the way to zero for much of today (a bit over, even, if all the dripping meant what I think it did), and a good eight inches of new snow were added overnight to the maybe four that we already had wherever it hadn't been tromped down or scraped up.
So not particularly cold, but with a bunch of new snow, we made our trip to the sledding park recommended to me. The park is enormous, surrounding the Pavlovsk palace (in the Petersburg suburb by the name of Pavlovsk), and has a large creek, several ponds, and three lakes as well as forests and some pretty good hills. We parked near the southeastern corner right by the LenOblast border, right near the one gate to the park that lacks a pay-admission booth. Heh heh.Of course, cheapskates have a bit of a hike to get to the sledding areas, but we have a sleigh-type sled with pull-cord, so the hike ended up being mainly mine -- dragging the boys behind me for the mile in and then back out.
Once we got there, though, the sledding was pretty good. There was one slope in particular that dropped down steeply for thirty or so yards, flattened out just enough the slow you down a bit, then dumped you down a sharp drop-off to skid along the surface of the creek. Z went five times. G made it halfway down once before flipping end-over-end on a bump of some sort, then gave the whole sledding thing up.
And of course, once we were done with that, on the way back we found a statuary area back in the woods at the top of the rise. And the boys got to put their remaining energy to use building snowmen. I took pictures of both boys' creations, but seemingly only G's shot came out worth a damn. On the other hand, one of the less-important pictures I took came out great. Go figure.
I didn't really check out any of the statues in the spot we had found for snowmen making. But my interest was piqued when a group of kids came up while the boys were working; one of them said, "boy, he looks cold", and they all snickered uncontrollably.
I see what she meant...февраля 01, 2007
Homeward Stretch
2/2 09:53, Pushkin time
Going into our last solo weekend. Snow is sprinkling this morning (maybe another inch overnight and probably yet another by lunchtime) and it looks like we'll have no problems with the sledding excursion. Which is good.
Yesterday during lunch, there was a tiny bit more interest in the cafeteria teevee than is usual. The Russian analogue to the state of the union address was going on; here the president is obligated to give as much as a whole day of his time over to what they call a 'press conference'. At the beginning (which I missed) he gives a real quick greeting, and then spends the next several hours answering questions. Of course, just like press events everywhere else, the only people who are allowed in to ask questions are in some way vetted by the government (in Russia, they have to be "journalists representing accredited news media"), but the vetting process must not be all that tight, because I saw Putin -- no verbal slouch himself -- get slammed more frequently than not, and spend more than a couple of awkward silences obviously formulating a way past. Yesterday's conference lasted just over four hours; they go until every one of the press attendees agrees that they are done asking questions. And the whole thing is televised (though not on every channel) and transcripted. And no one claps.
As tends to happen, people here spoke a bit of the US speech that happened last week(?). Older people talked about Brezhnev and the way that everyone jumped up to clap every time he paused to take a breath. And how the clapping sometimes amounted to a larger chunk of the time than did the speaking. Having been able to watch the US state-of-unions since the 90s, the observation was made to me that they are basically just like Brezhnev's speeches, except that only half the hall has to stand, and that they get to take turns (under Clinton, for example, as opposed to now), which half stands and which half stays sitting. And none of the US speakers appear to be visibly drunk or senile, either. The joys of a two-party system.
Going into our last solo weekend. Snow is sprinkling this morning (maybe another inch overnight and probably yet another by lunchtime) and it looks like we'll have no problems with the sledding excursion. Which is good.
Yesterday during lunch, there was a tiny bit more interest in the cafeteria teevee than is usual. The Russian analogue to the state of the union address was going on; here the president is obligated to give as much as a whole day of his time over to what they call a 'press conference'. At the beginning (which I missed) he gives a real quick greeting, and then spends the next several hours answering questions. Of course, just like press events everywhere else, the only people who are allowed in to ask questions are in some way vetted by the government (in Russia, they have to be "journalists representing accredited news media"), but the vetting process must not be all that tight, because I saw Putin -- no verbal slouch himself -- get slammed more frequently than not, and spend more than a couple of awkward silences obviously formulating a way past. Yesterday's conference lasted just over four hours; they go until every one of the press attendees agrees that they are done asking questions. And the whole thing is televised (though not on every channel) and transcripted. And no one claps.
As tends to happen, people here spoke a bit of the US speech that happened last week(?). Older people talked about Brezhnev and the way that everyone jumped up to clap every time he paused to take a breath. And how the clapping sometimes amounted to a larger chunk of the time than did the speaking. Having been able to watch the US state-of-unions since the 90s, the observation was made to me that they are basically just like Brezhnev's speeches, except that only half the hall has to stand, and that they get to take turns (under Clinton, for example, as opposed to now), which half stands and which half stays sitting. And none of the US speakers appear to be visibly drunk or senile, either. The joys of a two-party system.
February
2/1 12:21, Pushkin time
A new (for me, at least) weather phenomenon today. The various forecasting websites call it either 'freezing fog' or 'ice crystal mist' or otherwise descriptive terms. In russian, it is иней [ee-nyay]. With the low-quality camera I was able to grab once at work, I snapped a couple of shots that almost give some vague idea of what it looks like. Everything is covered, top, bottom, and sides, with a 1"-thick layer of white fuzz that, on closer inspection, resolves itself into long, hanging plates of crystals. Very nice. Even the boys noticed that something was a bit different today, catching sight of the antenna on my car all fuzzified.
It's not particularly cold out (at least, the wind isn't going much at all), the sun is out, and the sky to the north is clear in several spots, giving a variation on the backlighting-of-everything look that happened from time to time in Portland. All in all, a treat of a day. Try as I might, though, I couldn't adequately capture it with the camera I had. If it repeats itself while the boys and I are sledding, that will be perfect; I can try again with our own camera.
Both boys are back in the grip of health, and looking forward to the weekend's entertainment.
A new (for me, at least) weather phenomenon today. The various forecasting websites call it either 'freezing fog' or 'ice crystal mist' or otherwise descriptive terms. In russian, it is иней [ee-nyay]. With the low-quality camera I was able to grab once at work, I snapped a couple of shots that almost give some vague idea of what it looks like. Everything is covered, top, bottom, and sides, with a 1"-thick layer of white fuzz that, on closer inspection, resolves itself into long, hanging plates of crystals. Very nice. Even the boys noticed that something was a bit different today, catching sight of the antenna on my car all fuzzified. 
It's not particularly cold out (at least, the wind isn't going much at all), the sun is out, and the sky to the north is clear in several spots, giving a variation on the backlighting-of-everything look that happened from time to time in Portland. All in all, a treat of a day. Try as I might, though, I couldn't adequately capture it with the camera I had. If it repeats itself while the boys and I are sledding, that will be perfect; I can try again with our own camera.
Both boys are back in the grip of health, and looking forward to the weekend's entertainment.
