Life is slow. Puzzles, Farmers Markets. The race to collapse

20211206

I feel we are living like a farm family in winter, amusing ourselves with reading, jigsaw puzzles and singing through the quiet, dark months.

Zoriana has dropped out of daycare. She just doesn't feel like being with the other kids, and with Anna here all day and daddy not as busy as he used to be, why not? We have done every jigsaw puzzle in the house several times. She makes a mockery of the age suggestions printed on the boxes, absolutely zipping through 160 piece puzzles by herself. She could do the bigger ones as well, but she wants to bludgeon the rest of us into giving her attention by participating.

Eddie and I continue to read every day. We are not going quite so fast with arithmetic and writing/dictation. On the other hand, he isn't wasting his time. The microwave I bought in 2008 finally crapped out. Eddie pounced eagerly on the corpse and did a thorough autopsy. It contained two electric motors, one of them stamped 21 V. That was curious. I suggested that he look for a transformer, and he found one to step it down from 220. We talked about how radio waves might be generated. He found something that looked like magnets encased quite tightly in a rectangular sheet metal box. He undid it and came up with a couple of wonderful magnets.

When he suggested he would tie the motors to a battery, it prompted a discussion on the difference between alternating and direct current. A transformer doesn't work with direct current, and motors work differently.

He is doing things that I never did as a child. I was a very eager reader but rather lazy when it came to doing things with my hands. He is enterprising and skillful with his hands. When it comes to books, he continues to trip over the mechanical problems that have characterized his reading from the beginning, but he has a very good memory for stuff that he has read.

Eddie has learned that it is better to ask forgiveness than permission. He sometimes goes overboard and gets chewed out, but he takes it in stride. Yesterday he took my camera to take pictures of the cats. Interesting to me that the cats get more photographic coverage than the people in this family.

Marianna has a full-fledged personality at going on 15 months. She doesn't express too many words, but she knows what's going on. She continues to fetch my shoes when I say I'm going out. When I mentioned she needed her diaper changed, she showed up with a dry diaper to present to me. She is starting to understand the word no.

This leads into a discussion of differences between mom and dad. Mom lets her run around without a diaper. Dad wants nothing to do with a girl who is going to pee on him when she sits on his lap. Dad is less than thrilled about cleaning up poop when mom has left the baby in the living room as she retreats to check her mail. Likewise, dad doesn't like to see Marianna perched on the dining room table putting her hands all over stuff. Last week she dumped a couple of dishes overboard, making a wonderful crash.

Dad loses these discussions, but at least I lose them with ill grace. Everybody knows my opinion. When I am alone with Marianna she doesn't get away with that stuff, and she's smart enough to understand the difference between mom and dad.

Kyiv does not take the virus terribly seriously anymore. Even the bus drivers don't wear masks, and nobody gives me grief if I don't. They are not supposed to let me board unless I am vaccinated or have proof of a test, but nobody has ever asked. Nonetheless I do not travel on the Metro – I don't want to be thrown off in the middle of nowhere. Besides that, I don't want to validate this coronavirus madness by supporting the economy during a lockdown.

I have missed my Toastmasters club now for six weeks. They continue to meet and as far as I can tell the attendance is not fallen off by much. I have not heard of anybody suffering from getting the shot. On the other hand, one of the mothers who comes by for singing lessons got heart problems immediately. The doctor, I'm sure with thirdhand advice from the American Medical Association, assured her that her sudden heart issues have absolutely nothing to do with the injection.

I have not written much at all for a couple weeks, spending more and more of my time chasing threads on the Internet. Topics of the day concern the fate of the world, first with regard to the virus, second with regard to the financial situation. Both of them appeared to be teetering, awaiting a crash. Nothing I read dissuades me from my thesis that my children will come of age in a very different world, a far less populous world.

With regard to the virus, the daily graphs show that the incidence is falling precipitously. Not that we noticed it much in the first place. We better enjoy this lockdown while it lasts. Thank goodness no politician here is stupid enough to suggest universal vaccination. Western Europeans may not be able to interpret a graph showing a positive correlation between the level of vaccination and the incidence of coronavirus, but here they seem to be able to do that. I am sure that the Western powers forcing us to take measures against the spread of the virus would give us only a "meets minimum" grade. Wonderful as far as I'm concerned.

I have long followed Matt Taibbi, Glann Greenwald and Alex Berenson with paid subscriptions on Substack.  This week I have added unpaid subscriptions to six others: Steve Kirsch, Toby Rogers, Matthew Crawford, Eugyppius, Celia Farber and Margaret Anna Alice.  They cover just about every aspect of the Covid crisis. Crawford makes his case with statistics. Eugyppius takes a deep look at the politics and the psychology of the issue.  The two women are excruciatingly sarcastic and wonderfully well-informed.

But so what? My mentioning it will not change any minds.  Half of you are going to believe Anthony Fauci whatever he says and pay no attention to these people. None of these people concern themselves of my issue, which is the nature of the world that my children will inherit and what it will take to prepare them to perpetuate our civilization. Whatever is left of it. The Covid pandemic is only the coup de grace, culmination of a depopulation agenda that has been underway for a century or more. Time to get back to writing.

Life is to be enjoyed. The kids and I visited farmers markets on both Saturday and Sunday. Here they use the German name jahrmarkt, a not so accurate adaptation. In German it means annual market. Here it is simply 50 or so vendors lined up on a street that has been blocked off for the day. In any case, Oksana shoved us out the door with instructions to go soak up some vitamin D, and this was a likely destination. We got some good greens, fish and bacon. In the olden days I suspect it was the farmers themselves coming to town, but these are clearly middlemen, buying as much from suppliers as farmers and simply providing a convenient way for apartment dwellers to shop.

Saturday was a beautiful late fall morning. Thick hoarfrost on the ground, approaching a half inch of ice around the fringes of the lake, and the weeping willows around its edge still wearing the thin cover of green leaves. These trees are amazing – the first to leaf out in the spring, and the last to go bare in the fall, by a month in both cases.

That's the news from Lake WeBeGone, where the strong men are in semi-hibernation waiting for spring, or the end of the lockdown, whichever comes first, the beautiful women are still coming over with their children to enjoy music as if nothing had changed, and the kids are singing Christmas carols every day. When they are not singing silly stuff that they learn from their father. My mother would be tickled to death to hear Eddie doing this ditty she sang to me in childhood

Caviar comes from a virgin sturgeon

The virgin sturgeon's a very fine fish

The virgin sturgeon needs no urgin'

That's why caviar is my dish