I left yesterday; it was the first day that I saw enough yellow leaves to notice the change of color 🙂
And in Helsinki, the fall is in its all glory, and the leaves smell like fall 🙂
Fall
Month: October 2024
I Have Hope
Multi-Threading
What I had to do in the past five days:
Work:
- Forteen open tickets, actively working on four of them, all being more than one week long projects
- Collaborate with people visiting from our Austin office
Mom:
- Introducing a new caregiver
- Scheduling somebody present for all days when there will be any medical worker present
- Making sure all medical workers have Anna’s phone
- Making sure Anna has all caregivers phones
- Making sure Mom has an updates schedule on her whiteboard
Postgres business
- October meetup: food, drinks, setting things up
- Posting about October meetup, sending the video for processing
- Scheduing November meetup: verifying the training center availability, submitting the service ticket, asking the speaker for talk description, actual scheduling
- Created a new NFP
- Applied for EIN
- About a half of the tax-exempt application package is ready
ACM
- Had a call about possible ways to collaborate
- Sent a follow-up email to the ACM Chiago board
The Night Ministry
- Scheduled one dinner at the shelter
- Talked to several people about other ways to be involved
Other volunteering
- Howard-Evanston community board meeting
Other
- Doing my nails before departure
- Packing (a total disaster this time)
- Joffrey a night before departure
- I was asked to review a book of my good friend, and I couldn’t say no!
Joffrey Ballet: Atonement
Going to see a ballet the night before my departure was a little bit tight, even if I wasn’t as busy as I ended up, but having all I had this week, it was a crazy idea. I think that if I wasn’t going with my neighbor, I would just stay at home and pack, but I didn’t want to let her down. And OMG, how glad I am that I went! The batter is brilliant! The more Joffrey performances I attend, the more I like them!
I didn’t know that this ballet was based on a novel; I only learned about it from the program notes. I still had the right days to read it, so I got an audiobook and listened nonstop, even when I usually listened to the news. I listened to it almost to the end by Thursday evening so I could follow the plot (and I shared it with my neighbor because otherwise, it would be almost impossible to figure out what was going on on stage).
The epilogue was quite unexpected, and I was eager to find out how the book ended. It turned out that the book ends… well, unexpectedly, but I am not going to put any spoilers here. I loved it! Some comments on Goodreads say that Part One is too slow and not engaging, but I can’t imagine it to be different. I loved the novel, the ballet, and the endings of both.
No Work-Life Balance Or Any Balance At All!
This week feels like the Apple mental health survey(‘Have you ever felt that the difficulties are piling up so high that you can’t overcome them?”). I spend a disproportionate amount of time trying to schedule and reschedule things, and something pops up each time I squeeze things in. The worst part is that the work projects are moving at a slower speed than I would like them to move, which means I am leaving a lot of unfinished work right before going to a conference. I invested tons of effort to finish one of these “long-distance runners” last night, and it ended up being two and a half hours instead of twenty minutes, and not because of me. I am happy that I can put a checkmark and close the ticket, but I planned to finish packing last night, and I had no time for that, and now I am unsure when to finish except for right before the departure :).
Another “check” – I finally introduced another caregiver to mom. The positives about her are that she lives very close and is way more flexible. Mom at least didn’t dislike her and agreed to go for a walk with her a couple of times when I am away.
Also, I can’t believe it has been just a couple days since I was at the beach – it was heavily raining for the past two days, and yesterday it was sunny, but almost freezing in the morning. The good side is that I am more mentally prepared for Helsinki :).
More Books
Followed a friend’s recommendation. It was difficult in the beginning because although I do not speak Ukrainian and even more so Hutsulian, I could still feel that the English translation lost a lot of language flavor, and I was frustrated not being able to grasp it. Still, I kept reading because since I first visited Bukovina in 1976, I had fallen in love with its people. Despite all Soviet propaganda, it was impossible not to see the level of oppression Hutsuls had experienced, and it was absolutely clear that their existence within the Soviet Union was not a happy ending to their struggles. I fell in love with the local legends. For many years, Oleksa Dovbush was my hero, and when other romanticized korsars and musketeers, I dreamed about opryshkes. I know what is drymba and what is kiptar, and how does Hutsul embroidery look.
After the initial “no, it doesn’t sound right!” I got all absorbed in the story: powerful, horrifying, and so beautifully written. I am not 100% sure whether those readers who knew nothing about the history of this region would love the book as much as I loved it, but I highly recommend it.
Divine Might: Goddesses in Greek Myth
It seems hardly possible to tell something new about Greek mythology, but Natalie Haynes succeeded in this endeavor. Focusing on female figures in Greek Myths, she conducted extensive research and presented the readers with many little-known facts. She also encourages the readers to think beyond what they learned in schools about the Greek Gods, and analyze the myths from today’s point of view on gender (in)equality
Eile Weisel: Night. Dawn. Day.
For some reason, Goodreads does not show the other two books of this trilogy, Dawn and Day. I believe they are often combined into a “Trilogy,” but I can’t find it either. I listened to the audiobooks, starting with Dawn and ending with Night. All three are not easy to listen to. They all talk about the long-term personality damage that does not end after a prisoner is liberated from the concentration camp, which I think is really important to understand. I just looked over the reviews of this book, and I see that most readers limit their reviews to one or two sentences, and that’s how I feel: it’s very difficult to write anything except for “horror” and “must-read”.
Women At War Exhibit
A speaker whom I invited to present at Chicago PUG on October 15 came to Chicago for the first time in his life. That meant that I had to show him the city, at least for a little bit.
I booked the Chicago Architectural Cruise, and we agreed to walk around after that. Fortunately, the weather was not bad, although not as gorgeous as last weekend. Also, the docent on the tour was really good. You never know; it’s always hit or miss, but this was really good!
As usual, when I have very little time, I try to show some non-obvious places, so when we disembarked, I walked my guest directly to the Chicago Cultural Center. There, on the first floor, i saw an exhibit that I had no idea about:
Petition: One Month Later
The Longest Beach Season Ever!
And the water was not cold! It was definitely colder than ten days ago, but way warmer than at the beginning of June when you need to talk yourself into jumping in :). I walked into the water, and thanked the Lake, and looked around at the horizon line, the seagulls, a boat far away, and the reflection of the sun on the lake surface. I think that was actually the last beach day of 2024 :).
The Night Ministry
On Thursday, I attended the Night Ministry Annual fundraiser. With almost everybody I knew gone, I was unsure whether I would see any familiar faces. However, I wanted to make another attempt to resume volunteering, which has been challenging to schedule for the past several months. Surprisingly, I met many people, and even those who barely knew me recognized me.
I ended up having three long and in-depth conversations about my future at the Night Ministry. Everyone mentioned that I am/has been a person who could bring young people together, and “I was the best” and it would be a shame if the Night Ministry won’t have anything for me to do. One of the opportunities was a Crib, which is a completely different volunteering pattern but might actually work for me. I guess we’ll have to see in November.
Overall, I feel hopeful. For the past several months, there have been many times when I thought that I just needed to give up that part of my life, but then I felt a huge void and could not be a whole person without the Night Ministry, so I kept trying.
Hettie's Reflections 