Not for the squeamish

Stop me if you've heard this already...We had breakfast with a baker from Belfast this morning; he told us a wee story about a man whose brother you know well. Sv. This man, like his brother is a paramedic. In the middle of the night his wife woke him to say she heard someone downstairs, so he lay there getting his courage up to go down. After he'd gotten brave enough down the stairs he went. To be crafty he was crawling on all fours peering around, and the dog came up from behind and licked him. This was such a shock to that he jumped and shot through the glass doors. His paramedic colleagues had to come and rescue him; he was all cut up, having sneaked (snuck) downstairs in nothing but his birthday suit.
And on the home front here we can report that the resident teenage rebel came to ask if he could help dry dishes.

salad head

this is another kid I know from somewhere else...he had let me borrow his cap as a bag to carry lettuce and radishes in from the field, then I got him to pose like this for me!

How to love a teenager and other kids...

I have a good friend Mr. V. who has some very good ideas. Today his idea was to take us all on a picnic. We ate Shashlike, potato salad, and other good stuff, thanks to another good friend of mine, Simon the cook. I do nothing to deserve such good friends; I have a feeling all that "nothing" that I do may catch up with me one of these days. Anyway, our picnic was great for the general morale. We ate lots, went swimming, and played volleyball. There were too many of us to fit in one carload, so our driver had to make several trips. Some of us walked part way home. We walked through the largest, most huge wheat field I've ever seen in my life. A field you could spend your whole life in. I'll see if I can post some pictures.
The other pictures have posted now, you can go have a look.

cleaning crew

My revenge today

I'm in a different place now tha last week, and in a way than ever before...I always thought I liked kids, little kids, teenagers - whatever. Well, this week I'm somebody else than ever before. Maybe it was the bag of dead fish presented to me by the teenaged son of this home the day I got here..."here's the fish I caught today" me, "oh great!...uhm did you clean them?" "no, I don't know how, don't plan to learn"
For a number of reasons I didn't say much more, just cleaned the fish, and we ate them the next day...well today we have 3 more kids here, and they are about as helpless. I feel like I'm a counselor at a camp for terminally inept teenagers. I will skip all the details, but washing the curtains and hanging them up wet and not ironing them made me feel better about life. I felt all revenged at several frustrations, until Andrie, a very good, dependable brotherly sort came shouting at my window,
"you there?"
"yeah"
"you are FINED!"
"why?"
"you didn't hang our curtains right! they are insideout! we want them to look NICE!"
"ok, I'll come fix 'em"....
the picture is of the bathroom cleaning crew, before it suddenly disbanded, dissolved...disappeared?

Murka the momcatMouser

Big Sis

the stork in close up

Stork pictures that didn't post last week. I borrowed a friend's camera to take these pictures. I like the fact that my Ukrainian friends have a better camera than I do. Things are really changing here now!

the rouges

I thought I'd posted this last week, wonder if any of you got it then?

Here we have pictures of some of the crew: you'll see I have them labeled so you can identify them.

Sapun is about 6 weeks old now. In the pictures of him with the mouse he's only 5 weeks. He played with it for a while while his mother watched proudly. A few days ago she brought him another one which he started to gnaw at and it looked like he would try to eat it until his moody big sister from a previous relationship came and swiped it! She's good mouser though, look at the mole she caught.

Yesterday morning while we were making breakfast Murka brought a contribution into the kitchen. She thought we'd enjoy some micemeat with our scrambled eggs :/

Zhuk is fierce looking, but he's mellowed out through the years. I feed him scraps to keep on his good side!

kitten monster

Gallery of Rouges

I thought I'd posted this last week, wonder if any of you got it then?

Here we have pictures of some of the crew: you'll see I have them labeled so you can identify them.

Sapun is about 6 weeks old now. In the pictures of him with the mouse he's only 5 weeks. He played with it for a while while his mother watched proudly. A few days ago she brought him another one which he started to gnaw at and it looked like he would try to eat it until his moody big sister from a previous relationship came and swiped it! She's good mouser though, look at the mole she caught.

Yesterday morning while we were making breakfast Murka brought a contribution into the kitchen. She thought we'd enjoy some micemeat with our scrambled eggs :/

Zhuk is fierce looking, but he's mellowed out through the years. I feed him scraps to keep on his good side!

solution

To my hugely popular post of "what happened?"
These are bus station picture, all with the exception of one, which is titled, "down at the heels" somehow by free association it seemed to fit into this collage.
The empty bottle represents the root of drunkenness in this society, ok not the root, but there is a direct association. The weird one that nobody can tell what it is is an aquarium. This microcosm was found in a bus window, to be more exact; between double windows. It would have been more interesting had there been fish as well, like a virtual screen saver.
The sweater on the floor of the bus station looked like a dead body at first glance, but upon closer inspection it is very clear that it's either a floor rag, or a welcome mat.
The gloves on the ground? They were left by the same drunk phantom who forgot his sweater, let water into the window seal and works at the out of business shoe repair. Thank you all for participating!

Got 'em!

I finally got a shot of the pair. He doesn't stay long at all; he comes flying with a mouthfull of something, gives it to her and off he goes again. She greets him with that pop pop popping sound. I just happened to be right there playing soccer with Taras. (he's 12), oh and I lost... 10-5 I think :)
We weeded carrots today and I did fried potatoes for supper. We are having lots of fun! Wish I weren't leaving tomorrow!

The Stork

Not getting much done today, everybody's gone and a stucco crew is here, so I'm laying low. They have to feed the crew, so Maria made dinner, if we're lucky she'll make supper too!
The stork is interesting. It looks like it regurgitates its food to feed the chicks. There are other little birds that make their nest in the stork's nest too, in the basement area. I hope I can get a picture of both adults in the nest. They communicate by clapping their beaks and bowing to each other. It sounds like a popgun going off.

Working hard now

Yes, I made lunch for my friends. They love soup, so I boiled a chicken and served them the bouillon from it. I added the water from boiling the lasagna noodles and they ate it all very politely. There were leftovers enough for Maria to make it delicious for supper. She added fresh green onion and fresh dill and made dumplings for it! That's when Taras shared his real feelings with us, "I couldn't believe that WATER we had for lunch!" Good thing I'm not oversensitive or anything :/ I also made lasagna with no tomato sauce, because the kids don't like it, so I used béchamel sauce and put in a dose of vinegar to give it pizzazz.
Also we aired 13 blankets and several pillows. We put the blankets into a special box which nobody can reach. Good thing it's hot out. We washed windows, painted, vacuumed up dead flies and did laundry, ironed curtains and convinced a nice man to stucco the room I'm sleeping in. The walls are a spider's haven. A chunk of something landed on my pillow last night after dark.
Now I wonder what am I gonna cook tomorrow?
The storks are still there, I got several pictures of them today!

Goodbye Drohobych

By the time you read this I'll have left this nest. See the nice furniture they gave me from the university dormitory? There was a matching set of three of these quaint chairs, but one of them collapsed under the weight of an innocent bystander, so we hauled it off to the dump yesterday. We had fun making these 2 beds look like couches!
The wardrobe was my office. I had my laptop on a shelf in there and someone drilled holes in the back so we could put cords through and then I got locks for the doors. I had to move my office though, because the shelves kept crashing down...the poor piece of furniture is so dilapidated that the doors won't all stay shut. Somehow there's not room for them all to be shut, so I'm moving out.
I've had three bonfires to condense my stuff, but there are 3 bags under the "couch" that I couldn't get rid of, and I'm taking 3 bags with me, hoping to reduce it to 2 bags by July 8, that's when I fly. In one month from now, wow.

clothesline tales: a dry subject

This picture should put you at ease if you are worried about the laundry not getting brought in before dark.
There is a school of thought that laundry should always be brought in before it gets dark...don't know why, what good are PJ's for example if they are afraid if the dark? Is it that the blackness of the darkness of the night might make them all dirty again? I don't know... anyway relax. Tomorrow morning I'll get up at 0600, wash my sheets, hang then up to dry and leave for a year...
Actually I have regaled audiences for years with my laundry stories, one of the first laundry episodes after I came to Europe was after my good cotton Eddie Bauer blouse froze onto the line and got ripped as I jerked it loose in the winter in Puch, Austria; that was a stark contrast to the previous misfortune of burning a hole in my undies on the burning hot wire clothesline in Phoenix, Arizona.
Ok enough bedtime stories for tonight, now I need my hot chocolate. I WOULD take a shower, but my towel has been washed and dried and folded neatly into the linen cupboard. Thank you for not using Downy.

Lviv nature walk

The Lvivites call their city "little Paris"; it is a beautiful city, more so now than the first time I saw it back in 1993.

Here are some interesting photos from this spring.

The eggshell must have just hatched out that morning, the middle shot is straight up from where the shell lay, the nest must be up there somewhere. City streets are probably not the most conducive to ecology and the life cycle or the food chain, but still, life goes on!

What happened here?

Can you tell the story?