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 I Can Also Be Creative!

I mean “creative” the way I say it about some of our users: you would never imagine what they could possibly mess up!

On Tuesday, Boris and I planned to go for a bike ride after I got back from work (it was the first time I had tried biking in the late afternoon in Helsinki). Because of that, I tried to leave promptly at 5 PM, and as I’ve mentioned many times, depending on how long I have to wait for a bus, the door-to-door time is 12-19 minutes. I should also mention that the buses in Helsinki move much faster than in Chicago, and the distance between stops is significantly longer.

I called Boris to say I would be home soon, got out of the office and walked to the bus stop, and in a couple of minutes, I saw bus #400 approaching. This route stops in a slightly different place from all others at my destination, but I knew where to get off (or at least I thought so!)

There are multiple road construction projects and road closures throughout Helsinki, and a couple of streets around our building are completely closed to traffic. In addition, this bus didn’t have a new and improved screen showing all upcoming stops, and (a really rare case!) neither displayed nor announced them. I didn’t realize that it was already time to get off the bus and missed my stop. Getting off at the next one, I thought that I did not want to add more than ten minutes to my commute, and I would be better off walking across the street and getting on any bus going in the opposite direction. It would be a great idea if I didn’t forget to press the stop button upon entering the bus. I stood by the door, presuming the driver would realize I was going to get off, but I was wrong! The bus didn’t stop, and I was two stops back! I walked to the opposite side of the street again and, once more, saw bus #400 approaching, but I couldn’t bring myself to board it 😂. I decided to wait for a couple more minutes and get on another bus. When I finally walked into our apartment, I told Boris that he wouldn’t believe what had happened anyway, so we should just get on our bikes and go!

Estonia PUG Meetup

Estonia PUG Meetup

Tallinn

It was supposed to rain both days we were going to spend in Estonia, and I couldn’t be happier with the weather forecast going wrong! In fact, there was not a drop of rain the entire time we were in Tallinn, except for a time when we were walking to the ferry on Friday evening. We were so sure that it would be raining that we didn’t even have any plans for the good weather, so after disembarking, we stood for a while trying to figure out what to do :).

Roterman keeps offering something new each time we walk through it

Continue reading “Tallinn” →

You Know I Am Good In Messing Things Up…

On Friday (in the morning of the day of my departure), I received an email from Chase Visa saying I didn’t pay my bill, which was due on that day. I clearly remember scheduling the payment for June 24 (it happened to me once that Chase processed my payment the next day and left me with a past-due amount, so I always make sure I have a payment scheduled a day before the due date).

I logged in to my bank account, and there was no payment on June 24, which left me puzzled. A minute later, I realized what was wrong: I had scheduled the payment for July 24 instead of June 24! I promptly scheduled a new payment, but since it was Friday, I could only schedule it for Monday, which would make it four days overdue.

I started calling my bank (and it’s not easy in the middle of my workday), and as always happens these days, it takes some time to reach a human. Fortunately, I succeeded, and a person on the other end of the line told me that they, “as a courtesy”, will remove the fees when they receive my payment on Monday. Which they did, and life became better 🙂

Then, on Monday, I was booking our trip to Tallinn, and was struggling with the Tallink website: they are prompting people to book a day trip, which is way cheaper than any overnight trip, so I did it incorrectly first, that tried to rebook, then was adding and removing meals, and finally, when it looked like everything was done, I hit the payment button. It was spinning forever; I saw the charge appear on my phone, but the Tallink website responded that “something was wrong,” but they will resolve it and send me an email.

The email never arrived, and Talling was still showing as an unpaid trip, so on Tuesday, I sent a message to customer support. They replied that I had a duplicate booking, and they just canceled the second one. I thought that the issue was happily resolved and didn’t look at the reservation again. It was only on Thursday morning, right before we were ready to leave the house, that I realized two things: that the booking had not been canceled, was a day trip, and also that I hadn’t booked a meal for the inbound trip. Unfortunately, it was already impossible to change the reservation, so I had to book a new one for the next day (this was a minor thing, because of the special pricing of day trips). What was worse that there was no way to pre-book a buffet, which I was hoping for. If there weren’t that many people on board, we could pay for the buffet “at the door,” but the ferry was packed. I was very disappointed, even though Boris kept telling me it wasn’t a big deal. And it was not, I just hate when things are not going as planned.

There are a lot of places to eat on a ferry, and even more places to sit, so it was just me not checking the tickets.

Valo Co-working

Each time I work from Valo in Helsinki, I like it even more (if it is possible :)). I’ve mentioned a couple of times that my only challenge with working there is the uncertainty about exactly when a room will be assigned to me on any given day. The standard reservation time is from 9 AM to 5 PM, and I rarely start working before that, but until my room is assigned, my key button doesn’t open the gym door, and I love using the opportunity to work out before work.

On Monday, I saw that the room had already been assigned at 6 AM, so I happily departed for Valo. When I saw Jarko at his usual place at the “catpatin deck”, he greeted me and said that he saw that I had reserved the rooms for three days, and he made sure that for all three days the rooms would be assigned starting from early morning, so that I would have time to go to the gym and have breakfast. I can’t even describe how touched I was!

There are very few people working at the beginning of July, and the entire staff at their main cafe is on vacation for six weeks. Lunch is being served in a smaller cafe, and breakfast time is extended until 11 AM, because most people are staying in the hotel rather than co-working 🙂

Biking In Helsinki

We are actively using the time of year (white nights) to go biking, even though I spend 10 hours a day at the co-working space, including daily workouts and meals.

On Saturday, we biked to Natasha’s place, and it appeared to be faster than taking a bus. On Sunday, we went for a very long bike ride, including a lunch break at IKEA (it started raining twice while we were biking, but we waited for the rain to calm down at the bus stop shelter). There was no biking on Monday, but then I biked to work on Tuesday (Boris escorted me both ways), and then we went for another bike ride after that to cross the new bridge, which is closed to any fossil-fueled traffic 😂.

On the way to Espoo
Lunch at IKEA
Biking to work
On the bridge
No cars allowed

Each time I bike in Helsinki, I feel incredibly jealous of the local cyclists who can bike literally from anywhere to anywhere using the safe biking lanes that are isolated from other traffic. To be clear, biking in the city during the rush hour still makes me uncomfortable, but I know that it’s mostly in my head. Other than that, looking at all the bike lanes, all the arrows, all the crossings … I totally get what Anna is trying to achieve! Even Milwaukee can’t be compared with Helsinki, and I do not even want to start talking about Chicago!

An Organ Concert At The Kallion Church

It was a super-fun concert, and if you look at the program and wonder how some of these pieces could possibly be performed on an organ, you are in your right to wonder! It was quite unexpected, and sometimes funny :).

The dress was bought for the occasion 😀

Traveling

A very short trip to Helsinki. Left lots of loose ends in Chicago, in the office, and otherwise, and trying to take care of at least some of them remotely.

My flight was on Friday evening, and I decided to take the L to the airport, thinking that at least the travel time would be predictable and I could do some work on the train. Didn’t exactly work as planned, since I had a medium-sized luggage which was rolling around all the time, and I had to hold it, and a Blue Line train moved as if it was a race car, but I made it to ORD, and even had a relaxing hour in the LOT lounge (that’s where Finnair is sending their eligible members these days).

It was nice to see the welcoming screen 🙂

I have been in Finland for three days, and I did a lot of biking, met with friends, attended an organ concert, and worked from my favorite coworking space. Some clothes shopping. A lot of time with Boris. Sleeping for 7 hours a night (I will be back to six tonight, most likely, but the first two days are like that).

When we biked to Natasha’s place on Saturday evening, we passed multiple green areas with lots of wild flowers everywhere. All the flowers were the ones I saw in the countryside when I was a child, everywhere I ever spent my summers. If there is anything from my childhood I am nostalgic about, it is nature in the places where it was almost untouched by civilization: meadows, strawberry patches, wild blueberries, and lingonberries; high pines, ferns, and horsetails. And this soft light-green grass, which is surprisingly different from the prairie grass, and I never thought about it until the first time I came back from the prairies to the European North. And that might be the main reason I would always want to come back to Finland 🙂

Pride Celebration

We had a Pride Month celebration in all of my company’s offices last week, and I was disappointed with what we had in the Chicago office. Here are the pictures that all other offices shared:

The Montreal office had a cookie decoration activity:

I assumed that our cookie decorating class would also be Pride-themed, as advertised, but it was not! They didn’t even have the right colors 😦

These are the cookies that I decorated. I could make the rainbow and the heart pride-themed, but they didn’t supply us with the proper color icing!

I feel left out! (Although I learned some decorating techniques, which I will use for my Christmas cookies)

And I missed the Chicago Pride Parade and the whole weekend of North Pride celebration in Rogers Park, and the next year will be even more challenging schedule-wise.

TIME Magazine: People Are Living Better

One more interesting article (I am catching up on my TIME Magazine reading for the past month)

The article addresses common dystopian fears that people are living longer but in worse health, thus straining the health system and taking more money from the rest of society.

And that’s another topic I was thinking about a lot recently. When I read books that describe life in a not-so-far-away past (both fiction and non-fiction, especially diary-based), I am constantly stumbling over descriptions of people of my age and even more of Boris’ age as “old” and “very old”, having trouble performing daily activities. And I find it encouraging that that’s a trend, not us being exceptions.

Full text below.

Continue reading “TIME Magazine: People Are Living Better” →