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.

And One More – Please Come Out Next Saturday!

Friends! Those who are in Chicago, please consider coming and supporting this counter-protest.

Igor says very well why you should counter-protest if you really want to support Ukraine!

On March 18, the group of left-wing activists from the organizations that make up the ANSWER Coalition will gather at Wrigley building in Chicago to demand “end the $100 Billion in arms shipments to Ukraine,” negotiations with Russia and “no war with China.” Nowhere is there a demand for the aggressor in the war – the Russian Federation – to withdraw the troops from Ukrainian soil. But then, these are the groups that insist that the 2013-2014 Maidan protests are neo-Nazi coup supported by the West and that Putin’s response was justified because… NATO expansion, and Nazis. So lots of Putin talking points over there.

More info on their respective here: https://www.codepink.org/piu20iraqchicago

Peace in Ukraine is a laudable goal, but there can’t be meaningful,, lasting peace until the Russian Federation withdraws its troops, until all imprisoned civilians are released and until those who committed war crimes on the Ukrainian soil face justice. If you believe that a display of Putin’s talking points shouldn’t go unchallenged, come out and protest, and spread the word about the *real* path to peace.

I will be out of town (and out of the country) and won’t be able to come. Please, come for me!

Please Write To Your Legislators To Support Ukraine

I am so glad that there are people who are organizing the writing of these letters! We need it. Please consider signing and sending: Letter to protect Ukraine

Catching Up

Today first time after Sunday, my eye does not hurt, and I am trying to catch up for the lost time. I am still not sure when and if I will be able to wear contacts, so my head still hurts, but at least the eye is (almost) fine. I still feel it, but it is so much better, and I am so eager to do everything I could not do in the past several days!

Unfortunately, this week was going to be busy even without the vision crisis, and also – I am leaving Sunday night, so I am still horrified by the amount of work I need to do before I leave. And at the same time, I am terribly sorry that I am missing the whole European Film Festival – there were so many movies I wanted to watch, and I watched zero!

I am very well aware of how a person’s brain works, so I know that if I got to see zero, the festival would be lower in my list of priorities than other things… but I am still sad.

On the positive side, I finally made it to ODS, and we had a “make your own pizza” dinner, and it was a lot of fun. Almost all of the youth participated, and we all laughed and joked. I talked to several newcomers, and one boy who had been there for a while was really happy that I remembered his name. Some pizzas turned out very well, some – not so much, but nobody went hungry!

On Wednesday, I hosted Chicago PUG and not only hosted but also presented. I rehearsed a talk which I will be giving in Paris in two weeks. There were very few RSVPs, and I worried that nobody would come, but that was one of these rare cases when pretty much everybody showed up! All the pizza was gone – it almost never happens!

My talk was very well received, and I got a lot of helpful comments, so I am going to make some changes to the presentation. Overall, both Tuesday and Wednesday were great. I was so miserable with my eye, and the fact that I was surrounded by people, and people liked what I was doing, made me feel tons better.

Finally, today I made a recording for Citus Con. I didn’t want to submit anything to this conference because I knew I won’t have time, but the organizers asked me and told me that they would place me on the on-demand trek and that they would record me when I have time. And then, out of three talks I submitted, they selected the one which was completely unprepared! So I had to work on that one, in addition to my talk for Paris (and my reserve talk!)

Still, I didn’t want to cancel, because I knew that this would be a great opportunity to promote my new talk and new ideas, so I made time :). The talk was recorded by the organizers, and they will do the edits and everything. It went really well (I rehearsed it three times because the timeslots were shorter than usual – 25 min – and I wanted to make sure everything would fit. There were lots of technical difficulties during the recording, but after everything was resolved I was able to present well enough so that there was no need for re-recording. I feel pretty good about this, as well as the fact that the organizers loved my talk so much. And about me comfortable presenting i glasses – I might need to do the same in Paris!

Updates

As if I didn’t have enough to deal with, I started to experience pain in my right eye. That happened Sunday night, pretty much out of nowhere. I thought it would get back to normal soon, but it was not getting better, so on Tuesday, I when to the doctor (“any doctor available”). They told me a lot of horror stories about my eye and how it’s an emergency situation and wrote a prescription for two kinds of drops.

I am not going to comment on all these horrors because 1) I didn’t listen well since I was shocked 2) I am going to see the same doctor on Friday, and we’ll see. Now (Wednesday evening) it feels better than yesterday (finally), so I hope it will be even better by Friday.

Two things bother me in the current situation. First, my eye hurt so much in the past two days that I had trouble working on my computer so I fell behind again after I almost caught up on Sunday. Second, I have to wear glasses (God knows for how long), and I can’t see right, and my head hurts all the time. I thought that my prescription was not updated, but it turned out I updated the glasses last summer. It’s just that I am not used to glasses.

I know that is minor in comparison with serious problems other people have, and things are not bad in general, and I know that no timing is right for health issues. Still, I keep lamenting about what an inconvenient time that it all happened!

Biking in the morning again

www.instagram.com/reel/Cpdl87ZsOBM/

Writing

My life is pretty dull these days: most of the weekends are spent on writing and getting ready for multiple talks. Today, except for some physical activity, checking on mom, and talking to Boris, it was all writing. I finished the presentation for my weekly Advanced Postgres series at work, rehearsed the talk I will present at Chicago PUG on Wednesday (and made some edits), sent the pdf of my presentation for CitusCon, and rehearsed it twice – they will be recording me on Thursday. I worked on the article which I am writing for yet another professional website – I received a lot of questions/comments/editing suggestions from the editor, and it took me almost two hours to go over all of them.

And now it’s bedtime, which I religiously try to observe because neglecting it negatively affects my productivity.

Tomorrow, there will be several things that I need to do during business hours, including the PC committee meeting, finally, ordering conference T-shirts, finalizing the speaker’s dinner, and calling about three different appointments for mom. All mom-related things take forever: call to schedule an appointment to get a referral, make this appointment, call to see why there is no provider specified on the referral, call and leave a message to a provider; after they don’t return your call, call one more time, to find out that the home visits are not covered by Medicaid, and NY referral is not good for the office visits… and we need to start everything over again!

Then, I do not have time for everything work-related during work hours, and I am doing work after work, and I do not have time to do the edits over the weekend, and the cycle repeats. Sometimes I think that if I could do mom’s calls over the weekend, it would help, but most likely, it won’t work that way. After all, it’s not like I have any free time any day of the week 🙂

Steppenwolf: Describe the Night

I was extremely intrigued by this play’s description:

In short: Igor liked this play, and I … I am not sure. The play was very long, and about two-thirds into it, I thought that it was lost time again: I didn’t like it, and it was not “coming together” (I have a preview card, so all the shows I see in Steppenwolf are previews, you can see the theater only half-full)

Closer to the end, the artists finally started to build the dynamics, and the play became really captivating. However.. still… I can’t point at what exactly I didn’t like… Sometimes, I love historical fantasies with “what if” scenarios. This play was more phantasmagoria than fantasy, and the fact that the characters were names like historical figures, didn’t help. It’s one thing to put a known historical figure into an imaginary situation or environment and watch them act in the new circumstances. It’s different when the characters are stripped of what we all know about them and given new personalities. I mean, the characters were mostly realistic; you do not need to name them Yezhov, Babel, or Putin to be convincing.

Now, I want to read the book to see how far is it from the show.

And One More

Even though I already wrote several blogs in relation to the one-year Russian invasion, there are still a couple of things I wanted to mention.

The first thing is about the dominating mood of the anti-war protests. A year ago, these protests had a distinct mood of endless grief. When I blogged about the rallies a year ago, I mentioned that it was the first time in my life that I participated in the rallies, and they were not energizing. Usually, when you protest, you feel empowered by the people who are protesting with you, and you feel like you make your voice heard. In the wake of the war, the mood was completely different: pain and sorrow dominated, and the sense of eternal loss was in the air.

It was different this year. The mood was: we know what to do, and we’ll raise our voices so that the people in charge will hear us. The was way more offense and way more energy. Which is good. Once again, I hope that we made at least some difference.

And the second thought I had was prompted by the Facebook post of my friend. On February 24, marking this grim anniversary, she blogged about “many things that didn’t happen” because the war started.

As for me, I feel differently. The start of the war was not a volcano eruption that took human lives suddenly and unexpectedly. Although the war, indeed, ended lots of innocent people’s lives, it was not a force of nature. It uncovered the confrontation between Russia and the rest of the world, which many people didn’t want to see. Many people, including myself and Boris, tried to support some positive things we could see here and there and refused to see the uncontrolled destructive power behind the facade. So I’d say – yes, there were many things that didn’t happen because the war started. But it’s in some sense good that they didn’t happen because all of the illusions are gone.

I felt something similar (although of a very different nature) about the pandemic. In some weird way, I didn’t want it not to happen. It ruined all my plans for 2020, but I learned so many things about people, their relationships, about what is important and what is not that I would not ever trade this experience for blissful ignorance.

When the war started, it became impossible to pretend that “things are not that bad.”

I Will Never Ever…

I went to pick up mom’s glasses in the middle of the day – an excuse to be outside when the weather was so amazingly springy. Waiting for a bus, hopping on, hopping off, walking and squinting on the bright sun,,, navigating the crowd, passing people… and remembering March 2020…

I will never ever take it for granted – the ability to walk on the streets, hoping on a bus, being with others… Never ever…

Spring cleaning in Millennium Park

Weekend Protests Follow-up

I had so many work-related and conference-related things going on that I didn’t even finish posting about the weekend events. There were reporters out there,m both Friday and Saturday, and they took better pictures than us. All the pictures below are copied from the Chicago Tribune gallery. There is Annam and a part of me :).

I still feel dissatisfied, and I regret that I didn’t do more. The most important message we had to send was a message to our legislators to continue supporting the Ukraine war effort and to make it clear that it is not a general humanitarian thing,” but keeping the rest of the world safe. Looking and the news coverage, I feel that this mission was not achieved.

I also blame myself that I didn’t speak at the end of the meeting when the floor was available. It was already too cold, and everybody started to feel it (though nobody had left). Yes, I was unprepared, and it was cold, and I thought that Nadia and Kira could get completely frozen at any moment. That’s all true, but I still could.

Continue reading “Weekend Protests Follow-up” →