A woman's place is in my kitchen. Eddie joins the ranks of the grown-ups. My daily meds.
20220211
Yesterday Eddie and I met with Victoria and Arthur for an English/Ukrainian lesson. Victoria corrected Eddie's handwritten summary of what he had read of Ukrainian literature. They spent half an hour going over it, most of the conversation in Ukrainian.
I spent that half hour talking with Arthur. The first 10 minutes was the obligatory explanation of why he needs to talk with a native English speaker. I have heard this dozens of times, but it seems they need to express it. In school they learn to read and write English but don't have much practice in conversation. They are absolutely hungry to glom onto a native speaker and practice.
I assured him, as I do every time, that this is no problem. It is not much different for students of any language. The advantage Ukrainians enjoy is that they are drilled pretty well in English grammar. Better than Americans. I then took a few minutes to describe my lifelong studies of language, achieving fluency in six of them, losing Portuguese but coming up to speed in Ukrainian, and exposure to Japanese, Arabic, and Chinese.
Arthur and Viktoria are first year students at the Kyiv Economic University. Only 17 years old. They do not require Covid 19 vaccinations of people under 18. He opened up by expressing extreme skepticism about the shots. I asked how he came by that. He said that just about everybody abhors the fact that it is being forced on them. They see it as a sinister government machination. I let him know immediately that I agreed, but did not have time to go into the long story of why. I don't think I need to. I simply said that things are likely to change radically in the six months before his birthday. Don't do anything stupid.
After Arthur and Victoria changed places halfway through, I learned that she had been at the top of her class in mathematics. I told her I had the equivalent of a red diploma in math from Berkeley. This could be a promising development. If Eddie enjoys working with her, as I expect he will, she might work with him on math as well.
We ended the meeting with an invitation to our ArtTalkers Toastmasters club on Saturday where they can practice speaking English, and an agreement to get together Tuesday afternoon to go over Eddie's Ukrainian again. There's nothing like a deadline to focus the mind. Eddie gets along well with older people, and especially such intelligent folks as these.
After our meeting, Eddie and I stopped by Tanya, our greengrocer to buy some broccoli, spinach and cherry tomatoes. I had told her on our way in that we would visit. She had everything wrapped up, naturally about twice as much as I would've asked for. She has a generous nature. But it is good stuff – about $15 worth.
After filling my backpack with what we had paid for, Tanya gave us another 15 pounds worth of freebies. Five pounds of tomatoes that were past their prime. She knows that I like to make tomato sauce. Here they are. Also about five pounds of seedless grapes in a similar condition to make compote out of. As always, I had an argument with the women of the house – only Oksana and her mother yesterday, as Anna had the day off – about what should be kept and what should be thrown away. Half of the grapes and all of the cucumbers missed the cut.
Overripe tomatoes demand quick action. First thing after breakfast I cut onions and garlic to start the sauce. As I was working on a 4 foot piece of countertop Grandma came on by and pushed me aside. Every woman in my life, that's a large number now, feels proprietary about kitchens. Part of that feeling of ownership is that men have no place there. I told Nadia politely but firmly that I was only going to take about 15 minutes, please go someplace else. During that 15 minutes I started to heat a frying pan to do my cooking. Oksana took my onions out of that frying pan and told me that we should throw it away. I said no, it is useful. Please don't do that.
I separated the onions and garlic into two frying pans as I put the tomatoes through the food processor. There was more than would have fit in one frying pan. I didn't have to mention that the second pan was useful – anybody with eyes can see that. As I write this Anna is downstairs stirring my tomato sauce as it thickens. She moved one of the pans to another burner so she could make a soup. The soup certainly could have waited, but as I said, the women see the kitchen as their domain and any man as an intruder. The other burner works fine.
Robert Malone is learning the game of politics pretty quickly. His recent posts all end with the same three words: integrity, dignity, community. He does not write much about medicine anymore, because Covid 19 is not whatsoever a medical issue. It is totally political. Though he surely has not changed his mind about the pernicious long-term effects of the jabs to the adult population, he goes no farther than saying that they are absolutely unneeded among children. Medical ethics dictates that people should have control over their own bodies and that unwanted medications not be forced on children. He writes about the adverse effects mainly in the context of the in advisability of subjecting children to unknown outcomes.
The issue of the day is the increasing resistance to the more and more heavy-handed, blatant suppression of freedoms, highlighted by the truckers in Canada. This is a massive sea change. I believe that the truckers' momentum will be impossible to reverse. Nonetheless, it is important to maintain the pressure. The more quickly the establishment capitulates the less bloodshed there will be in the end. Unfortunately, I do not think that they see that. Read Malone's article above and also Canadian Celia Farber
Today is my ivermectin day. Note the Arabic lettering - made in Egypt, where it has worked like a charm. Along with the zinc, vitamin C, vitamin D and 81 mg aspirin I take every day. Until two years ago I prided myself on not taking any regimen of daily pills. However, as the only adult in the family never to have gotten Covid 19 I have to offer the opinion that the stuff works. It did not prevent the winter crud, which was with me for a couple of months. Therefore I also keep some Betadine on hand to rinse my nose out after exposure to large sneezy crowds or whenever I feel a tickle.
I had thought that I would take a day off from writing, but there is a lot going on. It's only 10:20 and I'm done. Eddie and I are going shopping for groceries and to pick up a birthday present he bought for his best friend Yarema. We will probably make a pizza crust as well to take advantage of the fresh tomato sauce.
That's the news from Lake WeBeGone, where the strong men occasionally manage to elbow their way into the kitchen, the good looking women provide polite but constant resistance, and the amused children stay on the sidelines quietly cheering on their teams.