Month: February 2022

Skating Lesson!

I just had the first skating lesson after 50 years! Can you believe it?! 

That’s how it happened. In Millennium Park, they have free skating lessons every Saturday morning. They start at 8 AM, and I just could not make it to the city that early on Saturday all the previous years. Also, originally they only had “learn to skate” lessons. Now, they also have the “intermediate,” which I needed. However, they are sold out quickly (free, but you need to sign up). I finally managed to catch the session for today. Then I learned that Boris was coming, and I told him I would skip and try to sign for another day. He said I should go, especially because he has a meeting with his students in the morning. 

I knew that with the trains running on an unpredictable schedule these days, especially on the weekends, I should leave an hour before the lesson started. I tried, but I also tried to have a nice Saturday breakfast with quiche, and I ended up leaving at 7:05 AM. That was enough to see the train departing, and then I had to wait for almost 20 minutes for the next train. 

I was late, and I almost wanted to turn around and go back home, but I didn’t. When I finally got on the ice, the instructor approached me and said that it was fine and please join the class. I realized that one skill I lost entirely was moving backward, and she even worked with me a little bit on that individually. I could practice all other movements, and I think I am getting a hold of moving backward. 

It was cold and sunny, and it was so much fun! Unfortunately, all the other slots until the rest of the season are filled (I think they released them all at once), but I will try to practice what I relearned and do more lessons next year. 

Late Night…

I’ve been very good this year about sleeping my six hours and going to bed by 10-30, no matter what:). It was not the case only when I had too much work. And yes, today is one of these days.

In EDB, almost all I am doing is new to me. I could never imagine there were so many things I didn’t know about Postgres :). To be fair, I just never needed to know them! So what happens often is that although I am full-time on a project, I spend half of the time learning things I need to know to complete this assignment, and then half of my work hours are non-billable. 

I know it will be better, but at the moment, I am still new to EDB 🙂

I mentioned the visa thing… Boris decided he wanted to use the last opportunity to enter the US on the visa, which is about to expire, and so he came yesterday. It was a very sudden decision. I didn’t mind; actually, I felt very loved when he said he was coming :). It’s just for a few days, and we both have work, but it still feels incredibly good. 

Baked Pumpkin With Mushrooms

I have a long list of recipes that I saw in various cooking blogs I follow and didn’t try yet. Sometimes, I try a new recipe right away, but sometimes it might take months! I still keep these “not-tried-yey” recipes in a notes file with the hope to try them at some point.

This recipe waited for its turn since October :). On Sunday, I finally cut the last pumpkin from my CSA fall delivery:

I used a half of it to make pumpkin puree and then make a baked cheesecake, and pumpkin muffins, and then I used another half for this recipe,. It was so good, I can’t even describe! I could not imagine such a “simple” thing can taste so great!

The best part is, that a giant mushroom and a red onion were from CSA deliveries as well!

Onine Ordering

One of my New Year resolutions was to optimize the way I use my time, and as a part of this, not to hesitate to spend money when it saves time. Specifically, I decided to use home delivery more.

I was always very reluctant to let somebody else choose my produce. When I lived in Palatine and would drive my car, it just didn’t make sense – it was faster to drive to the store and get all I needed than spend time looking for the products online. Now the situation is different. Almost till the end of the year, I could bike to the stores. Then, it was not a waste of time, but exercising. But after the snow settled on the ground, the situation changed, and I decided to try something new.

First, I finally gave in to Amazon Fresh. I was surprised to see that 1) the prices were competitive 2) I could purchase some produce I didn’t see in the stores for a long time, such as non-fat siggis and skyr. My first try (a week before I left for Helsinki) was a success. Encouraged by it, I decided to pre-order some food for the evening I would be back. It looked like a great solution. My plane was scheduled to arrive at 6 PM, and it would be close to 8 when I would get home, so most of the stores would be closed. I ordered lots of fruits and dairy for the 8 PM -10 PM delivery window. At about 8-40, I received a notification that my order was out for delivery and that all items were available. Then I received a message that “my stop is next” and started to listen to the buzzer. And then, to my dismay, I saw another message: sorry, your order could not be delivered.

Continue reading “Onine Ordering” →

And More To The Previous Post

Two things I forgot to mention in the previous post. 

One is about the resemblance between the Long COVID and the long-term effects of the Spanish flu on people’s ability to think and concentrate. John Barry even analyzes the behavior of President Wilson during the peace negotiations in Europe. He goes as far as speculating that his inadequate after-flu decisions affected the resulting treaty in such a way that it late made it easier for Hitler to come to power. 

And once again, about an extremely important balance between panic and informed decisions. As John Barry states, people should know the truth. When the government officials are honest in their communications, they help to maintain trust in society. Also, he cites Lincoln about the importance of identifying the thread – only when the thread is identified can you fight it. I would add to this what I’ve already said many times: whenever there is a need to change the course, it is important to explain why these changes are made, what prompted these changes, and why it was not the case before. We all know what would be the reaction otherwise 🙂

“The Great Influenza” book

I have so many things to say about this book! I started reading it because, like many others, the current COVID pandemic prompted my interest in the 1918-1920 flu pandemic. I wanted to know more about it, how people handled a pandemic a century ago, what was the effect on society and the economy, and most importantly – why we know so little about it?! 

The book gave all these answers and even more. It is more “medical” than I thought it would be; sometimes, I felt like there were too many medical details, but that’s what makes this book so convincing. 

 It starts with a survey of medicine and medical science history in America. I could not imagine that there was such a lack of science until the beginning of the 20th century! And then, the book proceeds with documenting the development of the flu pandemic, covering all medical, social, and political aspects. You can’t stop making parallels with the COVID pandemic, even though the book was written more than ten years ago. (The last version of the afterword was written when the COVID pandemic had already begun, so some similarities are discussed)

The big question I had from the very beginning of the current pandemic was the following: why do we know so little about the Spanish flu pandemic? Historical textbooks mention briefly that “one hundred million people got sick,” but that’s pretty much it. When you read anything related to the 1918 – 1920 period, the flu is never mentioned as a background of events. 

The most important reason why it all but disappeared from world history is that it was forbidden to write about it! The world was at war, and none of the participating countries wanted to spread panic or “hurt the morale.” That statement explained much of what was going on. It’s unbelievable: people were getting sick and dying. In some cities, like Philadelphia, dead bodies were piling in the houses because there was nobody to carry them away and nobody to bury them. And newspapers said nothing!

It was primarily because of the wartime censorship, but also because there was (and there is) nothing heroic in dying from a disease. 

The government kept saying, “it’s nothing but the common cold.” Same as know there were people in denial. A quote from the book:

The government’s very efforts to preserve “morale” fostered the fear, for since the war began, morale—defined in the narrowest, most shortsighted fashion—had taken precedence in every public utterance. As California senator Hiram Johnson said in 1917, “The first casualty when war comes is truth.”

Barry, John M.. The Great Influenza (pp. 333-334). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. 

And one more – especially pronounced because it was written way before the pandemic:

So the first two items on the list are the lessons from 1918, which COVID has confirmed: 

Number one, tell the truth. 

Number two, NPIs work.

Barry, John M.. The Great Influenza (p. 467). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. 

The author notes that not only the newspapers were silent, but also almost no works of literature mention the Spanish flu pandemic (that prompted me to start actively looking for such books, found some). You can’t stop thinking that our COVID memories might vanish in less than a hundred years! And you can’t stop thinking that the Spanish flu lessons were not learned!

Icicles

These icicles are so captivating! I am wondering what caused them to angle like this? Is it a wind?!

Vietnamese Lunar New Year Parade

it was a small, but very nice parade! I am too impatient to post on YouTube two dozen of tiny videos, so just embedding the Instagram posts here.

Mice In The House

I knew from the very beginning that when you live in the city, the rodent question is not “if” but “when.” We the number of dead and alive mice and rats I saw on the streets, I knew there would be no way to escape.

I used to hear mice invading the kitchen in my old house because my office space was very close to it. Here, my office is on the opposite end of the apartment from the kitchen, and I never noticed anything. I made this unpleasant discovery in mid-January when I decided to use some of the remaining sweet potatoes. I was staring at a couple of potatoes which I pulled from the bottom of the box, trying to figure out what happened to them, and then I finally realized that somebody was gnawing them! It felt disgusting! I looked inside the box, and so some droppings and some crums. It looked very much like mice, and I knew that mice are a building problem in the city-dwelling, not an individual apartment problem.

The building management told me that I needed to contact the same extermination company that services our building twice a year, but I would still have to pay my bill myself. You can imagine that while I was waiting for them, I was nervously listening to all the noises. I put both boxes with potatoes on the top above the fridge, where I do not want to have anything at all, but in this case, I needed to isolate the potential rodent point of interest 🙂

An exterminator examined all the walls and the kitchen floor and said that he did not see any holes for the mice to get in “unless they sneaked in from the balcony when the door was open.” He left two mechanical traps and a bait with poison, which made me even more nervous because I am afraid of mice, live or dead!

Meanwhile, a board member was questioning everybody from my tier, and a neighbor right under me told her that a couple of weeks prior, he spotted a mouse, killed it, and threw a corps away. Can you imagine that?! He didn’t tell anybody, didn’t call an exterminator – I guess he didn’t know what to do when you a facing mice invasion?!

What made me particularly resentful was that I saw earlier that he was keeping after-parties leftovers on the balcony. When I saw that for the first time, I thought that somebody was calling for trouble and then, the trouble came to me!

I was leaving for Helsinki two days after the exterminator visit, and I had fears that I would return to the battlefield of dead mice. I asked Igor to check on the situation during my absence, and he did and saw none. It looks like mice are gone, but recalling my previous rodent encounters, I am afraid it was just “part one.”

Last Days In Helsinki

The remaining week in Helsinki was all work. I stayed on my US projects, so I had some free time in the morning and then worked from after lunch until bedtime. I did some clothes shopping on Wednesday morning, and I met with my friend Natasha on Thursday, and Friday morning was all spent trying to get a COVID test.

Although my flight back was not super-early, we both did not feel comfortable relying on the test at the airport and tried to get something in the city the day before. One of the clinics, which is relatively close to Boris’ place, was presumably doing tests for travel for everybody. When we came in, they told us that yes, please go to the lab and take the number. We did and waited in line, and then the nurse said – no, they can’t take me if I am not registered with their system. It was very annoying because we had already spent all this time, and now had to look for another place.

Long story short, I got the test, but I have to pay over 200 euros for it! Indeed, the ferry to Tallinn is the cheapest way to get the test, even with the fare and breakfast! I was tired and upset, but I had to buy some chocolate to take home, so we went to Stockmann, and I barely made it to the start of my workday.

One funny picture from the center of Helsinki – this is granite which is going to be used to mark the bike paths – love these giant “shopping bags” 🙂

Both flights on my way back were half-empty, and the food was surprisingly good. It looks like SAS either didn’t reduce their menu during COVID, or they already returned to the pre-COVID times. It is hard to believe, but I had to take additional layers with me because it was way colder in Chicago than in Helsinki!