Let's talk about the weather…

Vin Diesel in The Pacifier; Believe me, when Tanya is at work, this guy has nothing on me when it comes to taking care of the house and kids!

We have had some real storms here over the last few days. Rain, rain, rain and more rain.

On the one hand having some rainy days in the middle of a too hot summer makes for a nice break. It is also good if you have been doing too much lately and needed a day or two off from outside work. On the other hand, if you did have a lot of outside work to do, which I did, that rain delay plays with your mind because inevitably it will create more work than there was before.

That outside work means doing some farming. This year has turned out to be more a preparatory year than a real farming year. We started with the idea of planting less and working less, but early rains and too many weeds turned the project into a run to keep up situation which has continued to this moment. I think without these last rainy days all would have been handled to perfection and next year would have begun with clean, clean land where it needed to be, and some new trees filling in some of the open spaces at the far end of the field. Now though there is a good possibility that I will need to start all over again, all of my extra work over the last few weeks wrecked by too much water and not enough time out in it hacking.

And that weather… these are real storms. High winds, lashing rains and it went on and on for days. Belarus is a large flat inland plain basically and therefore we get the sort of weather they get in the Midwest. Possibly in Pinsk we are a bit milder than Minnesota or Wisconsin whose electrical storms I well remember, but it does though have good enough storms that I have lost three trees out at the farm over the last three years to high winds, and we lost several limbs from the garden near the house this week. I will get the rest of the damage report Tuesday.

But as I said there was a positive side. Getting our plans crushed for a Friday work day meant the necessity to find something good to do at home. The answer came from Egor, who once having finished his summer math studies decided that really, there was nothing else to do but to go to the movies. Perhaps in America this thought might lead to reading the papers to see what would be playing at one of the several local multiplexes, the purchase of several $6-10 tickets, another $10 each for cokes, some candy and large popcorns. What does this come out to, $30-40? Maybe less, but I am not overdoing it by much. Here in Pinsk we have but one theatre, it shows one movie at a time (Right now it is the Fantastic Four II), tickets cost about $1.30 and there are no cokes or popcorn available. You can of course bring your own- a two liter coke is about the same price as a ticket and a midsized pack of chips is about forty cents. Entertaining two boys, a little girl and yourself therefore comes out to about $7.50- still a lot of money but much more manageable than a week's wage.

Egor pointed out though that for basically the exact same money, we could watch movies all day on the computer. Thinking that this was a much better deal, I sent him over to a local store that carries disks and told him to pick out the coolest multi-film disc he could find for 12,000 (about $5) or less. We still have bandit disks available here. They have become a bit less obvious then they had been previously, but you can still get pretty much any program or album collection you want for about $5. Egor came back with basically all of Vin Diesel's movies, dubbed into Russian of course, in one collection. So we bought some chips and real coca-cola (why not?) and spent the nest part of Friday watching Riddick, The Fast and the Furious, XXX, and the Pacifier.

Now Egor really likes the Riddick films and I can't blame him but when you after watching 10 hours of Vin Diesel movies, the man sort of gets all over you. The kids were basically beating themselves to a pulp trying to match his fighting moves and I myself noticed a marked nonchalance in my manor and that my voice had dropped at least an octave. It crushed me to find out that the man might be gay!

Anyway, this is the latest story. Today Tanya is at the farm hanging paper and I have a newspaper to make, tomorrow is fishing early and work after and Tuesday is back to the farm to see what clean-up there is and to instigate the strawberry moving project. Sound like fun? Check it out for yourself some time. Who knows, you might like it.

More soon…