декабря 06, 2007
Interstice
12/6 11:04, Pushkin time
Wow. Almost two weeks since I had a moment to breathe and get something put down. And I can practically guarantee that this will be my last until at least the beginning of January.
Today, a set of factory engineers arrive from the US, and tomorrow our plant starts working. We've got parts strewn pretty much all over the place (my parts manager, В Ф, has been bullied into promising to at least have everything tucked away somewhere, and everything at least perfunctorily counted, by the end of today). All the tooling we thought of ahead of time is ready, with the single exception of one trolley that we won't really need until next month anyway [I hope]. And really, we pretty much thought of everything -- though for some reason we didn't account for needing a 2-ton arm crane until last week. My project for today is to get that designed out and the iron for it on order so П and the guys at the plant can build it during our pause-for-breath in the last week of this month.
That was actually my project for yesterday. But on Tuesday, we were informed of a freshly-inked new rule at Customs, under which used trucks cannot be customs-released until they have a confirmed Russian-notarized (which means, translated and then notarized) copy of their American (or Canadian) title and title transfer documents. So literally everyone here spent all day yesterday translating the 120 titles into at least some form of Russian. And I spent the day running around helping people translate legalistic boilerplate -- of course, every state and every province has its own form with its own slightly, but distinctly different boilerplate. And the kicker? We managed to get all 120 translated and packed off to the notary by 5PM, tickets bought for the two guys who would be going down to Moscow (by the way, the only government-approved location in the entire country that can confirm the notarized titles for the purposes of Customs) today, and everything seemed to be well in hand.
However, this is Russia. So when they got the titles with translations to the notary, they were told that our translations couldn't be notarized -- they were "insufficient". But... the notary would be able to do the translations 'properly' for us -- for a fee. So for today no one is going anywhere. Hopefully they'll be ready today, and the folks can fly down tomorrow. And we'll only pay for a single weekend extra storage time for those 120 trucks at the port.
Z is cruising through his penmanship stuff. By the time our vacation comes up, he'll have the last of the the last of the letters down. G is reading pretty comfortably now (small words) in both languages. This happened sort of unexpectedly; we were working on his English letters at about the same time his preschool was having kids push into their letters. The teachers had both commented to me recently how he has picked up on literacy easily twice as quickly as any other kid in his class. He's not quite ready to be amused yet by the letters that look the same but sound different between the two, but that kind of humor is right up his alley. As for writing the letters, he can do a handful of Russian ones (he's for a long time been able to do the easy ones like О and Г, and somehow he also picked up Я along the way), and a couple English ones. But that comes next, and he's pretty stoked about the possibility. And then L is, as of a few days ago, completely forward-mobile. And somehow he over the space of no time at all, went from moving in slow, widely-spaced jerks, to being fast.
Oh, and as concerns the van; I have been told that the necessary parts are all very recently in, and that to hope for the van to be finished by the 12th is a very reasonable thing. We'll see.
Wow. Almost two weeks since I had a moment to breathe and get something put down. And I can practically guarantee that this will be my last until at least the beginning of January.
Today, a set of factory engineers arrive from the US, and tomorrow our plant starts working. We've got parts strewn pretty much all over the place (my parts manager, В Ф, has been bullied into promising to at least have everything tucked away somewhere, and everything at least perfunctorily counted, by the end of today). All the tooling we thought of ahead of time is ready, with the single exception of one trolley that we won't really need until next month anyway [I hope]. And really, we pretty much thought of everything -- though for some reason we didn't account for needing a 2-ton arm crane until last week. My project for today is to get that designed out and the iron for it on order so П and the guys at the plant can build it during our pause-for-breath in the last week of this month.
That was actually my project for yesterday. But on Tuesday, we were informed of a freshly-inked new rule at Customs, under which used trucks cannot be customs-released until they have a confirmed Russian-notarized (which means, translated and then notarized) copy of their American (or Canadian) title and title transfer documents. So literally everyone here spent all day yesterday translating the 120 titles into at least some form of Russian. And I spent the day running around helping people translate legalistic boilerplate -- of course, every state and every province has its own form with its own slightly, but distinctly different boilerplate. And the kicker? We managed to get all 120 translated and packed off to the notary by 5PM, tickets bought for the two guys who would be going down to Moscow (by the way, the only government-approved location in the entire country that can confirm the notarized titles for the purposes of Customs) today, and everything seemed to be well in hand.
However, this is Russia. So when they got the titles with translations to the notary, they were told that our translations couldn't be notarized -- they were "insufficient". But... the notary would be able to do the translations 'properly' for us -- for a fee. So for today no one is going anywhere. Hopefully they'll be ready today, and the folks can fly down tomorrow. And we'll only pay for a single weekend extra storage time for those 120 trucks at the port.
Z is cruising through his penmanship stuff. By the time our vacation comes up, he'll have the last of the the last of the letters down. G is reading pretty comfortably now (small words) in both languages. This happened sort of unexpectedly; we were working on his English letters at about the same time his preschool was having kids push into their letters. The teachers had both commented to me recently how he has picked up on literacy easily twice as quickly as any other kid in his class. He's not quite ready to be amused yet by the letters that look the same but sound different between the two, but that kind of humor is right up his alley. As for writing the letters, he can do a handful of Russian ones (he's for a long time been able to do the easy ones like О and Г, and somehow he also picked up Я along the way), and a couple English ones. But that comes next, and he's pretty stoked about the possibility. And then L is, as of a few days ago, completely forward-mobile. And somehow he over the space of no time at all, went from moving in slow, widely-spaced jerks, to being fast.
Oh, and as concerns the van; I have been told that the necessary parts are all very recently in, and that to hope for the van to be finished by the 12th is a very reasonable thing. We'll see.
