Жизнь Экспатрианта

10/31, 10:29, Pushkin time

This past week on only one car has had us all with somewhat less in the way of free time. Sometime fairly soon, though, we should get the estimate issued, run it to the insurance folks, and get the actual repair work on the van started. Pain in the ass.

A and I figured we'd not waste the opportunity for G that our December/January trip to the US will afford him, and to make a concerted effort to put him over the edge of english-literacy before then. That way he will be able to make use of his time surrounded by words to practice. He is doing well so far; though there are some amusing bumps stemming largely from the fact that he's been spending his days surrounded by russian words and that a fair number of letters look the same, but are pronounced differently between the two languages. Classiс example, the letters forming the word 'run' look quite a bit like the letters 'г', 'и', and 'п' (which make the sounds 'g', 'ee', and 'p', respectively). So he has to not only learn the letters and how to construct with them, but how to tell the difference right away what kind of a word he is looking at. Fortunately, he doesn't know how complicated what he's doing is, and he really just wants to get reading. So hopefully everyone will be ready to encourage him when we're out there.

As for other things, the factory building is pretty well done and ready -- a couple cranes need extending once some asphalt work finishes up -- and we've been this last week kicking out tooling, so far all of my invention. So I've been mad-busy. Yesterday we got released from Customs the first container's worth of stuff for the factory -- a 7000-pound single-piece stand for the first step of truck chassis building. So we have this 40-foot container on a trailer chassis (that is, about four feet off the ground), sitting in the middle of our yard; a single forklift that won't fit inside the container; a big trench in between the container and where its contents need to go; and a requirement to get the container unloaded and returned to the port (apparently, most container shipments are done in leased, rather than owned containers... now I know) by the end of the week. And that's the first piece. We'll figure out a way to get that taken care of, I suppose.
But then another three containers of parts from Brazil got offloaded yesterday evening. So based on the commonly-encountered Customs clearing time, we expect to get the first couple of those around Monday. At which time the trench might be filled, but the asphalt won't be in order. And without the remaining two containers of parts out of the US, we can't start building anyway. But still we will be needing to get the boxes unloaded pretty much right away once they arrive. Fortunately, since the building is ready, we have space inside (in the room the birds keep getting into) for all of that. And the remaining parts from the US should be with us in not a terribly long time. We're going to finally be getting this thing seriously underway.

I'll finish up with commentary on the title. This Sunday Russia went off summer time. So although it was fairly light out when I brought G to school Monday morning (and the past couple mornings), by the time 5PM rolls around, it's starting to get dark; and by the time I get out of work and over to pick him up in the evening it is full-dark. The leaves have all changed and most have fallen, and the last couple days have seen a shift from the fall-chilliness to a more significant cold. They're calling for the first snow of the year to fall this coming weekend (apparently that other morning didn't count; though it would have amounted to a full Portland winter...). The daytime has definitely slipped away. Winter #2 approaches.

10/23 17:02, Pushkin time

Yet again I find myself explaining an absence.

This weekend was the normal sort of busy. And then monday morning, A called me at almost 9AM to say that she had been hit by an idiot taking his half of our driveway out of the middle. And since then, I've been pretty well occupied.

I had to wait three hours for the cops in the freezing-ass cold (by the time they arrived, I was hardly able to fill out the forms they gave me, my hands were shivering so hard). Only after they had taken their measurements was I able to move the car out of the middle of traffic. Then arranging of and waiting another hour for the insurance company's 'damage assessor' to come out and make his report. Then arranging and waiting another two hours for the tow truck and space in the service shop. Then occupying two hours with the idiot tow truck driver while he tried again and again to load the van backwards (against my advice) at one point dropping it partways off the side of his bed and then having to pile up boards and stuff to get it back on. Then an hour and a half drive to the service shop, following this guy. By then the shop's estimator had already gone home for the day (the accident was just before 9AM; we unloaded the car from the tow at close to 9PM). Then first thing this morning, an hour drive back to the service shop; half-hour wait for the estimator; 90 minutes inspection and write-up; another 30 minutes drive to the main service office (not in the same place as the actual work gets done) and another half hour getting the agreements-to-estimate and agreements-to-repair written up and signed.

Before work can start, it still remains to actually get the estimate form the repair shop, go to the police station (I plan on doing this evening) and get all the paperwork they gave us on the spot officially stamped, and take the whole pile of papers to the insurance company office to get their pre-approval. Then we can have the work start; once it finishes, we pay for it and take our pile of receipts back to the insurance folks for reimbursement.

A's friend, Т, has been invaluable through this. She has basically reviewed everything we have so far done pursuant to getting the car fixed on the dime of the insurance of the guy who hit A. She also not only 'arranged' for the cops to put a rush on our paperwork -- which could take up to two weeks, but which we got right away -- but coerced the guy who hit A into paying for the 'arrangement'. Plus a bit of money directly to us to help us deal with only having one car for a while. And then once I get all the necessary papers together, she's offered to take care of the actual interface with the insurance folks. Which is a load off my mind.

The best part of it all (aside from the fact that no one was hurt, and that all the paperwork the police did clearly indicates that fault lay completely with the other guy) is that the van really isn't in that bad shape. The front fender piece is a total loss, as is the front headlamp and pretty much all the suspension parts of the front driver's side wheel. But beyond that, we've got scratches and paint and not much else. Everything runs great, no leaks or other indication of engine damage; the shop sort of indicated that the repairs will pretty easy and quick to get done (once the insurance garbage is done with). So that's good. I've sort of got my mind loosely oriented on having the car back by the end of November. Until then, we're all in the Ford, though A has volunteered to go on foot to pick the boys up from school -- L likes to ride in his stroller anyway.

Anyway, further stuff beyond this evening's visit to the police station will be done mostly remotely by our couriers. Which is good, because these last two days I have had a really large amount of work to do that I barely could get done. I did burn up an absurd amount of cell phone money calling one of the guys in South Africa to get a particularly critical issue resolved, but the rest of the stuff has been things that require a bit more of a physical presence.

Speaking of which, I got a call this afternoon from the foreman out at our house-site (we haven't been out for almost three days now) to let me know that, for some reason, they had lost power Monday night and had to sleep in the freezing cold and that I needed to get it taken care of or the crew would be sleeping somewhere else tonight. So that issue I will be dealing with after the police station tonight. Life is not boring; that's for sure.

10/17 12:54, Pushkin time

Studded tires went onto the van without a hitch -- as we had hoped, the lack of snow lying on the ground so far this season meant that there were no lines whatsoever at the tire place. And I was amused to find out that wheels need to be added to our list of 'regularly replaced parts'. Spinning the front two on the balancer, it was painfully obvious that they are pretty far out of round. But that's to be expected, riding the roads they have here. The tire guy rotated them to the rear (the rear wheels are still in good shape) and said that we should probably have at least the two, if not all four, replaced come spring. Ordinarily, they figure on three years to a set of wheels as par -- so ours are of pretty good vintage, really. But still.

Yesterday I was planning to go into town in the evening to get together with the well-drilling outfit. They called in the middle of the day to request putting the get-together off until today -- which was a stroke of good fortune, as some maybe fifteen minutes later М called to report that one of the heaters the framing crew was using appeared to have developed a short and was blowing his power junction. So instead of going into the city, I picked G up and the two of us headed south to get that question straightened. Л's mom was in, so she kept an eye on G (playing with their daughter А) while I monkeyed up to the roof to discuss things with the crew chief. We ended up agreeing that the weather wasn't called to be killing-cold for a while still, so I would with М figure out which of the heaters was malfunctioning and fix it and they would for a couple days make do with just the three. On the other side, М was sort of going to upgrade his power junction anyway (right now it is basically a screwdriver shaft wire-wrapped to two terminal posts). So since as winter comes on we'll be pulling even more power from him, I offered to go in halves on getting the upgrade done right away.
On other events, the agent swung by yesterday as well to show what the land surveyors had come up with. While it was nice to see that an accurate layout had been made of the structures and walls and whatnot, the surveyors had proposed completely re-drawing the borders to a sort of elongated asymmetric pentagonal shape (that actually covered a bit more than the 1500 sq.meters). Mainly they did this because they were concerned at problems potentially arising over the ownership of the sheds on the back part of our rectangular plot. But frankly, since the sheds are non-titled, we've today given the command that we don't want to change the shape of our plot away from the clean rectangle we originally planned with. И advised that we simply, once we have the corner markers of the rectangle in place, toss up a temporary fence right along the borders, let the winter pass as time enough for people to clear their stuff out of the sheds, and then when spring comes, tear down the ones inside our space and put up a proper fence. Which has the virtue of being a simple plan, as well as avoiding having to re-paper the land and all the pain that goes with that. Regardless, once we get the borders issue resolved, we're a matter of a couple weeks away from electricity. I also noted this weekend the appearance of a gas line and what appear to be phone poles going up in the valley right below us. If that's what they are, we may be able to arrange hookups of those over the winter, too.
As for the frame, the roof joists are all up, the first layer of moisture barrier is in place, and the longitudinals that go under the actual roof decking are going up. Of particular good note is that vapor barrier. it never rained enough for the wood to get damp, but nevertheless it eased my mind considerably to go out yesterday morning in the middle of a sprinkle, and see the drips all falling well away from the foundation and frame.

Z mentioned this morning that they have accumulated enough cursive letters to be able to write complete sentences. Not that this necessarily implies a whole lot, since the predicate is the only necessary part of a Russian construction, so a one-word sentence can be grammatically correct and complete. But that's most likely not the kind he's talking about, and he feels pretty good about himself.

G has informed us that he will be a dog in the fall performance. He knows all the songs he will be singing, and about half of the lines he will be saying (no, not 'bark-bark'). He's also pretty stoked about what he's doing -- mushroom typology remains a pretty significant part of his conversation-topic repertoire.

And L's neurologist came by (somewhat unexpectedly; we had originally arranged for 2PM on last Thursday, but she called the night before and indicated a need to reschedule; I mentioned that early in the week would be fine and apparently that was enough to count for 'Monday at 2'), checked him out, and pronounced him completely free of any -- even the very smallest and most minor -- lingering aftereffects of the difficult birth. So now we get to have the pediatrician come out next week and start poking him with needles. See the reward he gets?

10/12 11:25, Pushkin time

At the factory this morning, under a light sprinkle and somewhat less cold than yesterday, I noticed that the drops were appearing to float more than actually falling. Which strongly implied...
And then, watching the arm of my coat for a couple seconds, it was confirmed. The first snow of the season has fallen (strictly speaking, still is falling). Nothing that will stick, of course; the ground isn't even remotely cold enough, nor is the air, and it was coming mixed with rain. But still...

Yesterday after work A met me with L and Z to pick up G from his preschool and we all took a trip first out to the big hardware place on Kievskoye, then out the sort of back way to the house site to drop off the heater we had bought for the crew (A also picked up a 'how-to-can' book, since what she knew how to do involves different equipment and somewhat different ingredients from what is easy to find here). With such good weather yesterday, the crew had been working until it was too dark to continue -- which yesterday happened around 8PM. And it doesn't really start getting light until almost 8AM. Even twelve hours of usable light (if you stretch 'usable' as far as possible) seems dark after the summer, though. It's going to be bizarre going from the solstice here all of a sudden back to more or less normal 50/50 day length split when we visit back to Portland at the end of December.

Anyway, even though what falls today barely counted as anything worth notice, it's decided A and I to spend a chunk of this coming weekend getting the studded tires stuck back on the cars. We're hoping to beat the rush that accompanies and follows the first real snow.

I'll wrap up with an observation. As the fall season gets in, the advertisements on the radio begin to start talking about medical products. Antiflu; anti-runny-nose; antifever; and so on. Most liekly they had the same type of stuff on last year, but I wasn't tuned to pick it up yet. This time around, I catch the spoken 'fine print' (they do that here just like in the US; a guy says something in a really fast, quiet monotone at the very end). Where you would expect to hear, 'talk to your doctor before taking...', they instead say, 'has counterindications; familiarize yourself with the instructions' [if you care, 'имеется противопоказанные, ознакомьтеся с инструкциями']. I may have mentioned that pretty much anything you buy at the drug store comes with a two- or three-page instruction booklet, which includes everything from the usages to the dosage/age/weight chart to the chemical formulation to the counterindications. Useful stuff, and it saves you the trouble of having to look everything up in your drug bible. I'll have to buy a bottle of tylenol over the holidays and check, but I can't remember the accompanying paperwork on it being that involved.

10/11 10:57, Pushkin time

Finally, the well-drillers showed up. When I swung by about an hour ago, they had set up pretty well where we want them to be and were getting the bits and tube and so on into place. Maybe they finish the hole today; maybe tomorrow. Either way, it's happening.

Also, yesterday was a bit chilly, but this morning we woke up to a cloudless sky and frost on everything. It's even a bit worse out by where the house is going up, since there's less around it to keep the temperature up. I had a brief worry when I knocked on the container door and there was no sound of movement inside.
Of course, our crew is fine (though we're picking up for them another heater, and they have now reinforced motivation to kick ass getting the last little section of the roof erected and things buttoned up). But when the uninsulated metal box they're sleeping in is covered all over with ice and everything is silent and still...

In other things, one dump truck has sold (it's the off season for construction equipment, so even one right now is a good thing; come spring we'll be selling by the dozen), two of the four new-truck-delivered-for-certification have sold. We've been informed that the chassis under our serious dump trucks will start being built in Texas in early December -- putting them here well in time for that 'sale-by-the-dozen' season. At the factory, three of our seven overhead cranes are fully operational; concrete is going in over the next couple days to locate our loading dock and some hard-fixed tracking that we're using in lieu of a chain line to move the trucks from spot to spot.

G is doing a lot more at his preschool this fall than he did last fall (if you exclude, of course, the whole, 'learning how to speak Russian' thing that probably took up a lot of his time at first). He has a handful of new kid songs, jabbers on and on with his friends, and the other day, showing off the clay mushrooms they had made, started to lay out for me which ones were edible, which poisonous, and how to tell the difference. Z knows a handful of them, but I strongly suspect that mushroom lore is something that is taught at a very young age here, and so he probably missed out on the bulk of it. G, on the other hand, knows a mukhomor (red, rounded head with white spots; poisonous) from a lisichka (orange, crinkly flat head; good to eat) and a whole lot more. The coolness of this doesn't impress him in the slightest.

Z has had the good fortune to be in a Russian school on one of the round-number anniversaries of the launching of the first satellite. So of course they got to do little art projects (not that a 'ball-with-antennae is a particularly intricate thing) and spend some time talking about space travel and stuff. Which, it is safe to say, is an attention-grabber for most any kid, anywhere.

10/8 12:56, Pushkin time

This weekend I had the opportunity to show the boys exactly why they are not allowed to climb around no the house by themselves. Walking from one side of the main first floor room to the other, I stepped on the end of an unfastened board and went through between the floor joists (catching myself on the knee of my other leg). So my left shin is a bit skinned at the moment...

It's starting to get noticeably dark out -- dark when we go to sleep and also when we wake up -- so one of our first-order tasks this weekend was to start pulling the burned-out or otherwise unreliable bulbs from the apartment and replacing them with more powerful ones. We have several bulbs that went out back in May; but until now there's been no real need to have them working. The boys are all into coat/sweater combinations, G has started sporadically wearing gloves, and this morning in my hour reviewing the work on the factory buildings, I started to get cold. So summer is definitely over. This year we decided to get a jump on things and have our tires changed over sometime before the snow hits and the lines stack up. Assuming the snow holds off until the middle of the month (not something guaranteed), we may actually succeed.

We also yesterday spent some time at the airport getting A and L's tickets for Dec/Jan straightened out and adding to them tickets for G. They'll be staying a week longer than Z and I (school and work, respectively, calling). In fact, since A and L are locked into a silly routing involving an 8-hour stay in O'Hare, there is a very good chance that Z and I will be taking our own flights into Portland in December, too. It's not completely screwed-up, though. The Frankfurt-Portland plane gets us in close to twelve hours before A and the other two boys, so the two of us will have time to get the rental car picked up, grab some burritos, and otherwise tool around getting back into the swing of things.

As for doings, not much. We'll be having the neurologist back out to check out L this week so he can get the all-clear to get his shots. He's flipping over at will and scooting backwards when flipping gets boring. And making lots of noises. G decided this morning that he was big enough not to be walked into his classroom. And Я is starting to make more significant corrections to the way I speak. The roof joists are going up today/yesterday/tomorrow; things will be covered; and then the internal roof trusses will be added (mainly they're needed for snow loading, and we've got easily a month before it stays cold enough for snow to actually accumulate to any appreciable extent). The well-drilling outfit still hasn't shown up. That's not such a big deal for the time being, though, since the contract I signed with them includes penalties for late completion. So since we're not in any rush to get it drilled, I don't terribly mind getting a discount on the work. And then for the first part of this week, I expect to be putting a lot of my time into translating the thick stack of assembly instructions and otherwise getting things ready for the start-of-build.

10/5 12:33, Pushkin time

The well-drillers promised to be out today. The contract I signed includes penalties if they don't keep to that, so there's at least a decent chance they'll be out.

As for construction itself, the frame of the house was, as of this morning, done. Today the crew is going back to fit in bracketry, a couple remaining headers, and a beam they skipped while rushing to beat the weather. Tomorrow they start the roof beams, and by the middle of next week we may be watertight. So many people are coming by to comment on how quickly this style of structure gets erected -- it almost makes you lose sight of the fact that we're going something like half the speed of a crew in the US. Almost.

Of course, a big thing these past couple weeks has been the crashing of the US dollar. Since we buy stuff in dollars, it's not an unmitigated disaster; but since we have a fair bit of money held in dollars it's not much fun. We were discussing over coffee the other day possible changes to make to our financial organization to mitigate the pain of further slippage. One of the ideas I offered got laughed off out of hand -- to put a chunk of our dollar-holdings into accounts actually located in the US (thereby saving on the Euro-denominated service and transfer fees).
While once such a thing may have been feasible; even fairly desirable; such has for several years no longer been the case. US banks have developed a reputation for unilaterally and suddenly 'freezing' the assets of foreign entities. Or as И put it, stealing the money foreigners put in them. The process for proving the innocence of ones own money -- particularly when one is located overseas -- has, anecdotally, never been successfully run. In short, American bank accounts are no longer counted an acceptable financial risk. At least from outside the country.

10/3 14:04, Pushkin time

So. Picking back up.

Of course, right after getting all excited at the prospect of continued fair weather, this morning we woke up to rain. Nothing particularly strong, but still... So the guys building the house are now working under a bit more motivation to get things buttoned up (it has been said that by now you would almost expect to start seeing frost -- so I suppose it could be worse). In related news, my phone rang at the unreasonable hour of 6:45 this morning. Of course, my immediate response was to hit 'ignore' and then turned the ringer off. But once I got up and showered, I called back the missed number to learn that the ZiL upon which the well-drilling equipment is mounted had suffered engine failure (there's a reason why the field I'm in competes so well against the local stuff) and wouldn't be out until tomorrow. No real big deal -- certainly not something worth waking me up over; but whatever.

Anyway, I promised pictures. Find them below.

10/2 20:17, Pushkin time

A's parents left on Saturday, and finally this evening I find time to get back to taking care of my own thoughts (in this written, semi-public form).

To briefly catch-up:

The first week A's parents were here, as I mentioned, they hung out with A and the boys while I took care of work stuff and house stuff and so forth. The second week I took off from work and we spent the time taking them around Peterburg and LenOblast (and down as far as Velikiy Novgorod); and also handling house stuff. Then after they left we had re-centering, catch-up at work, and house stuff. Plus, Monday morning at 2AM G woke up puking and has been pretty much the same sick up until this afternoon. You know, to keep things from getting boring...

Now again by categories:

Progress on the factory continues at a decent pace. The several gizmos that I designed are in stages of built/building/materials-still-on-order. Several shipping containers worth of parts are already on the way to us; the balance for our first builds will [hopefully] go out in the next several days. We're quite close now.

G is having a good time (no surprise there) at his preschool. He's already picked up a new song about the leaves falling and so on, as well as having a group of friends that accounts for better than half of his group. Every once in a while he surprises me with some sort of linguistic feat that I didn't realize he knew how to do -- and then a bit later he'll screw up an English preposition. So he's pretty much normal. The lack of even close to overlap between Russian and English prepositions is probably one of the more confusing things about multilinguality (for example, the english word 'for' has meanings which are expressed in Russian by 'для', 'на', 'за', 'через', 'по', or by the use of declension alone without preposition; conversely 'на' can mean 'on', 'in', 'at', 'to', and 'during' in addition to the sense of 'for'; 'за' can mean 'behind' or 'because of' in addition to its sense of 'for'; 'через' can mean 'through', 'in','along', 'by', 'across', and 'alternating' in addition to its 'for'; and 'по' can mean 'by', 'according', 'in the manner of', 'along', 'each', and 'like' in addition to its 'for'. Easy to mix up, I mean to get across).

Z is doing quite well at school. They've hit on the different between consonants and vowels; with the additional dimension of 'hard' versus 'soft'. The penmanship has just gotten to the point where he does both the letters и and а. He's starting to do some after-school stuff, too. Starting October the parents and teacher agreed in committee exactly what they wanted their kids' week to look like, so he now has a firm schedule of which lessons on which days and when he finishes (12:40 every day except Friday -- when they do music/dance until 1:40). And that will hold for in principle the rest of the year.

L has just recently mastered the skill of 'flipping over' and the complementary skill of 'scooting backwards'. Meaning he can now get from pretty much anywhere to pretty much anywhere. Z already has some vague recollection of why this is, for him, an unfortunate event. G is still to find out.

A demonstrated during the time her parents were here that she is much better-equipped, speaking-wise, than previously we would have guessed (not just when they were around -- we took advantage of their presence to get free babysitting and go over to Е and С's place for dinner, and A did awesome then too). I suspect the absence of her summertime 'helper' (do-for-her-er might be more accurate) has been good.

And we're all getting pretty stoked about the house. My intention is to post several pictures in the net day or so showing the progress over the last couple weeks. I appear not to have mentioned (time may in fact have flown, though my recollection of it is hazy) that, all of a sudden, the guy whose crew had done the foundation and the brickwork came into access of a whole big pile of dry wood. In our sizes. For the same price as wet wood. So we bought the whole pile up and his guys jumped right to work. And the weather, for a massive surprise, has held out swimmingly. As it stands as of this morning when I was last by, the second floor walls are just under half finished. Right now the crew on it is pushing hard to get the body put together, sided with at least plywood, under a roof, and all covered with tyvek and roofing, before it starts raining (which it really should have been doing all this time... like I said, the weather has super-cooperated). So there's no, like, floors, or stairs (just walkway boards on the joists and four Tajiks who are comfortable taking chances). Those can come once the weather is kept out. Which is a bit sad for the boys, as there is No Way In Hell they are going to get to stand in their new rooms until we have a much better than 10:1 hole-to-surface ratio on the upper floor surfaces.
I also had a guy out to put together a quote on the septic system -- no point putting it in now if we're not going to use it, so we're scheduled for right at the first thaw. And tomorrow the crew comes out to drill our well and install the pumping and coarse filtration gear. I've been out to the site once a day at least; all the wall details were calced by A and I off our floorplan drawings, drawn up by me, and hand-carried, wall by wall, to the crew foreman. It's all very cool.

And now I'm getting the less-than-subtle message that it is time to close this off for the evening. I'll try to pick up again tomorrow sometime.