Ex Patria

Picture perfect

The holidays are coming, and we are busy getting our presents ready.

The adult relatives are all getting a photo book - again. That's because the photo books are always a huge hit.  We make them with Shutterfly and they are professional quality books with pictures of our life in Armenia, our travels, and most important, our boys.  Our relatives, who besides my mother have not visited us in Yerevan, are delighted to see at least a little glimpse of what our lives here are like.  Well.  In Kodachrome, anyway.

It takes a lot of time to makes these books.  They have about 28 pages, with an average of 80-100 pictures in them.  The photos need to be uploaded, and I always use the full sized ones as they print nicer.  Those full sized photos are about 2.1 MB each, and with our intermittent and slow Internet connection, this takes a lot of time.  I do occasionally upload pictures during the year but really, I mostly wade through the masses towards the end of the year and decide which ones I like best.

Besides the books for the relatives which are 8.5 x 11, we are making a coffee table book sized one for ourselves, with about 100 pages.  One for every year. Those pictures are more personal, and include sequences of the boys learning to walk, or themed pages dedicated to school, reading, arts and crafts, and so on.  I love those books.  It's much nicer to sit down with a book than with the computer. That way, the photos get looked at and don't just slowly disintegrate in a computer memory. It takes a lot more time to do those books...

(You know, I feel I'm writing in what we would call a "wooden" style in German... sometimes, I set out in a certain tone and although it doesn't feel right, I can't seem to snap out of it.)

Anyway.  Photos.  Memories.  Definitely worth preserving.  I hope that one day the boys will sit together over a beer or so, look through these books while their own kids run around noisily, and tell each other stories about that distant time when they used to be Expat kids.  If we are lucky, those memories will be favorable.

Ararat

View from our bedroom window, 10 am.

Hum.

Fun quiz, don't take it too seriously, though.  It doesn't ask you to pronounce "th", so it won't identify you as German...  Most funny are the comments of people who are offended by the results.

What American accent do you have? Your Result: The Inland North   You may think you speak "Standard English straight out of the dictionary" but when you step away from the Great Lakes you get asked annoying questions like "Are you from Wisconsin?" or "Are you from Chicago?"  Chances are you call carbonated drinks "pop."
The Northeast
Philadelphia
The Midland
The South
Boston
The West
North Central
What American accent do you have? Quiz Created on GoToQuiz

Car trouble

When we moved here, I inquired whether or not it would be OK to bring our Ford Galaxy minivan.  I was told that the streets were bad, and when I came to look for housing, I saw this was true.  However, the opinions among Expats varied.  Most agreed that when you don't try to drive up Ararat, you should be fine with a minivan.

Wrong.

There is hardly a thing that I regret more than that I didn't leave the stupid car in Germany with my parents, and stuffed a sturdy 4x4 into our 40 foot container.

The car came out of the container dead.  It actually had to be towed out.  The battery had not survived the long sea trip - but here's the thing:  it was the third battery for this car already.  That should have given it away but I am not a mechanic.

Success

We had guests for dinner - Doug's boss from DC, and his (Doug's) local component manager.

Now, the boss keeps sort-of-kosher, mostly vegetarian on travels.  I decided to go for Indian food and made these suggestions from Smitten Kitchen. Of course, I could not get black-eyed peas, so I made the dish with kidney and butter beans.  And I couldn't get yellow split peas, so I used green split peas (when you cook them long enough, they sort of turn yellowish). Then I also made the Indian spiced potatoes and cauliflower and some Raita, and added my fig-peach chutney from this summer.  It was yummy.

We also had a lot of red wine to drink which is why this post is short.

Oh, and the dessert was my new favorite maple-nutmeg-cream pie which sort of fell apart a bit because the electricity cut out when the pie was in the oven but it tasted very yummy.

Anyway.  Good food. Off to bed.

Addendum

I forgot something that I'm deeply thankful for:

That our friend Ivan H. is back from Iraq, safe and sound.  He's skiing in Alaska and enjoying his life, as he should.  Thanks for that, from the bottom of my heart.

Simple calculation

When we arrived in Armenia, the exchange rate bought us 450 Drams for one Dollar.  A liter of milk cost 780 Drams, or $1.73.

Today, the exchange rate was 297 to 1, and the price for one liter of milk rose to 830 Drams, or $2.79. That's an increase of 62%, if I have this right.  In 18 months.

We used to pay our nanny  $450 a month.  At the current rate, and with a pay increase to cover the rising costs, it is now $800.  We don't want to let her go because she needs the money.  But ouch, it hurts. She will also not find a job with Expats that pays equally well.  Whoever employs her after us, will fix the price in dollars, and fix it low.

I've heard, from a friend, that the "goal" of whoever-is-screwing-the-economy-around is 280 Drams/$1 by February.  Yup, looking good.

We are paid in dollars, you know.  This free-fall of the dollar, and the artificial strengthening of the Dram, is costing us more than 50% of our money that we spend here and that's not only milk -- food, pay, gas, heat and electricity, water and natural gas. School fees. (David's school is paid in Drams.) Piano lessons. Repair costs. Tangerines now cost $3.30 a kilo, and they used to be cheap. It's not funny at all.

Ah, I see you've done your homework and you tell me that's what the cost of living allowance (COLA) is for.  Well, yes.  But the adjustments in COLA are slow, and the pace of government budgeting cannot keep up with the ever-faster dwindling of the dollar in this country.

At least, we know we are getting out next summer.  But the average Armenian on the street, with the support net in the US that used to pay for so much of their daily lives, has to deal with it for the unforeseeable future.  That is tough luck.

Those people in charge have no moral bone in their body, not one.

Weekend photo blogging

Leftover buttermilk biscuit is donated to the birds.

Snow on the cherry trees.

Those peppers probably should come in now.

How they do it, I don't know

I have a maid, you know.

And I still have crap to do all day long.  I do the laundry most days to leave her with the ironing which I really detest, from the bottom of my soul.  Laundry is a lot.  All my boys suffer from a congenital neglect of things, which includes everything from toys and computers to clothing.  We cloth diaper.  Result: three loads per day, at least.

But I also do dishes about three times a day, including the stashing away of the dried dishes.  I scrub toilet bowls at least two times a day.  Why can't they learn to use a toilet brush?  It's not as if this was the most complicated gadget in the house.  Even Jacob can use the DVD player, for goodness' sakes.

I pick up after the boys all day long.  It's exasperating the way they leave their stuff everywhere.  My attempts at teaching them to clean up after themselves are undermined by the fact that we have a maid.  They figured out quickly that she will pick up whatever they drop and I detest that.  So much so that I considered letting her go (since she doesn't listen to me when I tell her not to pick toys up.  Or rather, when she does, then the nanny picks up.) But then she would be without a job and I'd feel bad.  Oh, and I would have even more work to do.

[Yes, I tried the "the toy isn't cleaned up so it goes away" approach.  It doesn't work.  They have too much stuff.]

Trash.  Grocery shopping. Three meals a day, lunch bags, assorted baking. Attending to banged knees, mediating 1001 fights a day, steri-stripping gushing scalp wounds. Mending ripped pants, volunteering at the pre-school, attending PTA meetings, changing poopy toddler five times a day...

It's 7 pm and I'm beat.  Most days, I go to bed before nine, and then I sleep badly.   How do women do it when they have no help?

My sister-in-law's house is always in perfect order. She's got four kids (granted, three of them are girls).

I'm deeply in awe.

And never, ever want to be in the situation where I have to do every single thing by myself. If anyone asks me, we stay overseas forever. I'm just not Martha.

(See all that paper?  Guess who picked it up...)

First snow

It snowed. 

A bit yesterday, then more last night.  The kids enjoyed some tumbling in the (really wet) snow, and I spent the afternoon baking. Because nothing is better than a hot chocolate and a big piece of Chocolate Chip Sour Cream Coffee Cake when you come in from the cold, drippy wetness that is the beginning of winter in the Caucasus.