Wasted day…

The garage and well up at our dacha farm; just never got there today

I completely lost this day. It started off fine, I had things under control and then step by step by step it all just got away from me. There are those who would say stuff like this was meant to be and that I should not beat myself up over it too much. Maybe they are right. Normally though I budget my time with as much accuracy as I can. It is not like I have a gun to my head, but there are always issues of energy vs work which needs to be done. Today, I really messed up and I am going to be paying for it.

It all started when this computer decided to crash right before I needed to send off a most important e-mail. I was supposed to have been on the farm today and this e-mail was a response to a English teaching project I am into and this e-mail needed to be off in the morning so there would be a chance to get the answer by the afternoon. Getting this letter later in the afternoon would be perfect because it would allow me my day on the farm and have tomorrow to spend on the project. Maybe I could even get to do some reading at the beach. That would have been a monument to proper planning and devotion to duty if things would have gone the way they were supposed to.

But then the computer decided to crash at about 10 minutes to seven, exactly the time I would have needed to be in the 13 bus over to the bus station. Not getting to the bus station a little early means not getting a seat on the bus and as they tend to smash people in there like sardines, that hour's ride out to the village would be murder. I really sweated that moment too because waiting for the computer to reboot would set me back to the point that I would miss the good 13 and have to take the bad 13, and all of that shared human warmth with the babas. But in the end I decided that getting this project going was more important than a little bus comfort and after allowing for some multi-lingual cuss words, I did sit down and wait for the reboot and then sent off the letter.

Fine. So now I thought I was ready. I slung my bag over my shoulder, slipped on my now three-year-old shower thongs and started out the door. One problem though: Where were the dacha keys? We have a place for these things but they were not there. I checked the bag, I checked my pants and my shorts. Nothing. We woke up Egor: "Did you take the keys?" Oblivion. We asked the same of Anya- same answer, though at least she joined in the search. Turned the house upside down, not a sign of them. Time on the clock: 7:15.

"What do you want to do?" This was Tanya. At the moment I was standing in the corridor. I felt like my arms weighed 100 pounds each.

"I need to go today because I need tomorrow for other things"

"How will you get in the house?"

"I'll just take a pane of glass out of one of the windows and climb through. I have done it before."

"Do you want to do that?"

"No. And I don't want to stand on the bus and I also don't want to have to break off my lock and buy another."

"Two more. You forgot the garage."

"Yes, I do not want to have to buy two more locks either."

"Can you go tomorrow?" This was the real question. If there is one thing that I have learned from the Rabbi is that no matter how important you may be thinking something is in a given moment, really, in the bigger picture it probably doesn't mean as much as you think, and there is always another way to get it done. I don't know how many times I have tried to fix a problem right away only to be told that it can wait or that even asking the question was a waste of time. And in retrospect it often turns out to be the truth; either it actually wasn't that important or whatever it was died from neglect along the way. In the end it works out about the same.

"I can but it will cost me a lot of time I do not have."

"What do you want to do?"

"Let's find the keys…" We looked and looked but never did and the effect was like an increasing gravity that just became overwhelming. My energy dropped like a stage curtain and after about 20 minutes of searching and researching for those keys, I simply slipped off my shirt and lay down on the bed.

"There is a good movie on TV." Tatyana said.

"You are no help."

"It's a western."

"Really?" There was too. Gregory Peck played this marshal who finds a map of a canyon filled with gold. He doesn't think this is important but Omar Sherif does and he and his gang bushwhack the marshal and demand that he take them to the canyon. Along the way Eli Wallace and Telly Savalas show up also trying to get to the gold and the whole time the buzzards are circling, waiting for the next guy to get dead. Pretty cool, even in Russian. Too bad I slept through most of it.

Maybe I was more tired than I thought or maybe the loss of he keys just broke my spirit, but that was the end of me for the whole day. Eventually I got up and did some other things like fixing the garden fences and spraying the weeds. In the afternoon I went out with Anya and we got a new lock and then I made a trip to the Piervamiaska market to get a second sprayer- you shouldn't use the same sprayer for feeding that you do for killing. While I was up there I ran into a couple of friends. One is a historian and an expert in the Jewish history of Pinsk. We had talked about making a website which would be like a virtual tour of the town complete with photos and texts. At the market I ran into Andre from the bike school. He works in the cemetery flower business now and is still riding but unfortunately, he did not hook up with a club. This to me is too bad because he has the legs and the heart to maybe have a little career for himself. I actually don't know why he is not in the sports school up in Minsk because he had a high enough ranking to get in. I need to finds out more about this but other than this, I promised to help him find a sponsor.

Anyway, this was today. I got some interesting reactions to yesterday's blog and decided that people would rather not read such defeatist/Marxist/ we-are-all-going-to-die-and-it-is-our-own-damned-fault rhetoric if they can help it. Several people who have been commenting or at least writing to me about my posts simply pretended that yesterday never happened. Sorry. However, for what it is worth, Yahoo today mentioned that George Bush has gotten the hint and has decided to try and look again into the soul of Vladimir Putin. Good luck with that one George. Hope you don't lose your keys and miss the bus on the way over.

Tomorrow I will be on the farm and I guess this means that Saturday I will be reading. Vsyo normalno. Vsyo xorosho

More soon…