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.
As it turned out, Vlad and Anna were planning to deliver a specially ordered cake for me on my actual birthday. When I told Anna that I will be in the city on that day, partially because I need to pick up my inauguration day order from Vanille Chicago, they had to change their plans. Anna canceled their order in an attempt to move it to Wednesday, but by that time, they were overbooked for the inauguration day :).
After all, it was not that bad because I (with mom’s help) was more than half done with the pie.
On Friday, when I was sitting working, my door opened, and Vlad delivered a cake. And let me tell you – it was something! It was just great; I have nothing else to add! Yes, it was huge, and it might look completely unpractical, but that was just right! I was in such need of an unpractical, fabulously looking present, and the one I would never get for myself 🙂
In my yesterday’s post, I mentioned that there was not one, but two projects. The first project being the book, the second one is closely related to the first.
When Boris Novikov and I started to work on the book, we realized that we need a training database.
For years, we used examples from the real projects we worked on during different periods of our professional careers. It won’t work for a book: we needed a running example. However, when we started the search for public databases, we could not find any available with the size big enough to demonstrate optimization techniques. After spending some time on the search, we realized that we need to create our own.
That took a while and materialized as a separate project. We really liked the result and thought that it would be a great contribution to the community.
There will be a lot of me on social media today because I have a couple of important announcements to make.
Those of my friends and colleagues, current and former, who attended yesterday’s Chicago PostgreSQL User Group were the first to know.
Last night, I presented two projects that I, together with my wonderful co-authors, were working on during the pandemic. These two projects are closely related, but I want to talk about each of them separately.
At the beginning of March 2020, when I was busy getting ready for yet another conference,Jonathan Gennickconnected with me on LinkedIn and asked whether I want to write a book about Postgres performance. I said: yes, but I am busy; please reach out in a month :). When he reached out in a month, we all lived in a totally different world, and I was ready to dive in. I am…
I will write more on one of the subsequent days, but I really want to share my news, which one of my former co-workers called “the next most important news of the day after inauguration.”
Last week, our book became official, we are on Amazon, and we will be published at the end of April.
I made an official announcement a today’s meetup of Chicago PostgreSQL User Group. Also, we officially announced the open source database postgres_air, which we developed to illustrate the concepts from the book. But it ended up to be more than that, and we decided to give it to the community as our contribution.
I am happy in all possible ways 🙂
Here is the recording, if somebody wants to hear a lot of me :). Tomorrow, there will be LinkedIn blog posts, and I will upload the video there as well, but not everybody follows me on LinkedIn 🙂
I took a half-day off today to spend some time with mom. First, because she didn’t get a chance to say happy birthday to me yesterday, and second, I wanted her to see the inauguration. It was a cold but sunny and really beautiful day, and I went for a short walk.
It was great, even though you might think it is impossible in the time of pandemic with everybody being remote.
It started with this picture I received from Boris at 4-35 in the morning (that’s when I wake up, and he knows :)). And since he is not sentimental at all, I liked it even more 🙂
Today was my office day. I didn’t have breakfast at home (I only took a small container of fresh-cut fruit with me) because I had a Starbuck birthday reward, which I planned to use. Unfortunately, the Starbucks at the Palatine Train Station closed for good (which breaks my heart!). But with the new train schedule, I take an early express, so I ate my breakfast at the city’s train station.
I hoped that this weekend would be a “return to normal,” but it ended up being anything like that. On Friday evening, after I already spent two days trying to resolve upgrade issues, I realized that I would have to work on Saturday. At that point, I thought it would be just a couple of hours (it ended up being eight).
I had a million things to do in the morning, so I told my co-worker that I want to start the next upgrade at one. That still put me on a tight schedule since I also planned to talk to Boris before work started.
I was trying to lay out all my morning moves in the best possible way, including the fact that I had to go shopping with mom.
The point is that I was trying very hard to keep my schedule and be home at noon to talk to Boris, and I had ten stops to make.
As a result, I forgot two things. One is that I forgot to apply my birthday coupon at IKEA (it was valid for the whole month of January, but I am not planning to go there one more time). And the second is that I forgot to pick up my Brazilian chocolates at the w=Winter market. They are only there for two hours every other Saturday, and they only deliver pre-orders. Not like I do not have enough chocolate at home, but I thought it would be nice to support them, and my birthday is a good reason to do so.
So I ordered a box of brigadeiros and two packages of alfajores and figure out that between mom, post office, and IKEA, I will be able to stop by the Winter market. And I forgot! Moreover, it turned out they texted me fifteen minutes before the market was over, and I didn’t see this message because I was already late for my online date:). I only saw this message two hours later, when I was already deep in work and texted then a million apologies.
Their reply was: we are glad you are OK! I realized that, knowing me for a while, they could not imagine anything stopping me from picking up chocolates! And then they texted me that they will deliver, and they did.
ANd it was so good to have all this chocolate at the end of exceptionally stressful day!
In December, whenever I would come across some interesting recipes, I would say to myself: after the holidays! Now, after the holidays is already here, and also, I had a lot of leftovers of the things which I bought “just for that recipe.” Here are several of my “after the holidays” creations.
I had half a package of ricotta left from my ricotta and merengue buns, and I had half a bag of spinach, which was left from the quiche, and I had some frozen puff pastry – here is a result:
On Sunday, I was trying to talk to mom about that summer. She confirmed that she was returning to Sosnovaya Polyana every day after work, and thereby her commute was three hours every day. She said that my father “rarely” was there and that “she needs to tell me everything.”
Actually, she already gave me her letters to my father and his letters to her from that period, and she gave me her diary to read, so I know how it all looked like both from her and his perspective. I do not doubt that I need to write about it, but I am still unsure whether to include their story in my or tell it separately.
For now, let’s say that my father came to Sosnovaya Polyana from time to time and that he took lots of pictures. I like the photos which are not focused on me because I can see the interior of this tiny apartment, and I can see Baba Ania, even if only in the background. Also, when I look at these pictures, it is very visible to me that my father loved my mom, even if it was in the wrong way. I mean, even though he a completely messed up person, he loved her the way he could love.
Hettie's Reflections 