A successful week

Enjoying a cuppa! Not our advanced Mac user, but a user
of the Macs warmth methinks

We have decided our cat is an advanced Mac user. This week Sofie walked across my laptop and up pops a box to choose the language for the keyboard, we had no idea that pressing "cmd" and space bar could do that. I have two options for my keyboard, British and Latvian, so that I can write the extra Latvian letters "ā, ē, ī, ģ, ļ, ņ, ō š" and so it is really useful to have a quick way of changing between the two languages, especially as leaving it in the Latvian keyboard means I end up typing a š instead of an apostrophe s. It has taken four years to find that out and it just takes a 9 month old kitten to walk across my computer! Mac users they maybe but mouse catchers? Hmmm! Despite taking our kittens to the greenhouse to play it did not seem to deter the mice in the caravan which is currently stored in our greenhouse and so just recently we have resorted to traps and then poison. At least we had some success with that and caught 6 mice now and the poison has been eaten - let's hope that sorts it for the time being as we don't really want a family of mice living in our caravan insulation.

A snowy scenes

I have had an amazing response to my request for interviews for my project on wild boar management and the conflict that results over it. Arranging interviews had been an usually protracted process for another project last year and so I was amazed to get a response to my three emails to people at national level within hours and I managed to get all organised for one day this week. All went smoothly with everyone available at the right time and everyone was extremely helpful and generous with their time. The only mishap was nearly sliding off the road in some atrocious slippery conditions on the way there, on the first corner out of our village. I also got some farmer interviews under my belt too this week and so I feel on a roll. Thank goodness! Mind you, one hour of interviews does translate to many hours transcribing them, and I don't think they would transcribe well using transcribing software, not with the accents, mine and theirs.

Ice rinks in the making as our ponds begin to freeze over

It hasn't been a proper winter here yet, but it might have just arrived this week. We have had weeks of snow here, snow gone, snow here, snow gone and it has left us with a rather muddy mess. It started to snow on Saturday and a good few centimetres fell, enough to send most of Britain into complete and utter chaos, but hardly worth mentioning here in Latvia. At least it has covered the muddy mess and, unfortunately for me, it also covered the frozen ice from the melted snow on a car park. The snow was not thick enough to cover the ice with a less slippery surface but enough to hide the ice, and I greeted a friend's New Years greeting by slipping flat onto my back. For a change I had two gallant men to help me up, makes a change from being sniggered at. Time for the Yaktrax methinks. Nothing was hurt beyond a bit of pride, actually I thought it was quite funny as I can think of better ways to return someone's greeting than sliding gracefully to their feet.

Snow covered roads. At least it fills in
some of the potholes

The reason we went out was, because I wanted a joint of pork for the weekend. We had had a lot of vegetarian meals over the week and I just fancied a joint for a change. It was a well timed action as a little later on that morning I had a phone call from a friend who was just about to set off to the near-ish big town to us, from his village some distance away, and was even sat in the car, when he found out the meeting he was intending to go to was called off. Since he was all ready to go somewhere he decided to pay us a visit instead. He had never actually made it to see us, we had always gone to see him, so we got to show him around the land we manage, as well as sit down and talk around the table. Oh we can sure do that and getting much practice just lately as you may have noticed if you follow this blog. In fact while we on our way back into the apartment with our friends, one of our neighbours was sledging with her little one and she stopped to chat a little and she invited us round for a chat another day, which was later was changed to a meal. Oh yes! we can talk and eat at the same time, and the fish supper this evening was superb too and the conversations fascinating.

A disappearing landscape under a blanket of snow

This week the Latvian State Employment Agency announced that unemployment was down 3%, they are still worried that many people are still looking for work though. A 3% drop though is pretty good don't you think? Or is it? There has been a fall of 34, 256 registered unemployed people, but there has also been a fall of around 23,000 in the population - many will have been adults who have left the country this last year. That doesn't make the fall in unemployment quite so spectacular does it! It is also worrying, because some of those may return if employment conditions worsen in other countries and there may still be no jobs for those returning. Having said that, there are some jobs that some companies are having difficulty filling, because those who can do a good job are often the ones that leave and those who are motivated to work hard are sometimes scarce. It would be easy to criticise those left behind as people who are lazy, and perhaps some are, but they are also trying to deal with a legacy of soviet system thinking that does not encourage a motivated workforce. Many battle alcoholism and a sense of hopelessness. Not easy to turn around a whole nation in less than a generation and there is still a long way to go yet, they could have done with some better politicians in the past and some better external advice, but hindsight is a wonderful thing, it is still a young nation and it all takes time.

The hat I knitted for Ian, hopefully it is
warmer than his other one.

The flip side of so many leaving the country is the anguish that one mother feels over the death of her daughter. In an article in the Daily Mail she blames herself for the deteriorating relationship with her daughter brought on by moving away in order to help her family financially. She feels it has lead to her daughter getting into bad habits and in with the wrong crowd, something that she feels may not have happened if they had all moved together. Mind you it is far harder to move with families, when the jobs the Latvians and others like them do are often low paid; it is easier for them to send the money home and live as a single person.  So spare a thought for those Eastern Europeans and think of how many families they represent back home who are missing loved ones, missing a father, missing a mother.

Just want to add Happy birthday to Mavis this last week. It has been great getting to know you through this blog and in person over the years. Mavis has followed this blog almost from the beginning and been such a support to me to keep going in the writing and then blessed us even more by coming out to see what we were doing and so it seems only right to send birthday greetings from my blog. If you want to know any more about Mavis then take a trip over here and read more about her adventures at our place here.

Convulsions

Ice on the inside of our car window. The literal translation
for these in Latvian is ice flowers ie ledus puķe
(pronounced lay-dus poocha)

The world has certainly gone through some convulsions this week and I thought I was just going to have a quiet week in contrast but towards the end of the week I found out that someone in our family was having severe relationship problems and I ended up spending quite a bit of time on the phone one day. It was very draining and I found it so sad, so Ian and I ended up at our local bakery for a pastry and a cup of tea. It didn't change much but the walk in the rather cold temperatures of about -17C certainly helped work off some of that agitated feeling. The rest of the week was quite boring really, I did some decorating (and I remembered to take pictures) and I did my studies. Boring is good sometimes though as it can be quite restful and peaceful.

The snow had drifted over our road way, and so this is Ian
heading off to get the tractor as the car could go no further

I did make it down to the local heating company to complain about our communal heating but the boss was not in and I haven't had anyone to translate for the rest of the week so I have left it for now. There is a possibility of a letter going from everyone in our apartment block but that depends if it gets organised. People don't always work very well together in our apartment block, some do, but others are quite awkward or maybe it is just distrustful - which given the history of Latvia is not surprising - but it does make trying to get something organised incredibly hard work. The temperature in the apartment hadn't been bad since I went down but they are beginning to slide again which is not fun when the temperatures outside have been very low, i.e.-24C this morning, meaning it was 12.9C in the kitchen. I think a little visit maybe in order and maybe even a little peaceful sit down protest, after all I am sure it will be warmer to do my studying there than at home at this rate. We will see, I will make a decision in a couple of days time, might just bottle out but you never know.

Digging the roadway again

Being peaceful can give a lot of room for pondering though and so I have been doing a lot of that. As we were away in Australia for around two months I somehow missed the news about an organisation called UK Uncut, well that and the fact I don't follow the UK news very much these days, but when I found their story very inspiring. Just in case you don't know they are a group of people who got together and were moaning about the fact that large companies seem to get away without paying taxes and yet those taxes were equal to some of the services being cut to the poorest in British society, so they decided it was about time they did something. They peacefully demonstrated in Vodafone premises to highlight their avoidance of taxes and pointed out it would save the cuts in benefits to those living in London, which may force many to move away. It was simple! It connects the corporate avoidance measures to concrete issues facing the Brits. Does inspire me to do a peaceful sit down protest though.

Some of our apple tree coverings had come undone, at such
cold temperatures it is not good for our young apple trees. I
found some compost bags and slipped them over the top,
but they didn't go all the way down to the bottom so I piled
snow up around the base. Hope this works.

So what about Latvia, where are the injustices there? There are plenty and Neo last year highlighted quite a few when he hacked into unprotected tax accounts and used the information to point out how much people were being paid in companies where workers were taking pay cuts. But how about today, or this week? Well Swedbank have just released their end of the quarter profits for October to December last year, a profit of 18 million LVLs (£21.5m, $34.5m). This is the same Swedbank who lent heavily to the Latvians and in so doing contributed significantly to the property bubble. The profit for the year after taking into account the bad debts was 73m LVLs (£87m, $140m). In some ways this is probably peanuts in global banking terms but to Latvians it is a lot. The mess the crisis caused meant Latvia took out a big loan with the IMF and they are insisting that Latvia cuts a further 50m LVLs from their budget, on top of the enormous cuts they have already had to make last year and on top of the ones they had already planned for this year. So while Swedbank are recovering quickly, the poorest of the poor are paying off the loan from the results of fat cat speculation with cuts to their services. But it isn't just Swedbank, SEB banks profits made a mere 36m LVLs, and DnB Nord 20m LVLs, another of the big banks, Nordea actually made a loss of 12m LVLs however. The combined profits of the three banks last year amounted to 46% of the cuts that the Latvian Government are going to make this year.

Winter wonderland! We went for a snow shoe walk around
our land. All I can say is never trust someone who says
that we won't have to fight our way through the trees!
It was pretty though and we are so grateful for having the
forethought to buy some good snow shoes before we left
the US, this is the second year they have been a boon.

Sorry for throwing figures around but it makes me mad that this situation goes on. The Latvians haven't got a lot of money and in fact many of them aren't even paying their heating bills because they are just so high and their wages have been cut and it is paying for heating or food in many cases and since by law the heating cannot be cut the food wins. Swedbanks quarterly profits would actually nearly pay what those in Riga owe the heating company. Also a recent sale of a Francis Bacon painting would have more than paid folks' unpaid heating bills. That song by Del Amitri comes to mind yet again, Nothing Ever Happens

"While American businessmen snap up Van Goghs

For the price of a hospital wing

Nothing ever happens, nothing happens at all

The needle returns to the start of the song 

And we all sing along like before"

This is the decorating. I think there are too
many blocks of colour on the left, but
that will probably be covered by a cupboard
anyway. It was fun to do though

Doesn't quite sound the same to "snap up a Bacon for half the price of Latvian cuts" but this song was being sung in 1990 and still the rich of this world pursue greed for their own pleasure. I am so pleased that UK Uncut are standing up and saying "Enough is Enough", the Egyptians are saying "Enough is Enough" and the women protesting against Berlusconi are saying "Enough is Enough" because Enough is Enough. It is time for a change in economics and politics that allow these things to carry on.

Our rainbow coloured house. This is looking
towards the kitchen with the door taken
off to be sanded down in the living room.

A close up of the detail in the hallway

Talking of the Egyptian demonstrations, I have found them so inspiring. Their dignity and restraint in their demonstrations and their diligence in their cleaning up operation should make us ashamed. The complicity of the northern nations to Mubarak's regime should not go by without comment either, the Egyptians could rightly stand tall and point their fingers at the north and say where were you when we were oppressed? They have demonstrated such unity almost unheard of in these days of firing accusations across religious and cultural divides. I have to stand up and say I admire what you have done, may you be an inspiration to many in this world and may your patience and persistence bear fruit. Keep going till you reach your goal. May those of us in the North have the humility to learn from them.

Since it is Valentine's Day - here
is a lovers' tree - all entwined.
Isn't that sweet.

  

Those twigs in the ground are actually bushes

These were the bushes in a previous year. Must take
another after the snow has gone