A Featured Author 🙂
ANd the last piece of my updates:
I am a featured database author for the month of July on Apress – check it out here!
I am a Featured Author for July
Category: everyday life
Insurrection
So that we remember
This is an outstanding and thought-provoking piece of work by the New York Times. It deserves to be circulated. Spread it around.
After watching this, I was left uncertain about my reaction to it and what I might want to say about it. So I’ll limit myself to a tangential observation. I’m not a pacifist so I hope I’m not sounding sanctimonious about this, but unless you have some ideological commitment to violent revolution, this is headed in the wrong direction. Whatever else this video is, it is a warning about how violence in politics feeds on itself.
Books About Pandemic
I wanted to mention two books that I recently finished; both are about the COVID pandemic.
The first one is The Premonition, and the second is The Plague Year. It may feel that it’s “too early” to write books about the pandemic, especially because we are not out of it yet. But I think that both books are very timely.
As you can imagine, the contents of both books overlap significantly, but even when they talk about the same events, they view them from slightly different perspectives. The first book focuses more on the political side of things, Trump’s inadequate response to the thread, and the health care officials who stood up against it. The second book touches more on science, epidemiology, details of vaccine development.
Both are very informative. Some things I learned:
- that the vaccine was technically “ready” before the start of the pandemic; the scientists had to plug in the genome details; that’s why it was developed so fast
- that most of the decisions about opening/closing/guaranteeing, which looked erratic at least, were based on multiple AI models. For example, there are certain estimates on the effect of schools closing depending on the level of infections at the time of closing.
- more detail on the shortage of swabs for tests
- why there were so many questions on the origin of the virus
And many other things!
Also, these books allowed me to recall the events of the past sixteen months, how our knowledge about the virus changed, and how and why the health officials’ guidelines evolved.
A Day Without Deaths
Today is the first day after the beginning of the pandemic when there were no deaths recorded in the state of Illinois. It does not mean that it’s all over. It does not even mean that there were no deaths. And we may wait for a while to see another day like this. But still – that’s the day to celebrate. To celebrate and to remember those who died during pandemic. That’s the day to multiply our efforts to prevent as many deaths as possible. That’s the day to encourage people to get vaccinated.
Oh yes, and the Crown Fountain is operating again 🙂
Grant Park Music Festival Is Back!
The Grant Park Music Festival season opened on July 1, but on that day, the weather was just a little bit too cool for the outdoor evening concert. I decided to give it a shot on Saturday (after returning from the Dunes) even though there was a risk of a big crowd.
And boy, there was a crowd! For a moment, I was questioning the sanity of my decision, especially because I asked mom to come and meet us there, but it turned out great!
We sat on the stairs, which instantly provided more distance. There was a large screen over the stage – new this year, so we could see everything that was going on on stage.
Continue reading “Grant Park Music Festival Is Back!”Biking To The Shakespeare Garden
I tried it once, and got lost :), so I was looking for an opportunity to bike early in the morning so that there will be no traffic, and on a day when I won’t have to go somewhere. Last Sunday, I decided that it’s now or never. The potential forty-minute round trip took over an hour, but at least I found the Garden!
The catch is that you can’t “bike to” that garden, you need to walk your bike on the last stretch. And Google was bringing me to the parking lot “under” the garden from where there was no way to get to the garden itself.
Some pictures from my bike ride to the North:
:(
In addition to working two jobs simultaneously and having never-ending crises on both, I dealt with one more problem.
Over a week ago, when the rains were really heavy, we had the building utility basement flooded. I didn’t think much about it: there is a bike room and storage units there, and nothing else. Our board members encouraged us to check the content of the units, but I thought I am fine: my unit is the closest to the bike storage, and I see it every day.
However, on Monday, I finally decided to move to storage a utility cart, which was sitting on my balcony. When I opened my unit, I realized that one of the cardboard boxes was sitting on the floor, not on the shelves. I thought that I should move it back to the apartment for a while since now I know that I have space, but I never got to do this. And now, the box was visibly wet and damaged.
It turned out that I was not even aware of how many letters I had! I didn’t have space to set them dry, and I didn’t have time! This week was very work-intense, I tried to squeeze a half-hour here and there, but it was not enough.
Some letters and dairies were almost intact and required very little time to dry. Others were so wet that the paper was falling apart, or the ink would get almost dissolved. Some wet pieces of paper or postcards were pressed together so that I could not take them apart, and then they dried that way.
I will need to spend some time over the long weekend sorting this stuff out.
Back To The Field Museum – First Time After The Lockdown
On Saturday, I went to see the new Field Museum exhibit dedicated to Jane Goodall (and I took Igor and mom there as well). I was not sure till the last moment whether e should proceed with the plan: the forecast was rain and thunderstorm for the whole day. I went to clinic escort in the morning, and I meant to ask Igor to bring mom to the Loop by the time I will be done. But I was not sure about the rain. Miraculously, we managed almost to escape the worst of it, and I was really glad we did it!
Mom said she does not remember anything about Jane Goodall. It was sad because her books were translated into Russian when I was a teen, and I remember both mom and I reading them and discussing them. I still remember the names of all of the apes, and I was delighted to see them “in person”. Mom said she would look her up in Russian, and I hope she will. I loved this exhibit a lot; also, I got a chance to show both Igor and mom the Apsaalooke Women and Warriors exhibit, which I got a chance to see right before the lockdown.
Here are some pictures from the Jane Goodall exhibit:
The Dining Room
On Sunday, I assembled the last two IKEA storage units in the dining room, moved to the guest bedroom the units which were there temporarily, and finally put all the things at their designated locations. Also, back on Friday, John and Anna took a bookshelf that I didn’t need anymore to my mom’s house. That way, finally, the last room in my new house started to look like I wanted it to look.
And you know what? I felt pretty depressed for a while, and every day, I told Boris that I am not sure what’s the primary cause of that: is it the old house, the job situation, or something else. And the moment I cleared the dining room, I realized that my primary source of depression is gone!
Another Rant About Things Falling Apart
Although I found an emergency AC service on Friday, I could not get anybody to come out right away. The service I got connected to told me they could come on Saturday around 11 AM. I said – sure, but later I realized that we would be at Aquarium and texted them asking to come after 3 PM. In fact, we were back by 1 PM, and then the AC people only came at 3-30PM, while we could not go anywhere. I am happy that the AC was fixed, but we lost all this afternoon time – we didn’t go to the beach one more time or to the playground. The actual repair also took a long time. I knew that this AC unit was old, and I know that I will need to replace it in spring, but I want the old unit to last through the season.
The issue was the same as last time – the leakage. They patched the tubes like how the bike’s inner tubes are patched; only it cost way more!
The 11 feet ceilings and the powerful fans helped us survive the night, but it was still not fun to be at home without AC with 84F outside. It’s so frustrating that I already had HVAC failures multiple times within just five weeks since I moved!
Hettie's Reflections 