Returning from Poland. Fewer love-letters to unvaxxed us. Pleasant surprise. A Toastmasters Speech
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Oksana and the family got a Skype call yesterday that I had been expecting. Our babysitter Anna, who fled to Poland in the first days of the war without hardly saying goodbye, is having second thoughts.
She reported that yesterday she forgot to pay the couple of dollars bus fare immediately upon boarding. The inspector asked for her ticket after two stops and she was subject to a $40 fine. Ouch all around.
Her daughter Sophia is learning little in school. The curriculum is about one year behind that of Ukraine. They do not assign much homework, and they have a kind of official goofing off day once a week. We hear the same story from Sasha, the mother of Eddie's best friend Yarema. Polish schools just don't seem very serious.
Anna has other complaints. The prices are sky high, including rents. The tomatoes and cucumbers don't taste as good, and neither does the chocolate. I am not sure I believe the latter – we buy Polish chocolate here in Ukraine and it's just fine. I doubt she is mastering Polish - in working ten years with us she picked up hardly any English.
She has not made friends. Especially, she has not met any interesting men. She is ready to come back. This was a bit of a feeler – is her job still waiting?
The fact is that we have done pretty well without her. Grandma Nadia does a great job taking care of Marianna. Two women will be superfluous. Inasmuch as both of them have complained at times about being overburdened, I expect the solution will be to schedule things so that they do not get in each other's hair.
There will also be the question of a raise, given that inflation has taken off so much. I am already forming my argument. My pension has certainly not gone up. Most of the inflation is in food, and Anna and Sophia get their meals here as a benefit. I am not going to be as much of a pushover as I have been in the past.
In other news, emails alerting me to the dangers of Covid and the need to be vaccinated are more and more infrequent. While nobody will admit that they were wrong, there is much less insistence that they are right. Meanwhile, Steve Kirsch and Alex Berenson just keep nailing it. How anybody can read this piece and contend there is no substance to the danger posed by the injectable biological products (anti-vaxxers call it genetic slurry) is beyond me.
At my age life affords fewer and fewer pleasant surprises. Here is an unexpected one. I gave up on Gilette a couple of years ago after their “toxic masculinity” ad campaign. Bic had a similar three blade razor, which did a great job.
I needed a new one. What they offer now has five blades. What excess! Who would need it? It turns out that it gives the smoothest shave I have ever had. It is appreciably better. So much for prejudice.
That’s the news from Lake WeBeGone, where immediately after writing this the strong man headed immediately to Toastmasters club to give a speech entitled The Jewish History of Argentina.
While my anthropology trip to Argentina was so titled, the substance of the speech concerns my interactions with the American woman on that trip, those with whom I associated at the University of Maryland, and those in my family. My concluding line was “Either I’m crazy, or the United States is crazy. I don’t think it’s me. I came to Ukraine, and it isn’t me.”