MTheads

Victory Day, Russian Style

May 9th is the 65th anniversary of the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany.  The Russians are going all out this year.  Here are several photographs of the area around Red Square and on New Arbat Street. 

This is the famous GUM department store opposite Red Square.  Lovely banners.

 

This is a close up of one of the banners on the famous GUM department store. 

The crowds are getting larger as the holiday approaches.

I don't know who this woman is.  I only know she got btwn me and this really huge banner.  It basically says "Happy Victory Day."

 

This entire street (Novyy Arbat) is decked out with huge banners.  I wonder what the residents think of their enforced twilight.

Why Do Some Writers Get Under Our Skin

I love reading M.F.K. Fisher.  Unfortunately, we didn't ship any of her books with us.  I didn't know I'd miss her so much.  It's the wistfulness of her writing that appeals to me.  And I like how she doesn't give us a sequential and detailed narrative of her life.  She lets little things slip in as they seem pertinent to the context of her essay.  Her Hollywood years are the most interesting to me, maybe because they are the saddest and she is at her most thoughtful.

She was also a thoughtful writer about food, obviously.  I particularly liked her approach to eating canned food.  It is a necessity at times to make due with what we have on hand, and she wrote beautifully about experimenting with mundane ingredients to come up with something worth eating.  I just like the woman.  And her books are not on kindle yet.  I might have to rebuy several of her books the old fashioned way...ouch, so much work.

You Gotta Shoot Them Through The Head

Just a quick update.  So far so good, no lice anywhere on any of us as far as I can tell. 

Though I am a bit paranoid...reading through all the testimonials on the internet, one gets the impression lice do not die easily.  They can live for years on that one square inch of fabric you missed vacuuming, spraying, and ironing.  They can crawl for hours at speeds over 600 mph in search of human heads.  They march in mass at night to find new heads using their awesome heat-seeking organelles.  They can hold their breath for one year.  They are impervious to the vacuum of space. 

And their nits are indestructible.  Nothing on earth can destroy them.  You have to remove each and every nit by hand, deposit them into an inescapable receptacle, and then shoot them into the sun's core.  If you want to be sure, anyway. 

And, according to some, lice come back from the dead.  In fact, that's my theory.  Lice are zombies.  Or, maybe I should stop reading about lice on the internet.

And to all those who wrote worried that I would use kerosene on a child, I was just joking.  Nor did I bring my youngest child into a hot sauna (the others love a good sauna visit anyway).  Again, an exaggeration on my part.  If we have conquered the unconquerable, it was through good old fashioned pesticides and a week straight of combing my children's hair with combs never meant to be pulled through human head hair.  But, the hair blower might have helped...if they are gone.

Guess Who's Coming To Dinner...and Breakfast, and Lunch

 

Hey!  Guess what my kids brought home from school!  Isn't he great?  Nothing like treating five people (yes, to include me) for head lice for a week. 

We're striking back with a multi-layer attack using over-the-counter products in combination with home remedies gleaned from strangers on the internet that I selected because I can also do them to myself.  I have also combed through my children's hair for hours on end with a tiny-tined comb designed primarily to remove hair from one's head -- can't have lice if you don't have hair theory.  But since nits can only be seen through an electron microscope, I don't hold much hope for the nit-picking method.  

The home remedies I'm trying are a bit unorthodox.  First, I went out and bought the most powerful hair blower on the market -- the most expensive, also.  Thus armed, I blasted the hell out of each of our heads for 30 minutes on the theory, found in a paper on the internet, that hot moving air dessicates the nits.

Then, on the theory that high temperatures kill lice on brushes, it was into the saunas for all of us for 15-20 minutes at a time.  Cries of not being able to breath because of the heat went unheeded.  This is war and I'm tired of doing laundry so shut up and sit still until mommy tells you time's up.

Will this work?  Or will I become that lady who secretly pours kerosene over her children's heads in a desperate attempt to finally end the nightmare?  We'll see. 

We're Shy

Here are a couple of my children enjoying a day at the Moscow Zoo.  Yes, to my great shame they each managed to eat their 28 servings of cotton candy.

This is the main entrance to the zoo.

 

Isn't that cute?