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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.
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…
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.
All About Yesterday
There were a lot of different events happening in Chicago on Friday and Saturday, marking a year of the Russian war against Ukraine. I have an acute feeling that I haven’t done enough, haven’t said enough, and that people, in general, are more indifferent than they should be.
Still, I want to report some positive news.
The Ukrainian rally on Friday was massive, with lots of city and county officials in attendance. I was hoping to be there at least for a part of it, but I had an unreconcilable conflict with the girls arriving at the same time. Igor was there and took a lot of pictures.
We Stand With Ukraine
Hopefully, there will be more photos and videos tomorrow, just the short episode including a rally in which Igor, Anna, and I participated.
Why your female co-workers do not come to meetups?
Continuing discussion about women at meetups
Thank you to everybody who responded to my post about the complete absence of women at the Chicago PUG February meetup on all three platforms where it was posted. While I understand that it is not an isolated issue but a part of the overall gender disbalance in IT, the lack of women in Postgres is striking compared to other IT fields. And even on top of that disbalance, it is even more pronounced at meetups.
During last week’s discussions, some people stated that going to any meetup or not is a personal choice, and there may be many reasons why people do not come. I completely agree with that, but I am leaving the discussion on “what are the benefits of attending meetups” to a future discussion. In this blog, I focus solely on gender disproportion.
Several commentators suggested providing daycare or allowing participants to come with children would…
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I Hope People Will Come!
Last Saturday, I distributed some flyers about tomorrow’s rally to the protesters by the Lyric Opera Building. It turned out that Chicago Tribune did an interview with one of the Ukrainian refugees who were there, and … they mentioned the rally in the article!
Also, Igor and one other rally organizer were interviewed by NBC today, so there will be even more visibility.
I hope that people will come!
Hettie's Reflections 