July, 1999. Fourth of July in Kyiv.

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Fourth of July And More

July 11, 1999

Hi (to Marianne),

I hope you get this e-mail when you connect from home &endash; with Jerry's help. This is just a week summary &endash; from last Sunday's Fourth of July celebration through this morning's photo shoot.

Fourth of July

I took a taxi over to the stadium &endash; a half-hour early like I normally do. It really is a nice place and they had quite a bit of shaded tables and such. Of course I WORKED instead of sitting in the shade drinking beer. I was in charge of the horseshoes for the kids and it was fun. There were "old" kids and not so old ones. Mary Bowen ran a game that was like pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey. There was also a water balloon toss. And a little "fish pond". The water things were particularly good because it was HOT and getting hit by a water balloon was a good thing.

After the games, I had a hamburger and beer but I could not find a single person I knew so I just ate and looked at folks. There is a problem with just hanging around school types who leave in the summer.

The Week

My week was very hectic. Peter came back on Tuesday, Sergey and Phil arrived on Wednesday and it was continuous meetings from Wednesday through Friday night. And there were a couple project crises as well (one of which has not been solved). We had dinners each night too. Mostly OK. Wednesday was Gavroche &endash; great food but a tense dinner with all the Scientech and Riskaudit bosses. Relations between the companies are strained right now for a variety of reasons. Thursday evening was the Riskauidt "party" and it was also OK. Not many English-speakers but at least I knew most of them. Friday night was actually more fun. It was just Peter, Laura, Phil, Sergey and me and I think everybody was glad the week was over.

Weekend -Saturday

Saturday was chore day &endash; like usual. I did the Centralni Market for normal food. Fruit is still pretty plentiful but the berries are gone. Tomatoes are great. They smell like real tomatoes and are ripe but just came off the vine. After that, I did some miscellaneous cleanup and then headed downtown to pick up my new glasses. They did a good job of fitting the old lenses into the new frame &endash; but the frame itself may be a bit smaller than it should be. Oh well, It'll last until I make it to a high quality source. They work fine, just a little snug on the sides. Here's a self-portrait.

I also checked in with Sergey (the artist) and we agreed to put the glass shelf up Monday evening. He bought some wall anchors that look like would hold up 500 pounds. He says the shelf is pretty heavy (10 mm thick if you have a ruler &endash; a bit under half-inch). It should be pretty nice I think. Just one shelf though because the "tea pot" is so tall an upper shelf would be unreachable.

The rest of Saturday I did office chores and started to understand how to make a Web-site for our diaries. Should be interesting but I still need some US-based provider to "host" the site. Maybe you could ask Jerry for suggestions. I think we'd need 100 Megabytes of storage and the free web hosting places normally don't allow that much.

Here's a picture of dinner &endash; good wine and sandwiches. Actually, after the dinners out this week, sandwiches at home seemed preferable to going out again.

Today

This morning I packed up early &endash; 5:30am - to take a test roll of color pictures with the big Soviet camera. I used the backpack and it was quite a load. Pictures #8 through #12 are the digital versions of what I hope to have from the big camera. It's interesting that the same shot is about 5 minutes per "click" on the Soviet camera and 5 seconds on the digital. But it's also fun to use the digital to "test" a shot. A couple of times I decided to use the big camera only after the digital shot looked better than it initially seemed. But an eight-once, instant camera does have advantages.

After making it to the river at about 8:00am, I went over to Arizona and rested over coffee, eggs, sausage and toast. No one else there but it's still a friendly place to spend some time "early" Sunday morning. I did miss my partner though.

By the way, the carpet will be hung tonight. Lena and her technician will come over about 5pm and mount the hanger and she will show the lamp drawings. Should be interesting. I'll send pictures.

We'll, I have to get this on the way and also start the KIS e-mails.

Love,

John