radish times

There are many important things to think about during the holiday season but when you are in the supermarket trying to find a beet, what a beet looks like is perhaps the most important thing to think about (especially if you do not know the word for beet in the language of the land in which you live). Of course, if you don’t know what one looks like you can think a long time and never actually purchase one. This causes problems when you would like to make a beet and apple salad for Christmas dinner. I did see something that looked kind of like what I think a beet might look like but I didn’t buy it. The only thing I remember very clearly is that beets are ugly and hard and this thing I saw was soft. Last year, Peter found the beets and bought them.

Last year was much harder for me on the whole. It was much more stressful and impossible seeming. Today I did Christmas shopping with no problem at all. I even found rye flour (pretty clever, huh?). Now I just have to figure out how to substitute for molasses and I will be able to make Limpa bread.

Well, it seems that Peter and I will be moving back to NY sooner than we had planned. We will be there this Winter. I will come in mid-January. Peter will come when his contract expires at the end of February.

We are having great trouble with our NY landlord, who, it seems, would like to do everything in his power to get us out of the apartment. Surely we wouldn’t like to lose the apartment but if that were the only thing we might chance it. However, it also affects our residency status in NY and possibly Peter’s status in the US. This we cannot chance, although we thought about it for an absolutely blissful 15 minutes. We imagined just giving the finger to all these big bureaucracies and doing exactly what we want. But we soon realized that this is not what we really want. Once Peter gets permanent permanent status we will be able, without chancing anything, to do just what we want. That will not be so long from now, if we go back to NY and figure everything out. If we stay here and end up having to start the INS applications again from scratch we will have much less freedom.

So we will be back. We will be looking for jobs. We will (possibly) be looking for an apartment, depending on what our landlord does. It is possible that he might try to start something in January. It is also possible that he will wait until May or June when our lease comes up for renewal. Right now we don’t know what he will do.
What is the issue, you ask? Well, we think he will try to challenge my legal right to succeed to the apartment. In the common sense world, our case is extremely strong and it is hard to imagine a clearer case of legal succession. In the legal world, it is not so clear and it seems to depend on all sorts of things over which we have no control, such as which judge serves on our case or how the term “permanently vacated” is defined. If we had nothing to lose we would definitely fight to the end. However, we would have a lot to lose if we lost: we would have to pay all legal fees (ours and theirs) AND the difference between our rent and the legal rent for the duration of the case. If you conservatively estimate the market rent of our apartment, this difference would be $2,500 a month. An astronomical amount that I cannot even imagine paying for one month, let alone for all the months of a potential court battle.

So that is where we stand right now.

I am getting the cats ready for another transatlantic trip. It breaks my heart!! But I can’t do anything about it. We are really lucky to have a vet’s office right in our own building where both vets speak beautiful English. I think I am something of a notorious customer there though. I went there yesterday to pick up some antibiotics for Pippin who will have his teeth cleaned. I had never before set eyes on the second vet. I started trying to speak Czech. I got one poor sentence out when he said “English?” I said “ok.” Then I started trying to explain who I was. He interrupted me mid-sentence and said “oh, I know who you are.” My fame preceded me. I have to awful fear that he knew me as something like “the weird American girl desirous of all kinds of weird treatments for her FOUR CATS!”

We are also trying to figure out what to do with all our stuff. We can’t carry it all back. So we are beginning to make little bags with people’s names on them containing things we borrowed and things we would like to give away. Peter, who is in Moscow for the week, took a large load of things there.

By the way, speaking of my illustrious husband, you should all check out this web site http://www.allaboutjazz.com/gallery/shkin.htm. It is an exhibition of Peter’s photos in an on-line jazz magazine, All About Jazz. Tonight he will go to a 5th anniversary celebration for the web site he founded, Jazz in Russia.

And today, I will write my personal statement for graduate school. I have been procrastinating for ages, telling myself that I was preparing in my mind. Alas, today I must prepare on paper.

I have a two year old winter coat. It is black. It is made of wool. It is from Jones New York. When I bought it, one of the pockets had a huge hole. It still has a huge hole. Last year one of the buttons fell off. It is still off and by this time the button is probably somewhere in never-never land.

I went to the vet today. The vet is VERY close by. I took two cats at a time. They got their yearly rabies shots. The vet doesn’t have a handler, so I helped him with everything. I was wearing my coat. By the time I was done my coat was completely covered with cat hair, most of it Krolik’s as he objected most fiercely to entering the cat carrier (there is a reason for this that I will tell you later).

Now I am trying to clean the coat (in moments I am not writing this e-mail). It is not so simple. The vacuum cleaner doesn’t help. It just makes a lot of noise. Our three shoe brushes and our cat brush don’t help either. Our hair remover thing is one of those rubber gadgets that is supposed to become sticky after you wash it with hot water. Ours is at the end of its life. It doesn’t get sticky anymore. So, I have tape. Tape works. But tape is slow. Sitting next to my tape is a bag with needles and thread. I am going to fix the button and the pocket.

Funny that I had to go to the vet in order to fix my coat. I wonder if I went to the vet last winter like I should have done if I would have fixed my coat then.

Krolik was the fiercest objector because he was the only cat that had to ride in the same kind of cat carrier that he was in on the airplane. I have four cat carriers but two kinds. Three of them are the strong plastic type. The other one is the sports bag type. BoBo rode in the bag type on the airplane. The other three were in the plastic ones. Going to the vet, BoBo rode in a Plastic and Kisco rode in the Bag. Then I let them out and put Pippin in the Bag and tried to put Krolik in the Plastic. He wouldn’t go in. I tried both the head-first approach and the butt-first approach. Neither worked. Finally I had to take the top off (at which point the door falls off too). I was ready for the door thing. I had that part of the carrier against the wall. I put Krolik and slammed the top on quick as lightening.

In the vets office, of course there was no problem. There all the cats want to stay inside their carriers for the whole time. If you let go of them while the are on the table they will run right back in their carriers - especially if they have just been stabbed with a needle.

Animal care is terribly cheap here. For shots for four cats, I paid 400 koruns - something less that $15. In NY, there is no shot for your cat that costs as little as $15 for ONE. And you usually have to pay for the visit too. I estimate that this visit would have cost us around $200 in NY. I may have them clean Pippin’ teeth here. It will cost between $10 - $20. In NY, it costs over $100.