See? Told You I'd Post Again Soon!

See?  And you thought I'd never actually do it!

And yet, here we are.  With a post that stretches all the way back to Thanksgiving (pictured above).  Normally, we have a massive Thanksgiving feast with all our T friends who have never experienced one, but since we're running out of friends who haven't ever had a Thanksgiving dinner in their lives, plus we were just kinda tired, instead we invited over an American single guy who's teaching English in town that Bobbie met at some sort of English expo a month or so earlier.  Being a Southern woman, she felt the need to take him in and feed him as his mother is 1000's of miles away, plus his roommate is a Chinese guy who hadn't ever had Thanksgiving, so it all dovetailed in perfectly.

No turkey this year, as we could only find a ham, but it was delicious and of course when you have stuffing that's the only thing that really matters (well, and deviled eggs) at a Thanksgiving meal anyway.

One of the other interesting things I did in December was take part in the local government's "One Village, One Product" program.  This is a rather ingenious idea to try to boost the economy by stressing that each village should, at a bare minimum, try to come up with one business that produces something, thus providing employment for at least a couple of people.  One of the big challenges T-land faces is that there are no jobs in many of the smaller villages, meaning that people, younger people especially, are naturally drawn to the capital to find work.  This leads to villages that once supported 1000 or more people in the Soviet times now consisting of a hundred retirees and maybe some of their grandkids, while all of the working-age people live in the city.

The government has tried to stem this tide by offering grants/loans to small business owners, and they held a big expo in December so every region could show off the businesses they were running.  Some of them were ideas with little upside for future sales growth (the production of T coats, for example) but others were interesting and showed promise.  Above you can see some of the ones that were displayed outside the expo center, with businesses that produce ready-made yurts or a hay-growing collective.  Below were some of the fur-trapping businesses that I found interesting, offering mink/wolf pelts for sale (presumably to garment manufacturers?).

Our region managed to scare up a passel of very cute T kids in traditional garb in an attempt to win the judges' favor:

Me with one of the other small business owners from our area.  He takes raw cast iron sheets and shapes them into interesting stoves that can run on used motor oil or kerosene.  They can be used for heating a home or cooking. 

Interesting, but perhaps without the same potential for future sales growth, was this business that offered stuffed sheep stomachs and milk vodka:

I doubt you can see it, but among the judges was the vice president of the republic (the equivalent of a lieutenant governor in the US).  I got to chat with him a bit about our pine nut business; it was a privilege to get to share what it is we're doing and our vision for the future of the business.

Now, for the business itself, I'm going to save the latest news for the next post in a week or so, but when I last showed you photos we had basically an empty frame set up.  Well, since then we've been hard at work progressing to actual interior walls!

Above: the enclosure around the generator

Below: the staircase to the second floor going in

And this is how it looks now, with actual walls going in.  Actually, it's a bit beyond even this now, so I need to go out and take some more pictures, but that will have to wait for our next update.

Thanks for stopping in, and we hope you'll have a very happy New Year!