Middle of the last interesting days…

I have so much to do right now that it is in fact sort of daunting really. Most of the problem has been a lot of the extra work that we have had to do in preparation for this year's school. There has also been some fixing up of the house. And of course the BEING HAD stuff. Usually this part of the year is hard because of the harvest but as we didn't plant all that much, there really isn't so much harvesting to do. We are taking pickles and some apples and pears of course, but nothing in any kind of interesting numbers. But then again, there has been a lot more grass cutting than I thought there would be.

I mentioned that golf course I wanted to put together; this turned out to be pretty cool but it took a lot longer to put together than I thought at the beginning. Most of the extra work can be attributed to had badly the weed whacker had been performing; there were simply too many times when the line would give way at the slightest obstruction. I tried using long wood screws and then I stuck in a few meters of steel cable but they didn't work very well. Actually, the steel cable worked great until the plastic wore off. After that the metal quickly stripped away and it was time to reload again. Finally I found some super, heavy duty line over at the market and it works ok now. The new line holds up for a good long time which allows you to get into a good rhythm. I don't know why they didn't just give it to me the first time when I complained about how my roughy-toughy weeds were eating their crappy yellow lines like they were spaghetti. "Give me the bad-assed stuff!" I cried, "I want robo-cop, get it? I want the terminator!". I actually wanted the last and thickest variety of line but the woman said I would like the one which was a fraction lighter. I eventually saw her point because this thicker line was a little hard to load; the line is a little stiff and does not like to sit bent. But I discovered a rather elegant way to wind both spools at the same time and the results were perfect. The line deals with almost anything without breaking and was only a little slow in taking down think crab grass. Once I finally got going, I cut the fairways and greens and planted the two oversized cups and made two flags. I am actually thinking that we might need a third hole- but in any case, we are in business come next week.

Today though I had it in mind that I wanted to finish all of my final, need-to-do list concerning the dacha. I also needed to make a newspaper. But instead of bullying ahead with these necessary items, all morning got spent trying to get Egor through math. I probably should have kept my mind on business and let the boy wallow but I simply couldn't. Probably my getting involved had a lot to do with our sharing office space; a little out-of-sight/out-of-mind would have made the morning much smoother. I am not even sure I really helped him because in the end, though he seemed to have gained a few meters in his quest for understanding the basics of algebra and geometry, no matter how many examples I threw at him he still couldn't simply do it. While all of this frustration was going on though, I couldn't help but think of my own algebraic inabilities when I was the boy's age. If I tried with all of my might to go back and picture those moments with my older cousin, I probably seemed like a 3 watt bulb at the bottom of a mine shaft. "NOW I GET IT!" I said to myself as I was writing example after example, trying to illustrate how separating and reducing things to their lowest common denominators and than adding the exponents together get adequate results. Where was my big brain back then?

In the early afternoon we finally broke off the suffering and I put Egor to work sanding the tongs I made for the BBQ. These tongs are pretty cool really. The problem is that the BBQ is basically just an open fire pit with our hard won grill laying over the top of it at various heights so when the wind blows a bit, the direction of the heat tends to go with it and sometimes the damned thing gets pretty hot. The solution was to make a set of extra long instruments. In this case, I used two tomato sticks, hinged by a piece of steel stock. As of the moment I have two corners at the end of grabbing teeth but I am thinking of going to eye-bolts instead. Either way they are picking things up pretty easily and for sure, my hands are safer now than they were.

But now it is the evening and I still need to get this paper out. I hate how these days sometimes get away from you. There really isn't any time to play around. I'll be lucky to finish before midnight.

Nope, got to put it off again- Tanya is calling me to dinner and things are crashing left and right which means Anya has found her second wind. Business as usual I guess. Maybe when school starts things will be different.

More soon…