Trekhprudny Lane

The furniture, and one hundred boxes containing everything else we own, is scheduled to arrive tomorrow morning. I look forward to drowning, as the saying goes, in my own shit. 

We have monitored the renovation of a nearby building on our walks, and lately the workers have been mixing and hauling buckets of thick, lumpy stucco cement. EB would not budge from the work site yesterday, hypnotized by dollops of wet stucco slapped one by one onto the exterior walls and then scraped smooth with a flat blade. Turned out the burly figure on the scaffolding was a woman. After some time she glanced down over her shoulder at EB and predicted, "Maybe an engineer, or an architect." Or a sculptor. 

Later EB wanted to know why the asphalt sidewalk crumbles in places. "Water eats it away," I said. "Over time." Needless to say, far from settling the issue, this provoked many more questions. "Eats it?" she asked. "Why?" After struggling a bit more, I thought of putting a piece of bread into a bowl of water at home and watching it disintegrate. But by the time we reached the apartment, twenty minutes (i.e., ages) had passed and I had long forgotten.