Category: everyday life

Office Days

I know that many people are afraid to take public transportation these days. I didn’t take CTA yet, and I can’t judge how safe it is, but I am 100% comfortable taking Metra.

People go to work in the city, maybe, ten percent of those who used to go to the city before the pandemic, but the trains are not ghostly. The schedule is reduced, and when I started to go to the office regularly, I realized that this presents some challenges. One is that I can’t be late for the 7-24 train. It used to be “my” train, and I am glad it survived, but previously I could take 7-51 express if I was late for 7-24, and now there is no such an option (which results in lots of Starbucks breakfasts!). I have to say there is something good in having fewer options, too, because it makes me more organized.

I always thought of myself being very well organized and working from home just fine, but after being forced to work from home for months, it required some effort to get out of the house on time. Through these past months, I felt that I am accomplishing less at home, but only now I realized how much time I am wasting for nothing when I do not have my usual morning checkpoints.
In short – I am happy to be back to commuter train.

That’s how the train car looks like these days. The conductors flip the sears so that it’s always one person per four seats, so I have a luxury to always sit by the window, always having an electric outlet, always facing the direction of travel, and always having room for bags. What am I going to do when it is all over?!

By the way, it is also plenty of parking space at the station these days, so you do not need to rush to be able to park at the convenient spot.

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All You Need To Know About Kenosha

I have no idea whether the rest of the world know about the current events in Kenosha, but if you know, this post is for you.

Igor went to Kenosha five days after the shooting of Jacob Blake, on one of the few days when trains from Chicago were stopping at Kenosha.

As usual, he came back with a million photos. I am posting just a couple here, but please. spend ten minutes looking at all of them here, this is all you need to know about what’s going on in Kenosha.

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Reindeer3 block the road / Renos3 bloquean la carretera/ Rennes3 bloquent la route/ Renas3 bloqueiam a estrada

If you think it’s a problem when geese block the road, here is a REAL problem!

Sartenada's avatarTravels in Finland and abroad

In English:

We went on a road trip and met reindeers

Background information.

I know that the title is not the best, but I wanted to point out that during this road trip to the northern parts of Finland, we met reindeers everywhere! The explanation for this is that the area belongs to the northeastern reindeer herding area which is larger than the northwestern area. In 2019, there were 4461 reindeer smashes although due to modern technique to warn about collisions of reindeers. This is so called the reindeer alarm application called in Finnish Porokello. Cons of Porokello (personal opinion): Gives a false feeling of security. Overall ratings of this application are for and against based on the user experiences. Many oncoming cars blinked their headlights to warn about reindeer – it worked great!

General information.

The length of our trip was 2413km / 1499mi. It lasted 10 nights /…

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Sandhill Cranes

I saw sandhill cranes in the forest preserve, when I was biking this morning, so close, that I nearly ran into them on my bike. The didn’t walk away from me, and I was staring at them, and taking more and more pictures lighted by the rising sun – how beautiful they were in these morning hours!

All The Books I Read And Did Not Review

I am trying to write this post for more than three weeks, and the list of books I’ve listened to or read is growing and growing, and I already lost hope to write even a paragraph about each. But since people are keeping asking me about what I am reading, and since I read a lot of really good books, I will try at least to compile a list with some notes.

This list covers the past four or five months, and includes only the books I liked.

First, I finally read all of the “Call the Midwife” trilogy. I can’t tell why it took me so long, I wanted to read it forever. Loved it to the last word:). I never had an opportunity to take a close look at the life of the impoverished population of London. I guess, I had no idea about what was happening between the times of Charles Dickens and nowadays. I could not help but noticing, how much the healthcare for the poor was developed in the UK even in the middle of the previous century, something which the US underprivileged population can’t even dream about.

Too Much And Never Enough – that was a classical example of “everybody is reading it, and I should, too.” It’s not like I didn’t like the book, but I guess I expected more of it after all the buzz.

The Book of Lost Friends – a beautiful book. The two threads of the story stand a hundred years apart, but even the “modern” part, which takes place in 1987 looks horrific from the nowadays point of view. Unfortunately, many schools in the underserved neighborhoods even these days have the same lack of resources and same limited expectations from their students. But I hope that school boards like the one described in this book, no longer exist!

Childhood, interrupted. Raising kids during pandemic – a short but charming essay by Sanjay Gupta, very personal and sincere.

When you finish saving the world – this book is available from Audible Originals, and does not exist on paper. The rating on Goodreads is somewhat low, but I really enjoyed the story, all three parts.

The things we cannot say – I mentioned this book in one of the recent posts, and I still hope to write more than a paragraph about it; it raised a storm in my mind. Same to the book Truths I Never Told You – these two books are painfully related in my heart.

As I said, I am only mentioning the books which I rally liked. I should probably mention the books which I started and didn’t like and didn’t finish, but it’s just not interesting to write about them 🙂

Our Outdoor Gym – One More Time

I am trying to use to the fullest the last days of summer when it is still warm enough to exercise outdoor, and there is still a possibility to catch some daylight before work. The latter possibility will be over pretty soon, but I am still able to use our outdoor gym for now.
I start my strength training sessions at home, in my home gym, and use my TRX and dumbells and my yoga ball. And then, I walk to the “Outdoor fitness park,” as I now know, it is called! I was very pleased to see this plaque and to learn that our outdoor gym is nationally recognized! It deserves that!

A Date With My City

This week, I started to go to the office again, and for the next couple of weeks, I am planning to be in the city three times a week.

I can’t even start to describe how much I love being in the city. Coming to the office gives me a lot of structure. Yes, I am a very organized person, but I still do not know why, but I always get more things done in the office. Also, for many years, I used the time on the train as “my personal time.” It was always that I had almost two hours a day when I could reply to my personal emails, ce=heck the social media, write my own blog posts. And when I work from home, it is like: when I sit down at my desk, it means work.

Walking in the city feels different, as well. I do not know why. Today, my Apple Watch shows more than fifteen thousand steps, and it feels like nothing. When I am in the city, I walk fast, and nothing hurts.

On Tuesday, I had lunch with Vlad (belated birthday lunch), and I didn’t get to walk much, because I had to carve time between meetings. But today – I walked and walked.

I went to the Art Institute. The same El Greco exhibit, which I saw on my last visit to the museum before it closed, is open again, and I felt infinitely good looking at these amazing paintings.
Afterward, when I realized that I have over an hour till the next train, I headed to the Riverwalk (actually, I half-planned it to be that way). That way my first real date with my city after months being apart, and I was breathing in this twilight, and the opaque water surface…

Birthday lunch with Vlad
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Please Help Us to Win!

Hettie D.'s avatarThe World of Data

Dear friends and colleagues! Do you remember the same time in 2019? Do you remember how I asked you to vote for me and to help me win the “Technologist of the Year” award? Ok, it case you don’t remember – Here is my last year call for support. and here is a my victory post – thanks for all of your support, I won the nomination, the first female in the history of this award.

Now, it’s time to vote again, this time – for our amazing CEO Stephanie Klein who was nominated as a finalist for the Outstanding Tech CEO Award! Let me tell you – she should win!

She has a vision, she is not afraid of challenges. She thinks big. And most importantly, she really values each and a single employee of Braviant Holdings.

I’ve being in IT for thirty-seven years, and each CEO…

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Happy Birthday, Vlad and Anna!

Today is Vlad’s and Anna’s 29th birthday, and for the first time ever we won’t be able to celebrate together even on a different date. Below is a picture from our last year celebration, I am posting it here to remind myself that time will come and we will celebrate in person again:)

I just scrolled my timeline and realized that I do not have any post about the day Vlad and Anna were born. And this brings me to the conversations Anna and I had when she visited. Now, we talk a lot about parenting, and we are finding out tons of details I never mentioned. Each time Anna says that I should write a blog post about it, I hope that I will eventually. 

Some topics are easy to write about. In other cases, it isn’t easy to separate the historical details and personal emotions, and I know that I am trying to put off writing about some topics. We talked about me writing “about everything,” and I am leaning towards writing some protected posts, for which my children will have a passcode. 

Just this morning, I finished listening to the book The Things We Can’t Say. I loved the book, but it also prompted me to think about keeping secrets regarding someone’s past. There may be many reasons which seem perfectly rational, but you never know what will happen if you take these secrets to the grave, and your children and grandchildren will desperately try to solve these mysteries. 

So here is my children’s birthday resolution – I will do my best to write about everything  It will take time, but I hope I will be done before I will start to forget things 🙂

Family Time

My girls went back home today. We spent a wonderful five days together, going to places, doing things together, and talking non-stop. After they left, I told Boris that I either became too old or out of practice because I felt tired of all these non-stop activities. He replied that he thinks that I am just out of practice, and I asked whether he implies that I should do it more often. He laughed and said that probably yes.

Speaking about activities, we went to the Botanic Garden on Tuesday.

The signs say: Welcome back! We missed you!
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