Expat Life

Truck 100

2008-11-05T03:58:00.001-08:00

11/5 15:04, Pushkin time

We finished it a little while ago, but decided to wait on taking the picture until it had quit raining outside. That happened Saturday.

Strive Against Gapping

2008-10-25T00:51:00.000-07:00

10/25 11:52, Pushkin time

I've had a guy from Pennsylvania (where American vampires come from) here doing a training course all this week -- and I get to play translator. So I've been dashing over to the plant for an hour before anyone else comes in and then trying to get in another hour after work hours have ended so I at least sort of keep up with the things I need to do. It's not really working, though things would be worse if I wasn't doing it, I guess. He's here until the 30th.

On the other hand, this month we have finally hit a more or less sustained rhythm of smooth working facilities, no crazy directives-from-on-high, and an adequate supply of parts; we've been at one truck a day for almost the entire time, and will likely maintain that for this last week of October. So finally our guys and we will start to see the nice, fat piece-rate money I've been promising since... oh... about last December. Next month and the one after are already pretty much in the bag, too. And we've got parts coming now that should cover us for January and a good chunk of February.
Of course, the dark side is that the depression in the US has rippled out a bit into the rest of the world. As it stands now, we've got customers for our stuff at least going forward a bit of a ways, but beyond those guys the situation is a bit less clear. Most likely we're in for a couple of tight months at least on our normal business side. Fortunately, we've got a ton of side projects that we are starting to ramp up to keep at least moving in a slightly forward direction. And as И says, in the spring once things have settled, we'll be in superb shape to be right out in front. Also it likely means (and we've already seen this starting to happen) that the prices for construction type stuff will come down. Which means we will be able to finish the house most likely for less than what we were previously expecting. Already the number of migrant workers in construction has dropped off sharply, and the ones that remain are starting to bid down against each other on price.
And in fact, the outfits that had extended themselves on credit are the ones taking it the hardest. They announced that the big tower GazProm was having built right in the middle of the historical city center won't be happening -- in fact, they say that likely by December, GazProm and several of the like companies snatched by the connected bandits and killers (who, as the last decade has shown to anyone who was looking, demonstrate that the skills required to shoot a competitor in the head and the ones required to run a successful company do not really overlap) in the 90s are going to be in the red. Several may actually fall, and have their assets be finally made available to maybe some less-sleazy scumbags. So there really are several silver linings to this whole thing.

In other things, the big news is that L has started talking. At long last. For quite some time, it's been clear that he understood what people were saying to him (in either language, for that matter) for example, without indicating with gestures or anything, if you asked him to bring you a specific thing, he would get it for you. But he used only his own noises for words until this last week, when he came out with a whole pile of words. With us at home, they're all english; but I'm planning to try him out with some of our friends (he's uncomfortable around new people still) and see if he's got any of their words, too.

Rolling along

2008-10-18T08:51:00.000-07:00

10/18 19:51, Pushkin time

Seeing as how I used to post sometimes even more than once a day, I suppose the sense of accomplishment I'm getting in writing a second post less than a week spaced from the last is a bit irrational.

Anyway.

Z has now been attending for almost a full week the musical academy ("named for Anna Akhmatov") in Pushkin. We've been meaning to get him signed up there for after-school lessons for pretty close to a year now -- but it's Russia, and I work during the day, and those type of cold introductions-discovery-and-negotiations A feels unconfident in her ability to handle (I, having had the experience when we first got here of being able to muddle through even as a totally ignorant boob, have more faith in her than she has in herself on this matter, but that's not the point). So it had to go until I finally got sick of waiting, took off from work for a couple hours in the middle of the day, and took Z over to the school to meet with its director and People-of-Admissions.
Somewhat uunsurprisingly (though at the time, catching the both of us completely off guard), after the director and we had exchanged a couple words, he asked what instrument Z wanted to study.
Umm.
Uhh.
(and Z was no help there, either).

I finally tossed out piano as a potentially good one to start with. Fortunately, there was space in piano classes, so that's where he is for now. They offer pretty much every instrument possible; G has already declared his intention to do guitar there as soon as he turns six. For now, Z does choir/basic musical skills two days a week after school and piano one day a week after school. And thus far he's having a good time. The only thing left to set up for his is getting him into a swim group. Hopefully I'll be able to do that sometime before the school year ends.

And in other things, we picked up the first set of radiators for the house today. Our septic is dug and ready to be pooped in. We dropped our well pump in to try priming the well only to find out that not using a brand new well for a year has the unfortunate side-effect of causing it to sediment back in somewhat (ours was dug to 26 meters, and the pump only went down to like 17). So we'll have a guy out to blast the gunk out with air and then we'll make sure to follow after that better. The garbage dump that was behind our place has been all cleaned out -- I arranged for a neighbor with a horse-and-cart to take the stuff away for way cheaper than what dump truck drivers were asking. And so that's all moving along at some kind of speed.

And now, the kids want to watch a movie that's on our computer; A is giving me dirty looks for keeping them waiting. So I suppose that brings me to the end for now.

Stopping by

2008-10-15T08:55:00.000-07:00

10/15 19:55, Pushkin time

Wow. Let's just say that it's been too long, and leave it at that.

It was not such an amazing summer, anyway. Stuff happened, other stuff didn't happen, I mainly kept busy. Really, only two majorly interesting things to note:

1) Hit A Pedestrian With My Car
Driving the boys to school one morning a few weeks ago, I was going with my green light towards the intersection right ahead of the Egyptian Gate. Just ahead of the crosswalk, a girl stepped right out in front of me, maybe fifteen feet in front of my car. I slammed my brakes and swerved to one side -- the sound of my skids caught her attention, she looked right at me, and jumped in the same direction I was swerving. I corrected, but there just wasn't quite enough time; so the next thing I know, she slams off the driver's quarter of the hood and I see her feet go flying to the side. I skidded to a stop and jumped out to do... something. I was frankly expecting to find an oozing body in the street.
It is, for the record, indescribeably more horrible than running over a cat or dog.
When I got to the girl, she was kind of shifting and muttering. Her legs were cocked kind of funny, but she fairly quickly came to some sort of sense and started to get up. I helped her up and helped her limp-hop to the curb, all the while monologuing a sort of, "ohmygodyou'rehurtohmygodyourheadholycrapthankgodyou'renotdead" and so forth. We got to the curb and I immediately told her we needed to go to the hospital; that there was no way she was alright. She declined repeatedly (though she did ask me to retrieve her shoe from where it had been blown off into the middle of the intersection. I sort of checked her over, all the time repeating my insistence that we take her to a hospital. But ultimately, she just said she wanted me to take her home (she had no visible damages, other than a scraped elbow, but she was hit by a freaking car...). I told her she needed to be looked after; she assured me that her husband was a doctor and he would take care of her at home, so I ended up loading her in the car (the boys, to their credit, sat quietly while I dealt with things) and took her to her place and then made sure she got to her door, and forced her to take my phone number so that if anything at all felt funny later on I could rush back and get her to help.
Then I got back to the car, got the kids to school and continued (more or less) with my day.

I got a call in the middle of that day from a guy claiming to be the husband of the girl I hit; that she had some sort of head injury that they were going to be taking her to the neurologist the next day to check out, that she was pregnant, and that, by the way, according to Statute such-and-such of the Rules of Road Transport, I was obligated to call her an ambulance and then wait for the police to come and fill out a report. I argued with the guy a little bit, to the extent that I offered her several times to call an ambulance or take her to the hospital myself, and then did exactly what she asked and took her to her home; that I was going the normal speed on the road (one of her shoes came off, and he was trying to claim that I 'must have been going' at least twice the legal speed for that to have happened); that she was not in the crosswalk, and that I had a green light when she stepped out in front of me. Plus, you could hardly say that I fled the scened of an accident, given the fact that he was able to contact me because I had given the girl my cell number. Ultimately, he offered to go straight to the cops and report me for hit-and-run, and I got him to agree instead to meet that evening to discuss things.

И went with me (stupid me, it was my idea to meet at 11:30PM in the shopping market parking lot), which was good since the guy had two friends with him, too. I let И do the bulk of the critical talking, since I'm really not that experienced in these kinds of negotiations. Ultimately, it came down to more or less what the guy had said; we asked him to name a price, and he gave 40,000 rubles. I knew enough to keep my mouth closed, and И muttered that that was hardly a fair number. The guy offered to call his lawyer (in fact, did call the guy and try to get me to talk to him on the phone). We ended up getting him to agree to give us until the next morning before going to the cops.

That next morning, we checked into all manners of Russian law. As it turns out, I did everything right -- including taking her to her house afterwards, as she had indicated that her husband was a doctor, which fulfilled my responsibility to 'take the injured in my own transport to a location where they can receive medical attention'. However, the law pretty much straight out says that in any case, I was obligated to come back to the scene of the accident, call the cops, wait for them to show up, and so forth. So I broke the law, pretty much unambiguously. As further interest, while the penalty for 'failing to fulfill my duties as a motor vehicle operator after an accident', until last year, was a fine or suspension of license, it was increased at the beginning of summer to suspension of license or 15 days jail time (administrative arrest, it's called). So the option of letting it go to court and then having И's friends in the police/courts regimes simply write me up for the fine instead of the serious penalty was off the table. We also looked up the exact legal definition of 'blackmail' (breaking the rules of the road is an 'administrative' offense; blackmail is a 'criminal' one) with the idea that we could turn the tables on this guy and intimidate him into backing off. But no luck there, either.
So, figuring I was going to end up getting tagged for the bulk of the requested 40K, since I didn't have any sort of leg to stand on, I had И call the guy up. Doing so, he got to show his genius. He gave the guy the line that, 'look, this guy is a foreigner. what does he care if his license gets suspended in Russia? He's leaving next month anyway. He wants to make some sort of offer to you out of the goodness of his heart and recognition that he's caused you trouble, but if you want to be a dick about it, go ahead and start the police report. He'll be gone before they even start looking for him." Then he named a sum of 20,000 rubles. The guy asked a few minutes to think it over.
Five minutes later he called back and agreed. I arranged to meet him that afternoon; as soon as i hung up, И cursed and said that we should have offered ten; the guy agreed too quickly.
So ultimately I ended up paying a guy about 800 bucks and getting in return a notarized letter from the girl I hit indicating that we had settled the issue between us to our mutual consent and that she had no claims against me.

So that's what it costs to have an idiot walk out in front of you in traffic. According to the Russian Rules of the Road, the driver is always at fault -- no matter what the pedestrian did, or what the other circumstances. A driver is considered the operator of a piece of "dangerous equipment", exactly the same legally as a guy holding a pistol or working with dynamite. Supposedly, if you could find multiple witnesses to confirm that a pedestrian looked at you coming, recognized that you were coming, and stepped in front of you anyway (I suppose, suicided themselves), you might be able to get away with having the responsibility not lay completely on you. But otherwise, you're screwed. So one big lesson both Andi and I got is, Watch Out For Pedestrians.
Oh, and by the way... If I hadn't been paying good attention, or had been speeding, there is no way I would have avoided hitting her straight on at speed. In the event that a pedestrian is killed by the operator of a vehicle, it is straight-to-jail. Given the speed at which the Russian bureaucracy works, И might have been able to pull enough strings fast enough to keep me from spending any time locked up, but no guarantees. So that's another little happy though for me as I drive.

2) Got Reported To The Authorities
Yesterday morning, I got a call from a person telling me that he had a "zayavleniye" (this can mean, 'application', 'request', and several other things; it holds the sense of an officially-documented something about something) regarding me, and that he would like to get together with me to go over it. Umm.. okay, whatever. So I told him we could get together at the house (since he identified me as the "Mr. Maroncelli from Pokrovskaya", it was a safe bet he knew where the house was) that evening at quarter to seven. He agreed, and I started to ask people what the hell that could have been about. Since the word is such a potentially general one, without any context -- and I had none at all, of course -- no one could say anything but, 'you'll find out tonight, I guess'.
As it turns out, I didn't. The guy never showed, never called, and we left after waiting for a reasonable time. He did ultimately call at like 10:30 at night, but by that point I had already figured, screw him; he can wait until morning.

So this morning, he called me again. First to apologize for missing out on meeting at the house (caught in traffic or something). Then to say that since he blew me off at the place convenient for him, he was happy to come to wherever was convenient for me. So I gave him the address of the factory. Maybe ten minutes later, our security guard called me to tell me a guy had shown up looking for me, and should he let him in. Since I was still a bit pissed at the guy for the previous night, I told the guard to let him wait and that I would be right out.

I opened the door to the security building, and saw in the entryway only two people -- the guard, and someone in a police uniform. Oh shit. And before I can react, the guard looks to me and says, 'here's the guy who was looking for you', gesturing at the cop.

Oh shit again.

So I introduce myself to the guy and we settle into the guard's office to go over the zayavleniye (in this case, I suppose I would say, 'complaint' or 'report'). He shows me a typed document consisting of about eight paragraphs. The first couple go over the border dispute we had with the people whose sheds we are tearing down; though it also at first glance seemed to be making some sort of claims about me personally. Then there was a section about our Roma neighbors (identified in the zayavleniye as 'burglars, murderers, and car thieves'), then back to something else about me making strong mention of my US citizenship, and then a bit that I didn't catch at all consisting primarily of the acronyms that Russians so love to use. Nothing really remarkably bad as far as I could tell, and the cop told me that it was basically bullshit, but that he was obligated to sit down with me and get an official response written up and filed. I called И over to give the paper a glance and to more or less consult before I got into making any kind of statement at all. He looked it over, started snickering, and then after briefly asking the cop a couple questions, told me it was definitely bullshit and that I should just do the response thing.

In more detail, the zayavleniye consisted of the following regarding me:

Addressed to the Governor of Leningradskaya Oblast, it identified the writer as a Russian citizen, long-time resident of Pokrovskaya. Recently, the plot of land neighboring his had been pruchased by an individual (me, by name) who was not only a citizen of the USA, but also, "in Russia for unclear reasons; having command of English, Italian, and Russian languages; of military bearing and specialized physical conditioning" [I know, that's the part where И started snickering; I've made all sorts of hay off that line today; A simply loves it.]
Said citizen proceeded to immediately wall off the impoverished Russian and his co-inhabitants from their access to fire safety equipment, fuel delivery, and toilet facilities; as well as tearing down sheds that they had been using for decades.

Then it proceeded to direct the Governor to, pursuant to her obligation to protect the citizens of the Russian Federation, determine exactly to what purpose the USA citizen had come to Russia, as well as taking whatever additional protective measures were appropriate. This was particularly critical, as the character of the individual in question and circumstances of his being in Russia were clearly indicative of an initiative on the part of the USA government -- noted as not being an ally of the Russian Federation, as evidenced by recent events -- in particular some form of Special Forces to take actions on in Russia on their behalf. Even more critical is the fact that the writer, as a scientist formerly associated with rocketry and other matters on a level of national security, is a likely target of this initiative, and if nothing is done, will be left on his own living right next door to said USA Special Forces Operative.

People have almost peed themselves laughing as I recapped that to them today. I asked the cop right away if I could have a copy of the letter for a souvenir. He was sort of confused by the request (as I said, 'you can't buy those kind of things, and no one has ever said that I had "specialized physical conditioning" before). Unfortunately, he wasn't empowered to do that, though he did give me the contact info for his chief, who most likely would have no problem giving me copy of the whole file if I wanted it.
Hell yes, I want it.
So anyway, I sat down with the cop and explained, no, I'm not a spy. No, I don't speak Italian. No, I'm a truck engineer, not a rocket engineer. Here's my US address. And so forth. And then read over his summary, signed it, and went off back to work to tell my tale. I'm not sure when I'll find the time, but there is no way I'm not going to get a copy of my police file.

Oh yeah, and as for the rocket scientist who wrote up the zayavleniye? Apparently, he's an old kook who peels off a half dozen or so of those every few months. The cop said it wastes an amazingly huge amount of his time chasing down all the people this guy names and interviewing them and so forth. The entire department basically despises the guy, but it's their job. And like he said, if we're going to be next to the guy, he'll come up with something to write on us. The last one before the one about me, he wrote about the inhabitants of the apartment across the way from him -- there was some sort of unusual smell coming from their apartment, and he was convinced they were either making dynamite or maybe narcotics there. And the Governor needed to send someone to check it out.
So, no harm done, and an amusing diversion for today.

[Hmmm... I wonder if they're organized enough to cross-index with my accidentally sneaking into the Kremlin several years back...

Naaahh..]

Got got got got no time...

2008-05-26T20:41:00.000-07:00

5/27 0741, Pushkin time

So wow. More than a month between postings. My last dry spell of that length was back when I was still working out of Portland and only posting on my trips.

On the other hand, things are busier here than they ever were there. In addition to A and the boys -- and we have even one more of those now than we had back when I was business-tripping -- we recently stepped up to a promise we had made some time back and got ourselves a great dane puppy. She's from a very good kennel and was already 95% domesticated when we got her, but still being as how she's only four months old, it's a chunk of time to expend.

Plus, since our dry spell -- that is, due to incompetence and/or fear on the part of several of our US partners, our complete lack of parts with which to build anything -- ended a couple weeks ago, П and I have had our hands more than full ramping back up to normal speed on top of the already-expected getting our new option packages implemented at the exact same time as we will be massively expanding our plant facilities and re-doing our entire assembly process (with all the construction-related grief that comes with that). Plus, periodically, either he or I need to do something related to the rest of the organization which takes us out of action for a day. Fortunately, we were recently granted a secretary, who will certainly be a big help to us once we have finished walking her through all the stuff we invented over the past six months so she can take it over on her own.
Oh yeah, and by the end of summer, we're committed to upping production by 50%. So yeah, it's kind of busy.

And then, of course, the house is moving along. In the last month, a brigade of Tajiks moved in and have added a couple of posts we really needed to take some spring out of our floors, gotten the floor decking all in (though for right now just tacked-with-nails, since we still don't have the power to run the screw guns for the final install), and the floors and ceilings insulated. They've also put in all the internal walls as well as the foundation and much of the brickwork for under our deck. I also had them set in two meters deep of concrete access-ring around the well as well as digging out the trenches in which our well pipe and our sewer pipes will run to the house and putting those particular hunks of piping in the ground.
After getting quotes from a few electricians ranging on the order of 150000rubles for labor alone(!!!!) to wire up our house, I was granted a one-month usage of our plant electrician (while he is on vacation) to get things done. The word is халтура [khaltura -- 'side-work']. And I'm a big fan of it now. In addition to covering the twenty-rubles-a-day it costs him to take the bus to our place and back, I'll probably end up paying no more than 30000 all told for his labor. And since he's doing the work for someone he knows, there's a bit more motivation, too. The slight down side is that I have to keep him supplied with materials, which has meant in the last couple days buying up all of the stock of ВВГп 3x1.5 wire (that is, solid copper wire, three strands, each 1.5mm diameter, insulated separately and then all in an outer insulation - the п means the package is flat as opposed to round) in two hardware stores in town and a good chunk of what was available from a third. Plus as well a meter and boxes, and in the neighborhood of forty circuit breakers of various sizes (though mostly 6A; remember, we're on 220V). As of yesterday evening, we have pretty much the entire second and first-and-a-half floors wired up; today and likely tomorrow he's going to get the upper floor breaker box put together, and then maybe another week for the first floor and garage level.
As for water/sewer/heating (they do water-radiator heat here almost exclusively), the quotes for labor on that are more on the order of 500000rubles. So I'm looking to халтура for that, too. It's a bit tougher to find, it seems; though since that side is a fair sight simpler than electrical, I'm strongly looking toward the possibility of at least getting the behind-the-walls work done myself (Z will probably help, if it goes that way) this coming weekend. With И advising, it should be fairly straightforward. And once we've gotten the wall work done, the Tajiks can come behind us and insulate and sheetrock. Then water/sewer (or maybe we do that ourselves, too, on another weekend) and then subflooring.
We've ordered our windows -- 23 of them, priced in euros; ouch. They should be brought and installed sometime in the next week-and-a-half. I'm ordering our furnace out of Moscow this week; since we have drivers going down that way all the time, getting it up here will be no problem. The only major item that remains slightly unclear at this point is the installation of the sewer device itself. We're pretty solidly against the hole-in-the-ground technique (we do get our water from a well, you know), but it's a bit tough finding an outfit that knows how to install the mini sewage processing stations that you can get here. We'll find someone for sure (or have the Tajiks dig and put it in ourselves, I suppose), but it's still a bit up in the air. Everything else is more or less on some sort of track.
And finally, as for paperwork. We should finally have our building permit in our hands on Wednesday/Thursday. That was the last snag we hit in getting our semi-legal (that is, set up and approved by the head of the local energy department, but not, strictly speaking, done according to any sort of rules) power strung out -- we've needed that for several months now, and the Tajiks are happy to hear that it is not far off. The final delay in getting the building permits was the sign-off from the office of the fire chief. The building codes require a 15-meter minimum spacing between wooden structures. Anyone who's seen our place and can imagine a meter could see that we don't quite make that at all -- primarily because of the wooden construction in our neighbor's yard right up against the property line. But we do have a reasonable spacing (I'd say on the order of 5-6 meters, which is plenty, compared to the 5 feet you frequently see in Portland), and the fire chief proved to be someone with whom a deal could be made. So, last hurdle jumped on that, and we should have power inside of the next two weeks. That's a big one -- particularly considering we will have gotten it done in less than a full year, which is way under par.
Of course that means we'll be that much busier.

The Hunt

2008-04-17T09:04:00.000-07:00

4/17 20:05, Pushkin time

A full month. -sigh-

Anyway, I make time to stop in and relate a relatively recent happening (and then likely disappear again for a time; perhaps not terribly unexpectedly, plant-managing is a fairly time-consuming endeavor). After making a year's worth of inquiries, I finally a couple months ago located in a friend of С С's a person who goes hunting. Last weekend I got to go out for my first time.

Friday evening С С and I bailed from work an hour early and I followed him down the Moscow highway into the Valday mountain range and then off to the right a ways to the city of Demyansk, Novgorodskaya Oblast. Though about five hours long, the drive was not particularly bad -- up until the 80km or so once we got onto the Demyansk road. This stretch we did in the already-dark, made even the more exciting by the constant appearance and passing of sections of road so badly potholed that only the fairly regular occurrence of chunks of asphalt paid any kind of evidence to the fact that we were still on a 'paved' road. As for the Valday themselves, coming out of the Petersburg flats, they were adequately mountain-looking, and had at least a few river-rapids-type things to look at.
Anyway, after an hour driving through increasingly-demoralizing road and roadside decay-of-things-modern, all of a sudden we popped over a bridge and jarred right back into civilization. Demyansk is, after all, a Russian equivalent of a county seat. Plus in the civilized part of the country, so really not so stone age as the drive out led me to fear.
And navigating into Demyansk itself, we found our way to the house of С С's friend, Viktor. We had a quick dinner, some vodka, and hopped into his sauna for a bit before hitting the hay. Viktor, it turns out, is no casual hunter. He and his crew pull something between seven and nineteen wolves out of the woods and bogs around Demyansk and the surrounding villages every winter -- in large part, they are the only people hunting several hundred square miles of wilderness. Not only do the wolves fetch them good money (the bounty is 5000rubles for a male, and 6500 for a female, which is better than $200 and almost $300, respectively -- wolves are apparently a serious issue in this part of the world; wintertime in the Demyansk region alone, they lose a person every other year or so on average to wolfpacks, and in the villages around people do not go outside at night, armed or not, when it's likely the wolves have had hard luck hunting), but they have gained them a sort of privileged position with the local game wardens. Which was good, since we were going to be hunting the local bird (глухарь -- call it 'glukhar', not an animal for which there is an english name) about a week before the season started. This was in large part necessitated by the fact that the spring thaw came on very early, and even at the time we were going out, the majority of the birds would have already mated and moved on. So we were going to be going on a 'Tsar's hunt' as Viktor called it (which is to say, on our own hunting grounds as we damn well felt was the time to go out. We'd get only the bare minimum of grief if we were caught, but still it was best to keep as inconspicuous as possible.

The next morning started at about nine with a breakfast of noodles and cheese, vegetables, and vodka (Viktor's wife scolded him for drinking so early, and I suppose me, too; but... russian hunting...). Then around about ten, Viktor's brother Sasha showed up with another of their party, Oleg. Sasha is a longtime Demyansk hunter. Oleg is a Korean-by-descent from Uzbekistan doctor who owns his own private clinic in Petersburg. His parents were less-than-legal inhabitants of what turned out to be Russian territory out on the Amur at the time Stalin decided to do some exile-swapping. All the ethnic Koreans in the Amur area got rounded up and sent to Uzbekistan, and a whole bunch of Ukranians-or-something got deported to the far east taigas to sort of take their place. That crazy Stalin... But you run into stories like that. Oleg speaks Korean and his son is actually married a girl from Korea that he met while he was there on a student-exchange thing.

Anyway, we piled into Sasha's UAZ (a russian jeep with the well-earned reputation of being able to go anywhere) and scooted out to a nearby village (see picture) to pick up our fifth, Ivan. He has also been hunting for a long time. I got to see pictures, later on, of the two sets of bear cubs that he and his family ended up raising (the first set's mother he killed, then found them and took them home; the second set's mother was killed by a guy he was with). Pretty cool for his kids, that. They had them from the size of maybe five inches long until they were maybe forty pounds each; four bear cubs as pets. Then he gave the first set to zoos, and the second set to a wildlife-release program.
Anyway, that kind of hunter.

And then from Ivan's house, we set out in the UAZ, with Viktor in a tractor following, down the road to the hunting spot. We took the UAZ as far as it could manage. When the road started getting to like like this, we ditched the UAZ and four of us piled into the trailer behind the tractor while Viktor drove us another hour into the woods.

Since these guys are the only ones who hunt these woods, the road is their own, and we did a fair bit of on-the-spot maintenance and otherwise driving over and around stuff. Made our own roads where it looked like even the tractor might not get through (mind you, the tractor went through three-foot-deep mud and water pits without so much as blinking).

We went through moose and boar-hunting grounds as well as a part of what they consider to be really good places to get wolves. And then eventually (though not soon enough for my and Oleg's aching ass-bones) we came to the point where even the tractor could go no further, parked it, got our stuff off, pulled up our swamp-boots (not quite crotch-high) and set off to slog the last two miles through the swamp to our campsite. Russian nature at its finest, up above your knees in ten inches of water and under that another who-knows-how-deep liquid muck. With a backpack and a shotgun . For two miles.

So eventually, we got to the campsite only to find that a recent windstorm had blown a big tree over right onto the lean-to that they use. Which made agenda item #1 - build a new shelter. Fortunately, along with the other necessaries, both Viktor and Sasha had brought along chainsaws, and Ivan had ported a hatchet and nails. So over the course of a couple hours, we de-forested a goodly size area and had put together a place to sleep in the more or less dry and warm.

In between chainsaw and hatchet work and hauling, of course, we took the time to have lunch (and drink vodka), and Viktor sort of talked me through what the hunt was going to be about and what I needed to keep in mind. Plus, of course, during the building we drank all the non-alcoholic liquids we had brought with us. More on that in a bit.

During the rest of the early afternoon, Ivan took me a little ways out from the camp to show why they called this spot the "Seven Airplanes". During the war, Demyansk, which sits in a valley in the Valday not too far by air from Moscow or Peter, was mostly taken by the Germans and used as a forward airbase. Of course, this meant that the Soviets bombed the crap out of it pretty much constantly, as well as making at least one major parachute-drop assault -- into the middle of a wolf- and bear-infested swamp, if you dig... Anyways, of course during the course of this, several Soviet planes were downed.And in fact, our campsite sat near the remains of a couple of them -- one plane, an ИЛ-2, a scant several hundred yard away, in fact. And this being a bog and all, the crater where it hit is still pretty much as it was, and chunks of it were still available (to the fellow equipped with a metal-detector as was Ivan) for pulling-out. On most of those, the paint was even still intact (again, thanks to the bog). So we played around there for a bit until it came time for Viktor and I to scout out our hunting grounds for the next morning.

We walked out in a general direction -- something I learned about bogs and myself; I make all my direction-estimates almost exactly 180 degrees off. Thank goodness I stayed with someone who knew what they were doing and had a compass. I asked at one point what would be the best way to get out if one got lost. Sasha's response was to find one of the rivers that ran through the area and follow it downstream until you got to the nearest inhabited area. That is, for close to 200km through bogs and marshes until you got to Velikiy Novgorod. In other words, if you get lost, you are well and truly fucked. See ya. So I stayed as much as possible glued to someone the whole time.
Anyway, Viktor and I went for about an hour, cutting marks in trees on the way to find our path back and then out again in the dark the next morning, until we got to the bog-proper (apparently, we had only been on the 'outskirts'). Then another half-hour into the bog and we found a spot. There we stayed until late dusk, listening and watching the глухари come in for the night. And in the later minutes, listening to the moose squish-squishing their way here and there.
A note, a moose makes less noise moving through a bog that I do. Significantly less.
And in the dark we made our way back. And -- for a surprise -- found it with no problems at all.

Then dinner and more to drink and sleep. We got up at 3AM, had a bite and more vodka (hmmm...) and then set out back into the bog. Viktor was optimistic (again, hmm....) and even though it was pitch-dark, and the middle of a freaking bog a freaking hundred miles if you were lucky enough to choose the right path from anything inhabited, decided to take a different route than the one we had marked to the hunting grounds. Okay, fine.
So we walked.

And walked.

And squished.

And squished.

After a time, Viktor started stopping to check his compass rather often.

Then he started banging on his compass every so often.

Then, when he stopped to check and thwap his compass, to curse to himself under his breath.

And of course, with my 180-degree-off sense of direction, every course correction he made -- and there were a lot of them -- seemed to be the totally wrong direction. Somehow, the sun started to come up and we were in a part of the bog (or some other bog... how the hell was I to know??) that was not totally unlike the hunting grounds we had scouted out. And the глухарь started to come in.

To hunt this animal, you have to follow the souds to it before it gets light enough for him to see you. Since they also have really good hearing, it is important to only move when they are making the very last part of their call (a sort drawn-out of belching sound). In the time they are doing this, an experienced bog-walker can manage maybe three steps. Frequently, I was able to extract a single foot from the muck before the song stopped and I had to freeze as my full weight, resting on only half the surface area, sunk me other foot deeper and deeper. It was actually a really good time.
Eventually, we got right up to one of them. In what would have been the last chorus of his last song, I took a single step to move into what I thought was hiding. But what turned out to be right in front of him in full view. The bird loo-ooked at me. And I presume considered whether it was really possible that something so obviously retarded could possibly pose a threat. Shortly it decided upon the course of prudence and flew away.
After cursing me thoroughly, Viktor allowed for the fact that I had done very well for someone on their first hunt -- especially considering my serious handicap of making more noise moving through a bog than the average freight train. Most people don't even get close enough to see a глухарь their first time out, and here I was able to get right out in front of him. For what that was worth.

Anyway, by that time, the morning was over, the birds had moved on, and it was time to pack it in. So back to camp, we waited for Oleg and Sasha, who had gone out to a different ground to hunt, to return. Which they did, having successfully bagged one as shown. While waiting, Ivan, Viktor, and I were finally thirsty enough to drink bog water (no pot to boil it, which was why we had waited so long). We discarded the first stuff we found, which was a dark brown color and had tadpoles in it, for a lighter-brown, otherwise-clear stuff. Considering it only gave me the craps for a couple days afterwards, I'd say we made the right choice.

Anyway, we packed everything in (after finishing off the vodka in celebration, natch), and slogged our way back to the tractor, which slogged its way back to the UAZ, which made its way back to my Ford, parked at Viktor's house. Then five and a half hours later, I was home and dry.

It is my intention to go out again at least this coming winter and get a wolf or two. How can you turn down an opportunity like that?? Viktor has said I am welcome out anytime, and that if A's dad (for example) wanted to come out, the best time for boar is fall, for moose and wolf, winter, and he has never gone out without bringing back at least one of whatever he's going for. And don't sweat the whole weapons permits and hunting license thing. They're his woods, after all...

Articles (first two)

2008-03-18T09:06:00.000-07:00

3/18 19:07, Pushkin time

I finally got the time (and got around to it) to get a couple of the better articles-that-have-come-out-so-far scanned and formatted and so forth.

This first is more about the trucks, from the major magazine, AutoReview (translated, of course). These are the guys who tore apart the dump trucks we made several months back -- not that it was anything to horrible; the magazine has a reputation for being reliable in large part due to how harsh they can be; so the compliments we got in that issue, though few, were sweet. With that as a baseline, the smaller piece they put out for our opening is practically glowing. They make a few rude comments about the age of the truck model, and the fact that the spec we are building is a bit 'budget'. Plus they have an irrational bias towards European trucks (also accounted for). So we're actually pretty happy with that first article.
Here's that one (it's big, ~3MB)

The second was a little blurb in the Business Petersburg (again, translated) newspaper. They put out that day a twelve-page insert specifically about the automotive factories that are being brought to life all around Petersburg. And we got a whole page of that (more than Toyota!). Of course, most amusing for insiders is the photo at the bottom center-left, identifying the plant manager. The question of, 'which one is he?' has already started to get old for everyone except all the people I show the article to. But that's cool. L got to be in the paper, so we'll keep a copy of that for him.
Here's that one (just <1MB)

Big day for Z's class

2008-03-14T08:45:00.000-07:00

3/14 18:45, Pushkin time

Last week at the plant we turned out 5 trucks; this week, 4 (Monday was a holiday). So we are officially now at our 1/day target. The bigger articles from the opening are starting to come out, too. My intention is to spend a bit of time scanning them and to put them up, too, before too long.

Anyway, today A got caught in traffic coming back from the store and called me to say that she wasn't going to make Z's ordinary noon pickup time. So I rushed over to get him, which was fortunate, as he had neglected to mention to us that today was a big celebration day for the 1st-classers. They make a big production out of the kids finishing with their penmanship books all the way through the 33 letters (in capital and lower case). Singing, dancing, and so forth. And if it hadn't have been for some bureaucrat deciding to take a drive through Pushkin, A would have gotten to see it instead of me (as it was, she ended up seeing more than half of it). Everyone turned out -- most kids' parents were clearly taking time off work to come by; A's friend T's husband was there; И's neighbor C; pretty much everyone we've met in town seems to have a kid represented in one of the three 1st class groups.
At the beginning of the celebration, the director of the school put the question to the parents, how many of them remembered their 'literacy celebration'. Most, of course. As it was remarked, this has been one of the traditional rites for Russian schooling for many, many generations. It was gratifying the be able to pick up all of the puns and plays-on-words that made for the bulk of what they did.
Z got to sing, among other things, the Russian alphabet song. I couldn't place the tune at first, until just now when he repeated it for his little brother. It's done to the "Welcome to Duloc" tune from Shrek (which is almost certainly from somewhere else, but that's what I relate it to).
And at the end, the 4th-classers got to present the freshly-penmanship-literate kids with bookmarks they had made to go with the very first books they will be jumping into for the "reading" class that is half of the replacement for the "penmanship" one just completed (the other half is, of course, "Russian Language" -- as in grammar, spelling, punctuation... the standard fare). The book the freshly-literate will be starting with? Золотое Руно [That is, The Golden Fleece]. Apparently, the starting book is different every year, but always something from the Greek classics. Z is pretty stoked.

Peter Spring

2008-03-06T21:08:00.000-08:00

3/7 08:08, Pushkin time

It's been snowing pretty much straight the last ten days (with a tiny sunbreak yesterday for a couple hours -- enough to grow some cool icicles everywhere). February in all was hardly even cold enough to rate a decent autumn, but March is coming off so far at least a bit closer to normal. We're not getting anything particularly cold (I think minus 7 was the furthest it got one night), but cool-and-snowy is at least considered expected for this time of year.

The biggest trouble in keeping writing regularly is finding a way to set aside time on a regular basis. Since the plant got started, the three of us who constitute 'management' (that's myself, personnel guy П К, and our quality guy С С) have seen a pretty much unbroken streak of business. For me it's gone so far as to have brought on a new guy back at the main office to work under me (though for now actually supervised by Е П, since I'm hardly ever actually at the office) to take care of the dealer-related stuff that I was doing prior to the factory launch. So once I'm ready to let him start doing some of that stuff himself, I get to swap my "trainer" hat for a "head of Training Department" hat. That is, to go with my "Plant Manager" hat and my "Project Engineer" hat (and the often-used, rarely advertised "Guy-Who-Speaks-Good-English" hat). Which is all kind of funny, since I only ever actually wear my orange hunting hat; and for this past winter, it's been warm enough that I haven't really even used it that much.

G is doing well with the reading and writing at his preschool, as well as with the reading (though a bit slower with the writing) in English at home. He recently got invited to come over to a new friend's place; A took him and said they both had a very good time -- the new friend's mom is a dentist, and they had lived for a few months in San Francisco not too long back, so she may be the first friend A's made who can actually sympathize with the language and culture issues and have a good idea of what to do to minimize them.

Z's class have finished the alphabet in their penmanship and are now doing words and sentences (much of it poetry -- we do live in Pushkin, after all...). His vocabulary is exploding. They've also passed out recorder-type instruments and he's gotten into making music.

L is not quite walking yet (A figures it's because we don't have carpet, so he is terrified of falling and bonking himself), but is getting into things at a walking-level. We've decided to take the route we did with G and start him communicating in sign-language so he can have at least some way to communicate with us until he gets to talking. And he's picking the signs up just as quickly as G did.

In other things, С С yesterday at lunch finally declared 'Enough' and took the time to teach me how to hold my spoon properly (that is, properly for Russia). It's something everyone is taught in preschool here -- G does it right -- and it just got to be too much for him to have an adult conversation every day with a person who didn't even use his utensils properly. I will say that using a spoon in a different manner is significantly more difficult than taking to chopsticks. Most likely, because I had no 'wrong' way to unlearn with chopsticks. But give it a few more days and I will eliminate one more barbarian mannerism from my regular habit.

Stupid flu

2008-02-22T23:08:00.000-08:00

2/23 10:09, Pushkin time

The title, I suppose, says it all. The boys have all been sick for pretty much the last week-and-a-half, and it seems that is just over the maximum amount of time my immune system can fight exposure. Crap.

Today is Defenders of the Homeland Day here (previously Red Army Day; the anniversary of the day Lenin signed the order creating the Red Army, as I was informed yesterday -- Russians prefer to simply re-name, rather than give up their days off entirely). In practice it's more or less a "Mens' day", the perhaps unique Russian counterpart to the May 8 "Womens' Day" (which is celebrated pretty much everywhere in the world I've been/been in contact with). So all the guys at work got gifts yesterday from all the women, and as they do here, since the holiday falls on a weekend, we get the Monday off. G made me a tank at his preschool (Z has simply had this past week off).

And as for work, we've got eight trucks off the end of the build process (with the exception of one major piece that the jerks in the US left out of the first shipment of parts and then ended up sticking in the very last container from the second shipment of parts). We probably won't make 1/day this coming week -- I've got a training course to run all week, and those last containers are coming in and will need to be unloaded. But as of March, we will be at that level. A tad bit late, but so it goes; at least we'll be there.

Then in other things, one of the lawyers finally got word back from the Russian immigration folks regarding the possibility of us getting the temporary-resident permits. One necessary piece of documentation that we provide them is a document indicating that we have no US criminal records. We got something along those lines a while ago from the FBI. But documents issued by one country have no validity in another country without a certification-type addendum made by the issuing place's Secretary of State (called an 'apostille'). We tried to get this on our FBI statements, but were told that the US federal government doesn't apostille FBI papers(?!?) and that the State of Oregon, where we live[d] doesn't either. So we submitted the papers without. And of course, the Russian bureaucrats rejected them. A series of calls to the US Consulate (in Moscow, not the lying jerks in Petersburg) finally tracked down the problem. FBI papers are apostilled by the Secretary of State of West Virginia (where, I presume, the FBI headquarters is located). So we're sending the papers out that way for the one more addition.

Another problem came in the Russian translations. Of course, all the documents we submit must be accompanied by Official (that is, done by the one licensed outfit in the city) Russian translations. We were already aware of the fact that the morons who do our visa applications can't spell our last name the same way twice in a row (the 'c' is alternately given as a Russian 'k' or 's' -- as far as we're concerned, the 's' is correct; it's what we had put on L's birth certificate and our land titles, the only actually Russian documents we have). That's not a problem as far as visas are concerned, since each one of those is treated individually. But when we try to apply for something as a family, the fact that our last names don't agree becomes more of an issue -- A had to do a bit of brief explaining when she and L flew out of the country that first time. And the fact that, for example, the translation of our marriage certificate has the last name spelled with the letter 'ch' in that apparently-ambiguous position. The Immigration people basically told the lawyer to come back with a group of documents about all the same people.
So, we're having the translations re-done with better supervision. The only thing that really sticks is our visas now. The solution to which is going to be to get one more set of them, also issued under much closer supervision. Everything has to agree (don't even ask about what the translators do to Z's name...), and then it actually looks like the permits will be a done deal -- for money, of course; this is Russia...

Papering

2008-02-17T20:59:00.000-08:00

2/18 08:00, Pushkin time

Another spin across the Finnish border this past Saturday -- this time in the Ford. Now both our cars are legal to remain in Russia for as long as until next February. Now it remains only to get our personal registrations sorted out, waste a full day in the city at the customs broker place, and we will have once again fully-formalized temporary-import vehicles (until we leave / our visas end in August).
Two trips in as many weeks -- not that they were particularly bad, thanks to L, our 'without lines' pass for a couple months more -- has us getting pretty well sick of doing the temporary-import dance. A and I have more or less decided that when the Ford gives out, we'll replace it with a car on which we will have a Russian title. The amount of hassle that will save is actually quite impressive.

The Brusnichnoye/Nuijaama border folks were decent again, though (there is that, at least). On the way out, apparently the Russian contingent was being 'visited' by a boss, so the small bit of waiting that is unavoidable no matter what special privileges you bring with you turned out to be a decent chunk of time. And then the capper -- the passport lady, after checking all our stuff out told us to pull up to the other side of the control booths and wait while she brought our passports into the office for 'review'. So we sit. And wait. And finally, she brings them back to me and shows me the orange stamps they have just now put in them.(!!!!) I know enough by now to get concerned when a bureaucrat does something unexpected, and as we had only really supplied-up for a twenty-minute stay in Finland, the prospect of some sort of special stamp being applied to us was... disconcerting.
Turns out (of course, here I am, sitting and typing) they just changed the colors that day; most likely that was what the boss was visiting to oversee. And the delay leaving Russia meant that we got to enter Russia right about the time the boss must have been having lunch, because all of a sudden the line on return started moving light-speed; the guards and bureaucrats were smiley-chatty, and one could almost have called the entire thing pleasant.

We had a good snow on Friday, and another one pretty much all day yesterday. Since the temp dipped enough, the ice patch outside has been maintained and Z has been spending a good chunk of his time skating and beginner-hockeying. He's got a school break this week, which will work out really well, since it looks like skating will be feasible through at least Thursday. G's friend M (the kid whose dad is a Virginian from Philip-Morris) got back this last week from whatever vacation they were on, so G's been in raptures. L has started letting go of things -- and mainly falling on his butt after a second's wobble, but it's the courage that counts for right now. He's not talking yet, though he does make a lot of different noises. Discussing with A, even though we talk to him in english exclusively, he does spend his time in a two-language environment (in fact, his first two weeks of life were spent in an almost exclusively Russian-speaking environment, you may recall), and supposedly kids who are so exposed do take a bit longer to start talking. So no worries.

Maybe?

2008-02-14T08:28:00.000-08:00

2/14 19:30, Pushkin time

It chilled down a little today. We've got perhaps as low as the near-freezing minuses, but nothing spectacular. And this very well could be the last 'blast' of 'winter' this year.

We're running into some difficulties with our registration this time around. When we returned in January, we were told that due to some sort of internal dispute in the immigration department, we would only be able to get a one-month registration issued. After which point we would, technically/legally be required to leave the country again to be able to re-enter and thus be able to register ourselves anew -- this opposed to the normal six-month registration we have so far been getting. Rather than go through all that, we simply stayed on our old registrations (not, strictly speaking, following the letter of the immigration law; but they failed to collect our old registrations when we left, and they were actually issued for until the middle of February). Then we took that trip to Finland last weekend, got fresh migrant cards, and took them to get our next six months -- with which we would be able to get our temporary imports on our cars extended for the same period.
But now, we are told that the same internal issues are now limiting everyone to getting no more than a two-month registration. This is actually much worse than the first time we went by, since it means that our cars would only be granted that same two-month temporary import period. It's all quite painful.

The people at the registration broker place indicated -- and И more or less agrees -- that this new thing (quite contrary to the laws, by the way; not that this necessarily poses any impediment to the at least temporary implementation of a new policy) is almost certainly associated with the upcoming (early March) presidential elections. Everyone figures Russia, recognizing that people come here all the time under semi-false pretenses, has caused being here to be somewhat more painful for foreigners in an effort to exert at least some level of control over who is here. The same rumor-hypotheses have the situation loosening up in a month or so.

We'll see.

Finland (trip #4)

2008-02-10T03:39:00.000-08:00

2/10 14:40, Pushkin time

Since the temporary imports on our cars were right about running up against renewal, and we're planning to be in the US around the time we'd have to take them actually in and out of Russia, we figured on simplifying things by spending a pair of weekends driving to Finland and back (thus 'exporting' the cars and beginning their temporary importation into Russia anew). So yesterday was the van. Again we took the Brusnichnoye-2/Nuijamaa crossing near Lappeenranta -- this time armed with the knowledge that, until he turns one, L is our ticket to a a 'without lines' crossing. Which in this case was very helpful; the line on the border was even worse than the last time we were through. But we blazed on up to the front, popped the side door open so the border control guard could see L, and were through the crossing in no more than a half hour, total.

Amusingly, A had a project she really wanted to get started on. And to start involved a side-trip to one of the big shopping complexes we pass on the way back (there's a shop by the name of Obi there that has a massive home improvement/garden offering). So we drove perhaps a mile past the border -- just far enough to find a side-road into some cover, down which we went just far enough to take a secluded pee in the Finnish woods -- then turned around and headed home. The return border crossing was similarly pleasant; in the interstice between borders, A had us pull off the road a couple times to get winter woods pictures. And even through Obi was packed to the gills, the fact that the Petersburg ring road now goes far enough for us to enter and exit directly from/to Kievskoye shosse, and the overall clearness of the drive had us home by 7. So a cross-border jaunt, plus a major shopping stop all in less than ten hours.
We'll see what kind of time we make next weekend in the Ford. The plan is to leave Z and G with friends for the day and just take our little line-pass-ticket with us. Assuming no stopping at the stores, we stand to make even better time. And then (that is, once we have the two-week import permits exchanged for six-month ones; and then taking into account the fact that we need to coordinate some paperworking for August to get the renewal done correctly) we're covered pretty much until this time next year.

Temperatures have spiked up to something like 5C (!!!February!!!Russia!!!) and all the snow and packed-into-ice have melted pretty much completely. The boys at Intellicast are implying that we'll get a bit more of a dip of chilliness (down all the way to minus 7C at night [insert sarcasm tag]) and then it looks like the season ends pretty much without a winter. On the other hand, the head research guy at the Pulkovo Observatory -- the very Russian-named Habibullo Abdussamatov -- has indicated that data is starting to come in verifying the prediction they made a couple years back (Medium-quality translation) that the sun is moving into the next major solar Minimum (the type of thing that caused the 'Little Ice Age' and indirectly, the end of the Norse presence in Greenland and, it is hypothesized, the fall of Rome) and that these couple warmer winters are the last this area is going to see for quite some time.

Morning

2008-02-07T21:08:00.001-08:00

2/8 08:08, Pushkin time

I've got a couple minutes while Z and G get ready to go to school.

We had, over Wednesday-Thursday, a nice constant snowfall, culminating in about six inches of accumulation. Later yesterday it warmed up enough that all we have this morning is a crusted-over slush. And they're calling for a warm (1-3C) weekend as well. So everything should be nice and clean for when it dips below freezing again in the middle of next week. Unfortunately, this upcoming frost looks (by the calendar) to be perhaps the last opportunity for Petersburg to have a winter; and the extended forecasts are showing it maxing-out at -3C, tops. It was colder than that in November.
Which means, apparently, that we will have been in Russia for two years without seeing a single 'real' winter.

Yesterday I did get the opportunity to drive truck #4 out of the final bay of our factory and into the lot (where all of our trucks are sitting for the time being until the police issue titles for them). I had driven on a small number of occasions when I worked nights at The Company's plant while I was in school. But apparently, never on ice or snow. Which is, in fact, a little bit different.
Particularly since the trucks we are building have all the cabins pressed way up front, without a trailer the rear axles have practically no weight on them at all. So when I paused in front of the front gates to briefly map out my path for backing into a parking spot, I got stuck. Firmly stuck. I spent about five minutes attempting various combinations of forward, reverse, and super-low gears with all manner of differential-related traction assist buttons and stitches. Even tried sort or rocking my own weight back and forth in the seat -- as if that could have made any difference. Somehow (maybe I just eventually dug down deep enough in the snow to get some rubber touching pavement) I did manage to get moving again and to get our front door unblocked.
Afterward, I was advised that the way to get moving when your vehicle gets stuck in such a manner is to try taking off not in low gear, but in one of the middle gears. The jump that happens when you pop your clutch generally provides the momentum you need to get out of your hole. Apparently, any Russian driver as old as I am would already have known that; it literally had never struck anyone there to tell me something so obvious.

Keeping up the Habit

2008-02-05T08:48:00.000-08:00

2/5 19:50, Pushkin time

So. Trying not to let slip again.

For starters, you could check out the picture I took yesterday morning at G's school after dropping him off. It turned out decent, considering I can't keep my hands particularly still at the low-light shutter speed.

The last couple days, as previous to them, have been packed. П and Е П have both echoed recently my feeling that for everything we finally manage to get around to actually getting done, another half dozen things crop up. П and I finally sat down this morning to hammer out at least a prospective scheme for the piecerate pay scheme at the factory; Е П and I have arranged to, before the end of the week, draw up an overall structure of how many people will be necessary, doing what, and so forth, to have an actual functioning structure to handle buying, shipping, selling, distributing, and supporting new trucks (for the time being, I have instructed everyone at the dealership to treat the question of building the trucks (whether here or in the US) as a black box -- simply make sure that parts keep getting shipped, customs-cleared, and delivered to one end, and keep picking up the finished stuff from the other).
Which, of course, itself will take time that none of us has to spare. But that's the way it goes.

Enough about work.

Д Д (the lawyer/inventor) felt it worthwhile to visit everyone in management to relay the results of his most recent legal actions. One of the guys in our company got pulled over for some sort of traffic violation, and as a result of the stop had his license seized. Д Д, as is his wont, got the license back and successfully beat the whole thing almost completely. It was the "almost" he wanted to relay to everyone.
In a Russian court, the arresting officer is considered not competent to stand as a witness; rather the officer himself is the complainant (while the defendant, as the other interested party, is also not considered a "witness"). That is, when in court, the word of the arresting or ticketing officer is considered of no more validity than that of the defendant. In the event that a case comes down to the word of one versus the other, the local analogue to 'presumption of innocence' requires the judge to find for the defendant. As I lost a ticket case in Washington when the only thing opposed to me was a letter, written by the ticketing officer, I feel fairly confident in saying that US law doesn't work the same way as does Russian in this respect.
Nevertheless, in the case that Д Д argued, there was an additional piece of evidence that was admitted -- the ticket itself. According to Russian law, a ticket is considered a finding-of-fact, of roughly equivalent weight to a witness' account. However, the ticket is considered a finding-of-fact by both parties. That is, whatever the ticketing officer writes on it is of absolutely equal weight to what the guy who got ticketed writes on it (there are four or five lines on the ticket for that purpose; generally, the cops just want you to write, "I confirm that the above is what happened"). So, as long as you write on your ticket, "I do not agree", the ticket no longer can act as evidence against you -- once more, you are back to the his-word-against-mine, which defaults to a finding of innocence in absence of additional evidence. And cops almost never have anything else.
The mistake our colleague made was to write on the ticket, "I decline to explain" in the spot for his explanation. As the judge told Д Д, this wouldn't constitute confirmation of the ticketing officer's statement, but neither does it realistically constitute denial. So ultimately, the best result he was able to achieve was a reduction-of penalties. So he made the rounds to everyone to make sure the next time he goes to court for one of us (apparently, this is another one of the 'perks' the outfit I am with offers it's workers -- free legal) he has everything he needs to win outright. Д Д doesn't lose very often, and doesn't particularly like it when he does.

Far Too Long

2008-02-02T23:08:00.001-08:00

2/3 10:08, Pushkin time

Wow. Last time I found a moment to get to writing was...

[checking]

...the beginning of December!!.

Oh man.

I'm not even going to try to do more than a brief re-cap; which is a bit unfair, since the whole reason I have such a long span to cover is that so very much stuff happened.

As I mentioned, way back when, the group of factory engineers from the US came out and spent two and a half weeks with us (including weekends) getting the first part of our factory line working. Aside from all of the more or less expected drama, we discovered pretty well within the first week that a whole bunch of necessary parts -- like, for example, every small part necessary to build and install the engines -- had not been sent to us; our painters were not able to make use of the special-order stuff we had brought in to the US company's specs; several critical suspension pieces were delivered wrong; the alternators delivered would not fit on our engines (even if we had bolts to hold them on...); and the major part of the vehicle chassis electrical wiring was build completely wrong.
Although really, I suppose I saw worse working nights at The Company's trucks factory back when I was still in school. New product launches are painful. Over the time before the US guys left for the Christmas holidays (shortly followed by all of us doing the same), we managed to get the vast majority of the problems worked out more or less; parts on the way, and so forth.

In the two days between the US engineers leaving and A and the boys and I leaving, I arranged with И to spend a couple days in Riga in the weeks after returning from Portland to get some bank stuff for myself done as well as running some errands for the dealership.
Then the New Year company party (which I left early; some six hours before our plane took off from Pulkovo). And then we spent a rainy two weeks back in the Pac NW.
Of all the global impressions made on me back there, the following two stood out the most:
- How big and common the ups-and-downs are there. The smallest, least noticeable rise in the city there is most likely bigger than the primary terrain feature in the Petersburg area. The clouds even lifted one day for long enough for me to see Rainier and the Olympics.
- The overall driving experience. Not only the seemingly exceptional quality of the road surfaces; not only the fact that the spray coming up behind cars was water-colored (as opposed to the brown-mud spray we get here); but also the way people drive in general. Drivers both here and there can be aggressive. The difference seems to be that whereas a Russian driver will push for a space, once he either gets it or doesn't, the matter is more or less settled and traffic moves on. On the other hand, PacNW drivers seem fairly oblivious to the intentions of the people around them (a fact I noted on several occasions back when I had my motorcycle), but get very aggressive after the fact if someone 'takes their place' or is otherwise perceived to have 'slighted' them. Different rule of etiquette, I suppose.

Anyway, we had a good time, saw people we wanted to see, did things we wanted to do, then around 6 January, Z and I flew home (A and the other two boys came back a week later). We puttered around for a couple days -- stopped by with М and got fed a nauseating cold pig-based dish, edible with enough mustard -- and then Z got to spend a couple nights at friends' while I stepped out to Riga.
The flight is only like an hour-half; I ended up spending one night, two days there at a hotel right in the middle of the city -- also right next door to the bank we use. I actually really liked the place. Latvia speaks Russian nearly as much as Latvian, so I had no problems getting on by myself. The fact that the Lat is worth twice as much as the dollar threw me for a bit of a loop; I pulled out fifty of them from an airport ATM without checking the exchange rate; I figured that would certainly be enough to get me to my hotel and then I'd get however much more I needed. Considering how small Riga is, and the fact that food item prices are generally fractions of a single Lat, and the fact that I was only there for two days, I came home with more than thirty Lat leftover. But my descriptions of the place seem to have piqued A's interest, so I figure we'll spend those when we all go out there sometime.

Then I came back, A and the boys flew back, and right about the same time, the crew of engineers came back as well to finish up our startup. Once again, we worked through thirteen straight days, late nights, but finally managed to get our first truck built completely and in working order (with our second, third, fourth, and so on right behind). Over the last two days of that another ten guys came from the US company (though several of them from Africa) to attend our grand opening. Which came off on the 22nd. I, at the last minute, was 'asked' to do translation up on the podium for both И's talk (into English) and one of the US-Company Vice Presidents (into Russian). In fact, after I did those, the US Consul-General in Petersburg got up on the podium to talk and asked for a translator. I sort of ducked down low in the crowd and she ended up having no takers and giving a speech in clearly-unused-to-using-it Russian. Then the Vice Governor of Petersburg got up and gave a bit of a speech. Then A and I got to walk around a bit and chat, until she had to leave and I got pulled off to do the press-conference thing. We were on at least three news channels; plus several magazines and newspapers are writing us up -- I'm getting a copy of the DVD И is burning with all the clips on it. A and I will figure out how to distribute that.

And then the Americans left, and we got back to work. Over the last two weeks, we managed to get three more trucks rolled off and all but the very last part of out process working at our targeted production level of one-per-day. In fact, П (with me, the other half of the management team) sort of accidentally found among his workers just this Friday a guy with the apparent capacity to foreman. So in all likelihood, tomorrow we will see the last part of our process hit target, and we will start cranking out a new truck every day. So far, we haven't even built ourselves out of prepayed customers; and in all likelihood, we won't do that anytime soon or medium-term. So that's all going good.

Interstice

2007-12-06T00:01:00.000-08:00

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.

November-end

2007-11-22T02:56:00.000-08:00

11/22 13:56, Pushkin time

The insurance place took their sweet time getting back to me; I didn't actually get out to pick up the money until Friday afternoon. Although, the process was fairly straightforward:
- Drive into the city
- Get a pass into the insurance office
- Meet the payout agent (2nd floor) and sign paperwork
- Receive payout order
- Go to bookkeeping (7th floor)
- surrender payout order along with passport
- get back money and passport; sign receipt

We left it until Saturday to get the parts prepay to the repair shop. But things are moving along and fairly well paid-for, even. A pack of engineers is coming out for our start-of-manufacture at the beginning of December. Most likely, the van won't be fixed by then; but it very well should be done before they (and we) leave for the holiday. And not that thing haven't been particularly slammed this past week; but next week it gets really mad. And sustains until we fly out.
But on the plus side, at my back when I start the upcoming vacation will be a more-or-less functioning manufacturing operation. With at least the first item built and operational. And for the week at the end of December, when people here continue working and I am out, there will be plenty to do just in straightening out and getting ready to kick things right back in come January 9.

Z is doing superbly at school. He absolutely loves the penmanship lessons and has been taking to writing lines of cursive whenever the opportunity presents. He's also gotten pretty into painting.

G this fall has taken to singing. Enough that he's being put into a relatively solo singing spot in the winter event at his preschool -- hopefully he'll be able to make it; we're kind of leaving right around the time it would happen. If he misses this he'll be pretty disappointed.

Goodies

2007-11-13T07:38:00.000-08:00

11/13 18:39, Pushkin time

So I got the estimate (94 thousand rubles and change); took it to the other guy's insurance place, and got the process of money-getting started. Supposedly today or tomorrow they will call me with approval; I can stop by and get the cash, and then over to the repair place to make the prepayment on the parts portion of the repair (45 thousand rubles and change) and they can start right off. Maybe we will have the car fixed by the end of November.

Work on the house has officially paused for the winter. Things are wrapped up and we're mapping out how to proceed as soon as the weather permits again.

L is, while not yet crawling, definitely mobile. Z remembers the considerations that need to be made for this time of a younger sibling's life; G is just now learning what 'getting into one's stuff' really means.

The snow fell pretty well through the weekend at least lightly and sporadically, but it has been clear and somewhat colder these past couple days. They're now calling for more to fall starting Friday. But it's staying not-particularly-cold. In fact, though the -1/-4 temperatures are not bad even with wind, even the wind has been mostly absent. In comparison with how we'll be in another two months, it's practically tropical. I've started carrying my hat and gloves with me everywhere, but I'm not actually wearing them for the most part, and I've only a couple of times actually zipped up my coat. But we have had to start using our lock de-icing spray in the mornings (and afternoons).

And of particular significance, today finally arrived from Customs-release the first container of parts for our truck factory. We spent the second half of today unpacking; another container comes tomorrow, then another Thursday, and then in a couple weeks, another four containers from the US (these first three are from Brazil). And then we start building trucks. And then (just as, if not more important) we start selling trucks... And then we all start getting rich. Which was a big part of the point coming out here. As with the house, a bit delayed, but happening nonetheless. Life.

Snow

2007-11-06T23:00:00.000-08:00

11/7 11:37, Pushkin time

As promised, it snowed over Friday night. Just a bit of a dusting, really. Maybe two inches of accumulation overall (some more fell during the day Saturday), but it has stayed cold enough that short of a small bit of sublimation and more or less being cleared off the roads, the snow hasn't really gone anywhere. G is still getting his head wrapped around the fact that it's going to be here until April.
Fortunately, it hasn't gotten particularly cold yet; they say we'll be no lower than -5C (23F) for at least a bit longer. So I can still afford to walk around with my coat open and to forget my gloves from time to time. G, on the other hand, at first snow fall practically dove into his hard-core winter getup. His grey russian army hat (which will probably fit him into adulthood), new snow boots, snow-gloves-with-fingers, scarf; all on top of the snow overpants and winter coat he was already wearing. And this morning, dropping him off at his preschool, the teacher expressed concern that he didn't have a sweater to go with it all.
What kind of an upbringing he's getting.. This morning we ran a bit late so I set him up with some cereal in a sandwich bag to munch on the way in. He had a bit left over when we arrived, so on the way into school he told me that he would "save it to eat with morning tea". They are also definitely getting the kids into literacy mode; they've all made clay numbers and letters. And at home, G is making the kind of fast progress with the whole english-literacy that we sort of figured he would.

In other doings, the framing crew has almost finished their part of the house; remains to be done only a beam under one floor and the staircases, then they head off and work pauses for a couple months while the worst of winter goes by. We are, however, in consultation with the folks who will be doing the plumbing, electric, and other internal stuff, and will be spending these months accumulating materials so that once work starts back up, it can proceed to finish without any supply-related pauses. A schedule somewhat later than we had intended at very first, but still work remains on the schedule that we had more or less mapped out a couple months ago. And the next house we build -- whenever that is -- will definitely benefit from our experience.

And the estimate company [finally] called today to let me know that their part is done, and that we can pick up the Official Independent Estimate for repairs to the caravan anytime. I've asked one of our couriers to swing by today, which means potentially we could have all the stuff in order to take to the other guy's insurance company tomorrow and maybe even get the shop started working on fixing the car sometime in the fairly near future. Which would be nice.

Three-Day

2007-11-02T07:16:00.000-07:00

11/2 17:18, Pushkin time

So Monday is a holiday of some sort here (and today was a holiday in Brazil, so we're four days out of contact with the folks down there...). And next week Z has off school, too. The estimate company has promised that that piece of stuff will be done today/tomorrow.

For now, things have been placed on a comfortable keel; looking forward to a relaxing weekend and some fun in the snow.

Interestingly about that -- back in Portland, I had a sort of informal gauge of temperature. It wasn't actually cold out until you could see the smoke even when you were breathing through your nose. I though of that the other day when I realized that I was still pretty comfortable in t-shirt and jeans, and had been seeing my nose-smoke for the better part of a month. Really, only the one morning where it snow/rained and the morning I spent waiting for the cops to show up at the car wreck were the only two that I found more than perhaps a tiny bit chilly. And we haven't popped over 4C (40F) for quite some time.

A and I swung by the house this morning; the sides are all up -- this morning the crew was getting windows cut-in. It remains for now only to tyvek-wrap the house, put in an additional beam under the middle of the first floor joists, and get the stairs put in. Then that crew is going to head off. I'm bringing the head guy of the Moldavian crew that does interiors out this weekend to get started mapping out electrical, plumbing, heating, and the so forth. His crew will be occupied until January, spending most of that month back in Moldavia, and ready to start tricking out the interior of our house in early February.
And, happily, A will soon be taking over the driving as far as what will be getting done and what it will look like; I handled the structure, she does the filling-in.

Dark

2007-10-31T00:23:00.000-07:00

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.

Comes Up

2007-10-23T06:01:00.001-07:00

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.

Rolling Along

2007-10-17T01:53:00.000-07:00

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?

And Then

2007-10-12T00:24:00.000-07:00

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.

Well. Cold.

2007-10-10T23:52:00.000-07:00

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.

Title Fatigue

2007-10-08T00:47:00.000-07:00

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.

So On

2007-10-05T00:51:00.000-07:00

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.

Continuing

2007-10-03T03:02:00.000-07:00

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.

Step 1 (23 September)

2007-10-03T03:00:00.000-07:00

Step 2 (26 September)

2007-10-03T02:55:00.000-07:00

Step 3 (29 September)

2007-10-03T02:50:00.000-07:00

Step 4 (2 October)

2007-10-03T02:45:00.000-07:00

Back To Normal

2007-10-02T09:16:00.000-07:00

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.

Stop by

2007-09-22T02:37:00.000-07:00

9/22 13:38, Pushkin time

Just by way of explanation: A's parents came into town last Sunday night and will be here visiting until next weekend. This past week was mass-busy for me because, in addition to the impending opening of the factory, the beginning of wood construction at our house, the visitors, and the other assorted normal things, I had to expend effort to cause things to run well in my absence over the coming week (which I am taking off). So no time for posting.

It is possible that I will find time during the course of this week to write a bit here and there. Possible, but honestly, not likely. Best simply to figure that I'll be next able to put stuff down in a week's time.

Work

2007-09-11T05:19:00.000-07:00

9/11 16:22, Pushkin time

At long last I find a couple minutes of spare time.

Let's try to pick up where we left off.

That next day, A and I went over to the customs office on the east side of the city to get things at least started for re-papering our cars. Only to find out that that particular office no longer did the temporary-import registration, and that we needed to go to the office on Vasilieyskiy Island -- more or less the east side of the dead-center of the city, as this was the only place doing those anymore. So.. cutting through Petersburg we went (A has by now attained a high degree of proficiency navigating the streets of downtown Peter... thank god...). We made surprisingly good time and arrived at the sea terminal customs office only about ninety minutes after leaving the first place. And when I got there, they informed me that as for the Caravan they were more than willing to have me signed-off as having showed up on time so I wouldn't get fined for taking it in to register a bit later on. But as for the Ford, we needed to take it out of the country and re-import it. And to make matters more interesting, we had sort of overshot the term of its registration by a couple weeks (A was in the US at the time). And so we were looking at some likely hassles crossing out. But okay; at least we knew what needed to get done.

So right away the next day I got the head of the service shop attached to the office to write up a paper stating that the Ford had been unusable for a month-long period due to massive engine failure. Written up to indicate that it had left the shop on this last Friday. And we started making plans to drive to Estonia -- since I had been told that the border was closer and that the lines for light automobiles were not so bad -- the previous horror stories passed to me having been all concerning heavy trucks.

The week passed; Z went to school, started getting homework, and has so far shown a clear preference for his sweater over his suitcoat. G fell right back into good times with his friends at the preschool, A slowly got back into the time zone, and L kept right on doing his four-month-old things. Friday late, discussing the exact mechanics of the Narva/Ivangorod crossing, the ever-helpful А Ш pointed out that the reason teh lines looked so small for the Narva border crossing was because cars were not allowed to line up inside city limits; instead you went to the place, put your name on a list, and waited on the outskirts of town until your turn was up. And the parking lots outside of town were packed.
So... okay... Finland it would be. А Ш's advice was to skip the Torfyanovka crossing that the boys and I used on the way to and from Helsinki and to cut north from Vyborg to the much closer -- and not-used-for-truck-traffic -- crossing to Lappeenranta. That crossing is more touristed, but in general, all agreed, if you could make it there relatively early, you'd have no problem getting through; and the return trip on a Saturday would be traffic-free.

Thus decided, we got up somewhat early on Saturday morning, piled everyone and some stuff into the Escort, and drove north. After a slight mishap (wherein we drove a couple miles past the unmarked Lappeenranta turnoff on the ring around Vyborg and had to backtrack a bit) we made it to the line at the crossing (Brusnichnoye-2/Nuijamaa, technically speaking). And what a line it was. Already there were 179 people in front of us -- I had plenty of time to count -- and the Russian customs/passport guys were only taking groups of ten. With fairly decent delays between groups. We sat for something like two hours -- aсегфддн made it into sight of the front of the line -- before a helpful Russian couple driving past spotted A holding L and pulled over to let her know that "people with infants less than a year and a half old were 'without lines'". Skipping around the last of the people, I mentioned to A how very important that word, 'безочереды', is. There is literally not a single instance of its use that is not a good thing. So we turned what could have been a three-hour wait into closer to a 150-minute wait. But at least we know for next time.

So, finally getting to the crossing itself, right away we ran into the Customs guys -- and the fact that, technically, we had broken the law in not having gotten the Escort out of the country by the end of the temporary import permit. Since that car is in A's name on all the Russian paperwork, she needed to be around to start off, but I fairly quickly managed to get her freed up to hang out with the kids while I and the customs guy went off to a side building to work things out. Twenty minutes and a handful (not literally, unless referring to the equivalent in small-denomination coins) of rubles later, we were going through the passport control side an don our way into Finland. On that count, the passport folks are technically supposed to take both the migration card that gets filled out coming into Russia, and also the scrap of paper that constitutes one's alien-registration. But our registrations are good until February-March; we had just gotten them; and they cost like 300 rubles, each to get. So fortunately, I was able to nice-talk the passport control girl into taking some really old registrations that had somehow not gotten collected in lieu of our useful ones. And a smile sent us on our way out of Russia.

And once there we figured, why not at least check out the town? Which was good for all of an hour -- the bulk of which was spent looking for a toilet that wasn't regulated by a Euro-coin-munching robotic device and finally settling on the one at the McDonalds we had passed coming into town. And then we turned around and headed back.

The Finland side of the border crossing is completely unremarkable. If I never mention it again, please understand why.

Coming back into Russia, as advertised, there was basically no line at all. We got to the passport/customs points, and A and I dashed in to get the car taken care of. And then.

I give A's passport, the customs form, and the Escort's title to a very brusque (and not-particularly-fond-of-kids) customs guy. While I am digging around for the insurance papers, he says to me, "don't bother, I'm not going to register this car."

In Russian, there are ways to construct negatives to make them softer -- more 'preference' -- or concrete. This guy's was the latter sort. "Машину оформить не буду."

It caught me enough by shock that I didn't really do anything useful for a couple beats, which he took as an opportunity to point out to me that, stamped on the title were the words 'export' and 'Houston, TX'. I'm not sure what difference that makes -- though perhaps since we're looking for a 'temporary import' there needs to be indication that the car is permanently registered somewhere -- and anyway, you would think the first we would have heard of that would have been a year ago when we did this all for the first time. I started to say that it didn't make sense, since we had just had like five hours ago a temporary import registration on that very same car, and the guy cuts me off with the same sort of impregnable construction, "I don't need а story; I'm not going to register it" [Не нужна рассказа, оформить не буду.]

So again I gape-mouthed babble a bit (by now, perhaps A had figured out something was amiss; I really don't know what was going on around at the time) and the customs guy tells me to come with him to talk to the boss. So I follow, telling A on the way that the guy doesn't want to let our car in. She and the boys follow.

The customs guy disappeared into the office, and for a good five minutes A and I started brainstorming strategies for 'what the hell to do next'. We were debating whether to turn around and try crossing at the Torfyanovka/Valimaa right away or to spend the night in Finland and start trying again the next day when the customs guy comes out of the boss office and, with no explanation (not that one was desperately needed, granted) says, alright let me get your car registered for you. And a matter of a few minutes later we were back into the country and on our way home.

Needless to say, Sunday was spent doing as close to nothing at all as possible. We did manage to swing by Pokrovka to check things out. I know A took pictures of the boys bothering the crew of Uzbek/Tajik bricklayers, who by today have finished the brick portion of the house. As regards the next steps, this week I am aiming to get arranged for drilling the well and installing the septic. Also, at the end of the week I should be ordering (still not confirmed whether with or without deposit) the lumber for the house. We are also in the final stages of getting the various permits in order and in getting the electricity set up. We need to wait on actual building until the well and septic are done, but it still seems a safe bet to say that by November we may have a fully-built frame. Pretty freaking cool.

On the work side, we're coming into the mad flurry of activity surrounding getting stuff ready for the beginning of factory operations. I'm turning out something like a tool or fixture worth of drawings a day plus [trying to] coordinate with the people in Caxias, Brazil and Illinois who are sending us our parts and with the various Russian structural steel, wheel and bearing, furniture, warehouse equipment, and fluid management equipment suppliers to make sure that everything comes together in a way more or less resembling the way we want it to. Thank god I'm not dealing with the actual building construction or utilities folks, and that my compadre, П К, is taking care of keeping the welders, mechanics, and gastarbeiter day-laborer crews moving -- division of labor. At the moment, it looks -- due to a delay on the production line of the Mexican company that is supplying us some chassis beams -- like we'll be putting our first truck on the line in the second week of November. Very exciting.

As for things, tonight Z gets to spend the night with a friend, since A and I are getting up sufficiently early to be at the Vasilievskiy Island sea customs terminal by 8:45 in the morning to get our cars taken care of. Then, depending on how it works out, I may be going over to a wood-frame house factory (they sell pre-assembled walls and the like for slap-together assembly on-site) to see it they're interested in maybe hooking us up. If not, as I mentioned, there's the offer we already have from one guy, the other guy (whose workers we will almost certainly be using -- I am so far very satisfied with the crews he's had out for us) who has indicated a quote in the next couple of days, and anything else that comes up.

Oh yeah, and A's parents are coming into town this Sunday for a two-week visit.

School

2007-09-02T10:09:00.000-07:00

9/2 21:10, Pushkin time

As expected, it was a very busy week. The two gents took up the bulk of my time not otherwise occupied with Z and G; then A came home on Thursday afternoon; and the whole weekend has been pretty crazy.

Let's look at that last one.

Friday, A took Z to his school for the pre-first-day med checkup (kids' doctors in Russia are associated with their schools). Just a quick in-and-out, though she did get a chance to meet up with a friend of hers whose daughter is in Z's class.
That afternoon, I swung by Pokrovskaya to confirm that the bricks and everything were ready to go as had been promised, and to pick up some meat from our neighbor. He had called earlier the week, indicating his plan to slaughter one of his pigs and wondering if we would be interested in any of it. So when I went into his place to pick it up, I really shouldn't have been surprised to see a pig that had been beheaded, gutted, and more or less simply cut in half lengthwise. He tried to get me to take an entire half of the damn pig (call it eighty pounds of meat, bone, and skin) but I ended up carting off only the right side of the ribcage and a front leg. For some reason, I was expecting it to have been somewhat more butchered, but what the heck... I'd helped butcher a couple of deer, and A grew up in a hunting family; how hard could it be?
A was somewhat less than delighted when I got the two massive pig hunks home.

Then Saturday, the first of September, was the first day of school. Since A was around to take Z in and pick him up, I had arranged to meet with the guy about the lumber at 9 in the morning. G and I showed up at the lot a couple minutes early to find that the brickwork had already been started.

In the wrong place!!!

We're raising up the non-garage half of the house 1.3 meters on bricks. And the workers had gotten about two layers done on the corners of the garage. I called the crew chief to scream at him; he rushed out and screamed at his guys that he had told them three times where to put the bricks and that if they couldn't get their heads out of their asses and do things right he would get his other crew to work -- and that, by the way, don't expect to get paid for the last day's work or for the half-day they were going to spend taking down what they had put up.
Good man.

Anyway, we waited on the lumber guy for about twenty minutes and were on the verge of leaving when my phone rang -- A. From what I could gather, the first day of school had turned out to be more involved than I had been led to expect. And she really needed me to get over to the school right away. Then as I was getting into the car to head back to Pushkin the phone rings again, И, to give me the first of my bitchings-out about why the heck I was doing something -- anything -- during the first day of school.
Umm...

Driving back through Pavlovsk, the dread started setting in as I kept passing groups of well-dressed adults accompanying uniform-dressed students carrying bouquets of flowers. At least -- I comforted myself -- Z was in his suit and tie and whatnot.

So then pulling into Pushkin, И's wife К called. To let me know that they were in the parade ground over at the bigger-kids school (that is, class 5-9, or ages 11-15). So I swung over that way...

To discover that the first day of the school year in Russia kicks off with a massive festival including 'introducing' the new first-classers to their older schoolmates and to the community as a whole; the presnetation of those students just starting on their final year of school; and so forth, ending with the last-yearers escorting the first-classers over to their new classrooms. And here I am, the big asshole, making other plans. I tried to explain -- ended up explaining to a dozen or so people who all absolutely had to express their distaste at a dad who would be elsewhere on his son's first day of school -- that where I come from for the most part the extent of first-day ritual involves sticking one's kid in a classroom or on a bus and walking away. In fact Z already had a bit of this experience, in having for a couple of months attended kindergarten in Portland before we left. Frankly, I don't think my explanations helped a bit. This week will show for sure (as I am certain that the morning alone will suffice for my failings to make themselves known throughout work) whether my cultural faux pas was as monstrous as some people made it feel.
Picking back up, I arranged to get Z and his friends М and Н along with Н's mom after school ended (at 11:30; they make for a slightly shorter day that first day) and to carpool the group into the city for the capper to the First Day festivities -- a concert/show for all the first-classers in Petersburg. For about an hour at the Petersburg Ледовой Дворец ('Ice Palace'), an auditorium full to the seams of kids got to watch singing, dancing, skating, trained bears, and so forth. Just sort of, you know, a recognition of them getting to join the ranks of the 'big kids'.
Holy crap.

And Monday is Z's school picture day. I'm pretty stoked to see how those turn out. His uniform is a maroon suitcoat, black slacks, black shoes, white shirt, and tie (he gets to pick the color for that one; he had A buy six different ones; Saturday's was a dark purple). And he's been practicing his 'dangerous' face for picture-taking -- see the Kiev pictures for reference.

And then today was a more or less relaxing day -- as much as can be said when you have a third of a pig to deal with. Suffice to say that A and I got that work done with only one mishap. Of that, we can simply comment that it is better for no one to try to engage A in conversation when she's occupied cutting meat off a bone, and that her finger is all cleaned up now and will be just fine.

Tomorrow after we drop the boys off at their various doings, A and I will head over to the customs office in the city to get the process of papering the cars for the next six months underway. Most likely we won't finish this trip and will have to come back later, since A's registration isn't completed yet and since the insurance we have on the cars runs out in a month. But to avoid getting fined, we'll 'open up an application' now and then come back by later this week once we've got everything in order. It sucks majorly to have to blow so much time on paperwork crap; but at least we're getting the hang of it and we should only have to go through it the two times for the next calendar year -- unlike the six trips we made out over the last one.

Notice

2007-08-27T05:30:00.000-07:00

8/27 16:33, Pushkin time

I should get this done before the guys from out of town show up tomorrow and I end up being incommunicado for the rest of the week.

Today started out very pleasantly; coming in to work, the sun was nice and low, and the rain coming in from the west combined to give a strikingly bright solid double-rainbow. Bright enough that the inner bow at the edges was almost painful to look directly at. It only lasted for maybe ninety seconds; but during the time, people on the sidewalks and the train station platform were dropping what they were holding to just stare. I suppose that means such a powerful one is uncommon here (and it was a good thing I was stopped, waiting for the train crossing to open; there were probably more than a handful of road accidents during that minute and a half...)
Anyway, just a really nice kick-off to the day.

And over the course of the day, I've gotten in touch with the guy about the lumber, the guy about the bricks, and the guys about the paperwork. I'll have a ruble-figure from the last two guys hopefully by the end of today, and a figure from the first hopefully in the next couple days. I did meet with the paperwork-agent to pick up the original of the fire department report on the house that used to stand on our lot and to give him a photocopy of my passport and documents-proving-legal-residence so he can get the electricity paperwork done.

Here's what such a fire department report looks like. Basically, we have who the land belongs to now, who the legal owner of the building was, when things happened, what happened (completely destroyed) and the cause of the fire (faulty stove/oven). All under the magical, all-powerful Stamp.

So there you have it. I'm off shortly to get the boys and whatnot, then tomorrow and the next few will be busy ones.

Continuing Progress

2007-08-25T05:06:00.000-07:00

8/25 16:09, Pushkin time

Another long hiatus. The boys and I have been going straight from work to pick them up and out to Pokrovskaya every evening. So time was pretty short, what with them still wanting to eat and all.

Anyway, I'm glad to say that as of Thursday evening, the foundation has been completely poured. Friday the three uzbeks removed the framing from around the concrete and headed off for another job site (we'll be getting a new crew to do the brickwork). Of course, since I didn't know they would be leaving, I hadn't arranged to be able to close up the container. So last night at eleven thirty, my phone rings -- our neighbor М calling (actually, Л, but using M's phone). She said that no sooner had darkness fallen than people started to come by to try to carry off the spare couple sacks of concrete and boards we had in the container. She wanted to confirm her suspicions that we had not, as the thieves were claiming, sold the materials to them. As she put it, 'if you bought them, why are you coming in the middle of the night to pick them up?'. So they chased the crooks off and first thing this morning the boys and I picked up a couple padlocks and then stopped by for a bit of a visit and to make the materials and remaining tools secure. Pretty much clearly my fault for having let the whole security question slide; but it's nice to have good neighbors.
Over there today I also met with a rep from a lumber mill. He claims to have on-hand all the boards we are looking for -- he wanted to make sure we understood that we were talking about a full train car's worth of wood; no small thing. We've talked a bit and agreed to hook up on Monday to arrange a time to get together next weekend and, depending on how the inspection goes, put a deposit down on the wood. At the same time, Monday I'll be getting together with the chief of the uzbek brigades to get the process of ordering and having delivered the bricks we're using to raise up part of the house. I'm trying to sort of nudge as much as possible out until next weekend, since this week not only is A coming in on Thursday (before which time I've got both boys to take care of still), but on Tuesday until Saturday morning there will also be one of the guys from Africa and another guy from Chicago, come out to have a working sit-down at the plant to get tooling started building and various other setup steps underway. As I may have mentioned, we're a bit later than we had at first hoped (by the previous estimates, we'd be up and running in another week; not it looks like the beginning of November) mainly due to problems on the US supplier side. But still, the Big Project is impending.

What else...

Ah yes; our agent-guy called in the middle of last week to say that the fire department had issued the documents pertaining to the fact that the house that used to stand on our land burned to the ground -- this closes out any potential ownership rights the previous guy may have technically retained, insofar as there not having physically been a house when he sold the land to us, the titling of the house at our address remained in his name. And in fact, our agent informs me that the papering of our title and the papering of our electricity is much closer to done than he had expected (we pay him monthly-plus; that is, whatever little 'gifts' he has to buy for the fire chief or building commissioner. So it damn well should go pretty quickly). We may actually be papered before the house is built. That's actually quite an oddity here.

And then, as regards Z and school. They at last posted the schedule for the pre-school-year medical checkups. Z's class is up first thing Friday morning (meaning, since A will be back, I don't have to figure out how to coordinate that myself). And then on 1 September, he gets his first day of school.

That is, on Saturday, the first of September...

The schools here actually kind of prefer when the year works out that way. The first day of school, all the way up and down the age scale, is more of an orientation and getting-used-to-doing-it-a-new-way day. It's first graders' first day at all; lots of second-graders are starting to get home from school on their own; and so forth. Having day 1 on a non-workday, parents are able to do the hand-holding that makes the transition much smoother. Z's school will be from nine to noon (three 'lessons' a day) for the rest of this year, and then coming back from the New Year's break, from nine to one. I know the 'core' lessons are Russian, Math, and a sort of Local History/Geography thing (I think it's called here, 'Our Pushkin'). Plus a couple of floating lessons like Art and whatnot. The curriculum is the sort of thing that everyone already knows -- since it's basically the same things they studied as kids -- so no one really goes into explaining it. So there remains an element of surprise for us.
We're also going to get Z set up at the aikido dojo near his school; A's hope is to arrange things so that he can hoof it the couple blocks from class over to aikido, and then she pick him up from there. The short school days present a sort of unexpected challenge to her.

Kiev pictures

2007-08-20T10:33:00.000-07:00

8/20 21:30, Pushkin time

Here they are:

The hotel room

The view from the hotel front steps (that big pillar with the angel on top was pretty helpful finding our way back to the hotel...)

The boys munching ice cream on a hill overlooking the Dnieper.

A statue/fountain in the square down the hill from the hotel. The angel-pillar is right behind the picture taker.

Front view of the angel-pillar. Behind, you can see the third floor entrance of the six-floor mall.

2007-08-20T10:30:00.000-07:00

Monument to Saint Cyril (of cyrillic, as in, the guy who gave the barbarian tribes a written language)

Zack and the baby ostrich who came over to say 'hi'.

The boys and the way-too-close rhinoceros. The Kiev zoo was full of such opportunities to come in contact with nature...

A war monument. The plaque reads (I'm assuming, based on close correspondence to Russian words), 'This is in memory of the husbands and sons of Ukraine who were killed in Afghanistan'. It doesn't seem all that old -- almost certainly it was erected post-Soviet-Union.

2007-08-20T10:25:00.000-07:00

The statue on the hill; World War 2 monument.

Playing on some tanks.

The statue from the top of the hill.

The beginning of the sculpture tunnel.

More sculpture tunnel (by the way, all statues running through the tunnel are facing more or less towards Germany.)

2007-08-20T10:20:00.000-07:00

More statue tunnel

And then they had a big parking lot of military equipment. Here are the boys next to some MiGs.

And Zack and some torpedoes (and a riverboat)

And then the helicopter in the 'Afghan' section of the monument. These type are actually still in pretty frequent use today.

Kiev (, etc.)

2007-08-19T22:10:00.000-07:00

8/20 9:14, Pushkin time

So.

This is going to suffer a bit in the telling; my usual technique is to drag a writing implement (by which I mean a computer -- pencils and pens are for sketching and note-taking) with me and at least spend a chunk of each day that I may be unconnected getting my thoughts down. That way, I have a more legitimate day-to-day record of what was going on. For the Kiev trip, we packed light; which meant no writing implement. So I'm going off the notes the boys and I made each day and my already-dulling memories.
-sigh-

------

We got up, as intended, nice and early on Wednesday morning, got the last of our stuff packed up, triple-checked to make sure we had remembered everything, locked the place up, (unlocked, and took one more look to make sure we hadn't forgotten to turn anything off or whatnot), headed downstairs and outside, (dug one more time through our bags to make sure I hadn't taken anything out during the last check and forgotten to put it back in), and called for a cab to the airport. Only to be told that all the cabs from the one company whose card I had were busy for the next hour. What a kick-off. So instead we hoofed it the short ways out to the main road and started trying to flag someone down. And within a couple minutes we were on our way.
At the airport (Pulkovo 1 -- the domestic one), checkin and passport and the lot passed uneventfully, and more or less on time we and our two backpacks and my metal briefcase were off the ground on an Aerosvit 737. Being a ukrainian craft, Z got to experience the joy of finding a language distinct from, but still close enough to one that he knew for him to be able to read most signs. In fact, the differences were -- to him -- mostly very minor, comical ones (to pick one of very, very many examples, the emergency exit signs, rather than the Russian "ВЫХОД" ['vykhod'] read, "ВИХIД" [per Z's reading, 'veekheed']. In fact, Z spent most of the trip snickering to himself at about every sign he saw.

And we landed in Kiev an hour and a half later. Right away, we dashed to the passport control lines and managed to secure a spot only three people back (with twenty or so behind us). And inside seconds, G starts dancing around, grabbing himself. A couple more seconds, and he makes it clear to everyone that he's not going to make it if I try to make him wait. So, Z got to occupy a space in the line for the two minute it took us to dash to the bathroom and back (I suppose that the upstream side of immigration control is about the safest place for a kid to hang out briefly; there's literally nowhere for him to go that's not closely guarded, and he literally cannot get out without his parent). And then we were at the window, getting our passports stamped (on the wrong page; the idiot put the stamps on a page marked 'endorsements'... I hope no trouble comes of that later on...), and out legally onto Ukraine.
We snagged a cab right past customs and took a quick detour to milk an ATM for local cash with which to pay him. Then getting into the car, learned that the 100 hryvnya I had gotten was not even going to be enough to cover the cost of the ride (call it 5 hryvnya = 1 dollar, and Borispil is a ways out from the city). No problem, though; there's always another machine at the hotel.

So there we are, driving into Kiev. With, by the way, a cab driver who was very talkative, and impressed by the boys' language skills. I had my first bit of amusement on the ride when the driver started talking about how the hot days and nightly downpours they had been having were perfect weather for getting fish. Oh, but that's right -- they don't really do fish where we're from.
Confused, I pointed out that no, in fact, we definitely do fish - in fact where we're from is on a big river intersection and our region is really well-known for salmon and other stuff.
To which the driver respond: No, no. going into the woods and collecting fish...

Collecting fish? In the woods?

And then it hits me. The Ukrainian accent. People had told me about that some years back. They pronounce the letter 'Г' (the Russian hard-g) as 'h'. So this guy has been talking about collecting ГРЫБЫ ['gryby' in the russian pronunciation - mushrooms] in the woods, but I've been hearing 'hryby', which when the 'h' is softened by quick conversation comes out a whole lot like just 'рыбы' ['ryby' - fish]. There are other pronunciation differences, but that's the biggest one. And frankly, three days wasn't enough time for me to get totally used to it; even at the end I'd still have to think about what I had heard someone say in Russian to figure out which word they had actually used.

So anyway, we cross the river Dnieper, and finally get to our hotel, which as advertised is smack in the center of the city. And not a bad place, either. By then it was late enough that we forgot about the idea of finding the consulate and just took a stroll around. Kiev is a pretty hilly city, and we found a couple of neat parks overlooking the river inside a few blocks' distance from the hotel (pictures will follow. Later). Then on the return, we grabbed some food ('хлiб' as opposed to 'хлеб' [bread] -- another one that even still cracks Z up) and discovered that the slope at the top of which our hotel was located was also home to a six-story mall, sort of built-in and climbing to right up the top. So we took air conditioned escalators back. While we were having a munch, it started pouring and massive-thunderstorming. The storm went on for the better part of six hours at least (I'm not sure exactly when it ended; it was still going strong when I woke up briefly at one in the morning).

-----

The next morning, we got up bright and early, hotel-breakfasted, and set off with a single backpack full of distractions for the kids to the Russian consulate. We took the metro there -- the station was located right at the doors to the hill-mall and we were only three stops plus a transfer from our destination, and arrived almost an hour before the stated ten o'clock opening time. And (of course) there was already a line of about seven people waiting. I set the boys up with their distractions, went over to the person keeping track of the lines, and asked which of the lists was for visas. Only to be answered that visas were 'without lines'.
-jaw drops open in shock-
So okay. Ukraine is a non-visa country to Russia, so no locals needed them, and is also enough of a ways off the beaten path that vanishingly few foreigners come through. So we had only to wait until the doors opened, and then to walk right in and get started. And for an even more unexpected surprise, the doors of the consulate opened early. At just a hair past nine thirty I was already talking to the Consul; he was checking to make sure I hadn't forgotten to sign anything and then calling the visa office to let them know I was on the way. In fact, the guy, when I asked about taking the boys with me to the visa office, said, "no need, they can sit over here by my desk and color; I'll keep an eye on them for you".
-jaw drops open again-
And then at the visa office, whiz-bam-boom. Seven minutes and I'm out and walking across the hall to pay for the visas; another five and the boys and I are on our way to kill the six hours we have until the visas are ready for pick-up. G and Z asked for the zoo; the consular guard with a big smile gave us great directions, and away we went.
The zoo was five stations, plus a line-transfer away from the consulate. Of course, six hours is a pretty unreasonable amount of time to spend at a zoo, but we did have a good time. The highlight was when we got to the monkeys. The gorilla enclosure was open-air, and the gorilla himself was maybe five feet away (and two layers of fence) from where people could stand. G saw him, froze, and in a shocked voice said, 'ohmygodthat'skingkong'. The gorilla was munching on a potato, and G and he spent a bit just simply staring at each other. I tried very briefly to explain to G that King Kong is in fact much bigger, and that this was just a gorilla. To which his response was, 'I know what he looks like. That's king kong'.
Anyway, after the zoo we took the three-stops-plus-transfer back to the hotel, grabbed some more хлiб and even took a brief snooze. And then back to the consulate, got our visas, and there you have it.

Of course, we still had on the order of 24 hours to kill before our flight left. So we took a bit of a walk from the russian consulate down towards the river, eventually ending up at a monastery complex right on the bank. And strolling through the monastery complex, we found signs that Z explained to me said 'caves'. So, cool. We found the caves (which turned out to be 'catacombs') and walked them for a little bit. Once again G got to be impressed when I explained to him that inside the glass boxes on either side set into the wall were mummies. The fact that we went down there without a light or candle or anything made it even more exciting.

And after that, we walked a bit more of the riverbank until we came to a metro station. Four stops and we were back at the hotel.

----

And Friday, we slept in a bit, had breakfast, packed up, and were out trekking by ten. This time we took the metro down to one stop past the consulate and then hoofed the mile downhill to the riverbank ridgeline (then up to the top of the ridge), where a huge statue was visible from half the city. And it turned out the statue was part of the Kiev WWII memorial park -- which covers the riverbank ridgeline for the length of three hills. We walked the park, stopping frequently for the boys to play on the military gear (tanks and artillery and rockets and jets and even a helicopter in their 'Afghan war' annex), and wrapped up at the tourist entrance right near the entrance to the monastery grounds from the day before. We grabbed a bite to eat, then a taxi back to the airport. A bit early, but better that than late.
At the airport were all manner of signs indicating that noncitizens were forbidden to take Ukrainian currency out of the country (citizens are allowed 3000 hryvnya). So I stashed my souvenir-cash in a deep pocket and through customs and passport control we went. The sole misfortune was in going through security. I sent the boys and the backpacks through first, since my shoes always set off alarms. And once I had been checked out, there was Z, telling me that there was 'something wrong with his backpack'. The security guy tells me that we have a tool in it, and that tools are forbidden in carry-on (recall, we had brought the backpack down to Kiev). I did in fact have my old trusty pair of briefcase-repair pliers -- originally motorcycle-repair pliers. But what to do? I took them out, gave them to the security goon with a 'happy birthday' (his face said that they don't have that kind of sarcasm there) and away we went.

The plane came, we got on, and we flew home. The boys were stoked to see Pushkin from the air and even to be able to pick out our place (the green roof and the fact that it sits by itself in a field help a bit on that count) Passport control was a quick deal (recall, we were at the domestic airport; so our flight was the only one to come in at the time), and we grabbed a taxi driver right past customs. When we explained that we were headed for Pushkin (away from the city), he demurred and found another guy. On the way to this other guy's car, I asked how much he wanted for the trip. His answer -- 1000 rubles. I chuckled and told him to quit bullshitting. And he repeated 1000 rubles. It cost us 300 to get to the airport; I'm willing to accept a bit of a markup, but that was insane. Which I told him, but he insisted that 1000, no less. So I called him an pig-fucking thief (I love cursing in Russian) and walked off to find another cab. The next guy wanted 800, but by that point I was in less of a mood for crap; he also wouldn't haggle. So we set off on foot to get out of the region of the airport and find some more reasonable rates. Fortunately, the weather was nice, and at 9 at night it was still plenty light out, but not warm.
It was actually a pretty good walk. We got a mile away from the airport and found a guy sleeping in his cab (prior to starting work, as we found out). All he wanted was 400, which, considering we were going to be sitting in the dacha-bound end-of-workweek traffic, was plenty reasonable. A ride, some traffic, some chatting, and we were home.

-------

In other doings this weekend. Saturday was the 15-year party for the outfit I'm working with -- a big shindig at a yacht club on the river. The boys stayed with some friends and I drove into the city. The party was pretty good (though it would have been better if A had been there), and I didn't leave until 11. Meaning I picked the boys up at near midnight and they weren't in bed and asleep until almost one. So we all slept Sunday until almost noon (even G). And then took a quick ride into the city outskirts to get food and some concrete anchors; out to our property to drop the anchors off with the uzbeks and to explain how and where we wanted them located, and then back home for a relaxing afternoon/evening. The boys napped from two until five, and then weren't able to get to sleep until almost midnight again. But this morning, bright and early I dragged their butts out of bed. Tonight we'll make an early one of it, and by tomorrow we should be fully recovered.

Anyway, that's the last few days. As I said, pictures will eventually follow. We took quite a few, but since tonight we've got to run back by the property and pick up some dinner-type stuff and still try to get to bed at a reasonable hour, I don't expect to get to the formatting and posting until Tuesday at the earliest. But it won't be three months like with the Finland pictures.

Prepared

2007-08-14T10:10:00.000-07:00

8/14 21:10, Pushkin time

So tomorrow the boys and I head out to Kiev. We'll not be bringing the computer with us; I'll try taking some notes or something if anything of interest happens; otherwise we'll just bring back pictures (and new year-validity visas).

Yesterday was moderately interesting. After work, I picked the boys up from the preschool and we headed out to Pokrovskaya to check on things there. Work is progressing fine; I chatted with the head uzbek while Z pestered the other two guys and G played with М's daughter. As we were preparing to leave, the head guy asked if we minded doing one more thing. Then one of the other guys came over, one side of his face all swollen. Apparently it had started hurting about an hour earlier, and they wondered if we could bring him by the dentist to get whatever it was taken care of. Of course, by that time everything I could think of was closed, but М mentioned that he was pretty sure there was a 24-hour dentist near the hospital where L was born. So we piled the guy into the car and all headed out to find this place.

On the way back into Pushkin, the guy sort of sidelong mentions to me that he's not, strictly speaking, legally in the country. Duh. He lives in a shipping container, for chrissake.

So back into Pushkin, and we just flat can't find the place М was talking about. So we hop from place to place before finally getting to the clinic that A used -- a bit high-end, but open late. We got there at maybe two minutes to eight. The clinic works until nine, but the signs said that the dentist leaves at nine. Still, when they took one look at Р У and the dentist just rushed him into a chair. Of course, filling out his paperwork, they asked for his ID. I gave the whole, 'oh crap, we saw what was wrong and just rushed off without grabbing anything'. So she asked for his address. Thinking fast, I gave them the address of the dealership, which she took down without a question.
The problem was a bit of a serious one; we were at the dentist until 8:30, then had to swing by a pharmacy for him to pick up some antibiotics before dropping him back off at Pokrovskaya. Just another part of the joys of having gastarbeiters.

Anyway, we're all packed. Getting up tomorrow morning, taking a cab to the airport, and off to Ukraine. Excitement.

Picture Post

2007-08-12T06:18:00.000-07:00

8/12 17:17, Pushkin time

So the boys and I have tooled around a little bit this weekend, provisioned-up, and basically accomplished nothing of lasting value. Exactly as it should be.

We did swing by the property this morning, ran into М and family (had a sit and munch with them while Z chatted with the uzbek foundation guys and G bothered the livestock), and so forth. But I figured, I've promised from way back to get some pictures up; the boys are contentedly playing and I had the time to go through our camera. So here goes a few pictures of my taking:
The bear exhibit at the Helsinki zoo

The middle of downtown Helsinki

Not quite the middle of downtown Helsinki

What the hell does this say?

Streetside parking in Finland means having your pick of a wide variety of inscrutable, vaguely menacing street signs.

2007-08-12T06:15:00.000-07:00

The woods in Rastila

More of Rastila

Finnish wildlife

The inlet at Rastila

2007-08-12T06:10:00.000-07:00

Some shots of the status as of today. Holes will be drilled, rebar armature configured, and concrete poured starting tomorrow morning. Would have started today, but apparently (and this has been independently confirmed for me) the twelfth of August is 'construction worker day' in Russia. So the concrete guys are off until tomorrow. They've got so freaking many holidays here...

Success!

2007-08-10T07:26:00.000-07:00

8/10 18:26, Pushkin time

A and L called a bit ago from the other side of Pulkovo 2's passport control -- legally having left Russia. They'll be complementing the de jure with a de facto in another forty minutes. A is, needless to say, very happy.

How it all came together:

I spent a chunk of yesterday losing my will to resist bothering the lady who was taking care of L's exit visa. Finally in the evening I called her up to be told that, "oh my goodness, there was a serious complication..."

Heart temporarily taking a siesta, I asked for details.

A's visa was made out with a transliteration of our last name giving the 'c' as a Russian letter 'к'. Of course, that's no tthe way our name is said; rather the 'c' has an 's' sound (which is the Russian letter 'с', if anyone cares). That's no big deal for a visa, since by the actual rules you are allowed one 'error' per transliterated name. But of course, since L's birth certificate is a legal document, we filled it out with the proper cyrillic spelling of our last name -- by the way, the spelling that the boys and I have on our visas; it seems transliteration can be hit-or-miss sometimes. So the 'complication' was that L's last name on his birth certificate wasn't the same as his "mom's" last name on her visa.

At this point, my legs started to go all numb. The lady helping us out said that she had already made our explanations and that it should all still work out before lunchtime Friday. I elected not to cause A any further agony, and kept the news of the 'snag' to myself.

And then all day today, on the verge of puking from the stress. Until my phone rang (a half-hour before the lady had promised to call me with news) with the information that the exit visa had been issued and we were good to go. I called A, we got her stuff stashed back in the car, went into the city to meet the lady (passed her a couple thousand rubles 'appreciation'), and off to the airport. And then, they made it through.

So. With all the stress of the last three days, I've totally neglected to worry about the boys' and my visa. And I also have absolutely no idea what's been going on (if anything) on the house. We'll save figuring that out for tomorrow.

As an interesting aside, these last two days at work a very well-known automotive journalist came by to do a bit of a test-drive on the dump trucks that made my first major project. So I spent a good chunk of yesterday and a bit smaller chunk of today being interviewed for what will ultimately be a six-page article in the two-weeks-from-now Авторевю. Very cool and I will be sure to scan and post and translate it once it comes out.

Resolving

2007-08-08T22:18:00.000-07:00

8/9 9:18, Pushkin time

I was back and forth to Pulkovo yesterday six times.

The consular office at the airport was singularly unhelpful -- in fact, very shortly into our conversation, they informed me that they "don't do anything". ...umm...okay...

So we hooked up with the outfit that has been taking care of getting our visa invitations and whatnot. They originally quoted us a term of ten days to get an exit visa for L, but the judicious application of money caused them to bring that down to a 'probably by friday morning' which when the money was handed over, became a 'definitely by friday morning'. Which, allowing for delays and whatnot made it not unreasonable to think about A leaving on friday evening -- which is convenient, since her visa is only good to the end of friday. Of course, her need to go no later than the end of that day, her inability to leave before the middle of that day (we had to give her and L's passports to the visa-getting folks), and the fact that most transatlantic flights leave by mid-afternoon at the latest means that she and L will be spending -- assuming all things work out now as they should -- right around twelve hours in the Frankfurt airport. Fortunately, Frankfurt is much more civilized than Warsaw, airport-amenities-wise. That and the fact that she'll be able to get into the business class lounge should maek the experience not quite so terrible. And her return trip is unchanged.

I achieved this feat of reorganization over the course of two hours spent on my sixth trip to Pulkovo at the Lufthansa office there. For A's original tickets, we were able to change the date, but not the itinerary; and there were no free flights in any reasonable timeframe on her itinerary. So we re-booked her original flights for use on our December-January trip (the boys and I will just make the same flights. And then we bought a whole spanking-new set of tickets for L and A right now. By the way, tickets bought two days in advance during what is still more or less tourist season? Not what you would call 'inexpensive'... In fact, the transatlantic leg of her outbound trip had no room in economy class. So a chunk of the two hours was spent in a three-way conversation with the LH clerk and the LH main office discussing a way to issue a ticket for a nonexistent economy seat and then immediately after purchase expend several thousand miles on upgrading it to a business class seat. As I mentioned yesterday, the LH guys are great folks.
So then it came time to pay for the tickets. I had the 85,000-and-change rubles on hand, but really was not interested in dumping such a large chunk of my cash in a place that had a visa/mastercard sign in the window. So we tried to buy it on our WaMu card. Which (of course) didn't take. The LH clerk offered that maybe there was some sort of bank restriction on our end -- definitely not on their end, since she knew from earlier that day that the 'mandatory approval' restriction from their bank was 15,000 euro. So we tried a couple times to split the cost card/cash (I remembered that in fact WaMu does have some sort of limit on purchasing over here; we ran into it when we bough A's sewing machine) all to no luck. Eventually, we had A on a skype call to the WaMu rep in one ear and on her cell to me in the other ear. The 'funniest' part was when the WaMu drone kept insisting that we name a specific number of dollars and cents for the transaction. Of course, we were trying to put through a specific number of rubles, instead. A checked the Inter Nets and found Google's rate-o-the-day; we trigged it out and gave the calculation to the lady with the explicit explanation that the amount we were giving her was NOT EXACT, because we didn't know the actual rate the bank was using (the LH clerk was just as baffled as us and kept saying, 'it's your bank's rate; they should know what it is... I had to explain about American customer service to the poor girl). At the end, the WaMu drone put in an approval for a specific amount of dollars -- that is, just what we told her not to do -- and disconnected. Then we sat down to wait a few minutes for the system to digest whatever they had just done, and I prepared to relieve myself of a large quantity of cash. Before that, we decided to give one more go at getting the tickets through; the LH system, however, all of a sudden started refusing to let through exactly the sum we had named to the WaMu lady. So, what the hell; we put in the full price of A's ticket (about 400 dollars more than had been approved). And it went through...
There was a moment of stunned silence in the LH office, and then smiles and laughs. I paid the remaining seven-thousand-odd rubles cash, got the tickets in my hand, and headed back home.

For now, we're with nothing to do. Nevertheless, I will continue to harass the people who have promised us the visa for L. And wait.

Steaming Piles

2007-08-07T21:46:00.000-07:00

8/8 8:47, Pushkin time

So I was going to be writing right about now about how me and the boys are getting ready to get on a plane to Kiev. Instead...

We all got up at 3AM to get the jammied-kids stuffed in the car and A and L off to their flight to Frankfurt and ultimately back to Portland. We made pretty good time; got her there about five minutes before 4AM, then the boys and I headed back home. As we parked the car, my phone rings -- A. Jokingly, I asked her, 'what's wrong?'. Her response, 'they won't let the baby leave'.

Okay. So I had her pass the phone off to whatever person she was talking to and I started trying to get things straightened. Turns out the person she was talking to was the Lufthansa rep, who really couldn't do anything to help. So I offered to come back by and talk things over with the passport control folks myself. Called the kids back into the car, and away we went. This time, made it to the airport and inside by about 4:35. Right away a difficulty arose -- they were willing to break the security rules and let one non-ticketed person (me) in, but Z and G (still in their pajamas and yellow rubber boots) were going to put us over that limit. We got permission to stash to two boys in line-of-sight of A on the other side of the security area, and off I went to start the straightening-out process.

The issue, as it originally presented itself, was that L lacks a Russian visa in his passport. That is, the standard Russian visa is 'entry/exit' and he didn't have an 'exit'. Of course, we asked about that sort of thing at the US Consulate in Petersburg back before he was born and again when we got his passport. They assured us that the fact that he had no visa would be no problem -- simply demonstrating that he was born during the validity term of his mom's visa would be adequate to get him out to get his own visa (Russian visas are only issued outside the borders of Russia). It would seem that the Consulate folks are either idiots or fucking liars. The fact that a ten-second internet search turned up all the information we needed to orient ourselves to our situation makes the second of those two options the more probable. As И said this morning, there's really no way they could not know about it.

Anyway, back to the story. We took the packet of A's and L's passports and L's various birth documents to one of the passport control officers and I explained the situation and what we had been told by the consulate and the fact that A's visa expires on Friday (she really needs to go pretty soon) and the fact that the stupid American law requires a baby to have a passport and the fact that the main purpose of the trip -- some creative license taken here -- was to get the baby a proper visa. Plus, at the end I sort of offered to 'pay a fine' if that was what the situation called for. As I had hoped, the passport control officer found sympathy with our position and basically offered to head over to the department manager for his sign-off. She was in his office for a good few minutes before he came out himself and gave me a long line of text ending in 'get a visa'. So I attempted to paraphrase, 'they can go to the US and get their visa?'. But no. 'they need to go to the police and get the exit visa'. I asked which police, he said, 'the police'. I asked specifically which ones (they've got a few different kinds fulfilling different functions). He says, 'THE POLICE'. I say, 'so then we should go out to the traffic cops a the airport intersection and they'll take care of things?'. He say, 'T-H-E P-O-L-I-C-E', and walks away. Helpful.

So back to the LH counter, we get A's bags and I have to break it to her that it seems she's not leaving this morning as planned. The lady that I spoke to on the phone almost at the beginning of this basically laid out for me what we could do in terms of revising the tickets and helped us out towards the ticket office. And in the ticket office things started improving. We have, of course, non-changable, non-refundable, and so forth tickets. However, the LH people said that they understand that immigration issues like this come up and so there is a more or less long-standing policy of waiving the 'non's for people screwed in the way that A and L were. Of course, there is no room at this late date to get the flight pushed back a week or a couple days; space starts freeing up on the Frankfurt-Chicago flight (we could change dates without re-issue of tickets, but not routes) on the 22nd -- not an option I was prepared to bring back to the by-now collapsing A. So instead we came to the decision that we'll push back the date on her tickets to December, when we were all planning on coming by anyway, and just buy new ones for her for whenever this visa issue resolves itself. The Frankfurt-Portland direct flight is pretty open they say.

One bit of amusement came when a gentleman situated himself between me and the LH agent and began to loudly complain about not having been booked to a window seat. She tried several times to get him to step back and wait his turn, but no luck -- he kept taking the polite brush-offs for what they were. Finally, he pauses for breath or something and the LH girl tells him, 'I understand your unhappiness, but this other gentleman is dealing with the fact that his American citizen wife and newborn son are not being allowed to leave the country. I think you're done for now.' Awesome.

Anyway, as for the whole paperwork issue, there is apparently a consular division at the Pulkovo international airport, which is our first stop for getting things resolved. There is a nonzero (in the sense that no matter how big x is, 1/x will never be zero) chance that they will bang the whole thing out right there -- the Inter Nets say that at Pulkovo, Sheremtyevo, and Domodedovo airports, the consular divisions take care of emergency or otherwise special cases. Ours does seem to be a special case. On the other hand, we may end up having to spend up to a week waiting on paperwork to be done up -- in which case not only will L need a visa, but A will need a visa extension.

So, we make our way out of the airport. Near the gates, I see a policeman and stop to ask him if he knows anything about the consular office -- all anyone could say for sure to that point was that they were not open at 5AM. He made some guesses and then said that really, the best thing for us to do was go to our (the US) consulate. I explained, 'they don't give out visas there'. He said, 'well then, for information'. I: 'apparently they don't give that out either...'. So some Russian cop got a chuckle this morning, too.

Back home, I called И (I was polite enough to wait until 6:30 to do so; I was ready to ring before 5) and laid out our situation. He offered to make sure that A was escorted through any necessary steps in the papering process. Of course, we don't know if I would need to be there at the beginning (it wouldn't be unreasonable for them to ask for rboth arents, for example). So since we're going to be with the airport consular folks at 11, it is safe to say that the boys and I are not going to make our 11:00 flight to Kiev. The Pulkovo english-language website showed an alternate flight leaving just after six this evening, which would still leave the boys and I with enough time to get done what we need there. So I went back to the airport to find out about changing our tickets to that evening flight.

Once I made it to the head of the ticketing line, I learned that the website was incorrect, and that the morning flights are Mon-Wed-Fri and the evening flights are Tue-Thu-Fri. So in theory we could fly out tomorrow evening, spend the day of Friday getting our visas, then come back on saturday. except that there was no space on tomorrow's flight. The lady at the ticketing counter was nice enough, after hearing me relate my story over the phone to И, to change the dates for free to one week later. Now all that remains on that end is to get our hotel reservations shifted a week out, and Z, G, and I are set. That also gives us enough time to comfortably settle the questions of L's (and depending on speed, maybe A's) visas.

So in conclusion (for now):
- A is definitely going to be delayed in coming by the US
- When we all fly out in December, it will be through O'Hare, with a seven-hour layover
- The US Consulate in Saint-Petersburg (it's American Citizen Services department, at least) is staffed by assholes whose word should not under any circumstances be trusted.
- There turns out to be a means to extend one's visa legally if the need arises
- Lufthansa remains a very good outfit

Friday

2007-08-03T09:21:00.000-07:00

8/3 20:21, Pushkin time

So today at about noon I got a call from the chief of the crew working on our foundation that the backhoe and dump truck guys had showed up and started hauling old foundation chunks out and were looking to get paid. So I rushed over, stopping to grab an extra 10,000r at an atm on the way (they wanted 300r per cubic meter of removed stuff and I figured that at most they would haul off thirty cubes; so 20,000 was plenty extra). When I got there, the neighbor that had been keeping track informed me that already six dump trucks worth of stuff had been hauled off and the seventh was pretty close to full. These were 16-18 cubic meter dumps. Gack.
They ended up taking out 128 cubes of stuff. And as the final one was being loaded I called A and had her hurry over with the additional cash. But it's done. And the uzbeks are finishing the trenches right now with an eye to drilling and pouring starting tomorrow. Which is also И В's birthday, so we'll be over on that side of town for the better part of tomorrow anyway. And by the way, 128 cubes was for 38,400r, which according to И's building engineer is actually a really good deal. We ended up giving a chunk of it in dollars and a chunk in rubles; the guy organizing it told me when I asked, 'pay in euros or bahts or yen or whatever you want, it's all the same to me'. Chatting while the last truck was loaded, I learned that he and his crew are byelorussians here on guest-worker gigs. As he put it, whereas back there having two hundred bucks is enough to warrant getting picked up and shaken down - hard - by the local cops, out here he and his eight guys pull down over a half million dollars worth of profit a year, without any real hassles at all. Everybody comes for the money.

This evening also saw Z getting into pretty serious trouble. I came home and one of the neighbor kids came up to let me know that Z had called him a bad name (not really of the high-octane class of curses that I've learned at work, but this is a culture where even 'idiot' is a pretty serious one depending on the context). Z got a serious talking-to; was sent outside to seriously apologize to the kid and everyone else who was in earshot, and got sent to bed early. The id (actually one of Z's good friends) basically told him, 'I forgive you', and it was let slide. I suspect -- and explained to the kid before going in to lay in to Z, that most likely he just didn't understand the seriousness of what he was saying. Hopefully this all made an impression. It's not like Portland here, and this is probably going some way to make Z aware of that.
At the same time, I really need to keep a handle on my language, too. I slipped up one time around Z. To be informed by him, wide-eyed, that he understood what I had said. Understand or not, it's probably not a good idea for him to hear me using that kind of language (which, on the other hand, makes up almost 30% of 'industry' conversation -- Russian is very versatile).

And since I'm on a gloomy kick, I may as well finish off with the really dire news. A's friend passed it on to her a couple mornings ago, but I was unable to believe it until I found this confirmation. I trust that anyone with a soul who goes to Portland ever for the rest of time will respect the justice of the boycott that is being advocated. Without EBL, the whole twenty-eight hours of flying seems almost pointless...

Getting close again

2007-08-02T06:11:00.000-07:00

8/2 17:11, Pushkin time

So. Into the month that will see my one-year in Russia.

As to the house; trenches have been dug and we have been promised that tomorrow (seriously) morning (no, seriously) the tractor guy will definitely (quit snickering, he really means it this time) come out to take care of those lingering chunks of old foundation so the trenches can be finished and the drilling can start. I've paid out in the last couple of days the 16,000r for the sand and gravel; and 74,000r for the rebar, concrete, boards, anchors, and so forth that will be used in the foundationing, along with their delivery. All that's left now is to take care of the work itself -- which doesn't get paid until it is done.

Depending on how this all works out, we'll probably turn right around and have this same crew (who, for all the pain, are performing satisfactorily) do the brickwork of raising the half-floor up to the appropriate level preparatory to starting to stack wood on top of it. Supply of said wood, by the way, still not completely hammered out. But that's not too terrible; we'll get the well and septic put in during the meantime. Then everything else is ground-temperature-insensitive.

We're also getting ready with the boys for A's trip back to the US and our -- somewhat more brief -- trip to Kiev. G as usual is less than enthusiastic. Oh well. Three days we get to spend there; at least there will be hot water.

I also yesterday managed to run into the parents of a new kid in G's preschool who I had been informed some weeks back had an american dad who was looking to meet the 'other' americans in Pushkin. Surprisingly, the kid turned out to be one of the ones who never gave me the impression of speaking any english -- G says the two of them only talk in russian. Mom is ukranian; dad is from Virginia. They're here with Phillip-Morris (which has a big factory over on the other side of Kievskoye shosse). It was a mildly amusing encounter. As I walked into the preschool, mom and kid walked out and I heard once they passed him tell her, 'that was Garret's dad'. So she stopped me (in english) and made brief introductions before dad got out from the car -- he's sitting in the back, behind the Driver. Brief history turns up that they just came over this way from living the last four years in Switzerland (some sort of big P-M office there). Of course, I sling out the, 'alors tu parles aussi francais?'. Dad just sort of glazes, and it was up to the kid to tell me in french that his dad in fact doesn't parle. Pause for a couple of beats... (four years?!?)
Then back on topic, dad asks if there's any sort of -- I believe the word he used was 'society'. You know, other foreigners. In Pushkin. Again, pause for a few beats.
So. Not really. The expats all pretty well congregate in the city. I made a joke about them giving us directions be Metro station, and us having to crack out a map to figure out what the heck they are talking about. Since we drive ourselves everywhere, you see. Pause...
So then he asks about groups we hang around with. Well. There's И and family; И В and family; Е and С; Т and family; М and Л out in Pokrovskaya; С Ш; and then the guys from back in Moscow. I spent a few more moments pondering before coming up with the diplomatic answer that, 'we pretty much hang out with locals'.
Who knows. Maybe we'll hook up with them sometime.

As well, in response to a question that was posed me regarding my recent comments about people, not-northwesterners. Apparently, the differences that A and I notice so strongly are not really very readily apparent to a Russian. At least so they tell me.

Translation

2007-07-29T22:07:00.000-07:00

7/30 9:07, Pushkin time

Back again after a long week of playing translator (among other things). I'd like to say I'm getting better at it.

I think I last got on sometime this past Tuesday. So to summarize from there:

We had people flying in pretty much all week -- a new person or two added every day. And really, only in the beginning (when the guests were limited to a head engineer and a project manager) was I in my zone of comfort. I spent the better part of a day doing financing negotiations, then a good hunk of another day working out a discussion between a representative of a Latvian bank and a guy from the treasury department of a US company. As if the fact that I had to have them explain in some detail a number of their terms to me wasn't bad enough, there are several terms that have direct translations -- but whose translations have concretely differing meanings in the two languages. I suppose this is the case for technical stuff, too (in fact, it is; I can think of a couple examples). But that's my field. Bank stuff?... -sigh-

Anyway, it ended. The remaining two guys are on a train which is probably at this moment pulling into Nizhniy Novgorod. Sixteen hours one-way (there are no direct flights from Petersburg, and routing through Moscow would take a while, too, plus necessitating a change-of-airports, and all manner of other unpleasantries) to spend an eight-hour day there. Then the two americans fly out via Frankfurt, and И spends another 16 hours returning. Better him than me.

One thing I've been noticing -- and particularly with this last time, since I was able to observe them in a more natural state (interacting with each other, rather than just touristing). The people who come here from the US are for the most part from the Midwest (Chicago and environs, more specifically) or the non-Southern East Coast (southern Florida, New Jersey, Pennsylvania). Although they have things in common with me -- with us, really -- that none of the people I interact with on a daily basis have, they're distinctly not... my people. They're as foreign in a lot of ways as are the guys from Africa or England.
Tripping for work before, I noticed the phenomenon. Always, on the last flight home, there was a different feel to the plane. Even before getting on the plane. Just being in the crowds, surrounded by a group of people who also made the PacNW their home. Tough to describe; it was just a clear feeling that these are my normal environment. In fact, it was usually possible to pick out, leaving Brisbane or Auckland not only the Americans, but the ones who would be on the plane with me all the way to Portland. A says she picked up on something like that, flying back this past winter, too. It'll be interesting to see if the kids catch on to it this coming winter. And then, to see what we pick up on for our return trip to Pushkin.
What fun is life without social experiments...

Then to the house. Sand and gravel have been delivered (says the crew chief; I'm going out to confirm this evening). Lines have been laid out for the foundation. A tractor was supposed to have come by to push some things around and clear out a bit of the old foundation over whose corner ours falls. This was on Saturday. Eventually, it came out that the truck that hauled the tractor from place to place had broken down somewhere. So nothing Saturday. And Sunday, so far as I know, still nothing on that end. I'm half-expecting a call today that the guy has arrived and I need to swing by and settle with him. Which, of course, is no problem at all in the middle of a busy Monday... Pain in the ass.

A part of this week will be dedicated to the preparations for visa application for myself and the boys (L will be getting his in Seattle with A; Z and G will be with me in Kiev). Surely, a part will also fall to the house-stuff. I'll try to make time here, too.

Guests again

2007-07-23T22:16:00.000-07:00

7/24 9:19, Pushkin time

We've got people coming in from the US all week this week, so this may be a short one (and they may be really sparse for the next few days).

Saturday after A's dentist appointment (they put in a temporary filling and said to give it a couple days before making the call whether to put in a permanent one or to do something more drastic) we went into the city to do a bit of present-shopping. On the way we stopped in at the big Dom Knigi and -- to all our surprise -- found that the new Harry Potter book (British release) was already in the store and on sale. So A had her book bought and in hand before the doors had even opened on the Portland releases of it. She was so stoked.
By the way, an import of a hardcover version of a big, popular book will set you back 1300r -- at today's exchange rate... too much to even think about.

The gift shopping. Surprisingly, the biggest stumbling block to our attempts to swing through the souvenir places without paying souvenir prices was G. We're pretty sure that he still doesn't believe that A and I can speak any Russian at all, since he never uses it to us. He dreams in Russian (talks in his sleep, so we know that for sure), talks to his brother in Russian, and all of his toys talk in Russian. But to us? Maybe a couple of words, but no sentences. So we would sidle up, trying to look all 'local' and G would bust out with a "Look at that, mommy! They have the dolls like you have!"
Crap.
But we did manage to get some okay stuff anyway. And the place we went is definitely worth remembering.

Then Sunday, A closed herself and L in the bedroom with the book. I had a quick get-together with the foundation crew chief, who looked over the lot (now with container!) and pronounced it ready to begin. He's said that he would have guys out yesterday and today getting the greenery taken out and the ground leveled for the foundation work to start. I've asked A to swing by today to make sure this is happening. Then closer to the middle of the week, they pound in their corner stakes, we go to confirm the location and they get started drilling holes. I brought the chief back by our place to meet A, since -- particularly this week with the aforementioned guests -- she's going to be the one taking care of the check-ups and approvals. Nice guy.

Then yesterday, A's dentist appointment went off. In a half-hour's time they had popped out the temporary, put in a permanent, and sent her on her way. The entire cost for the two visits and the full suite of work? Around 1700r. And this at a higher-end place, too. Once we all get back from our various travels, A says she'll set up for all of us to swing by and get checked up there. A may not have been able to start the med school yet, but of the five of us, she's definitely got the most experience accumulated in the medical realms here. Probably a better medical vocabulary than me (who, you may recall, was so excited to get to say something about the heart, since the word for 'valve' is one that I know) by now, too.

They're here. Time to go.

Something

2007-07-20T00:30:00.000-07:00

7/20 11:30, Pushkin time

The past two days' free time was occupied mainly on two tasks: Getting the container bought and moved and placed, and fixing our washing machine. The second came down to an issue of Z getting to the age where he sticks stuff in his pockets and forgets to unload them. Jamming the pump and the filter I found 7r,31k, plus $0.18, as well as what looks like a handful of finishing nails. Surprisingly, no pebbles.

And as for the first, on Wednesday i arranged to have the container purchased (something that, as it could only take place at a sales office in the city during business hours, was done via courier), having it picked up and delivered to the yard adjacent to our manufacturing building. Then yesterday afternoon, meeting with the driver of the tractor-trailer that would be delivering the container and the driver of the crane that would be doing the unloading and than having them follow me out to our place. Because the road leaving Pavlovsk to the south goes under a low bridge, our route took us through Pushkin and south on Kievskoye shosse down almost to Gatchina, turning off just beforehand at the Verevo train station, and cutting across country to hit the Pavlovsk-Gatchina road well south of the bridge, right near Romanovka.
Speaking of 'hit', I came close to getting pasted at the tail-end of our cross-country odyssey. The cut-across road hits the Pavlovsk-Gatchina right in the middle of an S-bend. It had been alternately dumping rain and bright sunshine all day yesterday, so the roads were a bit submerged in some places, and wet everywhere. I pulled to a stop at the intersection and was checking for cross-traffic, when I heard a truck horn and heard skidding. I looked to the other side to see a Kamaz sliding straight towards me, with his front wheels kicked all the way to the side (changing his trajectory not in the slightest). Panicking, I popped the car into a different gear (turned out to be 'neutral'), and gassed it. Fortunately, in the couple seconds which I spent figuring out my error, the Kamaz came to a stop a good six inches from my bumper.
Then he went his way and I went mine. Within a couple miles, the numbness had pretty much left my legs..
Anyway, arriving at our lot, with a little bit of rearranging we were able to get the container offloaded and put into place. Now the gastarbeiters will have a home for when they work.

Pretty much the only other thing during these last couple days was the five of us heading into the city wednesday evening to get blood taken pursuant to getting our 'HIV-Certificate' with which we will be able to get our visas in a couple weeks. The place we went was a "European Medical Center". Meaning -- I suppose -- expensive-looking and full of big, empty spaces. Even so, it still only cost 27.5 euro (in rubles) per person for the tests and certificates, which A tells me is less than they cost in Oregon. Plus, they turned the results and certificates around in less than 24 hours. I've got them in my hands now; all that remains to do for visa prep is to get the invitations for myself and the boys and to fill out our app forms. And then go do it.

Fortunately, since my visa was issued for through the entire month of August, the caravan is papered until September. So I've got no worries about the mechanics of re-papering it when we get back from Kiev. The Ford, however, runs out while A is still gone. We're going to try to go to the customs office and explain the situation to them so we can get an application opened before she leaves and have the actual temporary import paperwork done after she gets back and we get our registrations back (now a process that takes up to 3 weeks). Worst-case, they decide not to help us out and we end up paying the 1500-ruble fine for late filing. But I'd really like to avoid that...

Rushing

2007-07-17T05:02:00.000-07:00

7/17 16:02, Pushkin time

So late yesterday the head guy of the foundation outfit gave me a ring to ask about a safe place to store their tools and materials. Stupid me, I hadn't thought of that. He wondered if maybe a neighbor would agree to hold onto the stuff for me. Umm... No.

So I spent a chunk of this morning figuring out and putting in motion that item. We found a place selling 40-foot shipping containers, dashed over to their yard to pick out one that suited, are sending a guy out to the city to pay for it tomorrow morning, and will have it stationed on a corner of our lot by Friday, at which point the workers will have a place to store tools and materials, as well as a place to sleep (we were previously discussing getting them camping tents...). The nice thing about this option, in addition to it being one of the more secure storage methods, is that we'll be able to use it for the duration of the construction, and then when we're done with it, sell it for something close to (maybe even a bit more, depending on whether or not the market for them continues its trend) what we paid for it. So there is that.

The other quick project to day was a trip to Gatchina to pick up the documents indicating just exactly who we will be taking to court over their swiping of our property. As they are slimy crooks, I don't mind identifying them by name: the Cherezovs -- Sergey Nikolaevich and Yelena Konstantinovna [Черезов Сергей Николаевич и Черезова Елена Константиновна]. As I type, our attorney, Д Д, is putting together the filing papers.

So, progress on both fronts.

Uneventful

2007-07-16T02:23:00.000-07:00

7/16 13:24, Pushkin time

...to describe, in a word, the weekend. Summmertime is slipping by; things are getting done; and so forth.

I took a quick side-trip this morning down to the Gatchina land office to take the next step regarding getting the corner of our land that the neighbors chopped off straightened back out. Arriving at the УФК office an hour before it opened, I found myself first in line (!!). So when nine rolled around, I was able to hop right up to the window and pass in my 'request for release of official information regarding the registration of ownership' for the neighboring hunk of land. The clerk lady totally botched taking down my vitals from my passport -- in addition to misspelling my name, and among other things, she put down my visa number as my passport number, and the date of my latest entry into Russia as the date my passport was issued -- but was pretty decent about the whole thing when I handed back the pro forma 'check to make sure the information on this is accurate' sheet with corrections on every third word. And once I got the paperwork given to her, she expalined that I needed to pay 100 rubles (plus 2 kopek 'administrative fee'). Which payment takes places around here on the presentation of a квитанция [kvitantsiya - not quite translatable as 'check' or 'bill'] to any Sberbank payment window. That's the way bills, fines, fees, etc. get paid here. So I went across the street to the Sberbank to find that they had also opened at 9, and that in this line I was like number twelve. And Sberbank lines can move slowly (since people will frequently save up several months' worth of kvitantsii and bring them in to pay all at once - one at a time). So I blew close to half an hour waiting for eleven people to take care of what they needed to do before paying my 110.02r (the extra ten is the bank's 'administrative fee'), getting my receipt and being able to take it back over to the УФК office. In exchange, I have a little scrap of paper indicating that I should come back by tomorrow afternoon to get the 'information regarding the registration of ownership'.
But the drive back from Gatchina was nice.

In other doings, L's got a pediatrician's visit happening about twenty minutes from now; A's got a dentist appointment just freshly set up with the outfit that did Z's checkup-preparatory-to-school-registration; and the whole five of us get to go Wednesday evening into the city to give blood for the HIV certificates that we need to get our new visas. I asked, and the office at the city clinic informed me that even though there is no medical sense whatsoever in getting L's blood tested (since the test wouldn't show anything until six months after infection, and he was only born less than three months ago), the way the law is written, every passport needs its own visa, and every visa needs a certificate, and that every certificate needs a blood test. Really, it all comes down to the fact that we are coming from one of the vanishingly few places on earth where children are not simply annotated (with pictures) into their parents' passports. Were we carrying such passports, we would only be going through these hassles for A and I, instead of for everyone. -sigh-

A also got her tickets today (the Fedex delivery guy on what appears to have been Wednesday of last week claimed to have tried to deliver them to us and been unable since no one was home) for her trip back to the US in August. The boys and I have had our tickets to Kiev in hand for the better part of a week already. So that's all coming together.

2007-07-11T22:49:00.000-07:00

7/12 9:50, Pushkin time

So I heard back from another one of the outfits with a price on the foundation work yesterday. Based on the number we got a while back, it seems almost suspiciously low; though they've got an itemized materials list which adds up correctly and the prices they give also seem individually within the scope of reason. And it's not like they're offering it cheaper than people were able to get eight years ago (in fact, twice as expensive...). So I'm getting together with one last outfit on Saturday and then by the end of the weekend we will have set our selected crew to work. Which puts a foundation in the ground and ready to build on by the time we get back from Kiev. Since the lumber question is still under investigation, I'm not figuring that we'll have wood lying around until after that time anyway.

As for other things; we've got processes moved along far enough that we are getting commitments from the Mexico factory which will be supplying them to us that the first groups of some specialized trucks are going to be built in less than a month -- putting them on our lot inside two months, and sold inside two months + 20 minutes or so. Ad thus the money starts coming in earnest. The first sets of parts for the assembly are set to ship in mid-August, too; we're being conservative and saying an October start-of-build for that, too. Six in October, fourteen in November, twenty two in December. And so forth (though January, because of holidays, will probably be no bigger than December). The view from here going into next summer is going to be pretty different from last spring.

Also, some time in the next couple of weeks, A will be spending some time with her friend Т getting school gear for Z and Т's son С. He needs uniforms (they were willing to go 'real tie' instead of 'bow tie' when I asked) for lessons, play outside, play inside, etc... With only half the summer left to go, Z remains stoked.

Monday

2007-07-09T07:45:00.000-07:00

7/9 18:46, Pushkin time

This weekend I met with a few more guys about building work. Starting to get prices back; it looks like the winners will be the guys who started out (we're having them figure materials too) with a labor quote for the foundation of 60,000r. Not so bad.

At work today, an idea that I had several months back has reappeared in a surprising fashion. We've been for quite a while right up against the capacity for the RO/RO shipping line that services the America-Petersburg direct route. Then this spring some higher-dollar stuff (John Deere tractors by the thousand) started getting booked and we've been getting slightly bumped. Back last fall, I joking suggested that we should go in on buying or leasing a ship ourselves -- our traffic alone would support it. The idea apparently kicked around a bit, never fully going aw'ay, and tomorrow we start pricing things out. You could hardly call sea shipping a 'core competency' of ours, but -- as with so many things out this way -- there's seemingly no one able or willing to provide it. So we do it ourselves.

In other things, with Sochi 'winning' the 2014 Olympics, everyone is pretty stoked. Not by the games themselves, mind, but by the massive amounts of money that are going to get tossed, Russian-style, at the place. Something like 14 billion dollars has been earmarked for spending so far. Even figuring that 25% minimum will go straight to the pockets of political bosses and connected oligarchs, that's still a ton of money. And with the infrastructure down there on the verge of 'decrepit'... That's a lot of work that will need doing. In particular a lot of concrete mixers and dump trucks. We've got parters in Novorossisk, Rostov, and Stavropol -- all of which are close enough to Sochi that they'll be in the first line of suppliers to the construction. I mentioned some study I remember seeing about how not a single Olympics has even come close to paying off the cost to the hosting country; the answers pretty much all around came to, "So? We'll be making good money off it." Even our workers are talking about how, in three-four years (once the paperwork has all been completed and construction down there can begin) there'll be such a crunch for time that they'll be offering mad rates for welders and the like. I won't be surprised if at least a few make their way down there for the project. But even if things move much faster than anyone expects, that's still a bit off.

Happens

2007-07-05T22:20:00.001-07:00

7/6 9:20, Pushkin time

Off to such a good start, then I let it slip. Crud.

So I've been talking with a few foundation crews (one of which -- the one I'm right now leaning toward based on several factors -- is associated with the local concrete factory). These past couple days as part of the final quoting process I've taken a series of trips out to our plot with reps of various different crews; been taken around a whole slew of job sites in the neighborhood, and met a whole lot of guys with super-ethnic names like Makhmud, Ruslan, Kakha, and so forth. Most all of them say a 2-2.5 weeks is the par time from the start of foundation work to the time that you can begin erecting stuff on it. One of the crews, in fact, does the sort of wood-frame construction that we're planning on as well. We'll have to see if we decide to go with them for the foundation first, but there is the possibility that we may just end up making them our "general" on the house. At least for the outside; we're still pretty well set on using И's Moldavian crew (the guys who've put together the truck assembly plant) for doing what interior work we don't want to do ourselves.
The 2-2.5 weeks actually works out pretty well, since it gives adequate layover time for us to get the well and septic hookups put in.

Anyway, that's my excuse for slipping a couple of days worth of updates.

July

2007-07-02T22:30:00.000-07:00

7/3 09:33, Pushkin time

Temps have bounced up a little bit, but this morning's brief waking at 4AM to see that the sun wasn't shining more than makes up for a little sweatiness. The folks at Intellicast inform me that sunrise today was at 4:42AM (sunset at 11:23 PM means for all practical purposes that both continue to occur more or less to the north). It's somewhat of a relief to be coming out of the long, long day.

Yesterday in addition to doing a bit of dealing with the foundation folks, I got back the first concrete pricing information on the wood. Mainly, since it's only the first bid on it, it has clearly indicated to us that we will absolutely not be buying locally. Lumber (pine to pick and example) in the Moscow/Saint-Petersburg markets runs in the neighborhood of 9000r per cubic meter. From Nizhniy Novgorod it's more along the lines of 4000r/cube. Even plus the cost of delivering three trailer-loads worth of it the twelve hundred miles, is still comes to under half the cost. So that is definitely the route we'll be taking. One of our partners down there is getting quotes and inventories from a couple of sawmills to pack together the most economical mix of stuff-in-stock and more freshly cut. From the sounds of it, we might even be able to get delivery in earlier rather than later August. So that's good (except for the possibility that I'll be out of town in Kiev right when it happens...).

And then, A has just about finished the last step in the process of getting TB-cleared. She's had all the tests and is going in today to wrap it all together and get her name removed from whatever 'potentially infected' list she made it onto. Honestly, the process, though occupying a fair bit of our time, has gone by pretty quickly. I told her to make sure she keeps her receipt -- just in case.

More Dailies

2007-07-01T03:13:00.000-07:00

7/1 14:14, Pushkin time

Today, fixed Z's bike; not only was the rear tire flat, he had attempted to 'fix' the gearing -- the untangling of which was itself a good fifteen minutes' work. Now he's back out riding with the other kids while G and L nap.

As for other things, coming back from Finland, I got to take care of temporary-importing our car on my own (it was a busy week for our customs guy, and he basically politely indicated that I had already seen him do it three times; I should be able to figure it out on my own). Not so bad; it's unfortunate that the process requires an early-morning application, with the documents only given out in the late afternoon -- both ends needing to be done in person. So it's not something we could have a courier do for us. Which means that I blow an entire day's time each time I re-register a car. Luckily, my current car registration runs through to September, so I've got a bit of time after getting back from Kiev to pick a day to go and do the work; most likely we'll wait until A gets back from the US and then kill both registrations off simultaneously.
Hanging around with the other people who were temp-importing, I got to gab a bit with a crew of Byelorussians who were in town to work. Russia gets a fair bit of guest-workers from the neighboring CIS states. It complicates our dealings, since our efforts at moving out of the visa-regime fall under the same category as the thousands of undocumented Uzbeks and Albanians also trying to get some sort of legal status. It gives a bit of sympathy for the Mexicans back in the western US. The whole immigration industry sucks.

In a Row!

2007-06-30T04:07:00.000-07:00

6/30 15:08, Pushkin time

I made it back less than 24 hours after my last posting! Hooray!

Today I arranged to meet with a rep from the outfit that will [most likely] be putting in our foundation. We hooked up at the grocery store near the airport, then he and I (and G) drove out to our lot. Walking around, discussing and pointing and whatnot. He's got a crew of Georgians who are right now wrapping up another job; we're going to try to arrange to meet with the foreman (some Georgian name) in the next couple of days to map out the exact whens and whos.

So we'll have actual visible movement! A very good sign!

In other news, Z has been staying home since the school year ended, learning how to take care of his baby brother, riding his bike, rollerblading (both skills taught to him by the neighbor kids, who swarmed in to help as soon as they saw a newly-geared addition to their racing groups), and otherwise doing kid stuff. He's also getting a bit bored from time to time, which I see as not a terrible thing, since it will make the beginning of school that much more interesting for him.
G, on the other hand, has been continuing to go to his preschool. Thursday, I learned that the kids have given him a nickname there when his friend Ж called to him on the way out the door, "Пока Скелет!" ["Bye Skeleton!"]. The way they pronounce the word for skeleton is really close to the way they pronounce G's name. G's not sure yet how he likes having a nickname; but he knows they mean him by it, and it's definitely more on the 'cool' than on the 'derogatory' side. And yesterday they were playing outside when I came by, and at least half a dozen kids all called variations of that to him on his way out. We'll see if it has any sticking power.
As for L. He's a baby, still doing baby stuff. He's not really gotten into his limbs or tongue yet, but he definitely knows how to flail on command. He can turn around on his back, too. I was reading an article a few weeks back about how some study had shown that within the first two days a baby can tell the difference between his native language and foreign languages (based, presumably, on the sound-content). Since L spent almost his first week surrounded by Russian hospital staff, only seeing us occasionally, it sort of leads me to wonder how that's working out for him.

What else.. The Kiev thing is a definite go (tickets have been purchased; living arrangements arranged). A will be back in the States for the middle of August -- the way her ticketing worked out, three weeks came to be the optimal duration. Money is starting to come in on the mid-profitable projects at work -- the big one, truck assembly, having been pushed back by a couple months to the September/October timeframe. And soon we'll start accumulating dark again.

That last one is a pretty big deal. I've found that I am not so much tired as I am slightly not-sane from the light. Nothing dangerous; but I find myself realizing that the processes my mind is going through are somehow... not quite normal. It's like, I recognize that the functioning of my brain is slightly askew -- a condition that appeared sometime in mid-June and has been growing for the past two weeks -- in a fashion that bears a very vague resemblance to giddiness (were I pressed to pick an analogue; it's definitely not giddiness). I presume that when the dark comes back I'll bump back to normal. It's sort of ironic; A has trouble with the wintertime dark; I'm the most deranged by the summertime light. At least we're able to counteract each other.

Long Dry Spell

2007-06-29T04:13:00.000-07:00

6/29 15:13, Pushkin time

So.

My birthday came and went; I spent that other week with the guy from England, White Nights passed its peak.

19 days without anything at all. Discouraging, I know..

We'll just start fresh, then.

A couple days ago A called me to tell me that a medical person had come by and dropped off with her a piece of paper with handwriting all over it. Between my deciphering skills and the explanations of the folks at work, we learned that she had been officially informed that she may have been in contact with someone who had the "open form" of tuberculosis. And that they would really appreciate her coming by the TB clinic in town to get checked out.
Apparently someone who had been checked into the hospital in the city at the same time as her came down sick; according to my local sources, it's pretty certain that every single person who was checked into that hospital at any time during the period when the sick person was there is also getting these notices.
And further, A has most likely ended up on a list of some kind; we'd rather she not try to get another Russian visa without having first been removed from it.

So yesterday afternoon and this morning A navigated -- all by herself -- the Russian public health system. Horrible, to be sure, but still something to be proud of. You can be assured that no one there speaks anything but russian-bureaucrat (anyone else would have moved into private practice). But she did great.

Then what else..

Ah. With regards to the visas for the boys and I, the decision has been made to get them in the nearest-by non-EU country. So between the 8th and the 10th of August, we're going to be in Kiev. Fortunately for the boys, unlike in Helsinki, I may end up doing the actual consulate work myself. И has several family members in Kiev, and he's arranging now for one of them to keep an eye on the boys (I passed on G's recommendation that they check out the zoo) while I'm waiting in line/filling out forms. On the plus side, not being an EU country, we can get the year-visas there, so I won't have to repeat the experience again for quite a while -- by which time we strongly hope to have the whole temporary-resident situation in hand.
Ukraine is another one of those places that never really held much interest for me. But И says it is very nice (he actually seems almost a bit insulted at my lack of enthusiasm). We'll see.

That's going to have to do for now. I'll try not to keep away for so long this time.

A Woeful Lack of Discipline

2007-06-10T07:41:00.000-07:00

6/10 18:41, Pushkin time

So I've been a week since getting anything new put up here. It feels a fair bit longer.

Most likely this is due to the fact that for the last week, and through the next week, I'm taking care of a visitor from England (off whose efforts I am making money; so it's not really an imposition); as well as the fact that since the 12th is a holiday here, the preceding monday is also a day off, taken in trade for yesterday (saturday the 9th). So on top of the guest, a six-day work week.

And, joy of joys, I didn't know about the holiday in the prep-time for the brit to come out, so he and I and a group of unfortunate Russians from as far out at Novosibirsk and as far south as Novorossisk will be working over the two holiday days. The high point (other than the money I may have mentioned above) is the fact that since the cook at the dealership isn't coming in on his days off, we'll be utilizing the Pushkin pizza delivery place for lunches on those two days. As И snickeringly commented, "the real American experience".

In other events, A -- all by herself -- took L out to the hospital to get some follow-up tests one on him; then we had the pediatrician and neurologist out to take a look at him and the test results and both pronounced him 'perfectly normal'. The neurologist in particular commented on how gratifying it was to come back only a month later and have him gone from 'clearly having gone through tough times' to 'can't see any evidence of anything wrong at all'. It's all just regular monthlies from here on out for him.

And then yesterday A got invited with the boys -- actually, all of us were invited, but I have to work -- to go out to her friend's dacha for a few days up north of the city (the settlement it's in is called 'Орехово' [orekhovo]). So all four of them left here around noon and after a little bit of a mix-up regarding some very bad directions on her friend's end, made it there a couple hours back. She called to tell me about the place on the lake where they're staying and how much I would like it up there. Where I'm not. Because I'll be working. On a holiday. Because no one told me it was a holiday until too late.

Grr.

Although her friend and her husband have invited us up again later on in the summer. We may end up two-carring it so I can bail at the end of the weekend, but from the sounds of it, A and the boys are already hot to accept the offer whenever it arises.

Helsinki

2007-06-02T23:39:00.000-07:00

6/3 10:40, Pushkin time

Before getting to the meat of the story, I'll mention that the Tuesday of paper-chasing went off actually quite well. I was able to talk my way into getting L's birth certificate given out two hours ahead of schedule; then he, A, and I visited the local Radio-Shack-type store to pick up something we had been meaning to get for going on three months now (did I mention how infrequently I make it into the city?). Then back to the US consulate with the idea of arriving a bit early to get a good place in line. Once we got there, however, waiting on the street the guards very politely aimed to push us away for the half hour then remaining before the open of business hours. In fact we were able, through a combination of stubbornness and the possibly-genetic disinclination of Russians (who the security guards were, even if their bosses weren't) to push around a lady with a baby, to hang out just to the side of the entrance until things opened. During the wait, the guards did manage to force everyone else who wanted to come to the consulate to the other side of the street, and not directly opposite the building. "It's the Americans' rules". Even more, a couple with their maybe five-year-old were strolling the walk (which hosts most of the foreign consulates in Petersburg along its couple-mile length), getting the boy's picture next to the neat flags. But no sooner did the dad pull out his camera at the US one than three guards (where did that third guy come from??) come rushing over to him telling him to put it away. He tried to soften things by asking about just getting a picture of the flag, but categorically no photographing at or near the US consulate; again "the Americans' rules". There's a reason why we don't like to go there...
Inside the consulate everything went through pretty much okay. We got the forms all started and in maybe another week we will have L's "Registration of Birth Abroad" and US passport. I did manage to convince the consular secretary that A having to bring both L and Z (the preschool is out and we're going to put him to work for the summer until school starts) out herself to pick it up was unreasonable; so they agreed to let us approve a courier to come and get it for us. The courier, of course, was somewhat less than delighted to hear that he was going to get to go to the American prison -- as they call it. But at least we'll have everything pre-approved; so the trip for him should be short.

Now on to the weekend.

Thursday morning the boys and I piled ourselves and our camping gear into the van and started driving north-northwest-west to the Finland border at Vaalimaa/Torfyanovka. Since the main tourist travel is Russians going to Finland for the weekend, we had a quick drive up; a relatively quick border crossing; and a reasonable drive to Helsinki. Finland requires foreign vehicles to be carrying Finnish insurance to enter the country. There are a fair number of kiosks approaching the border that sell two-week policies. Stopping at one of those, however, I was informed that they only can sell insurance on Russian vehicles; since ours was American, we were sort of out of luck. "Ask at the border" they told me.
Then approaching the border, we got stopped by a guard wanting to make sure all our passports and car papers were in order (they don't really have 'turn-around' facilities at the crossing itself, so try to turn back people a bit sooner to save the congestion). I opened the sliding door of the van to show off the kids -- as well as the fact that the two kids were the only other ones in the car -- and he offhandedly says 'hi' in Russian to G. Of course, G answers in the same; the guy does a bit of a double take and then chats a bit with G while he peeks around the interior, before sending us on our way with a grin on his face. Then customs and passport control on the border itself. And once through that there remains maybe a half-mile drive between-borders and then through the Finnish side. The Finns didn't even ask to see the title to my car, much less anything about insurance. So I dodged that bullet. And then we were into Finland.

It was about another 2+ hours' drive to Helsinki. Honestly, the scenery after the first thirty minutes gave me a bit of a headache. Not that it isn't very nice and pastoral and serene and clean and so forth. But -- I concluded some time later -- the land forms being the result of long times fully under ice-sheet and having been a bit low-lying to begin with, the shapes of things were all wrong. The logic of the land was completely foreign to me. I took pictures which might help a bit to explain; I'll put them up in the next couple days.

And then the language. Finnish is related to Turkish, Estonian, and several eastern-Siberian and Far-Eastern-Russian aboriginal tongues. Which is to say, except for a scattering of totally non-native words (like, for example, the Finnish word for "pineapple" which is the same as the Russian one), there is no overlap whatsoever with anything I know at all. Even in China there was the occasional very-close-to-Japanese that I could pick up. But looking at signs -- which are all in both Finnish and Swedish -- and listening to the radio and people talking? Nothing at all. The language when spoken in a calm tone sounded to me a bit like a musical cats' purring. Fortunately for me a lot of people there speak English. Unfortunately for the boys, that quality does not extend to Finnish kids. G was, as usual, the most disturbing of the two -- recognizing that English was getting him nowhere, he moved almost right away to shouting in Russian at any kid with whom he wanted to communicate. Over and over again until I was able to make him stop (until he found the next kid to talk at).

I took advantage of the one-hour time difference off home to get a bit of an early start; we arrived at the consulate (where we had been assured in advance there would "be no lines") forty-five minutes before the nine-to-noon window during which it operates. And found ourselves number eleven in line. We did make it in eventually, right in line behind a Japanese guy and right in front of another American from Petersburg. Chatting with this guy, he informed us that there were a handful of extra forms that required filling=out that were only given out at the consular window -- that he had come yesterday and been given the forms and then sent back to the back of the line to fill them out and had not made it through again by the time noon rolled around. Oh crap. And then in front of us, I hear the clerk explaining to the Japanese guy that what he has presented her is an HIV test result, but what they need is an HIV-certificate. Double crap. Then over his shoulder I read the list of documents (longer than the one on the website or the ones I have been following every other time I got a visa) which includes a certificate of medical insurance. Triple crap (we pay-as-we-go here; it makes no sense to pay for insurance when the premium in one month is more than the cost of a couple days' hospitalization). But already near the front of the line -- and lacking any other way to get home -- I pushed on. We gave the girl our papers and were shortly informed that, "due to a new immigration law, the consulates in the European Union were only issuing 180-day visas rather than the 365-day ones you wanted. And also, since you aren't citizens of the EU, we can only offer you 90-day visas." Which partly sucks and partly -- since it saved us the insurance and HIV-certification issues -- was alright. So we gave the papers over for review. And in about twenty minutes were asked to fill out an application stating that, even though the invitations were for 365 days, we actually only wanted 90-day visas. Which application was also reviewed for ten minutes before we were given the bill for the visas; the exact same 720 euro we would have paid for the year-visas. We ran to a nearby bank, paid the bill, and ran with the receipt back to the consulate to get our docs. All in all, a massively screwed-up experience; but at least we were going to be able to get home without having to wait over the weekend for things to open up again on Monday.

Then afterwards, I took the boys out to the Helsinki zoo -- on an island, accessed via footbridge from another island on which you could park. The zoo was not bad; overall Finland was not bad, though I really can't see the big draw for all the Russians.

The next morning we packed up and made an early start back. It turned out that I had to buy gas in Finland to make sure I could make it back across the border. And -- Gaahhh... Expensive.... The normal price for 85-octane (by US measure) is 1.35Euro per Liter. I put fifty-three Euros in my tank without filling it up and just called it good. I held off on calcing that out until I was safely back in the land of 20-ruble liters. It turns out I paid almost seven dollars a gallon there. Everything in Finland, with the exception of Zoo admission at 8Euro for the three of us, was expensive. But seven bucks?!?

Anyway, we made it back through the borders in really good time; no problems with anything, except that the customs agent formulating our temporary import papers on the van informed me that, although the law allows for a six-month import period, that needs to be filled out at the offices in the place of residence. I was able by asking nicely to get her to give us three weeks instead of the standard two before the on-the-border permit runs out. So that's not so bad.

And И has agreed that if our experience getting the visas in Helsinki is indicative of the way things will be from now on, we're going to figure out another way. We've got to do it pretty quickly; the boy and my current visas are only good until September...

Weather

2007-05-28T09:32:00.000-07:00

5/28 20:33, Pushkin time

Continuing, life is interfering with my ability to regularly get to writing. It happens. The log-trailer project is coming together (first to be completed by Wednesday; remaining nine to be picked up on the 15th of June), the dump trucks are moving forward, and the factory work is still on track for a first build in the first week of August.

Last week I looked after a couple of British guys for a while. Both of them have been in the international gig for decades (one lives more or less permanently in South Africa). The non-africanized one had a whole host of good stories to tell -- many about his time as the representative of his US company back in the 80s in Baghdad -- back when they were the US's friends over there. As he put is, his old boss was hung just a couple months ago. In fact, he says that everyone he knew over there was either killed by the old regime, died during the Iran-Iraq war (he lived in Baghdad through the entire duration of that), or had been killed in the last few years. A hell of a thing, really.

In other things, Z's preschool is just about wrapped up. The music teacher there pulled A aside one recent morning to tell her about how well Z takes to instruments in general -- apparently, hearing something once he is generally able to reproduce it with minimal trying -- and to recommend we hook up with a nearby music academy to arrange for lessons for him. Which I did this evening after work. Between that and Aikido (I found a sensei right near us that will take Z on starting september at his old belt level) and school Z should be pretty occupied. It's only fair, since nowadays everyone tells us that he speaks better than I do -- which is probably true -- so he's ready to move on to normal-for-his-age doings. A and I have decided that he'll be spending time nevertheless over the summer keeping his English literacy skills fresh and helping her accumulate practice in Russian.

And tomorrow we go into Petersburg to spend what will probably end up being a good-sized chunk of the day first in picking up L's birth certificate at the Russian records place and then spending time at the US consulate to get it turned around into whatever US-equivalent paper as well as his passport. Then wednesday to work and other doings and then bright and early thursday morning Z, G, and I pack up and head out for Helsinki and camping and even more bureaucratic-garbage. At least we'll get some camping out of it.

And, to the heading of this one, the summer season in Petersburg has definitely started. During the daytime it's getting up into the mid-30s (call it 80s-90sF) with the humidity that comes of living in swamp country near a sea. It's not so bad for the kids and I -- I grew up with it and they're still not set in their ways -- but A being a weak lifelong-Portlander is having a bit tougher time of it. At least today, with everyone at work commenting on how hot it was, we're pretty safe to figure it won't be much worse than this. And as a bonus we have had during the past week at least four incidents of major thunderbangers with the soaking rain and everything that I remember so well. As with the climate, the kids are pretty neutral about them, but for A it's just another unfamiliarity.

And as for the light situation, my informal and incomplete survey a couple days back strongly indicates that we have just recently lost our remaining remnant of true dark until most likely July-August. It's still plenty dim around the 1AM timeframe (no reading on the street yet), but not so dark you could, for example, make out stars.

Oh yes. And also, this being the first hot day of summer, the trees (I forget the english name for the type) spent all day dropping their fuzz -- the stuff I commented on way back on my very first visit to Russia. G, as usual, was more or less oblivious; but Z was today struck by it. He collected together a softball-sized wad and is talking about stuffing a teddy-cow for his baby brother with it; it is one legitimate local use for the stuff...

Z is also riding a bike with no training wheels and rollerblading at a medium level. No sooner had he strapped the skates on outside than two older kids got theirs on and came over to help him figure out how to do it. And as for the bike, he had his first major wipeout over at И and К's place, losing a bit of skin off his elbow but hardly even noticing in his rush to get back up and going. Good stuff.

Another New Thing

2007-05-19T23:34:00.000-07:00

5/20 10:36, Pushkin time

We had Z's birthday party Friday night. He invited a half dozen kids from his preschool and a couple other friends over for bowling at the movie-theater-bowling-alley-restaurants-cafes complex right near the airport. I spent about an hour of prep time running around to the various eateries and arranging for deliveries to us at the lanes; we had fruits and veggies, salmon, shrimp, and eel sushi, and khachapuri. Sushi and khachapuri available in the same place was like a dream for Z. And the kids got to enjoy about two hours of bowling-based chaos with food.

Then yesterday morning, G and I took a quick jaunt down to Gatchina to scout out the land records office (more on that in a bit). Returning, it seems G found a bee or other such. It must have been quick, because he didn't complain about being stung. But by the time we got inside, the lid of his right eye had gotten a touch swollen. No big worries; though over the course of the day it did swell a bit more. And then this morning he woke up with about a 6"-diameter swelling over most of that side of his face. He can't open that eye and looks like absolute hell. But he's behaving as if nothing were wrong; and the medical advice we've solicited basically reassures us that he will be disfigured for maybe as much as 4-5 days, but otherwise nothing serious. It's a [my russian-english medical dictionary informs me] 'sensitivity', rather than an 'allergy' -- the med folks say that the latter involves respiratory problems and is fairly serious and rare.
As for what to do; pretty much the same as in the US. Hydrocortisone cream and antihistamines. If we had caught it right away, the local home remedy is the application of vinegar.
Oh well.

As regards the house, this last week was pretty eventful. We agreed on the house layout with the architect and have passed the project plans around to start accumulating bids. Also on monday I met again with the Kazakh guy who will be taking care of the paperwork side for us -- that is, getting the various approvals from the city, county, oblast, ecological, fire, electrical, and so forth. While this is a process that anyone can do themselves, vanishingly few actually do. Instead they hook up with a guy like ours, pay him an hourly rate, plus a bit of extra wheel-greasing to speed the process up (his example was that, for example, the fire approvals tend to have lines three days long. What he does is buy the inspector a nice bottle of cognac, give it to him in the parking lot at the end of the day, and ask him to open up the back door of the office a half-hour early the next day so they can get his stuff approved first-thing. Well worth the expense. Anyway, on Wednesday he brought out the head of a soil-sampling outfit and we arranged to have out profile-samples drilled this past Friday (based on which we can decide what kind of foundation we'll be needing). We'll be hearing about those in the first week of June.
Also, I sat with the dealership's lawyer for a bit to arrange a strategy for dealing with the neighbors who chopped off a corner of our lot over the winter. Pursuant to that, I'm taking his advice and starting the process of taking them to court. Step 1 is to get a legal document indicating exactly [i]who[/i] has broken our property rights (that's the way they say it here), that is, the legal owner of the lot and the buildings (not always the same person). Then step 2 will be to put together some sort of demonstration of what he has done -- a set of photos will do the trick handily. The after filing, the decision and court demands are done within 30 days. So I'm figuring mid-July for that; the nice thing is that they didn't chop off enough to stop us from proceeding with the building of our stuff. Anyway, step 1 is what G and I were doing in Gatchina -- the seat of the Gatchinskiy Region, in which all of this is located. I should get that answer in a couple days.

A Couple More Things

2007-05-13T23:19:00.000-07:00

5/14 10:20, Pushkin time

I've been meaning to get these up, too. Just no time until this morning.

For everyone's edification:

The receipt from RodDom №38

and

The summary we were given that will form the beginning of his medical records.

New Normal

2007-05-13T07:29:00.000-07:00

5/13 18:30, Pushkin time

So now that everyone is back home, things are more or less settling back down. As would be expected, we're all sleeping a bit less, though L pretty much sleeps fine through the night as bracketed by his feedings at midnight and 8AM and as interrupted by his 4AM.

We did, however, this past week find out what was all the fuss about the marriage and birth certificates. Apparently, while federal documents can be used anywhere, state documents are no good outside the US without an accompanying validation-type thing called an 'apostille'. Learning this, I called the US consulate here to find out that only the secretary of the issuing state can apply apostilles. So after email-corresponding with the Oregon SecState office to figure out the mechanics of it, I sent on Thursday the three certificates via DHL back to Salem along with a pre-paid return DHL airbill to get them back as quickly as possible. The apostilles cost ten bucks apiece (30 total); the shipping costs were five times that. Suck-o.

We also, pursuant to the process of having L US-papered and the visa stuff for he and the rest of us, got passport pictures taken today. The folks at the shop were agog at the need for a two-week-old to have passport photos taken; particularly to go in a document that will be valid until he is five. And the issue of the mechanics of getting his photo done was a bit of a challenge, too; we're hoping that a picture of him with his eyes mostly closed will work, since that's all we could get.

As for L, now that all the accounts have been settled, we can say exactly how much it cost to have him. At the roddom, we paid a total of 22,800rubles for the birth stuff, ancillary medicines, and night in the neonatal care place; at the children's hospital, the total bill for the couple days in their intensive care isolation ward and then the week in the main area, plus a half-dozen ultrasounds and ekgs and who even knows how many blood tests, plus follow-up on A came to a total of 32,300rubles. So the total -- since we weren't planning on the whole children's hospital thing -- came to a bit more than we were expecting; 56,100 rubles, which at today's rate is about $2173. Still, all things considered, not so bad; and it represents that [i]total[/i] cost, not just the copays.

Finally!

2007-05-08T09:32:00.000-07:00

5/8 19:33, Pushkin time

Sorry to have dropped off for a couple days. G got sick on top of my getting to commute every morning in and out of the city (a 20-minute one-way if traffic cooperates; a 90-minute one-way if not; and even more if things are really bad) so we've been pretty busy.

But today, the doctors decided that L had been checked enough, and this afternoon they checked he and A out of the hospital. So everyone is home. Yay!

Pictures from today

2007-05-05T11:15:00.000-07:00

Saturday

2007-05-05T09:17:00.000-07:00

5/5 20:19, Pushkin time

The boys and I were able to visit with A and L today. Both were pretty stoked, though G's attention was pretty short-lived. An amusing goings-on this morning, too. When a nurse was by to do a quickie check on L, A must have commented her that he didn't need the nose-tube anymore. To which the nurse replied, "okay," and then took the tube out (!!) We debated whether this was just a lucky coincidence in doctor's orders or a nurse who didn't have much in the way of future employment prospects. The doctor stopped by to check-in herself after the boys and I had left; and her somewhat surprised reaction sort of settled that question. But since L is eating well anyway, it's all fine.

The boys held L and we took all manner of pictures, which I will be going through and putting up as soon as the boys go to bed this evening.

Also, we did get the studded tires changed off the caravan finally. Finland won't let our car in if it has them, so we really had to put an end to the procrastination. The guy who did the tires-changing, a Kyrgyz on a temporary-residence deal, had the pleasure of both boys' company for the duration of the operation. G in particular asked enough questions that he could probably do a tire-swap himself by now; he even managed to sweet-talk the guy into letting him stomp on some of the control pedals on the tire-removal-press machine. Listening in, it is clear that G -- for all he has in terms of accent and rhythm -- still has a ways to go for vocabulary and grammar. But as everyone says, he's got more than enough time.

Oh yeah, and this morning on the way to the hospital G announced that his little brother was Russian -- after all, he is [i]from Russia[/i]. -snort-

End of Week

2007-05-04T10:39:00.000-07:00

5/4 21:40, Pushkin time

A bit of a worry yesterday. A called me to tell me that the doctor had said something to her about L being on antibiotics, and that from what she was able to glean, it had to do with an infection in his head (the words for 'antibiotics' and 'infection' are pretty much exactly the same in both languages). So my first mission when I got in was to track that down. And happily enough, I found that there had been a slight communication issue. The word for 'primarily' in Russian is "главно" [glavno] with the final 'o' sounding more like an 'uh'; the word for "head" is "голова" [golova], which is said with the first syllable pretty heavily suppressed into the second. So when the doctor -- who was also happy to see me, as she had been unable to clear up the mix-up once A had keyed-in on "head" -- explained to A that he was taking antibiotics mainly as an infection-preventative measure that is standard whenever a tube is left in the throat and/or stomach for longer than 48 hours, she heard the couple key words, plus something that sounded a lot like 'head'. I have a feeling we're going to be worrying about this kid for a lot longer than will ever be justified.

I did manage to get clearance from the docs, since A and L are in a private room, to take the older boys through the sanitization protocols to visit at the hospital tomorrow. Both are excited; G is, I'm sure, in for a heck of a time.

As for L himself, I happened to be by when his main doctor was stopping by to do a morning checkup, which woke him up and pissed him off. So I got to hear him scream and yell for the first time, which was nice (given all the circumstances). And he's popping his eyes open quite a bit more and periodically even looking at things. A commented that if we hadn't been through two other kids already, and as such already known that things like having not even very much eyeball control is normal in the first week or so, we'd probably be having tri-daily conniptions over the things he does -- or rather, doesn't do. But we can look at those kind of things and say, "nope, nothing wrong there; just normal baby stuff".

Between the two of us, we can't figure out if he particularly looks like either of the boys -- which probably means he doesn't very much. I'm thinking he looks a little bit like the oldest of my sisters (also an L; heh heh), but it's hard to say with any kind of certainty. A at this point has nothing. We'll get some better pictures this weekend and toss them up for comment.

News

2007-05-03T10:58:00.000-07:00

5/3 22:00, Pushkin time.

The sun is down, but just barely, as I finally get around to writing again. Still another month until White Nights.

This morning found A in much better spirits, and found L moved in to the room with her. He's still got his nose-tube for food; they say they will take it out once he regularly downs 50mL of food at each feeding (spaced three hours apart, round-the-clock). Also, A says that over the entire day today he's been, when awake, grabbing and thrashing and making various noises at her. Which is good.
They plugged him in to an EKG today for a couple of hours' monitoring; I'll have some idea of what they result tomorrow morning -- though A is more than capable of having gotten the point if there was anything showed up to worry about. At present, they have the two of them officially checked-in until the 13th. If he hits his marks sooner, they get out sooner (and we get some money back); if later.. well, we play it by ear. It's a bit too early to say for sure, but A might not be bringing L home this weekend; not such a big drama for her, now that she's able to stay with him, and as for the boys and I, we handle just fine.

Z's birthday is coming up, and as fortune would have it, there is a big, brand-new mega-entertainment thingy sprung up right near the airport (in fact, the complex's name, "Pulkovo 3" is a sort of joke off the fact that Russian international airports are all doubles of their domestic ones -- that is, Sheremetevo 1 is the domestic in north Moscow, Sheremetevo 2 is the international; Koltsovo 1 is the domestic in Yekaterinburg, Koltsovo 2 is the international). And having heard the rumors, we checked it out recently and confirmed that it does in fact have a fairly massive, nice bowling area. So we're setting up for Z's seventh to be an echo of his sixth; simply relocated to the other side of the planet. He is massively stoked.

I also swung by his soon-to-be-school this morning to check int the fact that his name wasn't listed on the sheets they put up a week ago. As the vice-director told me, "most parents should worry about that, but you shouldn't," since the sponsored kids are automatics. But we did find out the name of his teacher -- which, even though I wrote down, I have succeeded in forgetting at least six times; it is definitely Svetlana something-evna something-a. That is for sure. So Z is hooked up.

And finally, to my distress, I have confirmed to myself the beginning of a slow erosion of my english-composition skills. Translating an article for our colleagues in the States, I ran across a phrase having to do with particular actions taken by the police as having been... And I still can't come up with the non-awkward, correct way to say it. The words in Russian mean "outside" as it relates to the "rightful" "field", and they fit very perfectly together. But I stared and stared at it and made a dozen or so efforts at capturing the meaning without completely re-writing the paragraph from scratch. And just couldn't do it. (and then the big electric crane in the yard next door had a short which blew out a fuse in the transformer for our block, removing the immediacy of the issue) I'll sleep on it and see what I come up with tomorrow.

Also, speaking of money-related matters, we've just about got the second dump truck done, are mid-way through the first steps on our third -- this one of a set of three we ordered using a body assembled in Florida from parts made in China, and a total piece of crap that we will never order again -- and spent a chunk of this afternoon pre-prepping our fourth. Also, the parts have all come in for the prototype trailer I'm working on for А Ш (in whose hands the trailer manufacture side of the business has been for the past three years here), and the half-mile worth of metal beams has come in for the set of ten deposit-already-down logging trailers that we're selling to a timber outfit in Irkutsk, and which we expect to turn into a several-dozen-trailer order once these start getting delivered. All the profits for which I get a chunk of. And considering the fact that in Russia a project is not even worth considering unless it trigs out to at least a 200% yearly return, Yay me!

Oh yeah, and the truck manufacture. Almost forgot about that. As it stands, we'll be getting the first set of kits in July, and turning out our first new truck in the first week of August; our ramp-up is tentatively oriented to: w1 - 1; w2 - 1; w3 - 2; w4 - 2; w5 - 3; w6 - 3; w7 - 4; w8 - 4; w9 - 5; w10 - 5; w11 - 6; w12 - 6, which takes us all the way through the end of October having built 42 trucks. Which on the one hand is pretty small, but on the other hand, doesn't even come close to meeting demand, so represents a more or less regular component of commission-based dough. And the space we've got laid out is physically capable of handling 6 trucks production a day -- that is, 30 a week, 1500 a year. The market will bear it, too. It is at that point (actually, before that point; really, somewhere around w5-7 we start running into it) that the question of staffing becomes key. Crazy.

The Next Phase

2007-05-02T07:00:00.000-07:00

5/2 18:00, Pushkin time

This morning, A moved into a room in the children's hospital, where she will be staying with L until he is ready to come home. When we arrived this morning, the doctor with him explained that all with him is perfectly fine with two exceptions: he appears not to have an adequately-developed swallowing reflex (again, thanks to the wonder of Latin roots, the 'glottal'naya refleks' was something I was able to pretty easily puzzle out; we bought this past weekend a Russian/English, English/Russian medical dictionary, which I promptly forgot at home this morning); and he is not adequately active.
For the time being, because of the first, he isn't getting to stay in the room with A; once he no longer needs to eat through a tube in his nose -- just what we need, another kid who associates "nose" with "food"... -- he and A can stay together. They said this morning it might be a couple days, but then A called after his 3PM feeding to say that they gave him a bit of milk from a bottle and he managed to get it down; so he may pick up faster than they expected. As for the second, now that she's been with him for several hours straight, A says that she thinks he just has the same low-motivation character trait as did (does) G. He gets fed at the hospital every three hours, gets changed even more regularly, and has really nothing to bother him at all. So why make noise? It looks like I may be tasked tomorrow morning with explaining to the hospital doctors that we want to intentionally make our fragile baby somewhat less comfortable, so he can come home sooner. At least, I'm sure that is how it will sound to them. By now, I'm pretty well used to the horrified look that I get whenever I try to do anything based on my experiences with our first two kids. Although the head nurse did tell me, amusedly, that I was much better than the last American parents she took care of (a few years back). Apparently the mom spoke no Russian and the dad spoke even less than I do, and the day after the baby was born, they imply announced to everyone that they were leaving the hospital. And try as they might to explain the need for all the follow-up and whatnot, the dad just kept insisting that "they didn't need to do all of that" and that they were ready to go. Shocking.

By the way, they were absolutely unwilling simply to let A stay at the hospital. If she's going to be in a ward where children are (babies, no less..), she had to be fully checked-out for possible infectious diseases and whatnot. Which means more blood and pee tests and the like. These are the mandatory steps someone needs to take if they want to stay with their kid in the hospital around here. All together they ran us something like 350r -- less than $15 -- so no big deal (ohh. the look on the nurse's face when I said that about the blood tests without consulting A. "what kind of a husband are you, 'no big deal'??"). But that done, she's in.

Anyway, shortly after I left, my phone rang; A calling. Apparently someone had come to talk to her, and after a few exchanged phrases -- A says she very clearly got the fact that what she wanted had something to do with "hospital" "baby", and "money" -- they decided to call me up to straighten things out. Basically, she wanted to let me know that the hospital's policy is that free care is given only up until the point that the patient is no longer in medical danger. And then, for non-citizens, either an insurance company needs to be brought into the mix, or an agreement with some level of pre-payment needs to be concluded for the remaining services. This is for L; A's agreement for the lodging and the tests to get lodged was already taken care of. When I suggested that it could maybe wait until tomorrow morning, when I would be coming back by, the hospital lady basically said no problem, whenever it was convenient for me; she just wanted to make sure I knew about it. We're still tallying up the total cost of the whole Birth-of-L. Given the extra excitement, it's sure to go over a thousand dollars US, but it looks like not by much. So that's not so bad then.

And finally, today I did make time to stop back in at work to try to clear up any half-hanging things that I had run out on last week, and also to get the process moving on the boys' and my next visas. Since the invitations had finally been issued on Saturday, the plan was to fill out all the necessary forms, drop the whole packet, passports included, into a DHL envelope to a tourist agency in Finland, and let them get the visas and then ship the passports back to us. Of course, I called to confirm before sending things off. And found out that things have changed a bit on me.
Three weeks ago, a Russian department occupying itself with such things published a new rule forbidding the post or parcel courier shipment of passports. And then, it turns out that the law now says that only one visa can be held at a time, meaning that the moment a new visa is applied in a passport, the old visa is automatically cancelled -- even if it still has time to run. And it has always been the case that foreigners need to get Russian visas from outside the country.
So it became clear that rather than a quick day-trip across the border and back on the 2nd with visas already pre-obtained was now going to be a full trip to a russian consulate somewhere to get the visas, and then a return to Russia no sooner than the 2nd of June (when the old visas expire, and the invitation is written for the new ones to start). And further, when I asked about the possibility of going to Tallinn instead of Helsinki to get our visas -- I have a friend who lives in Tallinn; I know no one in Finland -- I was told that a couple of days ago, in protest of something or other, Estonia suspended operations at their consulate in Moscow, and in retribution, Russia suspended issuance of visas at their Estonian operations. goddammit. So, Helsinki it is...
On the plus side, we confirmed that driving our cars out and back in will not be the tragic mistake we had originally assumed it would be. So the current plan has Z, G, and I leaving Petersburg on the 31st of May to go to Helsinki, camping out somewhere near Helsinki (we'll bring our gear; there are plenty of good places to do it), on June 1 getting our new visas at the russian consulate, then driving back to Petersburg on the 2nd. What makes it exciting is the fact that June 1 is a friday, and if something fails to go properly, we'll be stuck until monday to try again.
That temporary-resident thing gets more and more appealing...

Process

2007-05-01T03:52:00.000-07:00

5/1 14:54, Pushkin time

The latest update: L is making good progress; they've asked A to be ready to start feeding him tomorrow (which is when they'll both be moved into a room there). The doctors say that he's pretty quiet, which is most likely related to this whole thing, but which he will recover from. Just, as the doctor told me today, "not overnight". He did start grumbling at me a bit while I was holding him this morning; it's a start. A is doing about as well as could be expected -- the doctors/nurses at the hospital with L keep asking me how his mom is doing, to which I have by now crafted my answer of 'crappy - he's still not home with her yet'. But tomorrow will be a major improvement.

It is still cold out - puddles that formed in the sun froze over again overnight and are still ice-scrimmed where they have remained in the shade. Ahhh. May.

Holy crud.

2007-04-29T22:35:00.000-07:00

4/30 09:35, Pushkin time

Please observe what we saw out the window this morning (30 April, remember...):

That's right. It appears we have about four inches of snow accumulated overnight, with more falling pretty strong right now. Take THAT! all you people who looked at me funny for not yet getting around to having my studded tires changed off!

Really, that's about all there is to say this morning. We'll be heading back out to the hospital very shortly now.

Further events

2007-04-29T08:27:00.000-07:00

4/29 19:32, Pushkin time

This morning we got a call from L's doctor at the Children's hospital letting us know that since he was so far out of any risks he would be getting moved out of the neonatal intensive care section into the follow-up-and-observation section. So A and I piled all into the car and headed right off into to city to see about getting her moved in with him a couple days earlier than we had been led to believe.

Unfortunately, this was still not to be. What they did this morning was start the process of moving him -- said process to most likely occupy still two more days. He's in an in-between place in the hospital, not in the high-grade isolation-type area he was when he came in, but still not an actual private-type room. He is, however, finally wearing his own clothes and fully unplugged from everything, which is good. A was able to pick him up and carry him around a little bit, and she said he's starting to make some noises (now that his mouth and throat aren't occupied). We'll be back there more-than-frequently, until they elect to set A and he up in a room of their own, or until the 2nd, when the room his doctor pre-arranged for us yesterday comes available. As it appears right now, we're looking at maybe a week until he gets to come home.

As an aside: of course, Z and G are aware of the fact that their brother is still at the hospital; however, A and I agreed fairly early on that with them we wouldn't be going into any kind of detail as to the exact reason why this is so. The boys are perfectly satisfied with "the doctors aren't ready for him to leave yet", and much more in the way of details would be not only unnecessary for their comprehension, but likely just distress them needlessly. So when the boys get to Skype-talking again, please keep that in mind.

More Updating

2007-04-27T23:57:00.000-07:00

4/28 10:57, Pushkin time

A's doctor released her a half-hour ago. We settled out the rest of our bill (the part pertaining to the epidural and L's stay in the neonatal care unit overnight, plus our nightly fee for the private room -- I'll get a final tally once we have L back at home with us) and got the stack of paperwork that comes with it. One document in particular is our 'receipt' for the baby. Fairly soon, I need to take that to the records office in Pushkin and have his birth certificate issued. С П told A that birth certificates are such a critically important document in Russia that they are the one thing that gets issued very quickly (within a week, we have been told to expect). Then with that we make an appointment and go to the US consulate to get whatever official document they want us to have preparatory to getting a passport for L. Then the passport, and once we have that, we can start the process of getting his visa invitation and then his visa. All of this in time for when he and A will be back in the US sometime in August.

Or so the plan goes.

For now, we are briefly stopping off at home to swap some gear and whatnot before heading on to the children's hospital to meet with the representative from the specialist-horde. Our intention is that A will stay there -- I'm led to understand that they have private rooms available there as well -- with L until the doctors are finished with their follow-up and are ready to let him out into the world. We will know more later today. A is pretty much over her nervousness about being by herself, language-wise; we found at the maternity hospital that a lot of what needs talking about can be done adequately on a simple vocabulary, plus since they're only just keeping an eye on things now, there's not much chance of anything really comprehension-time-critical coming up.

Will say more once we've done a bit more.

Update

2007-04-27T06:11:00.000-07:00

4/27 17:26, Pushkin time

Hey everybody!

Not the most flattering picture, I know; but what else to do?...

This morning A's doctor told us that a release of her tomorrow is pretty well going to happen (as before, she heals up pretty quickly). On the other hand, L they were still not comfortable enough about to let him go right yet. This afternoon they moved him over to the Children's Hospital №1 in Petersburg. I went more or less with him -- the reception guy at the hospital sent me on a wild chase all over the 10-story building before I basically accidentally found where he was -- and was told that, since he just arrived, they are keeping him in the 'non-emergency, new arrivals' section until the horde of specialists comes to look him over tomorrow morning. And that area is a no-parents part of the hospital, so A and I will be spending one last night in RodDom №38, before heading off to the next place to join L.

Of course, doctors being who they are, no one would give me anything approaching an exit date for L until the specialists have seen him, though I did bully the main on-call pediatrician into telling me that based on what they see L is most likely just fine and that they will probably just want to unplug him and watch him for maybe a week (this would be in a room where A could stay with him). But it is all for the specialist-horde to say for sure. We will find out at around 1PM tomorrow.

We've had some other comforting words. The neonatal whatever-you-call-them doctor at the maternity hospital wanted to make sure that I understood that L's situation, while uncommon, is nothing they don't see at this hospital at least a couple of times a year, and that she has yet to have a single occurrence of any kind of problems or damage as a result of it. Then later today one of the African guys -- with whom I was working before getting the "it's time to go" call from A -- rang up to see how things were and when I relayed the bare-bones story, said that he was born a 'blue baby' (as they call them in South Africa) and went his first five or so minutes without breathing at all; and he's turned out alright, too. So at both ends, hopeful words.

As for the boys, Z has convinced the sitter that he is up to cooking (with help) and has made now two breakfasts -- the first, eggs with baked tomatoes; the second, blini (the Slavic analogue to pancakes or crepes) -- and a bit of a dinner. They're still approaching the whole situation as a get-away-from-the-parents opportunity, and are making the most of it.

By now everyone on the maternity hospital staff has met and talked at least a little bit with A. Both she and I get comments (surprised, when they find out that she's only been here a little while and didn't ever study formally) about how well she speaks. Also, I'd guess that nearly a third of the staff studied English when they were in school, and other than a couple words that are basically the same in both languages, nearly all of them can't remember a lick of it. As the anesthesiologist (who studied german, but that's not the point) said, 'it's not so much that he studied English, so much as that he was in an English class for a couple years.'

Sound familiar, anyone?...

Outnumbered

2007-04-26T08:21:00.000-07:00

4/26 19:21, Pushkin time

It's what A and I now officially are. Our latest addition, L, was born today in the Pushkin RodDom №38 at somewhere around 3PM, Pushkin time (I was a bit busy to take close notes). He weighed in at 3.95kg (8lb, 11-1/2oz) and was 56cm (do the math yourself; 2.54cm to the inch) long.

A called me in the afternoon of yesterday to let me know that the time had come. I -- amazingly -- got straight through the train crossings and home to her at about 5PM, right about the time the labor stuff quit. After going over our options a couple of times, we figured to go to the hospital just to be on the safe side. Z and G got to have a babysitter stay over, and promptly proceeded to abuse that privilege by staying up until almost 11 and having mainly cookies and sugar-with-tea for dinner. But A and I stayed the night at the hospital, and around noon today her water broke and we headed off to the birth floor to get things going.

After a couple hours trying, the doctors ended up getting the baby out, suction-cup-style. And, to add a bit of (not at all desired) excitement, when he came out he wasn't breathing. At all. In the maybe five seconds before they rushed him off to the baby-care section, I saw enough to put me in a terrible state - only bested by the state A was in; no matter how well I was able to block her view (and I tried, when I realized something was wrong) she nevertheless did not fail to notice that L did not cry at all. And then the baby doctors left, and nurses came in to clean up.

And everyone was really quiet.

And not talking to us.

...

And then, about six forevers later, A's doctor came up to tell us that L had not been breathing when he came out, and that they had him on a breathing apparatus, and that at this point he was doing okay on the apparatus, but they wanted (of course) to keep him in the special ward, since they weren't sure of the prognosis except for 'stable'.

And then nothing for another handful of eternities.

When finally another doctor came up and said that, in a few minutes I could go down and see L and talk to the pediatrics folks. Which, after offering a few more piss-poor reassurances to A, I did.

On the next floor down, they had L on basically the standard baby-warming tray, in blankets, with a beeping, number-flashing machine behind him and a tube in his mouth. But he breathed when i walked in, and wiggled a bit. And the doctors told me that he was basically only asphyxiated for the brief interval of time between the clamping of his cord and the getting him downstairs; and that before they had even been able to hook the throat-tube up to the air pump, he started breathing on his own (they unplugged him for a bit to let me see for myself. And as far as damage from oxygen lack, they said that at such a young age, the nervous system is very 'plastic', and this it would take a severe amount of damage to have any kind of lasting effect; then they flipped a bright light on right into his face, whereupon he sort of jumped and scrunched up even further (they say that the light reflex in newborns is one of the more sensitive to anoxia, and since his is going strong we don't have cause to worry). I was so relived I didn't even think to try to poke at him. Since Pushkin isn't a huge place, they said they would want to send him tomorrow into Petersburg, to a big pediatric hospital, so as to free up their equipment just in case another newborn needed it -- but not to worry, they had duplicate equipment in a special neonatal ambulance, and he wouldn't be left hanging for any appreciable time at all.

Back quickly with A I had to try to convince her of what I had seen, but she (of course) insisted on rushing the nurses taking care of her to get to go down and see for herself. And when she finally did, at close to 4:30, he was even wigglier -- especially when he heard her talking. By the time I had to briefly bail out to pick the boys up from their preschool (К was nice enough to take care of their delivery to and from home over the past night), the word was that he was so improved that they might end up handing him off to us tonight or tomorrow morning, rather than going into Petersburg. The pediatrics people were particularly affected by his reaction to hearing A's voice. No lethargy there...

So. Lacking context, it might appear that we are not out of the woods; but this is Russia, and children are the absolute priority in this culture. Everything is in very good hands, and from all appearances we actually left the woods a while ago -- they just want to make sure; they do not take chances with children here.

We did take a picture of him less than two hours after he was born. But I left the hospital only 95% mentally functional and the camera fell into that missing 5. I'll get it up later. Basically, he's pink and scrunched. And he has a big head-hickey from the suction cup they ended up using to get him out.

Beginning

2007-04-23T06:17:00.000-07:00

4/23 15:18, Pushkin time

Yet another long hiatus. As we approach and pass the birth of our third kid, I would expect these to continue to occur. Stuff comes up.

Thursday passed without comment. And Friday A and I visited the doctor at the maternity hospital for a check-up; the appointment was at 4PM, and I as even figuring that I'd make it back to work for a quick stop afterwards. That was not to be.
After some medical-activity, the doctor turned to me and explained that he wanted to keep A there for a while to check up on her. And wham-bang, she was hospital-gowned and checked into a room in the "pre-birth" part of the maternity hospital (that being the only thing with which they occupy themselves, all things are referenced to it). And I was being told that she might be kept there for as much as five days, at which point they might send her home until labor started and she came back (!!!). So after a bit of panicking, we resolved to let her stay there for the night; I would pick up the kids and get things set up for a just-in-case over the weekend, and we would aim to have her out the next day. Her doctor lightened things a little bit when he said that 'if she was doing better' she could probably leave the next day.
So I left and A got to spend the night alone as the sole nonfluent-Russian speaker in a hospital wing. Her friend, Т, as soon as she found out what had happened, came by to drop off some goodies and magazines (which helped morale probably more than I did..) and then volunteered to take both of the boys the next day so we could get things moving without distractions. Which works out really well for them; Т is the mom of Z's friend Masha and G's friend Makar (a not uncommon boys' name these days around here). So they were stoked.
And in the morning, A was well and truly sick of the hospital (visiting hours, by the way, start at 11AM). When I showed up after dropping off the boys, the nurse-doorman almost wouldn't let me in -- apparently there are no visitors for the pre-birth wing -- until another nurse recognized me and explained that we were on the 'pay' wing. Ohhhh. In that case, here's your white paper gown-thingy; head on up. Several of the nurses commented to me on how good of a job A did talking and understanding -- they work 48-hour shifts with 48-hours off in between them, so she had only the one set of nurses. Anyway, we were just about to the point of plotting how to make a speedy escape (A knows how to take out an IV, and was more than willing to make use of that knowledge), when her doctor came in with the news that all the tests they had done had come back fine, and that she could go back home. Which we did -- fast. In hindsight, it was probably a good experience, since we have a much better idea of what to expect when we come to actually have the baby.
And the boys look at it as a good time they got to have with their friends.

One other thing that I apparently forgot to detail from a week ago weekend. A friend of mine, А, invited Z and I to come to the banya for the regular sunday-evening thing that he and his buddies have been doing for better than fifteen years (and to which they have been taking their sons since as soon as they were old enough). So Z got another hard-core cultural experience. А's son, Sergey, is a couple years older than Z, and sort of tour-guided him through things. Z was particularly enamored of the dump-a-bucket-of-cold-water-on-your-head device for immediately after getting out of the banya. And he amused pretty much everyone when it was his turn to get the birch-branches treatment by -- before the branches had even touched him -- giving a little shriek and jumping up and running out to dive into the pool. But he had a good time, which is the main thing. So once we get the new baby set up, we'll almost certainly be making a regular thing of it. Eventually, G will get to come too. That will be quite an experience for all of us.

And also; we had an unexpected pleasant surprise; С П called on Thursday to say that he was driving up to Finland on saturday and maybe would stop by if we were up to it. So we got to entertain a guest and the boys got to show off for yet another person. He is vacationing in Ireland, and at this time of year tickets out of Moscow are expensive enough that it is cheaper to drive to Finland and fly out of one of the major airports there. Now that we know about it, we're definitely going to look into it as an option for people coming out to visit us or for us to go to visit back in the US. It'd be a four-hour train ride at the end of the flight, but according to С П you can easily knock off almost five hundred bucks a ticket.

2007-04-18T05:21:00.000-07:00

4/18 16:22, Pushkin time

The tax issue got resolved in a relatively satisfactory fashion (that is, no illegalities or mischaracterizations were found, so the cops made something up and fined us for it) and things have settled into a relatively comfortable level at work. I did get to spend Monday and Tuesday this week giving a sort of informal training course to a German and a Russian guy from Kazakhstan -- both were born there; the German left at age 35 to live in Germany for a while, but came back 'home' after only a couple years; he speaks better russian than german anyway. How he ended up being born there is a long story he never got around to telling me...

Really, the kids' lives have been more interesting than mine these last few days. On Thursday, G got invited to come to the birthday party of a friend of his. Since A wasn't feeling great on saturday (and Z was misbehaving) G and I went alone to the party. A four-year-old's birthday party, I can now confirm, is pretty much exactly the same no matter where it is happening. But G had a good time and the entire time was spent speaking russian - which he does very well when it is expected of him. After the party, G's friend's dad got to mentioning how much they missed seeing Z, and that, by the way, he and some friends had been making a regular thing of sunday-afternoon banya visits for going on forever; they bring along their boys with them too, would Z and I like to join them?

And then Sunday we ended up all out and running into some other of the kids' friends with their families and spent a decent chunk of time being shown around the springtime-with-kids spots in Pushkin. A ended up hitting it off really well with one of the moms (who has four kids, which is pretty big for around here), and they have been making a regular thing of getting together during the days for language practice and just to get out of the house for awhile.

Otherwise, we're just sort of hanging around, waiting for the next kid to come. Everything is pretty much as ready as it can be...

---

Oh, by the way, I did get nabbed by the cops turning left where it was strongly implied by signage that I shouldn't turn left (the fact that these cops were camped out in a prime location to spot people making that move and not much else strongly implies that I'm not the only one to not hew to that implication). Fairly straightforward, I got out and argued for a bit with the cop, both of us drawing diagrams in the dirt on the caravan's windows for a little bit, before giving up my license and passport. Then while we were waiting for the passenger seat in the cop car to free up (like I said, I'm not by far the only one to get nabbed making that move), he wanted to know about the van - how we liked it, how hard it was to get it over here, what kind of prices he could expect to find buying out of the US. Then into the car with the other cop to negotiate and pay my 500r and then afterwards, he wanted to chat a bit about the van, having just bought a 2003 model-year one himself. Stuff like where do we go to have it worked on, have we found any good spare parts places around the city, what kind of fuel economy it should get, and so forth. Cops around here are so civilized; I actually caught myself thinking, while I was waiting with the other cop on the side of the road for the guy in front of me to get processed, how nice of a day it was to be spending some time outside having a friendly conversation.

I can't recall ever being in the condition to have those kind of thoughts around cops in the States. But maybe that's just my memory acting up on me...

Tax Season

2007-04-12T00:45:00.001-07:00

4/12 11:46, Pushkin time

In Russia, too, it appears.

Yesterday afternoon I got a call on my mobile from К. She asks where I am, and finding out that I am at my desk, tells me not to go anywhere until she calls again. Umm.. okay.

Shortly afterwards the server answering for our email and our internet access shuts off. So Е, А М, and I are sitting around for a bit with not much to do (I actually had a bit of translation to catch up on, but nevertheless...) So for about an hour and a half we hung around as things got very quiet. I popped briefly out to pee, an on the way back stopped by the secretary to ask about getting some mail sent out. Everyone there was quiet and preoccupied, too. By this point, I was somewhere between mildly concerned and wondering if some sort of elaborate (but very well executed) practical joke was being played on me. Fairly quickly, I figured out that the secretary wasn't going to be doing anything right then, and I'd be best heading back to wait where I was told. On the way, I ran into one of the dealership's couriers, and asked him what was up. His answer, while in the general usage is very good, in the specific sense of 'what the heck is going on right now?' is somewhat less helpful -- "It's just Russia". Umm.. okay - again.

So back in the office, and after maybe another ten minutes С С-ч comes in and tells us that we should all take off (it being still an hour before the end of business hours). At least the beginnings of an explanation were available from him - 'the cops are here, looking at stuff; best not to talk to them'. I suppose that beats no explanation at all. Of course, we all get up and grab our stuff to leave. Е grabs a handful of papers off his desk, folds them up, and stuffs them down the front of his pants; seeing the look on my face, he starts snickering (Russians are pretty fond of jokes) and pulls the blank sheets back out and tosses them in the trash.

So we all went home. And this morning, coming in, there was still the quiet. Apparently the cops were here with И and И В until five this morning, looking for some excuse to come down on them. Of course, there being nothing to find, they settled for making up some garbage about not having a Russian-truck certification (we don't need them, since all we deal in are American trucks) and about not having an ecological statement for parking trucks in our parking lot (??). The fine they elected to assess was paid, and they were sent off a bit ago. But as И pointed out, they had neither justification, nor right (according to the law) to do what they did; so it might not be unreasonable to assume that a competitor of ours paid someone, somewhere, to come and hassle us. Since the fine we paid was around ten thousand dollars, the next question is, how much did the instigator pay them? It is possible that they could be satisfied; alternately, a big sum of money could have been laid down at a very high level, and now that the first brigade (these guys were tax inspectors, more or less) has been sent away empty-handed -- a mere ten thousand dollars cash-in-pocket is pretty empty-handed in a country where most businesses genuinely are operating outside traditional legal parameters -- another brigade will be dispatched to seize computers, copy files, and so forth. Just in case, they gave me a run-down of stuff to look for on my computer and on the papers on and around my desk and set me, along with everyone else, to tidying up. Of course, I'm new to the whole thing (И says that the frequency of inspections varies with the profit margins in the industry; guys who sell apples and watermelons next to the train stations don't get hit at all; truck dealers seem to get about once every two or three years) so it took me a pretty long time to go through things. Some of the guys here were very helpful with advice on how to arrange things in day-to-day operations so that a cleaning can be done more quickly without a fear of losing something important. The new skill-sets I am coming into over here.

What else? Oh yes. I sent out yesterday the kids' birth certificates and passports, and A and my marriage certificate for Official, Notarized Translation, pursuant to our getting the temporary residency status. And in the afternoon got a call from the courier at the translation bureau (there is only one outfit in the city licensed to the required level of Officialdom); he handed the phone off to the clerk there, who proceeded to tell me that she couldn't verify our birth and marriage certificates, since they weren't officialized copies. Of course, they are in fact just those things (A having obtained them freshly from the state of Oregon people in January/February), but since they lacked stamps or embossed seals, the clerk was insisting that she couldn't validate them. I in an increasingly apoplectic manner, informed her that Oregon doesn't use those things, to which she responded that she had a copy of a certificate from the USA that was so marked. Then I, continuing to edge-towards freaking out at her, explained that each state does there own thing, and that there was no such thing as a "United States" birth certificate, to which she responded that we needed to have something from our federal government for it be validated, to which I again explained that the states each answer for those documents, and that there are not even overall standards for how each state has to do it. Shortly afterwards, I told her just to do the damn translation and stamp it however the hell she wanted; we'll take the issue up with the immigration folks when we actually get to applying. Grr.

Cold Snap

2007-04-09T03:07:00.000-07:00

4/9 14:08, Pushkin time

Last week wrapped up with a classic Portland winter pattern -- snow and maybe a sprinkling of hail in the evenings or overnight, melting off by mid-day. Sunday we even had as muchas a mild blizzard for an hour or so; still by now it's all gone except where the sun hasn't yet shone.

The big doing of the last couple days was actually this morning. Finally, Friday, I gave up on trying to get through and explain my needs to the home-visit medical clinic -- if you remember, for a Russian visa of validity longer than 90 days, everyone needs to get an HIV test. I asked К if her offer to do it for me still stood, and she in a matter of maybe two minutes on the phone had everything set up for a nurse to come out first thing monday morning.
As she hung up, I commented on how easy it was for her to do; every time I called, the guy who answered would ask one or two strange questions and then hang up -- by the sixth time I called, he must have recognized my voice and just hung up right away. К's response: "What guy? there's no guy answering phones at the clinic..."
Umm.

So we checked the number I had been calling; I was off by one digit from the clinic number. So for the past week, I have apparently been crank-calling some Russian guy and asking him to take a blood sample from me. And in hindsight, the questions he was asking me weren't all that strange after all, given the context of the conversations. Good thing we didn't actually go through with it...

Anyway, this morning, as advertised, a nurse came by our place with her blood-draw kit and paperwork. G insisted on going first (in fact, he was so stoked to have a new person to yell Russian at that I ended up having to remove him from the room while Z was getting done). Sitting on my lap, he watched the entire setup phase; the uncapping of the needle; the wipe-down of his arm; even the approach of the needle to his skin -- all perfectly calm. Even when the metal touched his skin -- not a whimper. And then, when it went in, he gives a little scream and a little jump and starts bitching out the nurse about how it hurts and why did she have to do that and so on. Pretty good vocabulary on him too, it seems. Then after G, I went, then Z. Amusingly, the receptionist at the clinic appears to have messed up our names -- not only spelling, which I suppose over the phone for foreign names is understandable, but also the order and concept. She had mine right in principle, but had listed my first name as our last name, and our last name as the boys' middle name and as my first name. No problem; straightened out easily enough. And the whole thing (testing included) came to about thirty-five bucks apiece, and took maybe twenty minutes if you were to include the time spent on the phone (with the clinic, not with the poor guy one digit off from the clinic). Not such a bad deal.

April 4

2007-04-03T23:58:00.000-07:00

4/4 11:00, Pushkin time

Our stretch of warm, dry weather broke, as you can see from the above (featuring one of the dealership's security guards on patrol). At the moment, an hour and a half after I snapped it, the sun is out, only a light snow is falling, and the inch or so that piled up is turning into slush. G will be livid; he was expecting a second winter. Word is that this kind of thing is normal pretty much throughout the month of April.

In addition to all of the mad effort that is going into preparations for the Moscow show and the certification of some new trucks and the completion of several of my projects (and the projecting for construction of our house and the actual beginning of construction of a fourth floor onto И В's house), there has begun a new frenzy of activity.
Some two weeks ago, the Russian government -- as required to be admitted to the WTO -- passed a new, much more stringent law for copyright. Where previously the fine for having a pirated piece of software was 300,000 rubles (something no one really worried about, since the cop that discovered such a thing would easily take a hundred-dollar on-the-spot payment to let things slide. Now the fine has been raised to 500,000 rubles, or six years in jail. This is, for each unregistered piece of software. And to make something like that go away informally... well, no one is really sure what kind of money that would take. And no one wants to find out.
So, after some scrambling and strategizing, the dealership is on the verge of doing a major migration of almost all its programs onto remote servers (where they can still be used, but will not be resident if a raid comes; shifting to Linux freeware for the absolutely necessary things like operating systems and the webserver software; and otherwise getting things in a new order. It's less convenient, but at the end things should work pretty much the same.
Of course, another effect of the new laws is that DVDs, CDs, and programs can no longer legally be sold anywhere outside of actual stores. We've noticed over the past weeks that the price of DVD movies has gone up, and that the selection has gone down. It is a shame that the underground (literally -- crosswalks for major intersections in the city go under the road and there are kiosks lining them in their entirety) kiosks aren't going to be as prevalent for a while. But there are still the 'internet stores'; where you can order on the internet and then either have shipped to you or go meet a guy somewhere to do a person-to-person transaction. И says that it would take ten years of concerted effort to shut that kind of thing down, if it could be done at all. The Soviet Union couldn't do it, and there's no reason to think it would be any easier for the current guys.
And besides, they say that once the WTO admission is a done deal the government will back off on the law. After all, most of the government guys have a piece of the grey DVD market (they'в be fools not to; the margin is too good). They even say that Putin has an outfit on a chunk of land he owns. So no worries; it's just a temporary bump.

weekend

2007-04-01T08:59:00.000-07:00

4/1 20:00, Pushkin time

Friday we got the dump truck body mounted; this coming week we'll wrap it all up and then it will go down to Moscow to be run through some testing so we can get our certification to make and sell those kind of things; then off to the big motor show at the end of April (which I won't be going to, since the baby will be born sometime in that time period).

Speaking of which, A and I went to the maternity hospital in Pushkin on friday afternoon to get things arranged for when the baby comes. We met the director of the hospital and had a bit of a tour around the various rooms they have; since we're paying everything cash, we at the end had written up an agreement to cover the birth and associated medical stuff surrounding it, including the basic cost of a room. Depending on which is available when we actually get there, we'll be using one of two a-bit-more-up-scale rooms, whose cost is an additional nightly charge (the 'nice' one is 400r a night; the 'great' one is 2000r a night). At the end, and ater meeting a few of the other staff there, the director asked if we had any requests for doctors or nurses or whatnot. The only thing i could think of was to ask if they could maybe have someone who had a few words of english to make A feel a little bit more comfortable. Right away the director gets on his phone and starts scoping out what it will take to arrange that. Pretty cool.
Anyway, it looks like the final cost of having the kid will be somewhere in the range of 600-800 dollars -- which is right about in line with what it cost us in co-pays to have our other two kids. And of course, for this one there will definitely be no insurance-billing-related screw-ups like there were with G (who, for a while on paper, was apparently circumcised twice). And as for taking care of Z and g while A and I are occupied, we have a few options available, so we'll be able to actually more or less choose (or maybe even use more than one of them) when the time comes. Which is also nice.

We went out on saturday to Pokrovskaya and took a bunch of pictures and some video (doofus that I am, I read the 'battery almost empty' picture as 'battery almost full' -- so we don't have as much video as I'd like). That will go up either here or on A's site fairly soon.

daylight

2007-03-29T00:44:00.000-07:00

3/29 11:45, Pushkin time

Been slacking here, it seems.

In my defense, Monday disappeared almost as quickly as it came, what with the catch-up from the previous week of accompanying-the-Canadian. And Sunday I spent a good chunk of with Z out at Pokrovskaya (I am committed to photographing it as it progresses for all to see) checking up on things and chatting with М and otherwise occupying with stuff that I had to let slip a bit during the last week. And Tuesday went almost as quickly as Monday. And Wednesday -- I really have no excuse for that one; just didn't get around to it.

So.. what kind of interesting stuff has come up?

Beginning with the bureaucratic. We confirmed that we will be able to ship our passports to Finland and have them returned to us with the new visas installed, once we collect all thу necessary crap to actually apply for them. The decision has been made that I will synchronize the boys' new ones with mine -- the better to visit Finland on the weekend -- and let A's switch over in August, when she plans to visit back to the US anyway. It will also de-synchronize the cars, which hypothetically speaking will make the re-registration of them slightly less onerous. As for the temporary resident status, we'll be getting that at the soonest sometime this fall. My main hope is to have it all done before we head back for this christmas, so that we won't have to hassle with re-registering and all that crap when we come back in January It seems at least feasible. The big trick right now is that A and I both need to have “Proof of absence of previous convictions in the territory” of the USA, which we are assuming will take the form of a letter of some sort issued by the US government. It is being looked into. The big thing right now for the visas is the HIV test. I'm arranging today for the medical folks I mentioned previously to come out to our place either tomorrow or Saturday to pull blood from the kids and I for that. It's not really something we couldn't do around town, but I mainly want to start a relationship with the house-call people and gett some experience on how their operation works.

And then on the issue of the house. I met with the architect who is adding a third floor onto И В's house, to talk about the house we are aiming to build. And frankly, the discovery I made was twofold. First, that most for-hire architects around here really don't have adequate experience to be able to design a wood-frame house, and second that the companies which trade in wood-frame houses have all the business they can stand producing cookie-cutter models and aren't in the slightest bit interested in taking on an individualized project. So ultimately A and I decided, to hell with that idea; and now we're in contact with a few places that do log-cabin type houses (for an example). Apparently, this is all part of the home-building process around here -- and a big part of the reason why the cookie-cutters sell so well...

And now I've just returned from a bit of a walk through the yard, and a bit of a 'have the car washed for cheap'. But with some boring pictures of what's been occupying much of the time for which I don't generally get into details. Here you go.

hiatus

2007-03-24T04:36:00.000-07:00

3/24 14:44, Pushkin time

That's what I'll call it (sounds better than the classic "too busy).

Really, though, there's not a whole terribly large amount to catch up on. I spent the week doing translating for the guy from Canada; A picked up his wife on thursday at the airport, we all went out to dinner a couple of times, and dropped them off in the city last night.

At the same time, the first project truck is soaring towards completion, and enough other things came up during my otherwise-occupiedness that I'll most likely be running around for the first half of this coming week playing catch-up, too. But it's all for a good cause (money).

In other events, the lawyer at the dealership pretty much found out what it will take to get us our 'temporary residence' status -- most importantly, six months processing time, meaning that all of us are looking at having to get new visas and repeating the joys of temporarily exporting and re-importing ourselves at least one more time. This is not such a big deal for A, since she plans to visit the US again in August. But it seems certain that the boys and I will be making a Junetime trip to Finland. This time we'll maybe plan a bit ahead and actually do something.

As for the rest, we switch over to summer time on Sunday, so ending our brief stint at 10-hours difference from the west coast. We're nearly at the length-of-daylight that we had when A and the kids first arrived; if my calculations are correct, the equinox was two days ago. The days are noticeably longer from one to the next -- if the fall equinox is any measure, it will be this way for another week while the rate of change is still at its highest. It seems so bright all the time... And G seems to have re-learned his capacity for sleeping in the light. Which is a very good thing.

Apologies

2007-03-18T09:04:00.000-07:00

3/18 19:07, Pushkin time

Sorry for being out for so long. There was a guy come in from Africa, the conference to contend with, and then another guy (this one from Canada) flew in yesterday hours after the conference ended and I've been entertaining him.

To catch up:

Thursday was more preparation, and meeting with the guy from Africa. I took a different route on the way in to work, swinging by to pick up Ю and give her a ride in. Of course, this took me along a totally new route to the train crossing I customarily use. And getting across the crossing, I was pulled over by the cops that sit on the downhill side most mornings. "Good morning," he says to me; "Hi," I say back. Taking my passport, "Been here a while?" Me - "few months". Cop - "you know our traffic laws?". Me (suppressing the initial response of, 'what traffic laws?') - "Pretty much". Cop - "so then you just decided to ignore the no left turns sign back there...?". Me - "Umm... what sign is that?". Cop (pointing) - "the one right over there" [sign is fifteen feet off the side of the road, but otherwise clear]. Me, "Oops. Heh heh. Why don't we get right to talking about that fine then..."
So that cost me 200 rubles. Noted on the tally.

Then Friday I got to go through my presentation and also do a fair bit of translating. The presentation came off good; I even got to explain why I avoid writing out and/or memorizing such things, preferring instead to simply learn the subject well enough to talk on it freely and then go up supplemented by a handful of note-words. It's not laziness -- don't think that. As for the translating, which I did on both days, it was a bit comic. On the first day, the guy from Africa ended his piece of a talk with a business-word-laden sentence about hopes for the future and respect for the capabilities of the blah blah blah. His sentence was run-on enough that my version of it was super-compound-complex-run-on. After wrapping it up, И asked the room, "anyone understand that last one?" The laughter was answer enough. Then on Saturday I found out that while I may be expanding my vocabulary into medical and financial lingo and a more and more effective obscenity-capacity, I have almost no polite words other than the most basic please and thank you. So for carrying across the flowery, diplomatic closing comment that was made, I mumbled a bit (in Russian) into the microphone before finally setting on, "to sum up, thanks a lot. It was fun". But for the dinner between days and for doing my own stuff I seriously kicked ass.

And then after the conference ended I blazed straight to the airport to pick up the Canadian guy who will be running a training course this week. S K has never been to Russia before (his wife is coming out to meet him at the end of the week and they are extending the trip into a vacation over the following week), but has all sorts of good things to say about it so far. It was late enough that I was able to get away with just setting him up at his hotel -- which, due to a bookkeeping error on the part of our secretary (I am assuming), took a bit of negotiation and nice-talk on my part -- and then headed home with a promise to pick him up this morning for some sightseeing. 11AM is still technically morning.

But it wasn't sleeping in that occupied my time this morning. I headed out reasonably early to meet with М to both check out the progress of the work on our lot and to meet with a local building contractor with whom we will possibly be arranging to have our house actually built. The big stuff is almost all cleared from the land, leaving small wet grit-rubble that is being removed by shovel and wheelbarrow. It is possible that we will also have the outfit that lays in the septic tank take their backhoe to some of the remaining ground-level chunks to get them busted up and moved out easier. And it turns out we have a lot of singed bricks. The architect was adequately knowledgeable -- I've seen his work around the Kommunar area already, and the quality is what we are looking for -- and even had some legal-related advice to give on the locations of doors and setbacks. We've committed to get back together once we have the drawings redone into project form to have him get us a bid on the work.
And then after that I picked up S K and Z and we headed down to Velikiy Novgorod -- now a classic standby for touristing. The weather was good; more importantly, Z was well-behaved; and the trip was entertaining to my guest. He even got the cultural experience of having me get pulled over and making a funds-transfer to a traffic cop. I was passing a series of trucks, when my passing lane ended. In the local fashion, I continued in the center (now 'oncoming-traffic')lane for the twenty feet that it took me to clear the last truck, then got back into the correct lane, just in time to get snagged. This one cost me 500 rubles. Also noted on the tally. I suppose I've been due for this.

Дела

2007-03-14T06:32:00.000-07:00

3/14 16:34, Pushkin time

So I was up until 4:30 Saturday morning working on the presentation. The sky even started to get a bit bright before I wrapped it up. But it's good (I got full-out laughs right where I wanted them, going over it in draft just now). So that's okay.

Saturday evening we went out to dinner with Е and his wife. They took us to a shashlik place a good hour's drive away, on the Bay of Finland out past Kronstadt (not quite to Beloostrov). Right on the bay; I even took advantage of the still-frozen condition at the coast to take a walk with the boys on the Atlantic Ocean -- technically speaking, since the bay is part of the Baltic Sea, which is itself part of the Atlantic... Z was adequately impressed, if G was more interested in the snowmobile tracks on the ice. And dinner was good, too; the shashlik was adequate, but the mors was awesome, and for the location, I'd have been wiling to put up with quite a bit. The restaurant is in the middle of a resort-town-type location. To me, the comparison was Hood River (probably all the snow in the crannies and around the trees); for A it was Sun River. But still, an area very different from what we've been seeing every day for the past several months. Almost certainly, it is getting added to our list of places to take people who come to visit.
As for A and the boys and the whole language thing, I am pleaseв to say that the boys handled themselves as well as I am started to become accustomed to; but more importantly, A was all over things, asking, answering, telling stories. It was very encouraging to see her really getting into talking, even having still a pretty small vocabulary and grammar skill set. A lot of it, to be sure, had to do with the comfort level of people we've already hung out with a bit, but even Е commented when we saw each other at work later that she has obviously made good progress since the last time we all got together. Yay A!

Then Monday A had her appointment, and we picked Z up to go get his medical stuff (required for school) started. Once we found the children's clinic --no small feat, considering how Russians give directions in town: 'where do we get the stuff done?'; 'at the clinic'; 'what clinic?'; 'the children's clinic'; 'where is it?'; 'down that way' [points in a generally town-ward direction]; 'how do I find it?'; 'go down that road, it will be the three-story clinic-looking building'; and so forth... With reagrds to the last answer, I might point out that the building actually looks on the front somewhat like a train station. And of course, when I tell people, 'the clinic that looks like a train station', they all know exactly which one I'm talking about. But give me that information to find it in the first place? Apparently not...
So anyway, we found the place and got in line to get Z's blood drawn -- the only of the several tasks that we could get done more-or-less right away. Of course, 'right away' means waiting in line for an hour in some situations. So Z got his first lesson in patience. And actually it wasn't such a big thing, since Russians are pretty considerate of kids' need to do something while waiting. So the waiting area was full of kids wandering this way and that, chatting with each other and otherwise keeping somewhat entertained, under the general supervision of the mass of collected parents-and-grandparents. And then when Z got in and got his fingertip punched with the spring-loaded plastic needle-cartridge, he handled it pretty well.

Yesterday, A and I spent the full day at the Customs office; first to have issued to us our tickets for letting our temporary imports lapse (fines were levied; you can see the effect on the tally in the sidebar), then to have to applications processed for our renewal of the temporary import, then for the actual issue of the import certificates. One day we'll never get back; though at least we had the forethought to bring books this time -- both of which were finished before we got our final papers.

And today I got to take Z in to the clinic again for his cardiogram (again, as required by the schools around here for admission). The procedure was a bit longer, and Z got to do a bit of talking with the doctor; also the line was a lot longer and he got to spend a good two hours meeting kids, too. But really, set up and knocked down and then back for him to his preschool and me back to work. As far as I can tell, he is done with the pre-school medical inspection. Now we have only to get the certificate (or whatever) from the doctor at his preschool and to get things finalized with the director of his school and he can start. Moving right along...

Not Yet

2007-03-10T02:31:00.000-08:00

3/10 13:33, Pushkin time

Of course, the 8th was a holiday; we spent it mainly just relaxing (A and Z still being a bit under-the-weather). On that day, the melt started in in force. The ground is saturated, creeks are all overtopping their banks, and I can easily understand why every Russian house is equipped with an entryway room for changing from shoes to slippers and back. But spring is definitely on the way. G even noticed the birds singing on Friday morning -- and he's not really one for noticing in general...

Friday A and I hooked up with О К (you maybe remember him from the first time we had to play the customs game) and spent the morning over at the inspection office in the city first being informed that we really should have come in and opened up an application before our first imports had expired (that was the plan, but the whole leaving the country thing kind of got in the way), and that in addition to the fifty bucks that renewing our regs was going to run, we were also going to get hit with fifty more dollars of fines. Crap. But it's the price of a lesson; apparently even bureaucrats here are reasonable enough to hold your place in line while you get your crap together and don't hold it against you if it takes longer to do the crap-arranging than you had expected. So for future reference, while we may need certain pieces of paper to get certain things done, if we go in without the pieces of paper, but on time, we get credit for that and can come back with the missing pieces of paper once we get them -- even far past the due date for whatever it is we're trying to do -- and thing will move along just fine. Does it work that way with the DMV? I can't remember...
Anyway, by the time that was all settled, the guy who does the actual physical inspections had bailed out for the weekend. So we have to go back tuesday (monday is already occupied).
-sigh-
But at least we know what's going on a lot better and have accumulated some important information that will be a big help to us in dealing with the bureaucracies here in general.

Monday A had already been scheduled to see her doctor in the morning. Z's teacher when I came to pick him up indicated that not only were the various blood, pee, etc tests on Z necessary for registering him for school next year, but the doctor at his preschool really needed to have them by the end of next week, too. So monday, once A is done, we get to pick Z up and give him the cultural experience of a Russian medical clinic. An interesting option for the longer term, however, has presented itself...

И's son developed what turned out to be appendicitis a week and a half ago, so while К was with him at the hospital, over lunches, the topic of conversation was medical-related. Which is fine; there are a bunch of questions about practical things (what to do if G falls and breaks his arm? you know, the kind of stuff we just know is going to come up...) that I got answered. The nearest full-on hospital to here is in Kolpino, maybe five-ten minutes' drive at a leisurely pace from here (and happily just about the same from Pokrovskaya). Here you dial 03 from any phone and get hooked up with your local ambulance service; there are private companies that contract with the hospitals. The ambulances are driven and staffed with MDs -- the Soviet Union way over-educated in a lot of fields -- and they carry enough gear to be able to do a lot more than just basic first-aid on the spot; in fact a significant minority of the time, they are able to get whatever the problem is taken care of and no trip to the hospital is necessary. Otherwise they do what they can and then pack whoever it is off to where the equipment and specialists are. There are also clinics all around -- I can think of eight in Pushkin off the top of my head -- that range from private to semi-private to state in terms of ownership. Basically all of them provide the same level of care; the private ones are nicer and have much less in the way of waiting time (that's what you pay for). The doctor A goes to is at a semi-private one, where every doctor spends certain days treating for free and certain days doing fee-for-service. If you can get yourself to a clinic in an emergency, they can give you a bit of help while the ambulance is on the way.
It's interesting to note that all of this is 'pay' -- even ambulances. But the question of money arises only once the emergency is past. I suspect the private outfits simply have to account for some degree of 'breakage' financially speaking and probably things are priced to account for the fact that some people are going to get fixed who aren't going to be able to pay (of course, people who can't pay don't get to stay very long in the nicer private spots once they're no longer at immediate risk). Certainly no one gets turned aside who needs it.

But the most intriguing part of the picture came on Wednesday when И's daughter came down with the gnarly flu that is hitting this season (fevers of 39-40 [102-104F] are part of it). He was talking about how he swung by home just as the doctor was arriving to check up on her. Now I understand that the owner of a company of the scope of ours has got money. But the casualness of which that part came up struck me and I asked if it was normal for doctors to come to people's houses. It depends, as it turns out. There are about a dozen private medical companies that offer home visits -- up to and including taking samples at home for analysis at their laboratories. One of them is located in Petersburg. И says the first couple times you have them out, visits run around 2000 rubles (call it 60-80 bucks), but that after a few times they start giving like member discounts and right now he pays something more like forty dollars per house visit -- even if they're coming to see several members of his family. Once you have two kids, he said, it's well worth the extra twenty bucks' cost difference to avoid waiting in lines for hours. We'll be a bit further out, but he's already paying for some distance from the city center and we're only a little bit further in Pokrovskaya than he is in Aleksandrovskaya, so the pricing is pretty comparable. And A is excited about the prospect of a house-call doctor for once our next one is born.

What else...

I talked today on the phone with the guy who will be putting in our well. Sometime in the next two weeks it will be set up and done. Septic installation is another guy, but we should have it taken care of by the middle of April as well. Things are moving.

At the dealership for the past week, in addition to the projects which are now soaring to fruition (the first dump truck, in fact, looks like it might be getting bought by a guy who is a sort of general contractor out of Vyrytsa -- a bit south of us, on the other side of Gatchina -- who does house construction; we're going to be doing a bit of chatting this coming week, too) our annual national dealer conference is happening next weekend.
oh crap; that means the guy from Canada is coming in next weekend too. got to remember that...
Since the number of dealers has more than doubled since last year, and since the business is moving in some very serious directions, this conference is going to be of unprecedented size and scope for us. And everyone wants me to be a visible part of it, so they gave me thirty minutes of presentation time. (I noticed a week ago an agenda on Е's desk. Looking it over, and feeling a cold lump of terror forming, I asked, 'there's maybe another "Justin" working here?...")
Ordinarily I've got no problems with public speaking. I recognize that I go too fast, and even when I slow down, inevitable end up finishing way before the end of my slot -- this does not make me nervous, either; I'm pretty good about ad-lib filling or making a graceful early exit. My problem is with the whole 'prepared' aspect of it. You see, since the factory isn't running yet, and since my projects are all still in their first-run phase, not much of my work is good grist for the conference. Next year; oh yeah... But for now, not so much. So they decided that they would break off a chunk of the presentation that the rep from Navistar would be giving and to have me expand on the topic, 'the history of Navistar-International'. Which, as far as topics go, is fairly interesting (fun fact, International Harvester did so much business in Russia right around the turn of the century that they actually built a factory near Moscow in 1907. Russians groan when they hear that...). But it changes my public speaking from an off-the-cuff on a subject I know all the way through, to something more... prepared.
And of course, the first thing I have to do is -- prepare it. I liken it to a fourth-year language class assignment: write and deliver a thirty-minute presentation, in Russian in front of the class. I actually did something like that in Y4 French (if I recall correctly, it was only fifteen minutes; but the topic was Degas -- that I know for sure). I don't have to do it all myself in the sense of proofreading and whatnot. But frankly, I don't have a Y4 vocabulary yet, except maybe when it comes to things mechanical and electrical. History -- maybe Y2 to be charitable. But, what the hell. Give it a go, see what happens...

Spring(?)

2007-03-06T22:25:00.000-08:00

3/7 09:28, Pushkin time

The last couple days have seen a significant warming; every day but yesterday has had at least several hours of heavy, wet snowfall which ends up melting off -- if it sticks at all -- within a half-day. Yesterday evening, chunks of ground started to be visible from under the receding snows. Of course, this means that all of the yards and parking lots are at least a couple of inches deep in slush or slush-covered water (a distinction whose importance makes itself known the first time you discover with your foot one of the second type). And most importantly for me: it's warm enough that hats and gloves are no longer even remotely necessary. Of course, winter is not over yet. They say that March fairly occasionally has dips back down into the minus-twenties. But we're less than three weeks from the equinox; all the kids in the schools are starting to pick up their two-day flus, and I've even seen grass in a couple places. It sure doesn't feel like winter.

As for other matters, the agency that does invitations for foreigners offered (for money, of course) to have our registrations taken care of; so that's not a worry for us anymore. And as soon as those come in -- today hopefully; Friday almost definitely (tomorrow is a holiday) -- we can have our cars taken care of. I'm also starting to strategize with the office lawyer to make sure we don't have to go through this crap again in five months or so (my visa runs out in June, so for me it is only three months).

There and Back Again

2007-03-04T06:37:00.000-08:00

3/4 15:39, Pushkin time

Fortune smiled on us.

Yesterday morning we got up in the early-dark to go to the Finland Station to catch our train out of the country. A dropped the boys and I off at the station in Petersburg at about ten to eight, stocked up with two backpacks full of coloring equipment, munchies, games, spare clothes, and anything else we could figure might come in handy to help the four hours of train and nine hours of waiting less horrible.

Not that doom wasn't already casting a bit of a cloud over us, but when the conductor took our tickets as we were getting on the train, looked them over, and started muttering about "idiocy"...

But the boys were in pretty good spirits as we settled into the seats in our compartment on the Russian train "Repin". There were several compartments to each wagon -- dining car excepted -- and in each compartment space for six people. In ours, besides the four of us were an older Finnish woman and a my-age Russian one. During the following two hours we (including the boys) got a chance to socialize a bit and I got to tell our tale of woe. The Finnish lady (who spoke serviceable, if grammatically atrocious and heavily accented, Russian) tried offering suggestions for things to do in Vainikkala, but most of the suggestions boiled down to, "holy crap, you are out of your mind" -- more or less. The Russian is married to a Finn, so she has some experience with the Russian immigration and customs stuff; she understood almost immediately why we weren't taking our own cars across and back.
All in all, good company. The high point for me coming when I was explaining to our compartment-mates how I was hoping to come to some sort of 'arrangement' with the conductor of the sister-train that would be crossing paths with ours in Vainikkala to spare us the need to answer the question: how do you keep a four-year-old entertained for nine hours in a population 400 village that speaks a language not even related to anything you know? In the wintertime...
Anyway, I had brought some rubles and some dollars in the hopes of making this arrangement with one or the other of them. But once I realized that the crew of the sister-train would be Finns I got a bit concerned that my strategy might not be workable -- a worry confirmed by both of our new acquaintances. Apparently Finland is almost totally without corruption and they were both very quick to say that I would be best not to even try to take the route I was contemplating. I, of course, was sad to hear that, since it was basically the only tool in my kit. And then the Finnish lady says that I should probably just explain our situation to the conductor; the Russian agreed that odds were he would be willing to just help us out. Just like that; out of the goodness of his heart. Apparently Finns are like that. What tickled me (and still does) is the fact that this particular tack had literally never occurred to me and that the idea that just an explanation of one's bad situation would be enough to motivate someone to just give you help was for a brief moment a complete shock to me.
It's not that a Russian wouldn't help out just to be nice; it's that for the most part they aren't even in a position where it would have to come to that. And just like turning on your car alarm whenever you leave your car -- I suspect -- Russians always go into situations where the need to get some help might arise armed with at least enough 'incentive' to possibly get the help should they need it. It's just being prepared, I suppose.

Anyway, eventually we got to the station at Vainikkala, got out of the train and rushed to the station building, where we passed right through the Finnish passport control and officially into Finland. The passport guy also took a kind of funny look at our tickets; when I explained our situation he said that they had been seeing quite a few people coming through for much the same reason in the last couple months. And then we were in Finland. The sister train was -- fortuitously -- fifteen minutes late, which gave us enough time to get ourselves oriented and make the acquaintance of a nice Finn who was dropping off some Australians who had come to visit his daughter and were readying to head over to Petersburg for a couple days. I should mention that all Finns apparently are required to study English and that all but one of the ones that we encountered still remembered enough to be basically fluent. It took a few minutes of trying, and a bit of talking (and a bit of translating help between the nice Finnish guy and the one person I met in the country who didn't speak English), but thing ended up going down almost exactly the way the lady traveling out of Petersburg with us had posited they would. A half hour after we arrived, we left the country. Simple as that. I did stop to take a picture before we got onto the return train. At the bottom. Look. Finland.

And before two in the afternoon we had met back up with A and were heading home. No big deal at all. As an aside, I would mention that the actual crossing of the border itself is almost certainly accomplished with the absolute minimum of hassle via train. As you leave the last station before the border, the conductor collects passports, and before they hit the first station after the border, the passports are returned and everything has been processed while you snacked or napped. We will definitely be using that route when we go back to Finland for vacationing.

Unexpected

2007-03-02T04:46:00.000-08:00

3/2 15:47, Pushkin time

Some modifications to the story as it went last time I managed to write.

Thursday morning I got to the immigration office at 6AM (as recommended) to find that a line thirty people deep had already formed -- fortunately for passports; on the line for registrations our name was the fourth. So after dropping the kids off at the preschool, A and I met И В at the office at maybe a quarter to ten. By then, the upper half of the stairway between the first aтв second floors of the building was pretty packed. The fact that we were, in fact, at the beginning of the list allowed И В to maneuver us up to a space on the upper landing fairly near the door (which, of course, opens onto the landing). It started getting a little crushy in the couple minutes before ten. And then a security guard forced the door open from the inside and informed the people on the landing that since the main waiting area was having work done that only five people would be getting in at a time. And then the five people closest to the door (none of whom, it would seem, were among the first five on the lists) squeezed in and the door was closed. And then the crush got rock-concerty. And for somewhere in the neighborhood of a half hour we were being squished against the doors and walls and pushing back and people yelling and swearing -- one guy right behind И В and I was making threats when we wouldn't let him try to squeeze past (to nowhere; the door wasn't opening). I am happy to say that И В proved to have a very good cursing-vocabulary, and that between the two of keepingpeople back, A didn't have too hard a time of it. Physically, that is; I was able to follow all but the most chaotic minute or so of shouting and swearing. For her it must have really sucked to be surrounded by angry people being loud in an almost totally incomprehensible (she can handle calm and slow speech; this was neither) language. But she troopered through, and we were able to make it in with the third five. A was fifth, and the on-the-verge-of-overwhelmed guard was in no mood to hear my one voice trying to say that I was "with her" (a classic ploy). But reason -- and her saying much the same thing into his other ear -- prevailed and we finally made it in. In the waiting lobby, A asked И В and me how, exactly, we were supposed to get out once we were done. A chuckle was the perfect answer.
SO. Thу traumatic part finished, we managed to make it in to talk to the immigration clerk. You may recall, we were told that our six-month registration, once it ran out, could be renewed to the end of the validity period of our visas. Which may have been the case earlier -- and may still be the case now; clerks in Russia are sort of renowned for not always being on top of the actual laws to which they are purportedly clerking -- but then and there we were informed that we cannot simply renew, but must leave and re-enter the country. So sorry, good-bye. Oh, by the way, since A had already done that in February, and had failed to register within the mandated three-day period, there was going to be a fine for her of some sort; assessable and payable once we came back with a big, new stack of filled-out-and-stamped paperwork. И В and I asked about the land we own and whether that can somehow be leveraged to make our lives easier, and the clerk said that there is a visa-free regime whereby we would apply for and be granted 'temporary resident' status -- which has a potential term of three years. But of course, such a status can only be applied for in another office in another part of town; and they say it can take a couple months to go through. But I wholly agree with A that, if it keeps us from having to do this crap again, we're all for it. И joked later that getting citizenship would alleviate the difficulty of ever having to do the registration-gig. Ha ha -- no.
So I'll be spending some time with one of the company lawyers next wee to figure out exactly what our options are under the new immigration rules, and how to take the easiest and most guaranteed route along the optimal path.

But in the interim, the kids and I will be less-than-legal starting Monday; and we still won't have our cars resolved. So last night I started researching, and two hours ago selected and paid for tickets for the three of us. Tomorrow morning at 8AM we get on a train; at 10AM we get off the train in Vainikkala, Finland. We hang around there until about 6PM, when we get back on the train and ride home. What's to do for eight hours in Vainikkala with a six and a four-year-old? Where the heck is it, even? I checked with my good pal the Internet and am feeling a sense of creeping doom. It starts when you see that, aside from a standard 'worldwide weather' site, a google search for the town brings up exactly zero pages in anything other than Finnish. I eventually managed to find a finnish site that had an english-language page; the results are not heartening.
Where is it?
What to do there?

Oh boy....

We'll take pictures; that's for sure...

Re-Up

2007-02-28T01:14:00.000-08:00

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...

Grr

2007-02-26T01:35:00.000-08:00

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!

Done

2007-02-22T23:44:00.000-08:00

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?