A favorite pastime ...

... on a hot day. Sitting on a large storage crate on the balcony and making a clothespin open and close.



With his teeth.

Well, buy them some peanuts and Cracker Jack

We love baseball. Oh my it's a wonderful game. We're midway through the Ken Burns documentary about our national pastime, and we're enjoying it. The documentary gives the impression that baseball was an even greater source of national unity in the past than it it now, though I'm sure there were people in the early part of last century who also claimed it was a boring game.

Soccer's the big game here in Ukraine, so Dietrich's not likely to learn baseball through cultural osmosis. We'll have to teach him, and mlb.com will help.

But I see signs that baseball might someday be not so foreign here. Around Christmas, we made a special outing to what we'd heard was the best toy store in Kyiv. We weren't impressed by the store (it's long and skinny, hard to navigate and too easy for little hands to grab all that interests them). But we did get one special gift for Dietrich. "Oh, a baseball," we exclaimed when we spotted the white ball with red stiching. "Dietrich must have it, no matter the cost!" (Thankfully, it was cheap.)

But last week we got Dietrich another soft baseball, and this one we found in a very ordinary toy kiosk above the supermarket a five-minute walk from our house.

Plus, on our way to the market one evening, we saw two kids playing some odd game in the courtyard of our building. Never expecting that they could be playing the game we love, we asked ourselves, "What is that? Cricket?" Nope, it was baseball. The rudimentary, pitch-at-your-buddy, no-one-to-field-a-hit version of baseball. Keep it up, kids, and in a few years, Dietrich can play outfield.

Taking a dip

Our washing machine is a front-loader that fits neatly under our kitchen counter. In our old apartment, we had a tall, skinny top-loader, but it wouldn't fit here, so we swapped with our landlord.

Dietrich has long known how to open the washer, and he loves to fill it up with stuff. Most of the time I notice this before I start a load of wash, but the other day we looked over to see this panda magnet going for a swim.



When it was just the panda, it was funny. But upon unloading the clothes, I found the pig, the cat, the dog and several other creatures also had taken a dip and, like the panda, were no longer recognizable.

You'd think I'd have learned after I washed the remote control ...

This week's Most Useful Discovery

Ukraine is not the land of the jumbopack. Though there are exceptions, even at our Costco-like store, Metro, many of the "bulk" items are actually several single items wrapped together. Five bags of oatmeal, four cartons of juice, seven packages of nutmeg ... you get the picture.

The first Sunday of every month, I prepare trays of tea and cookies that we carry around as people chat after church. I make the tea at home and pour it into Thermoses (from Metro, actually). Even hours after I make the tea, plus a walk to church, sometimes through the snow, the tea is scalding hot when I pour it. I love me those Thermoses.

But the cookies are another matter. At the grocery store, most of the cookies come in rather small packages — fine for a household, but pretty cumbersome when providing cookies for 40.

To get bulk cookies, you can go to the store or to the outdoor market and buy them from a cookie seller. I ask for a kilo or 500 grams of a particular cookie, and the seller whips out a thin plastic bag and dumps all the cookies in. I usually buy four kilos, which fills up all the space in the bottom of our stroller.

This is what I've been doing for years now, but I've never been very pleased with the results. First, inevitably, a lot of the cookies crumble. Second, there are lots of really pretty cookies here, topped with cream or elaborate designs, but I always decline to buy them, fearing that they wouldn't hold up to the beating they'd get in the plastic bag.

This past week, the visiting professor for the Talbot-Kyiv Extension gave a lecture on the problem of evil on Wednesday night. We had no idea how many people to expect, so I needed a lot of cookies. I went to the market, expecting to wind up with bags and bags of cookies, half of which would crumble on the way home.

But, what did I spy, but a guy. A guy with a van full of bright-yellow boxes of cookies! They were the same kind of boxes that the bulk cookie sellers get their cookies delivered in, only smaller. The cookies were nicely lined up, and the boxes protected them, even when I stacked seven boxes in the bottom of the stroller. I even bought some beautiful, pink-and-yellow-cream-topped minicakes, and even after the trip home and then to the seminary, they looked lovely and springy as they waited to be devoured. Plus these cookie boxes are wrapped in plastic, which means they'll keep overnight without getting stale, unlike cookies in a bag.

So, for now on, it's cookies in a box for me.

Bad day for the dollar

Last night at Kiev Theological Seminary, Talbot professor Dr. Doug Geivett presented a lecture on the problem as evil. Because this is such an important topic, especially in this society, we opened the event up to nonseminary folks, too.

Since some people would be seeing the seminary for the first time, we wanted them to feel warmly welcomed and well-fed. A friend and I were charged with supplying tables of coffee and yummy snacks, so I spent a good part of the day carrying bags of cookies, pretzels, fruit, serving dishes, candles, etc., over to the seminary.

The first time I went out, in the morning, the casino across the street was changing dollars into 4.63 hrivna. That's a pretty bad rate, much lower than the 5.05 that we were accustomed to until about a month ago.

The next time I went past the casino, the dollar had dropped to 4.50. At about 10 p.m., on the way back from the event, it was at 4.36.

I know the casino is just trying to capitalize on people who didn't manage to find a better rate earlier in the day, but who MUST GAMBLE NOW, but I still found it unsettling.

Most Interesting redux

So, last week I thought the fish jumping from the tank was kinda cool. Today, however, when we arrived at the grocery store, one fish was already flopping about on the tile. Soon after he was rescued, another one made a break for it. And it scared the cool right out of me. I shrieked a little bit. It was embarrassing. Now I think they need to put the lid back on the tank.

This week's Most Interesting Moment

I've blogged before about walking to the supermarket to check out the fish. This remains a favorite pastime for our little guy -- plus they've added a tank of crawdads.

In fact, we visited the fish this week, and as we were watching them, one jumped out of the tank (which is taller than me; the fish wranglers have to stand on a chair to scoop the fish out when someone buys one).

Poor fishie started flopping around on the floor just a few feet from us. We and another shopper explained the situation to the lady who was in charge of the fish counter that day. She finished up the transaction she was in the middle of, then calmly walked over and tossed the fish back in. He swam right away, so I guess the journey to the air-breathing world didn't hurt him. Dietrich, of course, found the whole incident utterly fascinating.