On family history, parenting, education, social issues and more
Author: Hettie D.
My name is Henrietta (Hettie) Dombrovskaya. I was born in Saint-Petersburg, Russian (actually, back then – Leningrad, USSR) in 1963, and immigrated to the United States in 1996.
I love Saint Petersburg, the city I was born and raised in, and I think it’s one of the most beautiful places in the world. Similarly (but differently) I love Chicago, and can’t imagine myself moving somewhere else in the observable future.
I have three children, Igor, Vlad and Anna, all adults living on their own, and one (so far) granddaughter Nadia. I also believe that my children are the best thing that happened in my life.
As for my professional life, I am working in the field of Information Technologies. When I was twenty, I’ve declared that the databases are the coolest thing invented and that I want to do them for the rest of my life. Thirty plus years later, I still believe it’s true, and still, believe that the databases are the best. These two statements together imply that I think a person can have it all, and indeed, I think so! Keep reading my journals to find out how I did it.
For reasons already mentioned multiple times, I didn’t do enough Christmas in 2025, and during the first days of 2026, I was trying to catch the last bits of it. On Monday, I was working from home, and went to Charmer’s for breakfast. I almost ordered a cappuccino, but stopped myself and asked whether they still had any holiday drinks, and they had!
And on Tuesday, my 6:30 AM train happened to be a Holiday train (somehow, they didn’t have time to remove decorations!), and that was another treat, because it was the only time this season!
Now I checked all the boxes, and finally ready to have the Christmas season over!
Here, there are more negative than positive results. My biggest regret of 2025 is that I didn’t do enough during the election campaign. To be precise, I did zero canvassing and a very moderate amount of convincing people of what the right thing to do is. I knew it was wrong, but I kept telling myself that organizing Prairie Postgres is more important at that moment, and that I can’t do everything, and… I didn’t speak up enough, which I also regret. I post very little, if anything, political on LinkedIn, where I am most visible, and the list continues. I will never do it again!
I’ve done a little bit better at supporting DEI, regardless of the political climate, but I wasn’t consistent enough, so one of my goals for this year is to always keep this support on my radar.
Even with simple things like attending the rallies, I did way less than I did in previous years. Once again, my excuse was that I was twice as busy as before because of Prairie Postgres and my activities in the professional community. Still, I should always remember that if the country’s civic values are at risk, the interests of my professional community are at risk as well. I want to make an intentional effort to attend rallies when I really care about the cause. I know that society’s well-being depends on each individual’s actions, so I have no excuse. I know that each person matters. Earlier in 2025, I tried to become more involved in local initiatives, but I had to drop these activities because they looked like a very insignificant outcome for the time spent. I will try to get involved again in a couple of years, when I retire.
Cultural activities and reading
According to Goodreads, I read fewer books in 2025 than in 2024, but I believe that’s because I didn’t record books that ended up being a waste of time, and there were more of those in 2025. The majority of books were audiobooks, and that’s something I want to address. I switched to audiobooks because it is easier to listen while I am doing something else, and also because of my vision problems. Now that my vision is better, I am looking to find ways to read e-books again. Today, I realized I have a new option: I started taking the L more often, and when on the L, I can find a place to sit, but there isn’t enough space to open my computer, especially since I switched from Mac Air back to Mac Pro. This is the time when I can read e-books.
As for the other cultural activities, I attended many exhibits, concerts, operas, and different theatrical performances, but I didn’t keep track of them, and that’s something I want to do next year. I am still hungry for more cultural activities and want to see more performances than I have time to see, and oftentimes I feel disappointed because I do not like the show. Next year, I want to get more organized with all these activities, keep track of them, and what I like and what I don’t, so I can figure out how much I really want to see and what exactly.
2025 was a difficult year, though which year isn’t? I had been through many fights and won many battles, but a significant portion of those victories were Pyrrhic, so by the end of the year, I was not sure whether I had achieved anything. Still, I wanted to write a short summary of what I consider the wins of 2025 (and what’s not), and how I am going to build on them. I plan to have it in three separate parts.
Money
It starts with money, because if you do not have enough of it, nothing else can happen. Everyone who knows me believes my money management is perfect; however, the only reason it appears that way is that I plan with large margins. Last year, I realized that although I was not overspending (not spending more than I make), my budget became rather mythical, and that I lost a clear distinction between what was “necessary” and what was “extra.” I haven’t changed anything in this classification since I first set it up 20+ years ago, and I was wondering why my wealth manager and I couldn’t find common ground. A year ago, I completely redesigned my budget (the totals didn’t change, but everything else did :)), and at the end of the year, it ended up being very close to reality. I didn’t make any major changes, only some minor adjustments, and I consider this result to be one of my best achievements of 2025.
Professional
Many years ago, when I first told Boris what I wanted to do when I retired, he told me it was not a retirement but a change of profession. Although I still have at least a couple of years until retirement, I feel like my profession has partially changed, or rather, I have added something new to it. Speaking strictly about my technical expertise, I am extremely happy that in 2025, I learned new techniques and technologies and became better at what I have already been doing very well. I have been presented with several major technical challenges, and I have resolved them in a new way, not relying solely on my previous experience. I consider it a very important achievement, because that’s what keeps me at the top of my profession, but at the same time, I know I could do more. There are several areas that I have never touched before because “it was not my thing,” but I believe that the time has come to broaden my expertise and not to be solely focused on the areas I am already good at. I have a list of techniques and tools I want to learn in 2026, and I hope it comes true.
For the first time since I started at my current job, I was able to create new open-source projects. My current job does not leave me much time to pursue professional projects outside the job itself, but this year I added one new project and almost added another. Formally speaking, I added it yesterday, but the work was done in Q4 of 2025.
Prairie Postgres
This is part of my volunteer work, but it is so massive that it warrants a separate section. Obviously, that’s the first time in my life of running a not-for-profit, and I still think I had more fails than successes. The level of responsibilities was no less than in my “normal” job, and I was not fully prepared for that. For much of the year, I felt like a complete failure because I didn’t have time to do everything this “other job” demanded of me. My accomplishment is that I was not a complete failure after all; we survived, and we are slowly growing.
The rest of the volunteering
I am not completely happy about it. Firstly, I now strongly believe I took on too many responsibilities, and I am glad I had the sense to drop the Howard-Evanston community board, not without hesitation. But I still have too much, and all my volunteer positions were because I wanted them, not because someone forced me to take them. That was the first year I had more than one professional volunteer responsibility, and they have all been very time-consuming from the start. I know that I do not fulfill my volunteer obligations at least for two organizations, and I need to figure out how to change it.
It’s still a mixed bag with the Night Ministry. I know that I am doing at least something good, and I know that at least some people are thankful, but it has been a very challenging environment during the last year. Several times I thought that I was doing so little there that it would be better to stop coming altogether, but each time, I feel that I would create a void in my heart.
I am happier with Clinic escort volunteering, because of the early morning shifts – I finally figured out how to be useful regularly!
Why did I do it so early this year? Because otherwise, I would need to do it the next weekend, and next weekend, I will have the girls, and it will be my mom’s birthday, and I will also need to get ready for my next trip, and review the training I am giving at the end of the month.
I ordered the tree removal for today, so that I won’t even think of keeping it longer :). It is faster to take the decorations down than to put them up, but still, it was a lot!
That’s how many boxes I had to move downstairs to the storage! It took me six trips up and down! I go up and down, and you think – why in the world am I doing this? Bringing all these boxes up, and four weeks later, bringing everything back down?!
I know that many people feel sad when they remove a Christmas tree and decorations, but for me, it symbolizes a fresh start: the holidays are over, and the new year has officially begun, and I am ready to make it great!
My Armenian hosts mentioned that they had a gas water heater “just as it was in Saint-Petersburg in old times, do you remember?” I told them – not really, but actually, I do remember. It was very different from what they had in their house, so I thought that this was one of the fun facts I should share in my historical posts, because nobody would ever ask!
In this post, I described what my childhood apartment looked like, and in that post, I talked about the heating systems. To reiterate: you had to light a match to start a pilot in the water heater, and then you had to keep the water running; otherwise, the flame would die off. Since you had to light a match each time you needed hot water, you had to have “something” to discard the burned matches. This “something” was a tin mug which worked perfectly for that purpose as long as I remembered. Many years later, when I was about 14, I finally noticed “1915” scribbled on the side of the mug and realized it was an army mug from WWI.
There was a large washing machine in the bathroom; for the life of mine, I couldn’t tell the brand, but it was the size of a small table, and that’s how it was mostly used :). I hardly remember any time it was operating, and I am not sure whether it was not working properly, or at some point it broke and no one fixed it, or whatever the deal was. All I know is that it was there and not working, and I washed all my clothes in a washing bowl in the sink using the laundry soap.
The kitchen had no hot water at all. There was a gas heater as well, but I can’t remember why it was not used. To wash the dishes, I had to do the following:
boil a kettle of water
put a washing bowl in the sink
pour some hot water from the kettle and mix it with cold water from the faucet to make it warm
wash the dishes
rinse the dishes with cold water
put all the dishes back into a washing bowl and pour the remaining hot water from the kettle over the clean dishes
dry the dishes with the kitchen towel
There was a gas stove in the kitchen (as I mentioned, the old wood-burning stove was not operational), but you still had to use matches to light a burner. For some reason, I was afraid of lighting matches until I was eight or nine years old, and my mom yelled at me for it. Upon returning from school, I had to warm up my dinner, and for me to be able to do that, my mom had to leave a burner on low since the morning (again, no idea why; my grandaunt was there, but that’s something in their relationships I was never able to figure out). I was very proud of myself when I finally overcame my fear and learned to light matches.
It’s good to remind myself how things used to be; humans become spoiled very fast and are miserable when there are problems with hot water, or when a washer breaks!
My historical posts are being published in random order. Please refer to the page Hettie’s timeline to find where exactly each post belongs and what was before and after.
I read more books than that, but unfortunately, a large percentage of the ones I read didn’t give me anything, and I regretted spending time on them. The most disappointing part was that I didn’t like any of the books from our book club at work. However, I am happy to report that I learned to drop the books I didn’t like without any guilt. Here are the last several books I read at the end of the year:
The Tipping Point. The full title of this book is The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference. Published 25 years ago, it’s considered a classic, and I think it’s a must-read for anyone who wants to understand how ideas are spread in society, and what can be done to promote progressive ideas or desired behavior. I didn’t read this book before, but I saw an advertisement about the next book, Revenge of the Tipping Point, and figured I needed to read the original one first.
Revenge is even more interesting; it explores social engineering, its faults, and offers a new perspective on the COVID pandemic and opioid crisis, among many other topics.
What we can know – A dystopia, the most interesting part of which is, in my opinion, how much the digital trace of our lives will reveal about the true us to our distant descendants.
Careless People – an explosive book, which I am glad I read. I am not disagreeing with those who say that the book is extremely subjective, and I can see the point of those who say that the author was not as naive as she presents herself, but still, I believe it. And somehow, it does not surprise me.
Spending the first day of the year sitting at home and crossing off overdue tasks from my list was not the most exciting thing, though it did bring some satisfaction. But I had lots of hopes for January 2. It was the first workday of the year, and the weather was supposed to be great (and it was). I went to the office not because I had to, but because I had ambitious plans.
My plan was to go skating after lunch, then, after work, to go to the Chicago Architectural Center to finally see two already-not-so-new exhibits, and then go to the Siskel Center to see Mistress Disspeller. All of the above activities belonged to the category “I want to do this, but I chronically have no time for it.”
Skating became problematic since last season, when Millennium Park cut the skating season short. Instead of having the skating rink operating until mid-March, they close it on February 9, and this year, the last day will be February 1. Since I will be out of the country from January 16 to 29th, I have only two weeks left! And you can’t go skating when it’s raining or when it’s really cold, which limits the options even further. All of the above was a long explanation of why I headed to the skating rink on Friday. I knew it could be a mistake, because it would still be a winter break day, which would mean a big crowd, but the reality surpassed my wildest expectations.
When I arrived four minutes before the start of the session, expecting to show my pass on my phone and put on the skates, I saw a line circling half the rink, and I was told it was for those who had already purchased tickets online! I wanted to turn around and go back to the office, but the sun was shining, the weather was perfect, and I had already paid for a session, so I decided to stay. It took me ten minutes to check in, and when I finally put the skates on, there was barely any space left on the rink. I think there were actually these hypothetical one hundred people there! And at least a third of them couldn’t or almost couldn’t skate.
I made an effort :). I navigated around the people who were moving rather erratically, but after twenty minutes, I gave up.
While this portion of my plan could be considered at least a partial success, the other two failed completely.
I checked the CAC schedule on their website the day before, and the schedule said they are open until 7 PM both Friday and Saturday. I thought that finally, I would go there not to purchase a gift, but to see exhibits. When I arrived at five minutes to five, I saw several people standing puzzled by the CAC door, and when I came closed, I saw a sign, which said that there are “winter hours” in effect, and the Center will be only open until 4 PM on the days it will be open (and it will be closed Tue-Wed, but that was not important at the moment). I felt crushed and decided that I could comfort myself by having dinner at Lea’s Cafe instead of eating a vegan sandwich from work, which was in my backpack.
Lea’s Cafe didn’t fail me :). It was a perfect comfort food, and I even took half a baguette home, because it was a lot.
But after that, there was a huge disappointment at the Siskel Center. I read about this documentary, and it looked interesting, so I was looking forward to seeing it, but it was nothing like what I thought. I honestly could not figure out what the idea behind it was, and how people could act the way they did. It is possible that, at least in part, it was a language and cultural problem combined. The documentary was in Mandarin with English subtitles, and the melody of the language is very different from any other languages I know or know how they sound. I was reading the subtitles, and could not map the words to the emotions projected on the screen. It felt rushed; maybe Mandarin words are too short for translation, I don’t know. Or maybe, it was something wrong with me. At some point, I thought of leaving, but then decided to stay to the end and see whether something would change my mind.
I hope that this day of disappointment won’t represent the rest of 2026, and that my delights won’t be solely culinary!
On December 31, I was working. Even though I worked from home, it was a pretty intense workday. I was hoping to start early and finish early, and make a nice meal to bring to my mom to celebrate the New Year with her, but “early” didn’t happen.
Most times, Igor is around for this early celebration, and then he brings my mom to my place, but since he went to celebrate with Anna’s family (which is definitely more fun), I figured I can’t/don’t want to make a trip to my mom’s house twice, and decided to make it simple and bring all the food to her place.
I prepared myself to sit and nod to everything she would say, which is the only way to keep things calm these days, and that’s exactly how it went. The events and facts she does and does not remember anymore are pretty random. Somehow, many people believe that when older people forget things, they forget the most recent events and remember their past really well. I don’t know what to tell you about others, but that’s definitely not the case with my mom. If there is anything she remembers, it’s repetitive things that she does every day. As for the past, even when she thinks she remembers some events, in reality, she does not remember them clearly, and I can see a difference between how she described them ten years ago and now.
It’s really sad to see, and I can imagine who scared she should be feeling that the world around her is becoming an unknown and dangerous place.
I didn’t plan to go to the Chicago River for the fireworks; not because Igor was not here; I am perfectly fine to go anywhere on my own. It was relatively cold, and also, I had too many things I needed to do before next Monday. On my way back from Armenia, I was making plans for the upcoming week (till January 5), and I was debating with myself whether I should do some fun activities, like going to the Navy Pier, or whether I should focus on catching up with life. By the end of the day December 31, the answer was clear!
I went to bed before midnight, and missed all the Happy New Year texts 🙂
On January first, it was even colder that on December 31, and also cloudy, which made it a perfect weather to be inside and focus on different aspects of community work. Also, I went to my mom one more time, to change her bedding and take her laundry to wash, and since I also took her shower curtain to wash, I returned one more time to put it back :).
The highlights of the day were several conversations with people with whom i do not talk often, and finally catching up on emails with friends, so I guess, the day was not entirely hopeless, and also, I finished some of my ong-overdue-tasks. Still, I hope that January 1 didn’t define the rest of 2026 :).
Everyone knows I love the Find My app! In fact, I do not know how I would survive without it! Recently, I’ve added several more AirTags, and I feel quite protected.
When I was in Armenia, I told my hosts about this app and demonstrated how I have everything displayed there and how I can check the status of the items I left at home. When it was time for me to leave for the airport, they asked me whether I had checked my room for forgotten stuff. I told them I did, and that everything except for my phone and passport is not important.
I got into a cab, and about ten minutes after the ride started, I saw a message from the Find My app: the AirPods left behind! Yep, a white case on a white windowsill…I reached the driver: How far along are we?
It was great that, because of the severe weather conditions, my host insisted I leave an hour earlier than needed! I messaged them, they found the AirPods case and brought it down.
Hettie's Reflections 