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.
On our trip to Antwerp and Ghent, we had a photo stop at Atomium, and our tour guide told us about the Human Zoo which was open during the 1958 World Fair. I had not idea that they still existed in the 20th century, yet along that recently, so I rushed to read more about it. I am sure that everyone less ignorant than me saw that picture, but I saw it for the first time, and frankly, whatever else you read about Human Zoos wouldn’t make the same impression as that one photo. Shocking is not enough of a word.
It’s easy to Google more details about human zoos; I do not want to put any more links here. I can’t imagine people tossing bananas and other food in the direction of humans which are literally “on display.” Just can’t imagine.
No time to write the actual reviews, but I still wanted to leave a couple of notes about the books I recently read.
Last year, I read Henry at Work. I started reading it because it was recommended as a book about “the meaning of work,” especially “during the era of mass resignation,” and it sounded interesting. When I started to read it, I realized that first, I needed to read at least some works of Thoreau, so I started Walden. It was an incredibly difficult reading for me, in part because early nineteenth-century English is very different from the modern language and in part because the pace of the story is a hundred times slower than I am used to. I took it upon myself to beat this challenge and exercise patience, especially because it was sort of a point of Thoreau’s philosophy. I made it :), even though it was possibly the slowest reading in my adult life. I am still thinking to which extent I agree with Thoreau. Is my work meaningful? I hope it is because I am definitely not working “just so I can earn money to live.” But is it really meaningful? I am not sure. I am in the race for a big paycheck? Am I one of the people who wants things because others want them, and I might not need them? Judging by me being among the first to get Apple Vision, it seems like it, but that was probably the only purchase of that kind in many years. Are my desires to have more cultural experiences and travel more unworthy ones? Henry James Thoreau condemned trains, saying that there is no reason for people to get from one place to another “as fast as possible.” I find it hard to agree :).
Eat to beat your diet. I started reading it because I thought that it was going to be an anti-dieting book. The author claimed that “you do not need to eat less; you just need to eat the right foods, and you will be able to fight bad fats, and everything will be great.” In fact, when he talks about the studies, he mentions that people in them were not eating less, but they were given some special foods in addition. However, when it comes to meal plans, the first things he emphasizes are “eat in moderation,” intermittent fasting,” and similar calorie-restricting techniques.
Before the Coffee Gets Cold. I read it for the book club and loved it! I can’t even tell why I loved it so much and what’s the significance of this work, but I was completely taken! Loved it to the last drop! Possibly will read the next one in the series.
Red Alert - The Novel that Inspired Dr. Strangelove, or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. I started reading it after I watched the movie. That’s shocking reading for anybody born in the Soviet Union. It’s hard to say “I loved it” about such kind of a book, so let’s say it left a long-lasting impression on me. I will try to write more about it next week.
That’s the opera I wanted to write about. I went to see it the next day after I arrived. I didn’t know the opera, and I thought it could be interesting, but not more than that. And it so exceeded expectations!!!
It’s the real person’s story, but the opera synopsis does not exactly follow Emile Griffin’s life events. It was very difficult to watch for many reasons, but for me, the most heartbreaking were the scenes of older Emile living with dementia. I went on the Lyric Opera website to look for the videos, and I noticed that pretty much all advertising materials showed the young Emile, although think that the old Emile was the most moving.
I don’t know what else to say. I almost cried when I was in the Opera house, and I want to cry now, when I recall all the scenes. it’s a heartbreaking story.
Flying back from Brussels was equally interesting. Since I had three separate reservations, I still had to fly back through Helsinki, but I also could not have a short connection in London because the next flight wouldn’t wait for me, and I didn’t want to lose one more day in transit. We took the last Sunday flight from Brussels, which arrived in Helsinki at 10:30 PM, which meant going to bed at midnight and getting up at 4 AM to get to the first flight to London.
It turned out that the border control in the Helsinki airport didn’t open till 6 AM, so I had to wait for about 20 min, which I could spend sleeping :). Also, British Airways didn’t issue me a boarding pass online, which meant I had to get it in Terminal 5 at Heathrow, just before the security checkpoint, and then I had to wait for my flight to Chicago for six hours.
Fortunately, the lounges in Heathrow are great, so that was not a problem. That was the first time I took a shower in the airport., and I found out that they had absolutely everything; there was no need to unpack. I will know for the next time!
That’s a picture from the Brussels Finnair lounge – they had a real mushroom soup!
Now, a short review of what was going on during the last four days. My flight landed ahead of time, but then we couldn’t get to the gate for 40 minutes, and the line for passport control was very long, so I ended up coming home at 9-30 PM, and I had to get my mail from my neighbor, unpack, and on Tuesday at 7-30 AM I was already in the office. On Tuesday evening, I was at the Opera (I will write about this performance separately), and my neighbor and I had dinner before the opera to celebrate her birthday. So once again, at home at 10-45 PM.
On Wednesday, I attended a meetup after work (good, productive, great networking, but once again … late night). On Thursday, I finally went to see my mom after work, attended an online yoga class, and made a couple of phone calls. And on Friday – a Valentine’s Day musical, “Twisted Love,” at Above the Law Theater.
Don’t take me wrong, it’s all great; just trying to catch up with life! Oh, and also, I am about to leave to another opera!
Although my initial desire was to have a short vacation in January, my trip ended up being work-related and Postgres-related. I spent the first day of my trip in our London office, and although the weather was great, I only saw it through the office window:
When I left the office, it was already almost dark, and I just walked to my hotel
I had to wake up at 4 AM the next day, so I couldn’t do much. Of course, it turned out that I needed to login to work, and then I met with one of my Postgres colleagues for dinner.
Hi bought my book right after it became available, and asked me to sign it for him
Then I flew to Helsinki, but because of the strike, we had to leave for Brussels the next day. We had a day for museums, and then on Friday, there was a Postgres Day at FOSDEM, which we both attended. I am not going to talk about technical things here (there is another blog for that), but there was one more book signing:
There was also a dinner for Aiven community advocates, which was in a very cool place, where I should have taken more pictures, but I was too busy talking.
And then, it was FOSDEM itself, a very popular and super-crowded event. I was happy that I met most of the people I wanted to meet, and I think I will try to get there next year as well – there are a lot of opportunities to step out of the world of Postgres into a bigger Open Source world.
Ghent was our second stop on this bus tour. Many people told me I should visit Ghent when I am in Belgium next time, and that’s what we did. Now I know that a couple of hours is not enough, and I hope that sometime in my next life, I will be able to come to Belgium at a minimum for a week and spend more time in each of the cities visiting all the castles and museums.
Ghent is amazing and impossibly charming, even in the weather like it was!
Our tour guide said that this building was the home for the first Belgium trade union. I didn’t get a chance to verify this information yet 🙂 This bell tower ou the Market square rang the start and end of the marketEnen t this time of te year and at this weather, the city is full of touristsWe didn’t have time to visit the museum un the city castle; next time!Antwerp made money on spices, and Ghent – on grain. The grain was Somehow, this view of Ghent looks a lot like a 17th century painting of Ghent 🙂 I just realized that I never got a good shot of St.Bavo, a little bit of it shows on the right.Th Belgians say that the Big Ben was copied from this tower 🙂 A new pavilion which was erected to protect the outdoor concerts from the element. We were told that the reaction of the public was very similar to the Chicagoans reaction at Pritzker Pavilion 🙂
It was our second time in Belgium, and so far, Belgium was good to us. When we were there for the first time in 2015, it was summer, and the weather was beautiful. We had a great tour guide, Mik, with whom we went for a three-hour walking tour of Brussels and then went for a one-day trip to Brugge. I remember how Mik was walking very fast, and some of the people in the group complained, but Boris and I were happy that it was the right speed for us. That was before my back problems started, and then for many years, I was thinking about this trip as “how I want things to be” – I wanted to be able to explore a city on foot again and to be able to walk as long as I want. In this respect, I “closed the circle” – we walked a lot, and nothing hurt.
This time, we took a one-day bus trip to Antwerp and Ghent, and It exceeded expectations. First, when I asked Boris whether he wanted to go on a day trip, he said he didn’t mind but expected that we would be on the bus for most of the day with some stops and a little bit of walking, but it ended up being a lot of walking! I was a little bit suspicious when they put both English-speaking and Spanish-speaking groups on one bus, so during the ride, the tour guides switched, and in each of the cities, we went on separate walking tours. It felt like too much of “optimization,” but fortunately, I was wrong.
Our tour guide, Marko, started by commenting on people taking pictures before even knowing what is in front of them, and he reminded us that the most important thing is our experience, not the Instagram posts. There is nothing especially new and groundbreaking in this statement, but somehow this changed my reception mode, and I took way less pictures than I usually do. He told us a lot of interesting facts (some of them didn’t seem true for me, and I searched for more information; some were completely new, and I also searched for more information, overall, a lot of bookmarks are sitting there waiting for more research to be done). Although he was entertaining, he was not one of these joke-telling-tereotypes-promoting tour guides, he knew in-depth what he was talking about.
Antwerp
Antwerp CastleThe Town HallThe Grote Markt SquareEach pf the buildings was a home of one of the professional guilds, and the figures on top represent the saint partons of these guilds or other guild symbols.Continue reading “Antwerp”→
I wanted to share Igor’s Instagram post about the unprecedented Chicago Tribune News Room strike that took place on February 1. As I often remind people, there were only three days in the whole Chicago Tribune’s history when it didn’t come out of print. February 1 can be considered a “thrid and a half” time, since the newspaper came out with only five pages instead of fifty:).
Boris and I visited this museum when we were in Brussels for the first time. It was our favorite then, and this time, Boris voted to spend as much time in this museum as we could. The best part of this museum is that you can listen to the recordings of almost all of the instruments that are on display. It’s overwhelming :). At some point, you simply can’t take in more, but you also can’t stop.
The thing that impressed me most is how many different kinds of music and musical instruments exist in the world and how little we know outside of our European experience.
Since there is no way to reproduce all the sounds we heard, tons of pictures.
I am on my way back to Chicago, and that means I am back to facing (literally) people experiencing homelessness. Yesterday, I signed up for a WTTW kickstart of a year-long initiative exploring homelessness in Chicago.
Last week, the city conducted an annual “point-in-time” count of homeless in the shelters and on the streets, which is often criticized for showing a lesser number of people than other surveys indicate. I still say it’s better to count that way than not count at all – see this article.
During the extreme cold of the second half of January, the Night Ministry doubled the effort to protect people from severe weather conditions, but I know that that was only that many people one organization could reach. And although the weather is way milder now, it’s still dangerous to be outside for extended periods of time.
My usual thoughts when I am anywhere in Europe – why are there so fewer people on the streets there?
Hettie's Reflections 