Been extremely busy, but did get to spend a weekend at home finally. Saturday night I simply locked the door to my apartment, turned off my mobile and did nothing but write and watch a movie with my hamster. What? Hamster? We'll get to that.
Half the plywood is on the climbing wall. It's looking great. It's on a lot that the Polissya crew decided to beautify, so Saturday was spent breaking up and moving asphalt and shovelling dirt so that they can plant flowers around the perimeter. It was also spent gripping the frame of the wall with my ankles and thighs, ten feet in the air, while holding big sheets of plywood to it at akward angles. My new Russian word learned that day was "Derjai!", which roughly translates as "hold the goddamn plywood flush so I can get this goddamn bolt into the hole!" Actually, my dictionary doesn't translate it that way, but it's a small dictionary.
I have hot water again! I never got around to posting it, but the way they fixed my pipes meant that only a small trickle came out of the hot water tap, not enough to kick in my kolunka to heat the water. For about a week and a half I took bucket baths. Then, suddenly, the water was off for two days (but all my water jugs were full this time, so it wasn't badly missed) and then when it was turned back on, the water pressure was back. My kolunka is still idiosyncratic, so hot water is still intermittent, going on and off while in the shower, but this I am used to and can just step out until it kicks back in and then step right back in. I love hot water!
The other thing going on in my life, other than all the teaching and lesson planning and Russian tutoring is preparing for winter. The thermometer has begun its downward slide and the days are getting noticeably shorter (all the more so because my kitchen light still doesn't work and I'm still cooking via headlamp) so it's time to start canning. All the canning implements appeared in the bazaar and, with Diana's help, I canned my first batch of vegetables: 9 liters of tomatoes and 6 liters of pickles. Since then, I've canned a couple of liters of salsa and tonight I am going to make applesauce (once again, via headlamp). I need to hurry up, though, because tomatoes are dissapearing out of the bazaar and going up in price. When I made the salsa two weeks ago, I bought 7 pounds of tomatoes for 80 cents. Yesterday, it took forty minutes to find someone with tomatoes, and they were tiny. Everyone was selling apples yesterday, which is why I bought a few pounds to make the applesauce.
Sterilizing the jars
Boiling water on all four burners
Spices
Diana doing math. She's anal about the level of spices being right and apparently how much salt, sugar and vinegar should go into X liters of water requires a level of math that would make Einstein babble.
Loading up the jars
Finished products
Oh, yeah. The hamster. When I was in the bazaar, I passed the part where they sell pets. They sell everything in my bazaar, and when I say everything, I mean everything. You can buy an AK-47 in the bazaar for $250. I'm not kidding. One day, I'll work up the courage to go take a picture of the weapons shop. But passing the pets, I noticed something unsual: in a cage full of hamsters, one was hanging upside down from the roof. I watched this hamster climb around for a few minutes and, knowing she was a hamster after my own heart, bought her.
Her name is "Scalalazitzka". It literally translates as "female who crawls on cliffs", which is the closest Russian comes to "climber". I call her Scala for short. She's my backup protein source if I run out of food this winter.
