Poor Douglas

If you're new to reading this blog, Douglas is my husband. He's a Foreign Service Officer serving in Russia. We started out in Vladivostok. We were evacuated to Moscow during the pandemic where we spent about nine months. We've now been living in Yekaterinburg for about six weeks. Like the rest of you, we don't know what's going to happen next. Also like many of you, he works remotely from home most of the time. For the most part, I stay quietly out of the way.

This morning after breakfast, he announced that he was heading upstairs to get dressed. This should have been a clue to me that a meeting was imminent, but I missed it. I went up to play a Christmas song, New York Fairy Tale by The Progues, which has been in my head for several days in hopes of ridding myself of it for about eleven months. I found it and played it, loudly. I heard a door firmly shut. This hint I did receive and I turned the volume down, a bit. In the song, reference is made to another song, Rare Mountain Dew. I decided to follow Fairy Tale with The Dubliner's version of Rare Mountain Dew. I didn't want to fall down the modern rabbit hole of Irish music, so I exited out before forces beyond my control pulled me further in. It was then that I heard voices. For real. I realized that as I was singing along with "you scumbag, you maggot, you cheap lousy faggot" and skipping to "to my hi di-diddly-idle-um, diddly-doo-ri-diddlum-deh" Douglas was in a meeting listening to, and talking with the Consul General and other colleagues. After the meeting, I apologized to him. He said he hadn't noticed. 

And there, folks, you have one of the fundamental differences between Douglas and I. I will sit here writing (or what-evering) and be distracted by the neighbor's refrigerator kicking on and off, while Douglas can be oblivious to "you're a bum, you're a punk, you're an old slut on junk lying there almost dead on a drip in that bed" (yes, it's a Christmas song!) while he's working. I wish I had that kind of focus, I really do.

Last Friday, Douglas called me from the Consulate to tell me that the long-awaited package from Moscow had finally caught up to us. Unfortunately, it was not the Halloween marshmallow pumpkin candies I was expecting from my Aunt Katy. It was from Aunt Katy, however. Douglas asked me if I wanted him to tell me what it was. This question can mean two very opposing things. It can mean that it's something that will either thrill me or disappoint me greatly. I told him to tell me. "She sent you something called Naked Males." He said. Naked males, I thought. My curiosity was piqued. But knowing that the word naked means different things for the various sexes - movies are full of nudity, but rarely will you see a penis, I asked, "Are there penises?" "No." He curtly answered. I later found out why he'd been so short with me. When he got home, he pulled it out. The gift. The one from my Aunt. It was a manicure kit called Naked Nails. Oopsy. My mistake. 

Everything is so up in the air right now regarding the fate of the Consulate in Vladivostok (still officially Douglas's post), and I hate to put any pressure on him (especially as I sit hear listening to him sing to himself, I've got the sword of Damocles hanging over my head), but we must get back to Vladivostok or to the States. We're out of Charmin and chocolate chips. I've thrown away two of my pajama tops for being threadbare and stretched out. While I admit the threadbare part can be sexy (especially after night sweats), the stretched out part is just unattractive. Without my books and the Vladivostok Consulate library as a backup, my Kindle bill is going up by about $16 a month. I know, I know, I could borrow through the library. I haven't figured that out yet. Anyone? Kaliope? 

This morning, Douglas and I walked to the Consulate together, him to work and me to exercise in the gym. I forgot to kiss him goodbye at home before we bundled. Easy to understand. I wasn't saying goodbye yet. Anyway, as we neared the Consulate I knew I wanted to kiss him before we went our separate ways. I thought ahead enough to not wait until we were inside where he might be shy or embarrassed about kissing me, so I asked him when we were outside the door. I saw his eyes roll just a bit. Not because he didn't want to kiss me, but because in order to kiss me, he'd have to remove his mask. In order to remove his mask, he'd have to take off his ear muffs. To get the ear muffs off, he'd have to doff his hat and to get any of that off, he'd have to take off his mittens. It was 27 below last week. Not as cold this week, but still ."I have needs." I said. So he did a very modest strip tease and kissed me. 

I don't deserve him.

I'll leave you with some wintry pictures of Yekaterinburg.

I found this hothouse in a nearby park. What a treat.

There are two ice sculpture displays within walking distance.

I hope this comes off as humorous in this picture as it did when I passed it on the street. He looks like he's holding out his hat for a handout, but is poised with a snowball for those who don't contribute!

Holidays in the Time of Pandemic

 

In 2020, because we couldn't go out to eat and lacked the forethought to order through Amazon the  number of weeks in advance it would have required to be timely, we celebrated my birthday around a fire pit eating Georgian khachapuri delivered to the Embassy compound. For Douglas's birthday, I baked him an apple pie. Our anniversary was spent watching a movie and eating a 'special' dinner of take-out burritos and chili soup from the American Diner in the Embassy. For Thanksgiving, I found some deli-sliced turkey, sweet potatoes, cranberries and one box of Stove Top stuffing that we ate on opposite sides of the apartment while Douglas finished a quarantine after a trip to Vladivostok. 

I was determined to have a festive Christmas.

The yolka in the parking lot of our apartment in Yekaterinburg. Yolka translates as Christmas tree, but it's more of a New Year's tree, since the Russians celebrate the new year with a decorated tree.

Then we were bundled off to Yekaterinburg where they needed Douglas to serve as management officer and act as post security officer. One job just isn't enough for some people in the eyes of their superiors, two or three are better. "Just bear with me during this and throw some food my way." Douglas told me just before his head sunk into his computer and he disappeared.

A detail from the yolka in the parking lot.

I try to maximize trips to the grocery store and only go once a week to avoid exposure to the coronavirus. Society's mouth-breathers have been thoughtful enough to make themselves obvious by leaving their noses hanging out over their masks as they walk around cloaked in their entitlement, so I can usually avoid them. I speak enough Russian to get by at the grocery store - I don't have to flap my arms or rudely squeeze myself if I want chicken or milk. (I don't think you want to know about the time I had to buy tampons while living in Germany.) Our oven here is about a third the size of a standard American home oven, so turkey is out of the question. Maybe a couple Cornish game hens cooked one at a time. For the most part, for Christmas dinner I stuck to things I knew. But I also wanted brown sugar. There's plenty of brown sugar on the shelves here, but there's no molasses in it. It's not unusual for me to draw a small crowd when I shop. It usually takes two or three to confer, read labels and figure out exactly what it is I want. I am grateful for the patience of the Russian people. I found brown sugar at the fifth store I visited - dark brown! Since I'm on the topic of sugar, you know the difference between regular granulated sugar and baker's sugar? Well, double or triple the size of the grains of our regular sugar and you have the only sugar available here. You must allow extra time for the sugar to dissolve when making everything or everything crunches.

So, our dinner of sautéed peppers, onions and zucchini with rice and salmon was colorful and delicious. But we had no Christmas decorations. Wait. Not true. My dear mother send me one of those cardboard Advent calendars with the chocolates hidden behind each window. We gave it a prominent place on our couch and surrounded it with gifts from Douglas's co-workers.

These are our Christmas decorations for 2020. The picture of the young women is a Peace Corps calendar with photographs take by volunteers around the world.

I'm not crazy-busy like Douglas, but there is plenty to do to fill my days, even when it's not Christmastime. When we're living as we are (so-called temporarily), we are provided with what are called welcome kits which are made up of the bare minimum of household supplies: four each of bowls, plates and utensils, popsicle sticks that somehow pass as knives, kitchen shears that can barely cut lettuce, burlap towels, blankets that are made of some sort of rubbery material, 14" mattresses with fitted sheets made for 8" mattresses,  etc. and I am grateful for these welcome kits. Really. But to leave behind Wusthof knives and have to wash dishes twice a day to have something clean to eat off of is taxing. Then there's the laundry. Our washer and dryer are each large enough for about three bath towels, so it must be done often. The units came with no instruction manuals. The dials for the washer have pictures:

In case you're wondering what all the Russian means, briefly: beside the picture of the pants, it says jeans'; beside the picture of the shirt, it says 'shirts.' You get it. I have deliberated for many minutes when I stand before it with a pair of pants and a shirt I want to launder.

The dryer is no clearer. Your choices include iron-dry, shelf-dry, closet-dry and very dry. Most cycles for each last well over an hour and a half.

Okay, back to the holidays. I've mentioned before that New Year is the big holiday in Russia. Christmas is more of a church holy day. 

I wanted sparkling wine for toasting the new year. This was challenging since I don't know Russian wines (she writes as though she knows American wines or Italian wines). It was further complicated by the fact that I'd forgotten to bring my reading glasses, so I couldn't make out сухое (dry) or сладкий (sweet) which usually appears in very small print on the back label. (Reading microscopic English is hard enough, but to make out the Cyrillic alphabet is just too much.) I did, however find a брют (brut) for P295 (295 rubles, about $4). Pretty cheap. I was suspicious. Well, I thought, maybe this is the two-buck-Chuck of Russia; maybe it's not so bad. I took it. There was another bottle nearer the checkout for P495 (about $5.35), so I figured I could afford that as a back-up. 

Fireworks are popular here, perhaps from the proximity to China, I don't know. So there were intermittent fireworks all night New Year's Eve. They aren't very spectacular, not that I've seen, but they're beloved. In Vladivostok, they were a regular occurrence all year round.

Douglas ended 2020 with the receipt of some very good news, news I'm not allowed to share yet. That's your teaser to read next month's blog.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year from Yekaterinburg, Russia!