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.

Christkindle Market

Yesterday, I went to Christkindle Market for the first time this season. I dragged one of my co-workers (who didn’t mind), saying we were “doing work-life balance.”

Later that day, when I went to the musical with my neighbor and told her that I was at the market, she asked: why do you like it? What is in it for you?

I know that not everyone loves Christmas markets (like Boris sacrifices himself for my Christmas passions), but I am one of the people who love them! I ran around greeting the vendors whom I knew from the past years and showed “the best of” to my co-worker. We toured the ornaments shops and the chocolate shop and browsed the food offerings. I already went there one more time today, and bought a package of Christmas tea that I put my eye (and nose) on the day before. And I will go there again.

& Juliet

I saw this musical yesterday, and somehow, it left me non-engaged. Everything was perfect on the surface: great dialogs, cultural references; the audience laughed where expected (sometimes too loud). Still, it didn’t click, and I do not think it was because I was tired. Just something didn’t work.

Official photos below:

Continue reading “& Juliet” →

Life Is Happening

Once again, a million things at the same time!

One hand is doing work, another hand is testing the website for PGDay Chicago, another hand is making sure we have all things we need for Prairie Postgres, another hand is packing presents. Some other hands are submitting Amazon Fresh orders for the remaining cookie ingredients and booking three different hotels for three different trips.

Presents for Secret Santa, presents for the Night Ministry, Amazon returns, returning boots which turned out to be too tight even though the size is right. Work. Going to Chriskindlmarket, buying roasted nuts and chocolate. Finding time for meetings with friends and out-ouf town peers. Boxes for cookies. Christmas bubble mailers. Tissue paper. Work. Going to the show. Finding the right presents for half of the family who are still without presents. New Christmas tree stand.

Work. PGDay Chicago new Volunteer form. Checking the dates on the form. FInding cost allocations to close the support ticket. Schedule an email to my mom for 10-30 PM saying we are going home from the show.

And it’s actually time to go, just need to refresh my makeup!

Riding In A Holiday Train (Not The “Real” Holiday Train)

After Thanksgiving

Boris nearly missed his flight: there was a traffic jam at the ORD entrance, and it took Uber 50 minutes to get to the terminal. I believe the better strategy would be to Uber to Cumberland and take the L to ORD. But it is what it is. I am sad about such a stressful ending to a very good week we had.

As it always happens, I have more things not done than done, just because I have all holiday things, plus work, plus the conference, plus our NFP, plus conferences where I submitted some proposals. Plus twenty different professional projects I want to start. Oh, and plus, it became sharply cold and my body didn’t have enough time to adjust.

Nevertheless, we had a very good time together and did many things around the house. Boris repaired a bookcase that started to fall apart after I returned from my last trip, and then he moved bookcases around as we planned several months ago but never did. We took down the flower baskets, covered all the balcony furniture for winter, and put up Christmas decorations.
I feared that because of how busy I was this year, I wouldn’t feel as joyful decorating the house as I usually feel, but this fear was unfounded. Everything except for the tree is up, and Christmas is in the air 🙂

Books

Just a short list of what I recently read so that I won’t postpone it for three months again.

The Song of Achilles. This was our workplace book club reading, and I loved this book! Maybe it partially helped that I read it while I was in Greece, but I think I would love it regardless.

She-Wolves: The Untold History of Women on Wall Street. This book was recommended by a co-worker. OK. Not bad, but less exciting than I thought it would be

Skin and Bones. Very good! I didn’t expect it to be so captivating—I kept listening whenever I had a minute to spare. I can’t recall which recommendation list it came from, but I am so glad I read it!

“Blue” at Lyric

I thought that “Blue” was a very recent opera – it sounded like it emerged from the Black Lives matter movement, but when I looked it up, it turned out that it was written almost ten years ago. That means that nothing changed in these last ten years – nothing!

What you hear from the stage is extremely painful and way closer to reality than any opera should be. The Father focused on keeping his black son alive, not knowing how to protect him:

run/do not run/look at their faces/do not look straight at their faces/keep your hands out of your pockets/take off this hoody/pull up your pants…

Each word is a pain. Each word strikes home.

And it’s just opera. People will clap and go home. And will look suspiciously at the black teen on the train.

Thanksgiving

I never know what to write about Thanksgiving. We made it :). Actually, the cooking time was the least effort I remember. It took me more time cleaning up, doing the dishes, and packing the food to go, but I am done with that, or with most of that. Boris helped me a lot (probably more than ever), and I am also very thankful for that. I am tired, but also, since Boris and I were chatting all the time while I was cooking and he was helping, I got a lot of new Postgres ideas that I want to try 🙂

I know I am hopeless:)

My son-in-law said I have a secret extra day of the week – I wish!!!

One thing we always have for Thanksgiving are pies from Vanille:)

How Math Became My Favorite Subject, But Not Right Away

I was a good student from the very beginning of school: my mom, Aunt Kima, and Baba Fania would never allow me to be less than that. However, I didn’t have a favorite subject for a while. I loved books and reciting poetry, so I was always the kid who opened the shows, but other than that, I didn’t have any special talents.

We didn’t have science or social studies lessons until the fifth grade, although I read many popular science books. We started to study Russian history in the fourth grade and botany and geography in the fifth. I immediately fell in love with biology, especially because by then, I had read many books about the wonders of nature, the mysteries of cells, endangered species, and so on.

In the fifth grade, I started to attend academic competitions, which were called olympiads. We had school olympiads, and the winners attended district olympiads, and the winners of district olympiads were sent to the city-wide competitions. All of them took place on the weekends, and having that we had school on Saturdays meant no weekends at all.

My first competitions were in biology, and I easily made it to the city-wide olympiad and easily got a second-degree diploma, finishing the fifth person in my grade level. I remember that I did great in microbiology and almost failed zoology (we didn’t have zoology at school yet, and I didn’t read enough by myself). I could not tell the difference between the black grouse and the wood grouse, could not identify the birds by skeletons, and so on. In the end, the examiner asked me what I wanted to talk about, and I told them what I knew about birds’ migration, and somehow got a passing grade in biology. The last subject was ecology and wildlife protection, and I spoke my heart out and got a top grade. I remember that I was very nervous about not remembering the names of the national parks and the dates they were founded, but my examiner said: please, spare me from the dates and name; tell me what you think about protecting endangered species. And I rocked!

My mom became very nervous about my fascination with biology because all of the craziness with genetics and Lysenko was fairly recent, and she didn’t want me to be in trouble. She started to steer me towards math. I liked math, but not even close to how much I loved biology. Besides, there was a new thread on the horizon – I started to be very interested in history.

How we were taught history in school will be a topic for a separate post, and in any case, we didn’t have any history olympiads – I guess it was dangerous to know too much about history. However, we had olympiads in math, physics, chemistry, and literature, and I participated in all of them.

My mom wanted me to focus on math because it was the only safe subject from her perspective. I was not against math, but I didn’t feel strongly about it. In the sixth grade, I started attending a Youth Math School, an after-school activity hosted at the Department of Mathematics and Mechanics of Leningrad State University. Back then, the Department had yet to move to the out-of-the-city campus, and the classes took place in the old building on the 10th linia of Vasilevsky Island, about 15 15-minute tram ride from my home. Most times, I was the only girl in the class, and I always felt stupid. Our teachers were first- or second-year university students, and they rarely had enough pedagogical skills. The boys pretended they understood all that was said, and sometimes, they could solve complicated problems, and I was barely able to keep up with them. Still, I thought it was cool to come to the University once or twice a week, so I kept coming. In the sixth grade, I participated in the district math olympiad but didn’t make it to the city-wide.

I kept attending the Youth Math School in the seventh grade and still didn’t get any diploma at the olympiad, but I quite unexpectedly made it to the city-wide essay competition, got a second-degree diploma, and was interviewed for a radio show. I suspect that made my mom even more alarmed :), especially because my award-winning essay was about Euguene Schwarts’ plays. It’s not like Schwarts was a forbidden writer, but he never praised the Soviet State and the Communist Party, many of his friends and peers were imprisoned, and the officials silently ignored him.

Fortunately for my mom, things changed when I started the eighth grade.
To be continued.

My historical posts are being published in random order. Please refer to the page Hettie’s timeline to find where exactly each post belongs and what was before and after.

How I Beat The System – Again!

Boris tells me that it’s my specialty to get through any bureaucratic or technological challenges, citing my battle with Finnair for my missing points, my battle with Lyric Opera for my money to be returned, and the most recent for the trademark agreement. Here is one more of my accomplishments that I am extremely proud of.

The Illinois Department Of Human Services (IDHS) has a very non-user-friendly website, so it was not unusual for me to call their customer service to validate my mom’s eligibility for benefits or whether they were ever renewed because it was impossible to understand from the website. Many people, especially those who had to communicate with this system more often than I used, told me the only way to resolve issues was to come in person. A couple of months ago, I decided to try to apply for additional benefits for Mom, but when I logged into the website, I found that they switched to the new logins (they are using ILogin, same as many other sites) and that I need to create ILoging and link it to the existing account.

I followed all the steps, and almost at the very end of the process, I accidentally copied a blank at the beginning of the password I prepared, and after that, nothing worked. I could not confirm the password, and I could not reset it. I tried to use the “reset your password” buttons, but I didn’t receive any links by email or text. Then, I found that there was no phone number to call for any login issues anymore because IDHS no longer maintains logins, and I needed to submit an issue online.

The online system, as you can imagine, requires ILogin to submit an issue :). It took me several attempts to get to the page where I could submit a ticket without a login, but then I got lost in the questions like “location of the service (work/home)”, “new/old hardware,” etc.
In the next several weeks, I tried to repeat the sequence of actions with similar results. Finally, I decided that I had to break through the system, and followed all these steps about “at work/at home/new/old hardware.” In the comments section, I described the issues in detail.

Hurray – I received a ticket number! Two days later, I saw a call from Springfield on my phone, and it was customer support calling. I repeated the whole story, and they said that they would reset the login and send me a link – “watch for the email.”

Three days later, I indeed received an email. I could follow the link and create a new password! And I am more proud of myself than ever! I am only wondering how they expect seniors to navigate this system! the existing account.