Yesterday we got Grandfather Sasha to come with us on an outing for the first time in the year and a half he has lived here. Last week's successful visit to the dentist showed that we could get the wheelchair out to the street and that there was a taxi that could handle it.
Grandma Nadia surprised us by offering to come along. She went to church early so she would be ready. Here are a series of pictures that Oksana will post on Facebook showing how we did it.
Taxi driver Yuri loves his job. He is extremely accommodating, and we had him as a driver him both ways. It is incredibly cheap – three dollars for the trip plus a dollar tip.
Nadia was delighted to discover that there was a church in the park right next to the playground. She spent 15 minutes in worship while Sasha and I waited for Oksana and the kids to arrive by bicycle. Oksana is a very resourceful woman. She had no qualms about making the 2-mile trip with three kids all by herself. However, had I been with them, she would have certainly had no qualms either about asking me to do all of the heavy lifting.
The first thing Oksana did was to take her father for a tour of the park, leaving Nadia with me and the kids. She posed for this picture. It is in her nature to supervise everything. As 22 kg Zoriana was picking up 13 kg Marianna and carrying her all around Nadia busily told her not to do it. She would mess up her internal organs. I sat like a sphinx, quietly cheering on Zoriana and pointedly saying nothing when the bitching was directed my way.
Zoriana is a very solicitous big sister. When she has nothing to do, she will fight with Marianna, but when the two of them are alone she is very protective. I took this long distance shot as they were off for an extended while by themselves in this corner of the playground.
I saw this little snake as I went to get the bicycles when it was time to go. I brought it to the kids, who were of course very curious. Zoriana has no fear. Eddie took this picture of me handing it off to her.
My plan to bring everybody to a restaurant didn't pan out. In the first place, as is always the case, Oksana brought enough food for an army. More than that, her mother and father are simply unaccustomed to restaurants and didn't really warm up to the idea. I returned with the wheelchair in the taxi and Oksana bicycled back with the kids.
My first family grew up in Montgomery County, Maryland. Though the children mostly went to private schools, daughter Naomi attended Woodacre Elementary from the first to the fifth grades, and second daughter Suzy attended Walt Whitman High School from the ninth to the 12th.
The LGBT agenda was well underway. I attended a parent meeting at which they explained why they were teaching kids to put condoms on bananas. A lot of the parents were upset that they were teaching more about gay sex than anybody thought their children should be learning. A doctor among the parents said he had a number of gay patients whose weird medical problems would certainly give the lie to the claim that all approaches to sex are about the same.
Daughter Suzy, who would not have thought about it if somebody else wasn't pushing the agenda, became the president of the Walt Whitman gay and lesbian club. I don't have any indication that she had inclinations in that direction herself. What I did observe was that she treated her boyfriend Aidan like crap. She of course wanted absolutely no advice from her dad on that subject. Upon graduating from Trinity College, Dublin in 2011 she followed her Swedish boyfriend to Stockholm. I gather nothing came of that. She has stayed in Stockholm and so far as I know is resolutely single approaching her 35th birthday.
Montgomery County Public Schools are once again in the news, defying state law enforcing a radical gender agenda on their students. I do not know if what they learned in school was the only thing that made my daughters unfit for and largely uninterested in matrimony, but it certainly had something to do with it.
The private schools were hardly any better. For $20,000 a year the kids got inundated with Howard Zinn's history of the US as a racist, sexist nation. Finally, far too late for my kids, private school parents are rebelling. Last year it was Grace School in New York. This year it is Brentwood School in Los Angeles. What difference does twenty years make? The indoctrination is more forceful, and the tuition is up to $50,000 per year.
Close to home, the parent-run Sunflower School apparently will have a first-grade next year for Zoriana to attend. Improbably for a school that had only about six students this year, they are talking about having a seventh-grade next year. I gave an emphatic "No" when they asked about Eddie. We are doing better on our own.
That's the news from Lake WeBeGone, where the weather is absolutely perfect. For my Ukrainian family, too hot precisely 50% of the time, too cold the other 50%. Eddie and Zoriana swam in the lake last night. I'll bring my bathing suit today. It will be bracing, but I need to do it.
Graham
I had a chat with a friend last week. She tells me that the kids she knows (her daughter just turned 18) are primarily non-sexual. They don't date. They don't mate. She says that there was a study done recently of Gen Z kids and more than 60% had not had sex. She notes that the girls are horrified by what they see on the Internet in such sites as Pornhub which is available to anyone with an iPhone. What the girls see is disgusting and abusive.
On her recommendation, I took a look at the site and I have to agree. It's target is an all male audience, and women are treated as menial objects to degrade and abuse. If I were a girl watching out of curiosity, I would never want to have sex. The video producers and the male participants hate women. They are angry and mean, and the videos are offensive and rude.
I would guess if girls are exposed to this ugly world, they are likely to be repulsed. There is nothing appealing in it, so it's no surprise that they are not sexually active. What I see is wariness and caution. I have a feeling that Gen Z may be the generation with a near zero birth rate. And I understand their feelings. As a man, there is no way that I would ever get married again. In this day and age, I would rather be celibate, especially with the divorce laws in the US. Most of the men who were my contemporaries lost everything when their wives divorced them and took everything that they could. If not for pesky hormones, it is a much calmer life to be asexual and to contemplate the universe from a sacred grove.
There is a poem by Ben Jonson in which he writes about an Infant being born during the siege of Seguntum in 219 BC. In the poem, the baby is born, takes a look at the world, then crawls back in the womb to die. I think for the Gen Z kids today, it must be overwhelming to come of age in such an insane world. They hear from Saint Greta that the world will end in ten years. They can watch sex as a commodity on the Internet. They have been forced into stupid lockdowns, forced to wear masks, and had their freedoms restricted by repressive governments. Every day, they get bombarded by the Woke nonsense, seven billion different genders, transgender bathrooms, accusations that they are colonizers, racists for being white, feel guilty for breathing, and being alive. And for some, they find their lives torn apart by war.
I've lived a relatively peaceful life. I have been prosperous, had a nice house, money, and the time and freedom to travel. When I look out at the world now, I think the best choice is to become a hermit, live my last days in quiet solitude, and avoid the madness of crowds. That's my goal now, and it's not really that much different from the Infant of Seguntum who looked out at the world and chose his mother's womb to be his urn.
Lovely weather in South west England as well. At last. It's been a long , quite cold winter.