Category: everyday life

Lots Of Happy News

I just learned that the staff and clients of the Night Ministry are vaccinated as a part of phase 1B, and many of them have received their first dose already. The volunteer coordinator emailed us that we should expect the update soon. I hope that this means that we won’t have to wait till the end of March to resume in-person volunteering. I can’t wait to make “Mama’s soup” in the ODS:).

For the past week, I was jealously looking at my Europen friends’ Instagram posts with the first early spring flowers emerging, with the first patches of green grass and lots of sunshine.

It looks like finally, we see the end of winter here, in Illinois. It was 46F today and lots of sunshine.
On top of this happy news, the Lakefront space will be open soon, almost a year after it was closed. The playgrounds and indoor swimming are also starting to reopen.

Next week, I am planning to go to the rt Institute first time after the last closure in the fall, and also, I am going to do escorting for the first time in a while. That’s mostly because I do not tolerate the cold weather well enough to escort during the freezing temperature, not because of any restrictions.

Overall, it really feels like a new beginning:)

Family Time

My daughter and my granddaughters are my guests for the past three days, and today my son-in-law joined them.

it’s a very busy time, with lot’s of cooking and cleaning, and it’s the most wonderful time spending time together, talking, reading books and drawing pictures, sledding and having fun the snow. these day, I do ot have to do sledding in the wee hours of the morning, when nobody can see me. I am a grandma with my granddaughter, and we can go sledding as all other people with children.

People are making sledding trains out of multiple sleds, and most of the time theey would turn upside down, but everybody would have fun anyway 🙂

Today, Anna made scones for breakfast, as she always does. This time it was a new recipe, and it was super-delicious. Also, she made them with dry lingonberries, which I brought from Finland, and that made them even better 🙂

Matter Does Not Disappear

It’s just that sometimes ot takes forever!

This Christmas season, I complained about the postal services a lot! However, mostly it was about the postcards, all my parcels had arrived surprisingly on time. But there were two parcels which I knew were shipped on time, and which didn’t arrive. 

One was my traditional Dim Reschikov calendar, which was shipped from Moscow on November 19 by International Express. Another one was a box of Christmas cookies from my friend in Germany. For both of these parcels, it took three months to arrive! 

I mean, I am delighted to receive them finally, but what was going on for three months?!

Yet Another Article

Yet another article about the post-pandemic “return to normal.” I disagree with almost everything in this article except for one statement: we should not return “back to normal” in the sense that its” normal to come to work sick and not to wear the mask, either for the reason that you do not have enough sick days, or you need money, or that it’s a way to demonstrate your loyalty to the company.

Too Much Of Everything

Too much of work, roo muchof life, too much of everything!

I will be back:)

Chicago Under The Weather :)

Seriously, why it is that with the same or less snow and with the same or less cold, the resulting conditions in Chicago are so much different from Helsinki? Why nobody declares the state of emergency in Finland, as our governor just declared in Illinois?

I had to come to the city today, because I could not do it on any other day of this week…

Continue reading “Chicago Under The Weather :)” →

Work- Life Balance, And What’s Not

Last week, our CTO asked the tech leadership team to estimate the percentage of all work time we spend on the following categories: the actual management, routine work and processes, and project work. 

I was in Helsinki at that moment, and since I had some extra time< and Boris was there, I decided to approach this task creatively. 

We had different views on what should be considered the project work and whatnot, but in the end, I decided to count as project work only the code writing and coming up with ideas on how to do certain things. I classified all the project planning, discussions with businesses, etc. as management. 

To calculate the percentage of each activity, I needed to calculate the number of hours I spent on each of them. Since I had time, I didn’t just estimate, but I looked at the three previous weeks and calculated the average numbers. 

It turned out that I work 55 hours a week, and I could not believe that number when I saw it. I always thought that if I worked during the after-hours, that’s because I spent some time during the workday for some non-work things. No wonder I felt so tired in the past weeks, and no wonder I felt that I need some vacation, And no wonder I did pretty much nothing in Helsinki. 

All of the above might explain my reaction to the “Laziness Does Not Exist” book. These past three weeks were the weeks when we finished working on the book, and immediately all the extra time I had was taken by work, and that was not right. A side note: when I calculated the total number of hours I work, I included the “natural time waste,” which totals to about an hour a day: sort intervals between meeting, coffee, and bathroom breaks, stretches, and other small distractions. They are essential for your normal functioning, and thereby should not be subtracted from the work time. 

It’s not that I never knew all that. I knew, and I was encouraging other people to not overwork. But for some reason, I always thought that “this does not apply to me.” Because I am passionate about my work, because this is not hard for me, because I am a superhuman, and for whatever other reasons. 

I am trying to change it now, and I realized that I need to advocate for myself the same way I advocate for others. 

Maid: A Book Review

This is not the real review, just the short note, since I want to mention this book to my friends who are following what I read.

Another book I finished last week, was Maid by Stephanie Land.You might want to say that “that’s what Barbara Ehrenreich wrote about in “Nickled and Dimed,” except for (as she herself said in the foreword) that’s FOR REAL. Stephanie is not role-playing. it’s not a game, it’s survival.

Working hard is not enough. Working multiple jobs is not enough. Trying your best is not enough

My takeaway from this book is: people who are struggling, need help. They need help from organizations, funds, and people. From individuals. Otherwise, survival mode will stay forever.

Laziness Does Not Exists: A Book Review

I especially liked the first half of the book. I’d say I would give 5 stars to the first four chapters and four stars for the rest. I felt like the second half was partially repeating the first, and at the same time, it felt less convincing and slightly off-topic. But what I just said does not diminish the fact that this book is AWESOME! For me, it was also extremely timely – just when I felt completely burned down.
Interestingly, I knew most of the things this book is talking about many years ago. I knew that even when we have an 8-hour workday, the actual time we can produce the intellectual results is not more than four hours a day. I knew that switching from time to time your attention to something which is not “work” helps the thinking process. I knew that when you work too much and too hard, your body becomes less immune and more prone to all sorts of illnesses.
I knew it all, but after I joined my current company, where I really wanted to do all the things I wanted, and it was too much of these things, I started to think that if it is not “somebody” which makes me work more, but I, then “it does not count.” I do not know whether anybody can make any sense out of the last sentence :), but at least I know what I meant to say :))

Another thought which resonated with me a lot was about “me” and “everybody else.” Devon Price says that most of the people he interviewed for this book would agree that “people in general” are not lazy, but they would say: but I am REALLY lazy. For me, it was “nobody has to work overtime, and it is unproductive anyway,” but “I” CAN work long hours, because “I” have a very special attitude, and since I WANT it, not like somebody MAKES me, I will be productive. Maybe now that timing was right, but I took it in this time. Even before I finished the book, I resolved to make changes to the way I work now, monitor how many hours I spend working, and not allow my direct reports and people around me to work long hours. It is unproductive and sometimes dangerous.

And the final takeaway from this book was about stopping “saving” people. Once again, I knew for a while that I rush into “saving” people way too often. Recently, I started to distinguish between people who need just a little push or simply encouragement and people who need me to listen to their complaints about everything that goes wrong with their lives. It’s nothing wrong with complaining; I just started to realize that there are people who are not looking for ways to improve their situation but need to complain just for the sake of complaining.

To summarize, by the time I turned the last page, I had a whole bunch of resolutions, and I also liked the author’s personality and writing style a lot!

Vlad Is Going Back To School

Vlad applied to Augustana college to finish his degree, which he abandoned eight years ago. What happened then is a long story that will probably be told at some point. The only thing I want to tell now is that nothing in his current career depends on this classic major, and nobody ever reprimanded him for not making this final push. 

In my view, the only reason he wanted to receive a diploma is that this was an unfinished project. And the major obstacle for the past several years was that if he would choose to do this, he will have to put the rest of his life on pause for three months. 

Now, with the remote learning and temporal indoor dining closer, everything suddenly falls in place. 

He applied for the federal loan, which was granted but didn’t cover all classes and fees. He shopped for a private loan, which would cover the rest, consulting with me on the way. At some point, I received an email from Augustana addressing me as “a parent of a student.” I messaged Vlad: what in the world is that?! And he was like, “sorry, mom, it looks like they still have my old records somewhere in the system; I will fix it. I am an independent student now.”

As usual, all these college tuition talks prompted me to think about several subjects. First, why it is only in the US that college costs what it does, why one class has to cost 7K+, and why higher education is almost free in the rest of the world. 

I know (and the only reason I know it is because my kids are so smart and resourceful) that there are relatively easy ways to significantly reduce your costs. And if anybody thinks that the fact that higher education is not free fosters more responsible behavior, they are wrong. It encourages opposite behavior. But the most frustrating fact is that all of these ways to reduce the costs are so non-obvious, so hidden! 

The above was the second topic. The third one is about who’s the responsibility it is? When I read the blogs of parents whose children are in the process of getting into college, I do not understand why it becomes parents’ responsibility rather than their almost adult children? I read about the Facebook groups of parents researching scholarships and admission requirements, and I do not get it. 

Also, I do not understand a desire to get children through college debt-free. I understand even less why so many parents see their financial assistance being a basis for dictating their college-age children which classes to take, how to behave, what is the minimal acceptable GPA, etc. 

I will stop here :). I will never understand most of the above :). And I am immensely happy that it was different with my children.