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.

Last Sunday

On Sunday, it was my mom’s birthday. Last year she turned eighty-five, and we had a big surprise party for her. This time, it was just me and her, although all her grandchildren sent her messages, and she received lots of birthday wishes from her friends and former colleagues.

I still tried to make it festive. As mom likes, I made tiny sandwiches, and we drank Vlad’s liquor and had coffee with tiny cheesecakes and other pastries. And I took the time to listen to her and let her talk. I gave her Kindle Paperwhite, and taught her how to operate it, and uploaded a dozen of her favorite books and some others that she might like. I also ordered a photo calendar for her.

I didn’t feel like I made too much of an effort, but when I dropped her off at her place and returned home, I felt exhausted to the degree I wanted to cry. I am not even sure why. She is not hostile anymore, and even when she is upset, she is not making scenes, which should be a relief. It is sad to see how her personality is changing. She is becoming more like a child in many aspects, and she is becoming dependent on me emotionally in an almost unhealthy way.

The same as when I was a child, and even a teen, developed this unhealthy psychological dependency, that I could feel good only when she was around, she is now developing towards me. I think she does not have any other models of relationships. Like a small child, she feels it when I am upset, so I need to watch my behavior when I am upset with something. Like when my water heater broke, and when she thought that Anna and her family left, while in reality, we had this COVID situation here.

There was one thing that surprised me, though. Sometime between Christmas and New Year, my friend, whom mom also knows well, told my mom and me separately that her son had COVID and that he didn’t tell her until it was all over and he was tested negative.

I knew the story from my friend, and when I came to visit mom, she told me the same story. After she shared it with me, to my surprise, she said: good boy! I thought she was joking, but she wasn’t. She repeated: he did it right! I was planning to tell her about Vlad’s infection, but when I heard that, I said to myself: great, thank you for letting me know!

I got mad at Igor when I learned that he told my mom about his positive test on her birthday. I expected a major crisis. But she was surprisingly OK with everything. Even before that, I saw that she was not even half upset with the news of John’s infection as of Nadia’s. I think she still does not realize that this virus is way more dangerous for adults than for kids. But it felt like she does not want to let additional worries into her head. And I am going to leave it as is for now.

Summer 1964, part 2

More pictures from the same summer. I poster the picture below in the previous post.

The building behind us is this three-story building where Baba Ania and Deda Fedia lived. Their studio apartment was on the third floor, one window was facing his scene, and the balcony and the kitchen window faced right (where the wooden huts are). If you look at the ground under the balcony (on the right of this picture), you will see some sand. You can’t tell that this is sand, but if I tell you that it is there, you can figure out where exactly it is.

Now, look at the next picture.

We are playing in this dirty grey sand and trying to build something:). And on the next picture, I turn my head up and yell towards the balcony for Baba Ania to drop my little shovel to me.

Continue reading “Summer 1964, part 2” →

More Christmas Gifts

Because of predictable slowness of the mail around Christmas and New Year, I received a lot of presents in the days after Christmas. Which made it even more fun – I feel like I have a month worth of Christmas!

My older granddaughter Nadia made these ornaments with her palm print all by herself 🙂

The packager from New Zealand arrived as well. Each Christmas, I feel like this is the coolest thing to receive cookies from the opposite side of the globe! And it’s not just cookies, each year there is something else special!

Continue reading “More Christmas Gifts” →

A Lonely Gym Goer

I thought it was a really funny picture. Since there is no mask mandate in our gym, and although some people wear masks, not everybody does, I only go there very early in the morning, wear a mask and leave when the first person after me arrives. I took this picture when I was leaving the gym last week, and this first person just came in.

About a Major Crisis

Today, on January 11, we finally have every chapter of our book submitted. Out of the total of eighteen chapters, including the introduction and conclusion, four are still being reviewed, but they are really small ones. Even if our technical reviewer would suggest some changes, there won’t be massive rewriting. I am doing a final walk-through with all examples, ensuring everything works as expected, and creating the source code files in the process.

I feel very good about this accomplishment, and if there weren’t a major crisis, everything would be in place a week ago. I know that I kept my friends uninformed, so here are some details about my family’s happened in the past two weeks.

For three weeks, we were going back and forth about Christmas and what is safe. Finally, we decided on a hybrid solution. 

Continue reading “About a Major Crisis” →

Summer 1964

The complete gallery is here, so that my children and grandchildren will know where to look for photos; I am not going to post all sixty :).

In the summer of 1964, I was one-and-a-half years old, and I spent the summer with my maternal grandparents. 

Deda Fedya (grandpa Fedya) “received” this one-room apartment from the Leningrad Commercial Port, where he worked after returning from his army service.

They lived in one of the houses built in the 1950s’, in Sosnovaya Polyana, the part of Leningrad only from an administrative perspective. I remember that in 1964, the peasant’s houses that surrounded it were freshly demolished. The wooded houses were gone, but the stone chimneys and the fireplaces stayed. Now that I recall this picture, it seems creepy, but I found it extremely funny back then. My grandfather would take me with him on expeditions to checked whether there was something worthy left in the abandoned gardens. He dug out some strawberries and planted them on his balcony, 

 I was there for the summer because of the firm belief, which I mentioned earlier, that children should have some “fresh air” during summer, and adults have to make sacrifices to make it happen. 

It was a one-room apartment, with only one normal bed for my grandparents. Mom slept on the camp bed in the tiny hallway. I slept on the small day bed. Mom walked to the train station every morning (almost 3 miles), and took a train and then a tram from the railway station to her work. My father was there only on the weekends, and I am not even sure whether their issues already started at that time.   

In any case, all these pictures were taken by my father during one of his visits. The most precious thing about these photos is that I can see parts of that apartment, and I can see Baba Ania passing by on some of them. 

The house was originally built with the woodstove only; the gas stove (on the right) was installed later) 

Mom
Mom sits on the balcony and tries to feed me some meat
Continue reading “Summer 1964” →

Note To Myself: How To Store Freshly Baked Bread

Saving instructions on how to store freshly baked bread

Hettie D.'s avatarHealthy Cooking - Hettie's Way

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Political

You might not believe it, but I planned to write a political post yesterday, way before everything happened. 

I wanted to write it because I read my very liberal friends’ blog post a couple of weeks ago. She said that Trump didn’t create any permanent damage to society. That yes, he was annoying and embarrassing, but it’s not like he ruined something. 

I didn’t want to comment on her blog because I am avoiding writing about politics in the Russian blogosphere. I am genuinely admiring her patience and willingness to talk to her blog guests, but I do not feel I can match up. However, I wanted to reply not only to her but also to other people who, at least until yesterday, expressed the same sentiment. 

From the beginning of Trump’s presidency, I thought that the worst thing he did to American society is that he gave this indulgence to people to be not civil. While society was changing and accepting more humanitarian values, it slowly became unacceptable to be openly racist. To be anti-LGBTQ. To be a misogynist. And here comes Trump and says: it’s fine. You can do it. You can be racist. You can hate other people. Moreover, you can say it out loud. It became so much easier for people to display the worst of them. 

And this will not be so easy to revert. 

And one more comment which is somewhat related to the first one.

I heard from many people, even those who consider themselves progressive, that they do not understand why diversity matters.

They say it when Biden is praised for assembling the most diverse cabinet ever. Their rationale is: people should be assigned to the high posts based on their qualifications, not on their race or gender.

Let me tell you why diversity is important, especially in situations like choosing the cabinet.

The truth is that nobody performs the country-wide search for objectively the best possible person to fill a position. There is a pool of candidates known to the president-elect, judged not only by their professional qualifications but also by whether the president-elect feels comfortable working with them. In short, even if candidates are selected based on their qualifications, the pool of candidates itself is selected based on some assumptions. And unfortunately, quite often, these assumptions work against minorities. They are being dropped from the initial circle of consideration. And this happens more often than anybody can imagine. And not only when choosing the cabinet members, but on all levels.

That’s why having a diverse cabinet matter.

I wrote all of the above before yesterday’s events. Actually, for over a week, I had this post “almost ready” and didn’t have ten minutes to finalize it. And yesterdays’ events only reaffirmed my opinion. 

2020 Reading

When Goodreads sent me my 2020 report, to my surprise and astonishment, I found only two books there! 

I know that I didn’t record everything I read, but it was definitely more than two!

When I checked my books on Goodreads, I found that because most of the time, I’ve recorded my reading way later than I read the books, I almost never put the date when I finished reading, and thereby Goodreads omitted them. 

I had to go back to my list of books and fill in the approximate dates when I finished them. It ended up being twenty-five books. It does not sound like a lot, but I do not record the books I read in Russian, and I do not record the books I do like. Full discloser: most of the time, if I do not like a book twenty percent into it, I just drop it. 

The last two books which I finished last year were Wildwood Creek and Redlined. The first didn’t quite meet my expectations. The beginning of the story was auspicious and expected a lot, but then it somehow ended abruptly, in a hurry, with some threads abandoned. At least, that’s how I feel. 

Igor recommended the “Redlined,” and I liked it a lot! I like the whole real-life plot: after both parents passed away, their children found their dairies, where they described the same events each from their perspective. Also, the first-generation immigrant family, and also – Chicago’s West Side transformations. Maybe, this book is not so meaningful for those who do not live in Chicago, but I enjoyed it a lot!

I am now finishing the Promised Land, and also listening and reading a couple of Russian books. They will be my first reads of 2021. 

Pandemic Financials

I just closed my books for 2020. I use regular Excel with some smart formulas for my finances. Boris and I came up with these formulas many years ago, even before Excel. In the times of MS-DOS, there was one primitive program that could calculate some sums and averages, and that’s what we used. Now, for many years, I have one Excel file for each year, two tabs per month, plus the Totals tab.

I was curious to see how much did my budget change in comparison with 2019. To my surprise, the changes were minimal. Same as last year, my regular expenses were a little bit under the budget and irregular – a little bit over, but in the end, everything was in balance. Most of the averages were surprisingly close.

I spent way more money on groceries this year and less on entertainment, but surprisingly almost the same amount on clothes and extras. The latter proves that I like nice clothes not because I care about other people’s opinion, but because I like how I look in these clothes, even if I am at home alone.Christmas spendings were the same, and birthdays spendings were lower, because we decided to postpone all family birthdays celebrations till the time after.

One of my friends posted the link to this NYT article about the current economic situation, and it looks like it can be applied to me. The only kind of expenses which stand out are my huge medical bills from my three surgeries and multiple other medical procedures. 

Usually, when I start new Excel for the new year, I review my spending limits and financial goals and make some adjustments, but I didn’t feel I need it this year. It will be interesting to see in six months how things will turn out.