Guests, after lengthy isolation. Shopping forays. Oldtimers disease.

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Oksana invited two kids from school over to play with our kids yesterday. The daughter is Zoriana's age; the others don't match up. It was, however, very nice just to have company.

I have been spending most of my mornings with Marianna and Zoriana. We typically walk a mile or so to Voskresenka to go shopping. Marianna rides most of the way on my shoulders. I fill my backpack and usually a Trader Joe's bag and we go back home.

This keeps the kids occupied for couple of hours. We go by a pasture of about ten nanny goats, with weeks old kids this time of year. The girls are fascinated. I don't know why, but the goats will come over to take two blades of grass from a little girl in preference to what is growing at their feet. We pass a church soup kitchen that feeds about 50 people at lunch time. We pass a couple of playgrounds, but it has been too cold and wet to swing this week.

The storekeepers know us well. There is a mini supermarket, greengrocer, baker, pet food store, sweetshop, and a butcher shop.  The prices have risen outrageously. I paid two dollars a pound for tomatoes yesterday morning. I am sure that the sellers are feeling a squeeze as well, and Vika is pleased to see her American customer. Doubly so, as half of Kyiv is still gone.

Yesterday, since the kids had something else to do I was able to break the routine. I took the regional electric train over to the right bank for the first time since the war started. I had read that the Metro was working; I hoped to go to the Podil neighborhood to see if any restaurants were open and to go to the big market. It did not happen – for whatever reason the entrance to the Pochaina Metro was roped off.

I had a second objective – to buy a stack of 5/8” washers 1 1/2 inches high to shim out the axle on the replacement wheel I bought for the wheelbarrow. I mentioned at the time that I broke a ball bearing in the wheel hauling sandbags in the first week of the war. Eddie and I took the broken wheel to the Yunost hardware market to see if we could get somebody to replace the bearing. They could not do that, but they sold us a new wheel with a large diameter piece of threaded stock to serve as an axle. It looked a little bit big, but I took the chance.

And – it was too big. We had to either drill out the holes through which the axle passes or shim out the old one so it was wide enough. And that's what I did today.

It's a comparison in modes of shopping. The sellers in the small kiosks in Yunost market don't have everything, but they understand mechanical objects pretty well and can give you good advice. The ball bearing guy sent us to the wheel guy, who said that he couldn't fix the wheel but he could sell us a new one. It cost only 10 dollars. Eddie really enjoys the conversation with these fellows. If you look at it objectively, the education is worth more than whatever we pay for the hardware.

The Epicenter store is on the model of a Home Depot or Lowe's. Immense – a third of a mile from end to end.  I asked for directions three times and they kept saying farther, farther. While I was there – this always happens – I had to pick up something for Oksana. Gardening gloves. The garden center, which took 10 minutes to find, had some nice ones for $20, but only in size small. They directed me downstairs to the tools department. They had a big bin of work gloves, size 10, whatever that means, with no marked price. And of course nobody within shouting distance to ask. I picked up a pair figuring they could not be too expensive if they were in a display like that.

I pulled a washer out of my pocket and asked where those might be found. It was only half a city block away – very close. They had bins and bins and bins of washers.  I found one washer (1) the size that I wanted in among some larger ones. I searched about 10 bins to the left and right looking for more, fruitlessly searched for somebody to help me, and came back and expanded my search to 30 bins to the right before I found what I wanted. It was bin 987 – I figured I would need that information.  I took the 20 I needed, with the gloves, to the cashier.

She sent me back and told me to have the clerk in that section weigh them. I finally chased down the clerk, who pointed to a scale. People who know hardware stores would have known to look for one. The instructions were in Ukrainian, telling me to press keys that were all scratched up and could not be read easily. I finally got it weighed with a little sticker. $0.85. I took the bag of washers triumphantly to the cashier, paid the three dollars with a credit card and asked how to find the front door where my backpack was stashed in a locker. The time I spent in that store was about an hour and 20 minutes, and the interactions I had with people were not terribly enjoyable. It makes me appreciate my Yunost market all the more. The old guys who do business there may be relics of a previous era, but they are human.

On my way to the Epicenter I had seen a 242 jitney bus. Just last week Eddie and I figured out that it crosses the bridge back to our neighborhood. I was glad for an opportunity to try it out. It brought me almost to our neighborhood.

At the mini supermarket I attempted to buy some frozen food and milk. The self checkout absolutely flummoxed me. As had the one, by the way, at the Epicenter. And this one the customer ahead of me in line. Part of the problem is of course that it's all in Ukrainian, which I don't read all that well. Another factor is the my vision is no longer that great. But the major issue is that I'm an old guy in a new age.

As a programmer I have been noticing for years that other programmers have little intuition as to how real human beings think. Navigating websites is always a pain and bother. I cannot imagine what Third World country is home to the idiots who programmed this thing, but I despairingly uttered a primal scream after trying for 10 minutes to get the damn machine to accept my credit card. I can imagine what was going through the mind of the young thing showed up to help me out of my quandary, but I was just grateful that she did.

On the way home I stopped once again at Vika, the greengrocer who is fond of Americans, to buy some spinach, parsley, tomatoes and pickled herring to make an Easter salad. Yes, I will gladly pay a little extra to be treated like a human being. Besides, her produce is good.

Two hours later I made another foray, this time on bicycle, to our UPS equivalent to pick up three seedling trees that Oksana had ordered from a nursery and to buy a birthday cake for Grandpa Sasha's 75th tomorrow. He'll celebrate in the hospital with Grandma Nadia. I don't have the feeling that any of them have gotten to know any staff – will probably be just the two of them.

I just went on the Internet to see what the Kyiv Metro had to say about the Pochaina station being closed. Nothing. But there was a notice to the effect that our Livoberezhna station opened on Thursday. We can check it out on today's outing with the kids.

That's the news from Lake WeBeGone, where events conspire to inform the strong man that he is nonetheless getting old, the good-looking woman comes to the same conclusion working in the garden, and the children need more exercise than they are getting in the absence of school and places to go.

Graham