The childcare center we have been using for two years is on a pause. Very suddenly all of the children besides Marianna disappeared. Since they cannot support a staff of three with only one child, they are taking a few weeks’ break. I am not sure that is a good business decision – when you cease operation, you have a hard time getting restarted. But that's not my business.
There is childcare associated with the school that Zorianna now attends. It too is problematic. There is only one caretaker, Maria. She only wants to work three days a week so that's what she does. We are on our own on Tuesdays and Thursdays. It being Thursday as I wrote this, were on our own. That is the basis of my story.
Maria is an otherworldly sort of a woman. She is 6 foot 2, extremely graceful with a beatific face. The kind of woman that you are compelled to look at. At first, she strikes you as extraordinarily attractive. Upon closer examination, it is not any photographic beauty but simply an irresistible presence. These qualities do not render her a good businessperson. She wonders why she doesn't have more clients. The obvious thing is that people want childcare five days a week, not three. I doubt this has even occurred to her.
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The good news about Oksana's father Sasha is that he has the desire to become mobile again. To get a prosthesis and walk. The sad thing is that it has taken two years since his amputation for the spirit to move him. In that time, he broke a hip, which must have mended itself long ago without treatment. Nevertheless, he needs an x-ray to prove it. In addition, the muscles and tendons that move his lower leg seem to have shrunk. He needs physical therapy in order to get his knee joint working again. That was the occasion of his doctor's appointment this morning.
The plan was that Oksana would have the handicapped taxi pick them up at 8 o'clock. I would take Marianna for a ride as I took Zoriana to school, since we are own are on our own this week while Grandmother Nadia is down in Svetlovodsk attempting to sell her apartment.
Oksana and I had the usual fights over clothes and such as we got two girls dressed and out the door by 8:40 to bicycle to school. The difference this time was that Marianna and I waved goodbye to Zoriana and continued back home.
Oksana had not yet been able to get a taxi. She tried in vain for another hour, after which she decided we would all get on the bus and try to get a taxi in town.
Ukraine is slowly implementing some of the innovations from the West. The bus is fitted for the handicapped. More or less. Instead of a hydraulic lift, as they have in buses in the west, the driver had to park the bus, use a long key poked down a hole to unlock a ramp and flop it open, after which the two of us pushed Sasha in his wheelchair up into the bus. It's not great, but cost-effective considering how few people use it. At any rate, we got Sasha on the bus and into the city.
Oksana was able to arrange for a taxi once we were in Livoberezhna. We had a 20-minute wait, during which time she made a number of phone calls. Since we had an hour to kill until the return bus, I was happy enough entertaining Marianna. The taxi driver was on time and all business. He got Sasha and his wheelchair onto the hydraulic lift and off they went.
I had brought my backpack and a suitcase to handle our shopping. Salami, cereal and sixteen rolls of toilet paper filled the suitcase; fruit went into the backpack. Marianna and I still had 20 minutes to wait for the bus. Interesting sitting with a three-year-old, just watching the world go by. Great when the world is so new, and everything is fascinating. The ride home took 15 minutes, after which she was mine to entertain.
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My first order of business was to make a proper plum cake. Those from our tree are too small to make it look right. The ones I bought in the market – 50¢ a pound, what a bargain – are about 2 to 2 1/2 inches long. You make a thick batter with milk, butter, flour, salt and baking powder. Put it in a baking pan and stuff in the plum slices, as you see in the picture. Then you sprinkle the top with a rich mixture of sugar, ground cinnamon, ground nutmeg and ground cloves. I have just concluded that since I'm going to grind the nutmeg and cloves anyhow, it makes sense to use cinnamon sticks and grind all three together. The cinnamon is fresher that way. You top the whole thing with melted butter and bake it for half an hour. You see the result here.
Marianna entertains herself fairly well while I am cooking. She knows where I am and sees that I'm busy, so she is content to entertain herself. After the cake, I hung up the clothes that Oksana had left in the washing machine. That she also tolerated pretty well - it took only about five minutes.
There was one more task I could do with her watching – wash the dirt down the holes that the mole had made. One very industrious mole has really been playing havoc with our lawn this fall. Amazingly, for all the 50 or so mountains he has left, this guy is pretty cagey. I have never caught him in action. In previous years I would come down hard with a pick and occasionally get lucky. I have adopted more of a live and let live attitude. The lawn will be fine next spring when the grass regrows after we seed it. We can use the foul-smelling pills that encourage moles to simply go away and try to keep things under control.
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I brought the camera downstairs to take a picture of the plum cake. Marianna understands cameras. She wanted to be right in front of it and see the photos immediately. I got her out in the backyard so there would be sun on her face.
After that she got bored and asked me to read to her. Since there was no way I was going to be able to get to my email – I had not even turned the computer on so far– I gladly assented to read to her.
Here is a picture of the first book. It is about a young boy named Roman – Romchick. I'm happy to say that I'm finally to the point where I can more or less read fairytales in Ukrainian. I get the gist of the story quite well. It's a simple story, and reading it improves my pronunciation and also my vocabulary. I'm sure will be no more than six months until Marianna starts to correct my pronunciation and tell me what the words mean. My hope is that she learns to do it more courteously than her sister and brother. Fat chance.
There is also a story about Patron, a bomb-smelling pooch. A book for our times. Surprisingly well done.
As always, Oksana left me extremely thorough instructions with regard to what I should feed Marianna for lunch. As usual, I let it go in one ear and out the other. At lunchtime I looked in the refrigerator to see what I could find. Oksana had mentioned soup, so I offered it to Marianna. She said, no way! I’m not going to try to force a reluctant child to eat what she doesn't want. There were some Ukrainian crêpes – they call them mlintsy – in the refrigerator. She mainly ate the crêpes and left the filling. Fine with me. Zoriana had only eaten half of her breakfast, leaving oatmeal and cucumbers on her plate, which I offered to Marianna. She took the cucumbers. Half a deal is better than none. Dad’s work was done. The child didn’t starve.
I then served some plum cake– the part that you see missing from the picture above – for us to share, with ice cream. Marianna ignored the plum cake and enthusiastically ate the ice cream. I was happy with the bargain since I'm fond of my plum cake. And that pretty much rounded out our lunch.
At two o'clock, per Oksana’s instructions, I put Marianna to bed. She did not fight as much as I expected. I got her diaper on and put her into her crib without a problem. That gave me the chance to let my computer warm up for the first time in the day.
I was still sitting at the computer half an hour later when Oksana came home and informed me, rather tartly, that Marianna was not in bed. Oksana put Marianna back to bed. I was downstairs when she showed up again twenty minutes later, not to be sent back for yet another try.
I bicycled up to school to pick up Zoriana and take her straight to her piano lesson, where I sat as I dictated this. Zoriana, like her sister, is fussy about eating. Oksana had packed a complete dinner. Zoriana ate bits and dabs of it and the rest came home in my backpack.
That's the news from Lake WeBeGone, where the good-looking woman is satisfied that she was able to do what she needed to do for her father. He has some exercises he can do at home. The strong man is not disappointed to have spent a day with Marianna. I enjoy the chance - she spends most of her time with her grandmother and at daycare and I don't really spend as much time as I would like with her.
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I have not weighed in on the recent events in Palestine. To me it is a clash of evolutionary forces, about as likely to be influenced by moral judgments as the collision of tectonic plates. I refer again to one of my touchstones from the time of my birth, Evolution and Ethics. Sir Arthur Keith’s thesis was that modern liberalism, Christianity and evolution are mutually incompatible, and evolution trumps all.
My mailbox is flooded with news about the barbarism of the attacks. No doubt true. My ancestors were repulsed by the barbarism of the Indian attacks they suffered in Fort Seybert before the revolution in what is now West Virginia. They no doubt reassured themselves that they were on a mission to spread civilization and Christianity to the heathens.
Muslims at the time of Suleiman the Magnificent surely felt similar sentiments as they attacked Lepanto and Vienna. And the people who call themselves a Light unto the Gentiles, who have produced vastly more than their share of geniuses in just about every field of endeavor, don’t feel much compunction about taking advantage of my own tribe’s naïveté when it comes to dealing with money. Whether it is accomplished through barbarism or legalisms, the objective is the same – the evolutionary displacement by your own people of another people.
My practical observation is that secular Jews are a spent force. They don’t believe in themselves, they endorse every conceivable kind of non-reproductive sexuality, they marry out, they don’t want children, and they don’t want to pass on their culture. Whatever one may think of Islam, its adherents do believe in themselves. Look forward to the upcoming expansion of my review of Why Islam Makes You Stupid . . . But Also Means You’ll Conquer the World by Edward Dutton.
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Returning to another recent theme, we have this headline about the ACT test. The one that less qualified candidates are no longer required to take because college admission is now based on subjective criteria. The one that, by my understanding, has been re-centered downward several times over the last few years. Not far enough down! Scores are still getting worse. They can’t look for any help from me! My kids will never participate in raising test scores in the United States.
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That’s the news from Lake WeBeGone, where the strong man is nursing a sore elbow. Bursitis? Arthritis? Another week and I’ll have to get a doctor’s opinion. Meanwhile I am giving thanks for the many problems that are in remission: gastritis, acid reflux, psoriasis, gout and much more. We all live on borrowed time, and have to be grateful for what we have.
Good luck with grandpa Sacha. In my experience the muscle atrophy is very hard to overcome. But he may be able to use a walker instead of the chair. Balance is very hard to regain and differential leg strength becomes a issue.
re: Gaza - the Israelis my have brought this on themselves - see https://streamfortyseven.substack.com/p/heres-some-good-detail-on-hamas-from and https://streamfortyseven.substack.com/p/some-imteresting-analysis-here-too