Month: August 2019

I’ve Realized One Interesting Thing…

When I started my LiveJournal blog 12 years ago, one of the goals I had in mind was to tell my Russian friends about America “from inside.” Not like there are not enough Russians living in the US, but I’ve credited myself for looking at the life which surrounded me with the wide-opened eyes. I was curious, I wanted to understand, and I had my American co-workers, who thought of me as a complete savage (which was a good thing in this case :)), and educated me about everything.

I knew what could be interesting for my Russian audience. I would explain lots of things, which were so obvious and trivial to the locals, that they could never imagine somebody needs any explanations on them.

Funny enough, I am doing a similar thing now but in the opposite direction. I am writing for my American audience, and since I live here for 23 years by now, I understand, which parts I need to explain in detail. And if I won’t be a part of both countries, I would not even know that the explanations are necessary 🙂

Being A Tourist In My Own City

I love Chicago. I love this city at any time of the year, but especially in summer. It is a challenging task to talk me into going somewhere in summer. I like being here, and I do not mind the heat at all. There are so many things that only happen in summer, and summer is so short!

One of the reasons why I like summer in Chicago so much is that I can blend with the crowd of tourists from all over the world, and to take pictures of the same buildings for one hundredth and first time.

For example, to take pictures of mounted police

On Friday I took a half-day off, Boris came to the city by 12-30, and we headed to a quick lunch in the Pret, and then to the Art Institute.

This year the Nichols Bridgeway was closed way too often, for all sorts of events, like Pokemon Go! (I am trying very hard not to comment on the worth of these events, did you notice?!) This Friday it was opened, and so we’ve entered the Art Institute that way.

The city view from the Bridgeway
I am being a tourist
Continue reading “Being A Tourist In My Own City” →

The Days Are Getting Shorter

The days are getting shorter, which means that by the end of next week I won’t be able to bike before work, also most likely I won’t be able to use our new outdoor gym in the morning – I do not like biking in the dark and wandering around in the dark :).

On Thursday, I was working from home, which allowed me to go to the casual bike ride with the Palatine bike club, and it was the last time this season. I can’t make it to Mike’s Bike shop by 6-30 if I am not working from home. And next week the rides will start 15 minutes earlier, and in another two weeks, they will be starting at 6 PM. But I was so glad I went. Also, that was the first time I took Boris there. I was hoping he will love riding with the group, for the same reason I do – it’s much safer, especially if you have vision issues. So he went with us, and he liked it. Even more, than I thought :). We also stopped at Dairy Queen at the end of the ride for some ice-cream, which added to the right impression, I guess.

But still, working from home these days feels more stressful than in the office, and I thought that I didn’t have time for anything. By now (Saturday night) I feel much better, but I need to figure out how to be not such a slave of schedule.

I Am In The Slow Mode For A Week, And Air Travel Surprises

Boris came on Wednesday, and this will be the last time before October when we are going to see each other in person. As usual, the adjustment from living solo to living together, even temporarily, is hard. This time especially, since I was unusually stressed with all the things going at work and in my professional life in general. I didn’t have time to adjust to the slower pace mentally. Our velocity of living is very different, and each time we are making an effort to reconcile these differences at least for a short time.

From Wednesday to the next Wednesday, I will have no volunteering activities, and I took one day work from home and one and a half days off. We shall see how it goes.

There was one funny thing about his arrival. O’Hare International Airport (ORD) has four terminals: 1,2,3 and 5 (do not ask me why :)). Terminal 5 is international, no matter which airline you take, the passport control and customs are located in Terminal 5. It usually always takes time to get out of it due to the long lines, even if you do not have the checked baggage. With the flight arrival time of 3-45PM, we agreed that I would leave work at about 3 PM. The CTA Blue Line, which goes to ORD is a little bit unpredictable, like the whole CTA in general, so although the stop is very close to my office, it could take from 35 to 50 min to get to ORD. Plus, Terminal 5 is the furthest from the CTA stop, so it’s a separate journey. Plus, the inner airport transit is still under construction, and there are shuttle buses between terminals, which also adds time. With all these calculations in mind, we agreed on the meeting time 3 PM and our usual meeting point. Since we both have vision disabilities, having a default meeting point helps a lot.

That was the first time he had a connection in Dublin, and I was watching the live updates on his flight. BTW, Google always knows what flight I am looking for, so I do not even need to type the number. It showed the arrival time slightly earlier than on the schedule (3-33 PM), and I decided to leave 5 minutes earlier, although we both know that this time does not mean anything. Some airlines report arrival at the point of the aircraft touching the ground, and there can be 10-15 min of cruising afterward.

I was on the CTA when Boris called, and he almost never calls the phone, because it is way more expensive than a video call. I was trying to tell him that I am still on the CTA, but then I’ve realized that he was telling me that he is on Terminal 3. And after he said so, I’ve realized that that’s what arrival information was telling me, but I chose not to believe it :).

After all, it saved us tons of time, because when I arrived, he called me again and said that he was already by the CTA station. But I was curious to find out what happened. Turned out that as he put it, “The US is expanding its borders.” If you ever traveled by air from Canada to the US, you know that the US border control is taking place in the airport in Ottawa or where else your flight starts. So when you are boarding, you are already on the US territory. The same thing happened in Dublin, and he didn’t realize that it was an actual border control, except he was puzzled by the additional security checkpoint. He only looked into his passport when it was announced that the arrival will be in Terminal 3 :). It ended up being very convenient, and now we know why the connection was three hours long!

CSA And Local Produce

I first started to buy stuff from the Middlebury Farms, because it was just good stuff, which other farmers didn’t have, and it was reasonably priced. And then they told their customers that they are going to do the CSA, and I jumped in because I like them and wanted to support!

Since that first time, there were good years and bad years, but that’s the risk you take! The best part of all this deal of CSA never failed me – the mystery of “what’s in the box” next week?

I try to cook everything within a week, and when I can’t eat it all, even with sharing with mom, I freeze the cooked food in small containers. It’s way better than freezing raw vegetables. The cooked meal, when defrosted, tastes not worse than freshly prepared.

I’ve already showed one of my deliveries several weeks ago, when I published my Cold Beets Soup recipe. Here is one more, from this week:

And this one is from the previous week:

Until mid-November, I do not think I will need to buy any greens, or tomatoes, or cucumbers. I will cooking and freezing lots of vegetable sides and making vegetable soups. And I will be sure to demonstrate if there will be something new and exciting this year!

Healthy Living For Baby Boomers

I often talk to people who are about my age or older, or a little bit younger, trying to motivate them to be more engaged in physical activities and overall, to have a healthier lifestyle. I am an excellent motivator :), so most of the time there are some positive outcomes.

Some time ago (about six months, to be exact) I came across the article in the Chicago Tribune, which I liked a lot. I decided to paste it’s full text here because people do not like to click on the links, and there are way fewer chances somebody will read it, if it is not copy-pasted.

The reason I often post my pictures with all the muscules exposed is not that I like to show-off, but because people believe more in what I am saying when they can see results not on TV, but on the real person. Most importantly, I try to draw people away from the preception, that their health should decline with age, that this is normal.

It takes moxie to flip an unhealthy lifestyle to a healthy one particularly for folks 60 and older.

Here is the article:

Most baby boomers approach retirement age unwilling to follow basic healthy lifestyle goals established by the American Heart Association, said Dr. Dana King, professor and chairman of the department of family medicine at West Virginia University, referencing his university’s 2017 study comparing the healthy lifestyle rates of retired late-middle-aged adults with rates among those still working.

Continue reading “Healthy Living For Baby Boomers” →

About My Nomination, And How To Vote

Hettie D.'s avatarThe World of Data

First of all, a big THANK YOU to everybody who reached out congratulating me for becoming a finalist in the “Technologist of the Year” nomination. This nomination is especially important for me, because I’ve always strived to apply the best CS theories for the success of the business. I do not believe in approaches, which can’t be used in practice. However, I think that applying the right theoretical principles in the industry can have a tremendous impact.

Another aspect important to me is that all my innovations are related to PostgreSQL. If I were asked to name the three most important things which I’ve introduced at Braviant Holdings, it would be

  • The wide usage of FDW both in OLAP and OLTP
  • The usage of pg_bitemporal in both OLAP and OLTP
  • Abandoning ORM and using JSON -based data exchange between applications and databases

There is more in my blog about all…

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Summer 1992

I know that I am jumping from one point of time in my life to another with no notice, but I promise it will all be straightened up on my Timeline. Chronologically, this post follows the story about kids and me getting settled in the University boarding house.

We had a great six weeks over there. As I’ve mentioned, we had a flat of two rooms and a kitchen, all for ourselves. That was way more space than I had in Saint Petersburg. The hot water was running only theoretically, so I had two big buckets, a basin, and a huge portable electric boiler. I would fill in a bucket with cold water, immerse a boiler into the water and plug it in. I would fill a basin to the half with cold water and then using a dipper; I would pour hot water in it, to make warm water of the desired temperature. That’s how Anna and Vlad had their baths before going to bed. Igor would stay his feet inside the basin, and I would combine cold and hot water in a dipper, and poured it over him, making it feel like a shower. He was almost seven then and felt utterly embarrassed to stay naked in front of me. When everybody went to bed, I would wash similarly.

There were cockroaches everywhere, so many I learned not to be afraid of them, and kill them by a dozen. Still – I did not have to cook and wash the dishes, and life was great. We would take a bus and go to the parks of Peterhoff to see the famous fountains. We were swimming in the ponds of the University Park (former Lichtenberg Manor). We would buy raw milk from the gypsies. One of Boris’s postgrad students named Irina would occasionally babysit for free, and then I would be able to do some work outside of the babies bedtime.

It was there that both Anna and Vlad started walking. As with many other skills, Anna would be the first to master, making her steps barely lifting her feet, but beaming with happiness. Vlad would successfully hide his attempts to walk (Irina asked me once, whether I knew that Vlad is trying to walk when nobody sees him). On public, he was only crawling, moving extremely fast on his butt, and only several weeks later, he had demonstrated perfect walking.

By the beginning of August, Anna, Vlad, and I returned to the city. My Mom was staying for some more time in the boarding house with Igor. Igor was not a baby and didn’t need constant attention, so this was a vacation for her.

Boris took these pictures by our building in the city. Anna and Vlad were approaching their first birthday. I was done with breastfeeding in extreme conditions and weighed 49 kg (about 109 lb). The clothes were hanging on me like on the hanger, but as you can see, it didn’t bother me much:)

Anna 11 months
Vlad 11 months

Getting Into College And Soviet Anti-Semitism

From Hettie:

Several years ago, one of my followers on the LJ platform asked me to write a post about anti-semitism in the Soviet Union, specifically in the college admission process. Many people didn’t believe her that these things had happened, even when they were living in the USSR at the same time.

I promised to write about it, and it took me a while – it was excruciating to recall these episodes. Later, my older son Igor translated my blog post into English. I think his translation is quite accurate, so now that I am collecting all my memories in this blog, I’ve asked him to repost his translation here.

First, I thought that I will make some edits, but turned out that even reading it again was way too emotional, so I decided not to make any changes. Maybe I will do it sometime later. But now – no edits, no comments, all “as is”. Here it comes:

A few weeks ago, in a friendly LJ, I promised to talk about entering college in the end of 1970s/beginning of 1980s in the last century, in USSR – particularly about state antisemitism. I will only talk about what I saw and heard personally, or about what people directly involved in the events told me. I promised to do it by New Year. I started writing this a few days ago, but it was very painful, so it came out slowly. And so, as a result, I am posting another very non-holiday post. Yulya – I couldn’t manage to write everything that I knew about it. It was very difficult to write any more.

I know that the situation I’m writing about lasted literally a few years. By 1983, the situation already changed. Most likely, it was different in other cities, and it was definitely different in other colleges.

Because vast majority of the people involved are still alive and I’m not Elena Chizhova :), I won’t give any names, and I ask all my readers who witnessed or were involved in the events to do the same. It’s not that I have any doubt in you :). I just want this to be a public post.

Continue reading “Getting Into College And Soviet Anti-Semitism” →

About Mornings, Breakfasts, And Getting Stuff Done

Today life was much better than the previous several days. When I was leaving my house at 8-10 AM, I looked around and thought that in most of the homes, people are just starting to get up. It is a weekend, after all!

As for me, by the time I was leaving the house, I have;

  • spoken to Boris for what originally planned to be a half-hour, and ended up being close to an hour
  • gone on a 40-minute bike ride
  • done 30 -min yoga session
  • showed and got ready for a day
  • got the breakfast ready and eaten it outside

I am obsessed with breakfast. I love making nice breakfasts and eating them outside. People find it hard to believe that my numerous breakfast pictures on Instagram are my real everyday breakfasts, not the sill life and that I am making them just for myself (if I do not have anybody staying with me, of cause).

But for me, this is an essential part of the day. I am a morning person, and to start the day with some physical activity followed by a yummy and beautifully arranged breakfast is the way to set me up in a good mood. Sometimes it can’t last through the day, but at least for some time.

Today I made myself a millet hot cereal. The original recipe is here

https://hettiecooking.wordpress.com/2014/01/06/millet-hot-cereal/, although now I make it with water and some nono-fat milk. Making it takes some time, but today I put it on LOW before going biking, and after I retured, I mixed in some defrosted pumpkin puree, and spices, and left it on LOW again. It all worked so probably I will be making it more often.