June: More sights for Tanya

Tanya and Valiya at Johnson Space Center.

Tanya at the Cockrell Butterfly Center in Houston.

Tanya and Valiya at the Cockrell Butterfly Center.

Liliya, Tana and Larissa at Visible Changes at the Galleria. Liliya styled her hair.

On the Bolivar Ferry between Galveston and Bolivar Peninsula, ground zero for Hurricane Ike.

Vlad and Tanya outside Fisherman's Wharf in Galveston.

Tanya and the queso

The queso dip at Laredo Cantina Tuesday, May 19.

Tanya invented her own way of using the tortilla chips to keep the dripping queso at bay. She said she'd prefer to just scoop up the dip in a spoon. Well, duh!

The obligatory chain-restaurant brownie concoction. This one has cinnamon ice cream a la mode and a ceremonial pouring of the "brandy butter" onto a searing-hot cast-iron fajita plate. I'm not a sweets person, but did have a bite and found it was very fresh and tasty.

It gets real caramel-esque. I detected neither cinnamon or brandy taste in this thing, but the brownie itself was nice.

The group minus me: Tanya, Volodya, Alex.

Valiya's 40th birthday

Valiya celebrated her 40th birthday Sunday, May 17, with dinner at her beautiful house. Here she poses with Sasha in a photo taken by Alejandra.

Friend Marina and Valiya & Sasha's oldest son, Yan.

Yan serves up the katorshka (potatoes) to Ale, Victor, Tanya and Volodya.

Our little family: Tanya, Laura and Volodya. Ale took this photo also. Here's more of her photos on Facebook.

Liliya trying to fit Marina into her hair styling schedule at the Galleria. It takes two phones to do it, but she's a master.

Bistro night

Dinner at Cafe Express

Sisters

Tanya loooooovved this fountain.

Anna gets engaged

Anna got engaged to Sasha while Tanya's been visiting. Here they are on vacation in Crimea. Sasha is a musician.

These photos I'm guessing were taken in Kiev.

Easter, Russian Orthodox style

Dying the 6 dozen eggs with dyes bought at the Russian General Store in Houston.


Packing up the pascha cakes and dyed eggs to take to church for the priest to bless.

Marquise pretends he's an American Easter egg no one found on Easter Sunday.

Before going to church. She went with our Houston friend Marina, also an Odessa native.

We took the pascha cake and eggs to our friends, the Nezhinskys, for an orthodox dinner.

Easter, Texas style

In Fort Worth, Easter weekend. First the gifts from Odessa.

Suzanne checks the goodies from Tanya

Mom tries on her new apron while Bill and the girls look on.

Pretty as a picture.

Time for Easter activities.

Sarah dyes eggs.

Everybody joins in the messy fun.

All decorated up for Easter.

Tanya tries her hand.

Tanya's in Texas!

It's been a long while since I posted. But now there's very good reason to resume. Tanya's here at long last.

Tanya is Vlad's sister from Odessa. She's never been to the U.S., or outside the former Soviet Union.

The first week has been pretty steady. She's cleaned my house, she's cooked and we've had a lot of laughs. We have Russian TV piped into her room, and she loves that.

She's seen a bit of the world of Houston. She's not that impressed with Wal-Mart, it reminds her of all the stuff they have over there. It all comes from the same place, right? She likes the grocery store. And she liked Kemah and my tartar sauce, smoked quail, cheese grits, barbecued brisket, peanut butter and these orange peppers from Whole Foods.

Thank you very much, she doesn't care for: Margaritas, chicken-fried steak or cherry peppers.

We did very Texas things on Saturday. Took her to Dozier's BBQ in Fulshear, Texas, about 20 miles west of Houston. Then we drove up Highway 36 and to parts west of there to look for bluebonnets. We stopped at Carol's at Cat Spring for some dinner where we had some of the aforementioned treats. Here are some photos from the day.

Vlad & Alex's Big Adventure

I just dropped them off at the airport this morning. They're on their way to Odessa by way of Amsterdam and Kiev. It's going to be kind of a bonding experience and I hope a profound experience for Alex. He hasn't been back to Odessa since he was 3.

Language barrier

My dear friend Liliya, who is something like my sister-in-law, was at a dinner party Saturday night. She retold some of her old stories about her misuse of English, which I've been wanting to include in the blog. Liliya is an extremely talented hair stylist in the Galleria.

1) Shortly after starting as a hair dresser, Liliya asked one man: "Do you want me to trim your mushroom?" He's still a customer today.

2) Another woman she asked: "Do you want me to give you a blow job?"

3) After work one night, a bouncer at a local club commented on Liliya's hair, which was black on the bottom, blond around the crown and red in the middle. He said she looked like a strawberry cheesecake. To which she replied: "Do you want to eat me?," completely in the dark about the connotation.

Liliya is always saying interesting things by accident. I need to write them down more often.

Murder in Odessa

Volodya, Sonya's father, the police officer, was found dead in his apartment a few days ago. There was a woman in the apartment also, sitting on the couch, dead. The word we're getting is they were poisoned. Vlad talked to him only last weekend about seeing him next month when he and Alex travel to Odessa. It's so devastating. Such a punch in the stomach. Shocking. We have no idea why he was killed or who might have done it. You could assume that because he was a police officer, he came across something in his work that got him targeted. But it's hard to say. We'll probably never know.

Sonya is now technically an orphan. I mentioned her mother, Masha, at right in 1997, in an earlier post. Masha died a few months after we had been in Odessa last year. Masha succumbed to a long drug habit, after becoming sick with the illnesses that usually accompany long-term drug use. She was found crawling in the streets, taken to a hospital where doctors were surprised she could still be alive in her condition. She died like the next day. Tanya (her mother and Vlad's sister) visited her there, thank God, before she died.

One day during our 2006 trip, Sonya's entire family, sans Masha, got together at a restaurant to visit. Volodya had been trying to find her for months. To tell her we were coming and get her to say happy birthday to Sonya. He finally tracked her down this day we were all together. We were outside the restaurant, passing around the cell phone. I talked to her for a minute despite the language barrier. She was crying. Horrible sobs. She was very congested. She was so sad and despondent. I think she wished she could be with us. I think she knew she was going to die soon and she couldn't say anything. I told her we loved her and that we'd see her next time.

At some point after we left, a long freeze, presumably over Masha's lifestyle, between Tanya and Sonya's family began to thaw. We were so happy about that. Vlad and I like to think we had a small part in changing things for the better. Vlad and I invited Tanya to go with us when we visited Sonya, but she didn't go. But, oh, she begged to see the photos. And tears welled up in her eyes as she looked at them. You just knew her heart was not that hard. You knew she loved Sonya. I think probably Masha's death gave Tanya the courage to give in to her better self and reconnect.

And then this happens, just as this new relationship is finally blooming between the families.

The funeral is tomorrow.

Ginger surprise

As I opened the front door this evening to let Marquise the screaming cat outside, I found the monstrous ginger plant has bloomed. It's so beautiful.

Houston blooms about this time of the year. It's gorgeous. My begonias hanging on the front patio gate have come back with a vengeance, and the Boston fern has taken over the flower bed by the door.

It's beautiful for now. But once the Texas sun gets to baking next month, it'll be a struggle to keep it pretty. Houston's humidity helps.

Found this brave little lizard, left, hanging out on the wall behind the ginger. He changed his color from brick beige to ginger-leaf green just before I took this photograph. I guess he likes being spotted.

Bluebonnet time again

We went looking for bluebonnets on Sunday. I think it's a little early for the peak. We found quite a few, but passed some fields that had been full of wildflowers last year that had not yet bloomed.

We drove from Houston to Sealy, up to Bellville and over to New Ulm, where we moseyed through the farm roads up to Industry. This year, we found ourselves a livestock theme.

We went down to Cat Spring to eat at Carol's, but it wasn't as good as last year. Vlad had an amazing stuffed pork chop, but my shrimp were truly horrible.

Among the odd things we saw were a huge bird that appeared to be orange-ish red. It was flying over very quickly and disappeared behind the trees before we could identify it. It was pink like a spoonbill, but we were way too far inland for that. Could it have been a red-tail? No clue.

We also came across a barbed-wire fence lined with coyote carcasses, I assume to keep those still alive away from livestock. The smell was remarkable.

Anyway, here's a few photos: