I thought maybe we should try and get this blog thing up and running again, now that we're doing something a little more exciting than sitting at home cutting up perfectly good fabric, and sewing it back together again, and doing the gardening (which means I'm watching the grass grow). Anyway, for those of you who don't know we're in Alaska, and have been for the last month. It's been an unforgettable experience, our only complaint would be the weather. So far out of 30 days in the state we've had two without rain, and only one of those could you call sunny. The ferry system has been great, the fishing was great, the scenery is absolutely incredible. It's taken awhile to get used to the sun NEVER going down, but now you just go to sleep when you're tired, could be 2AM,doesn't matter, we're on vacation. I'll try posting a few pictures if I can figure it out.

Bye for now

Tom

Well I still can't get the new camera to work with the computer. In case you haven't heard our camera was stolen after I left it at the inter-net cafe. Also, our normal Internet cafe is non-operational today, they said maybe tomorrow. This one is about a 15 minutes walk away and nearly twice a expensive, still only $1 for one hour, but it is better ventilated. Also, I can't get our home email to come up from here. Anyway I can't get the camera and the computer of communicate. so I won't be updating any photos today.

We're still doing well, making progress in the bureaurcacy and relationships with the twins in small steps. Inna pretty much lives with us at our apartment, while Alina still likes to sleep at the internat, I think because she can stay out later.

We went downdown yesterday looking for shoes for Inna, she has a very specific type and style in mind. After going to the market area and looking through maybe 2 dozen stores we still were not able to find what she wanted. We also drove through a market area for animals. Dogs, cats, rabbits, chicken, turkeys. There were literally hundreds of kitten in large cages for sale, and at least 100 dogs and or puppies. It was kind of like a fleamarket for animals.

Katrina did find some soveniers to buy, so we're not coming home empty handed. Katrina, however, took a pretty hard fall yesterday, bruised her hand, shoulder, and knee, and sprained her ankle pretty badly, so she's going to stay off of it for a couple of days. Nothing broken, no aputations in the works, just tweaked it pretty good.

Donna called yesterday for Mother's day, and it really made Katrina homesick. She was pretty weepy, and kept saying she just missed Donna and wished she could have talked to her for longer. Which brings up something I heard about. You can purchase on line phone cards at Noblecom.com on which you can call the Ukraine for about 9 cents per minute. Katrina would love a phone call, she's getting pretty lonesome without her phone buddies. If you kids try this, I'll pay for it!

I'm going to try and access the email one more time before I leave, so I'm logging off, bye for now.

The weathers getting warmer, we're seeing more bare arms, and I even saw a man in shorts today. He was probably an American. The temps be in the mid 70's, very humid, but the wind in steady even heavy at times, so it be very pleasant. For us coming from the northcoast where its very cool, anything over 70 is a very warm day. The highest temp ever in Arcata/Eureka is 86 degrees and that was a very rare day. We're hoping to get down to the sea shore today or tomorrow, I'll try and let everyone know what that's like. Gotta go out of time.

Well, we had our court date yesterday. Which went smoothly. The judge asked us our names, birthdates, about our families, and then out of the blue asked what our incomes, and assets were. We were a little surprised, as we weren't sure we wanted to tell everyone our net worth, but we complied. We were concerned that the girls wouldn't understand that we aren't rich, even though have a decent net worth.

After the court date we decided to go to the city center to get the passport photos for the girls and their new passports. This turned into a major event as the girls didn't want to go, for a yet to be determined reason, after a sort of melt down they complied, we got the photos, met the Dearingers for lunch, and came back home.

Since then they have been well behaved, not quite sweet, but a little closer anyway. Inna stayed the night with us in the apartment, stayed up late, did her laundry, watched TV, talked on the phone, and slept in late this morning. Sounds like all the teenagers I know.

Now we're just waiting for today's events to unfold all of the new surprises. This is not going to be easy, we only hope it will be worth it.

Natash, our interpreter, is back. she'd gone back home to CarKiev for the last 5 days. She assures us we will be able to make our May 23 flight. But we don't know quite what to believe, sometimes I think people here tell you what you want to hear. If everything goes smoothly we should make it with a 1/2 day to spare. Today I saw two men carrying a roll of carpet down the side walk. It was probably 12 feet long and 12 - 15 inches in diameter. I don't how far they were going, I assume they had come from the Market near us. Still it's a little different from what we're used to be seeing.

These are pictures of the orphanage (Internat). They were taken by Inna. It's pretty run down from the outside. It appears to be a old school. The inside is rundown but very clean. The food they eat appears to be adequate, nothing fancy. The Kids were all carrying around fruit at different times. The worst thing we can see is a substancial lack of supervision. The kids pretty much come and go as they please. If they leave they've no place to go and wind up on the streets. We understand some kids come and go all the time. The girls cut school today to come and stay with us.

Inna, Vera, and Alina. Vera's being adopted by a family in Chicago sometime in June. They pretty much eat, and eat, and eat, at our apartment. They do all of the cooking and most of cleaning, so it's been pretty easy.