Category: everyday life

How Was My Birthday

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.

Continue reading “How Was My Birthday” →

Days Full of Snow

Stress, Chocolate And Me

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!

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.

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” →

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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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.