Way Behind

I know, I've been amiss in keeping this updated.  Since we came back so much has happened and we have so many pictures that it's just too hard to come on here and post a blog.

But for those of you who have been pestering me, here it is: a post full of pictures.  I have to be up in a few hours, so you're only getting captions, but I hope you're satisfied. :-)

Above: trimming the Christmas tree
Below: Steven's birthday presents - I'm sensing a theme

Learning to ride a bike.  Also: rubbing it in our Russian friends' faces that we can wear short sleeves in December!

Reconnecting with: (above) cousins and (below) abuelas!

Also, because it's still 'Murica, Santa Claus.  And below, Steven as a shepherd in the Christmas play.

And I'm going to bed and I refuse to write more and you can't make me.

But thanks for stopping by. :-)

A New Hemisphere

From here ...

 To here ...

 

So, obviously it's been a long time, and I should apologize, but I'm refusing on principle after I was admonished for continually starting my posts that way.  This is my way of apologizing for the delay without really doing it. :-)

The Wandering Family has been living up to its name of late, managing to go from one continent, through another one, and on to a third.  But before we talk about that, we should cover the last part of our time at home.

Above: I AM the coolest man alive!
Below: Me in my new office, cramming before our departure.

I know most of you won't be able to read this, but I found it a fascinating bit of Russiana.  It's an old Soviet poster that hangs in an officemate's cubicle: "The Moral Code of the Building of Communism."  Fascinating.  It lists the "principles that make up the moral code for the building of communism, according to the party."

A couple of dudes just ice-fishing.  A cold way to spend the day, I've always thought.

I took this picture in the Buddhist temple one day last month; it's where the worshipers come in and light a candle.

They also sell some beads and scarves for worship there in a little booth next to the temple.

The trip here was very, very long.  We were stuck in the airport in Abakan all day with a major delay.  Fortunately, a very nice Chinese lady who didn't speak Russian got my help translating (she did speak some English, though her husband didn't) and in exchange let our boys play with her iPad.

The airline gave us some food, but mostly it was just a long wait.  We sort of made friends with the Chinese couple and spent the day with them.

It was kind of cold.  On the left there you can see Matthew bundled up in a coat and blanket, just sort of waiting out the cold day in the airport.

So, that'll do it for now.  Hopefully soon we can post something about our time here so far, which has been fantastic.  And just as a reminder, we're still making plans for our "tour of America" in February and March, so if you don't live in North Carolina and you'd like to see us, write us an email and let us know and we'll plan to stop by if we can.

Boys Playing in Russian

So this isn't really a full post, but I thought a few of you might think it's funny.  The boys are starting (finally, after a whole year of going to kindergarten here) to pick up Russian.  They mostly use it at school, though, so we don't get to hear them speaking it much at home.

The other day Bobbie noticed that they were playing in their room together and speaking in Russian, so I tried to get a video of it from around the corner, knowing if they saw the camera they'd stop.  It's so cute to hear them speak it - it's like they've reverted to being toddlers again.  They've only been learning it for a year or so, so it's not a surprise that they speak it almost like babies.  

They kind of have that slurred only-parents-can-understand speech that 18-month olds do, but it's still funny (you can hear the word "samalyot" meaning "airplane" pretty clearly as they play with the toy plane):

Their pronunciation may be funny, but I could only get the intonation just perfect like that in my dreams!

Edit:
Just to pad this post out a bit, a "Russian Cars" bonus!

 

Snow, Yurt, and a Minor Disaster

 

It seems that every year the snow gets earlier and earlier here.  Of course, this year we don't mind as we're going to leave to where there's no snow soon, so we get to enjoy a bit of it before we head out.  

The boys in particular always love the first snow of the year.  I think they forget how much they hate it by April, and they're just like "Snowball fight!" every year.  The novelty may wear off by December or so, but you have to at least get your money's worth at the beginning of the winter.

 We built the year's first snowman, but since we only had about four inches of snow and it wasn't wet enough to make a decent size ball, this is all we could get.

 Matthew, having recently watched "Frosty the Snowman," felt that the snowman looked lonely and wanted to give him a hug.

While Steven got to work making as many angels as he could fit into the flat part of the playground.

This week has been better than a lot of recent weeks, because despite still being on the hunt for a new culture and language helper, I got a lot of language practice in when some friends invited me to help them build their yurt.  

It was a bit different from a T yurt, as they had ordered it in a set from Mongolia.  The middle piece in particular was weird to me; apparently you have to have windows especially fabricated to fit or if it's warm, some plastic sheeting.  It does seem like a good way to let some more light into what can be a dark place in the winter, but I'm not sure how practical it is to haul windows around every time you have to move it.  

The first step is getting the wall lattice pieces set up and tied together and tied to the door.  This yurt is an "8-wall" yurt, meaning it's much bigger than usual (more commonly they are 5 or 6 wall pieces).

Then we had to set up the unusual high roof piece by balancing it on supports and then tying it temporarily until we can get the cross-pieces in to support.

The last step is getting the felt pieces on.  Unfortunately the set did not come with enough felt to cover the whole wall, so we halted construction eventually to go buy some more felt.  I also think they were going to buy another layer of felt for the parts that already had some, because the felt that was sent was quite thin and not up to insulating the yurt from the winter cold.

 The construction team takes a break for a photo shoot with the yurt in mid-build:

I was supposed to come back for the last day of building to finish (which I don't think actually happened, as the felt had to be ordered from somewhere), but the next day I got a call that our friends' garage where they were storing their furniture and household goods had sprung a leak.  You see, they're out of the country at present, so I had their key and had been checking on their stuff every now and again.

Sure enough, I rushed over to see what was going on and opened the door to a sauna.  It seems that when the hot water to the garages was turned on, there was a leaky radiator in the garage, which of course started spraying water all over the place.  Some frantic rearranging (and of course turning off of the water) later and it looked like this:

Mattresses were soaked, the couch was moist but hopefully salvageable, and some of the household stuff was ruined.  I did my best to get as much saved as possible, but it was still a bummer to have to call our friends back in the Western Hemisphere and tell them about the accident.

Above: you can see the radiator pipes on the right there, which unfortunately sprayed water for a day or so into a pile of stuff including books, kitchenware, bedding, etc.

Below: the weld that repaired the leak.

Sadly, some of the boxes of books were pretty much toast. :-(

And that's about it.  Tune in next week for more pictures of ... well, something.  Hopefully.

Thanks for thinking of us.  It's hard to believe that our departure is coming so soon.  We have some important meetings between now and then, so hopefully we'll stay very busy getting ready for them and also to leave.  We'll be seeing some of you very soon!

Attack of the Wandering Family!

 Steven and Matthew preparing for an assault on America

 So yeah, it seems that we are planning a trip to the US a little sooner than we had originally planned.  Due to a desire to get Steven into school for first grade next fall, and then the need to hand in our financial statements in April, we've had to reschedule our return for a few months from now.  Not ideal, but not the end of the world either.  And if you were thinking you'd have to wait for another year to see us, then it's good news to you as well.  Or bad news, if you don't like us much, I suppose.

Anyway, it's time for a blog, so here one is.  Not much going on, to be honest, except for stuff preparing for our new business and language study difficulties.  But you don't want to hear about that.  No, you want cute pictures of our boys preferring to sleep on the floor to their beds, and them reading a book as they fall asleep.

But we don't have that many of those pictures.  So, thought I to myself, what else do we have some pictures of?  Cakes!

Why cakes?  I don't know.  Ask my wife.  After making so many desserts for our guests (we have company at least a couple of times per week, and there's always a homemade dessert of some kind), Bobbie developed kind of a reputation for making delicious cakes.  And since there aren't really bakeries here where you can commission a cake, people started asking for her to make one for them.  She doesn't ask for much money, just enough to buy the ingredients (she's a much better baker than a businesswoman - that's why I'm in charge of the pine nut business!).

Above is a typical example.  Our friends and neighbors were having a birthday celebration, so they asked Bobbie to make them a yurt cake.  It's in the shape and decorated as a T yurt.  Below you can see the birthday boy blowing out his candle.

The tricky part of the cake was that they wanted it to show the T flag in cross-section when it was cut.  Obviously, with a yurt shape there had to be a top section that wouldn't work for a rectangular cross-section, so she did that in chocolate and the rest is the T flag:

This sort of thing has led to a whole slew of "orders," ranging from designs people want Bobbie to draw on their cakes (favorite cartoon characters, etc.):

to more classic roses and tiered styles:

I think this one is my favorite one, a birthday cake for some friends' daughter.

Isn't Bobbie amazing?  I mean, I guess you all knew that already, but she is, isn't she?

Father/Son Camping Trip

So, we finally tracked down our camera a few weeks ago and got it charged (it turns out Matthew had been taking it to school in his backpack - how it got in there is another question!).  We actually have several posts worth of pictures stored up, but I'll let Bobbie do those as they're about gatherings and friends and food, and that's her thing.

As for the men of the house, we've been up to more manly things.  Well, Matthew is excluded, because he was sick, but this week I took Steven out for an overnight camping trip while the weather was still nice.

 Above: waiting outside the kindergarten where I'd just picked up Steven for the taxi to come get us.  The story of the taxi became a saga when he didn't come get us then next morning as we'd agreed, but fortunately another car came by and agreed to haul us back into town.  But I'm getting ahead of myself.

 First we had to get out into the woods, next to the river, to set up our tent.  Steven was loving all of this, of course:

We brought delicious sausages (for me) and hot dogs (for Steven) for supper.  I like his expression below, sort of a "yes, I'll smile for the camera while I hold my hotdog stick, but I'm not sure how to do it without getting too close to the fire."

MMmmm!  Yummy.  And the view was nothing to sneeze at, either.  Mountains, river, trees just turning yellow - T-land must be one of the nicest places in the world in the fall.

After a session of throwing rocks into the river (above), always a favorite pastime, we gathered wood for the evening fire.

We had a great time.  I don't have that many pictures because mostly we were enjoying ourselves, but we played football one-on-one in the little grass field next to the campsite, and then I read "Little House on the Prarie" to him in the tent before we went to bed.  

I like the below picture (as we waited for the taxi that never came), just Steven staring off into the beauty of creation.

And that's it for this post, I guess.  As for daily life, we're back at the grind of language study and trying to get things set up for the new business we told you about a few weeks ago.  I'll let Bobbie show you all her new culinary creations and gatherings with friends and guests.  Keep an eye out for that in a week or so.  Until then, thanks for checking in and especially for thinking of us. 

Edit: Bonus cartoon that I'm adding as it made me laugh today