We colored two dozen eggs, ate tons of Finnish and Estonian chocolate, and Anna and I spent more than three hours talking non-stop (and found an amazing coffee place!)
Good Friday In Milwaukee
Category: everyday life
About “Leaving It For Later” And When Not
When somebody has a newborn baby, is working day and night to meet a deadline, or is in another challenging situation, their house might become a mess, or they can forget something important that they would never forget to do under other circumstances. This is all perfectly understandable.
What does it have to do with me? It’s not like I have always been a model of cleanliness, nor are my current standards of having things in order model ones. However, I have this thing where the sight of a mess is aesthetically displeasing to me, to the extent that most times I can’t do anything else when there are things on the floor or dirty dishes in the sink. I tidy things up right away just because it makes me feel better.
Still, the two weeks before I went to Helsinki were really exhausting. I felt like I was doing something all the time, and most of what I was doing was past due. And several times, I caught myself leaving a mess behind. For example, under normal circumstances, I would not leave the house with a pile of things on the floor or dishes not put away in the dishwasher, but I have had it several times that I had to leave immediately so that I am not late.
And each time I realized how quickly the entropy builds! You miss putting things away just twice, and now all of a sudden, you need an extra 30 minutes to get everything back to order.
It was a timely reminder for me why I am going out of my way to do all this small chores right away. Also, similar thinking appies to non-household chores. For example, when several months ago I lost one week worth of updates of my finanicial excel, I was furious, because just three days before I recorded almost two weeks of my Amazon transactions and a week worth of Visa transactions. I was very proud of myself when I was done, and it was all gone. Back then, it was a reminder to be sure I save my work in addiiton to the autosave mode, especialy after working offline, but also, I was questioning my habit of recording Amazon transactions once a week (I know why I do this, and there is a good reason, but still).
The reason I was thinking about it all the other day was that I ws in Helsinki, and wanted to spend as much time with Boris as I could when we are physically in the same location. However, I felt that it was important not to fall behind on recording my expenses, especially since I am using a diffterent CC when abroad. Same with several seemingly small things, like scheduling next A/C tune-up or filling in medical paperwork for the upcoming procedure.
I think I ended up balancing it right, still spending most time together but not feeling bad about coming home and needing to stay up later the first night I am back.
VALO Pictures
By now, Jarco, who oversees all the technical side at Valo, is my good friend, and happily greeta me when I arrive. This time, he told me: now we have a proper app, and you can make reservations there, and you can also get your morning porrige for free. Do you like porrige?
Unfortunately, for some reason, I was unalbe to find the app in the App Store, which I reported to him later that day. Next day, when he saw me walking down for breakfast, he asked meL are you eating a proper breakfast today, or just porrige? That was, in fact, the day when I ate fruits and protein at home before heading to Valo, so I said – I was thinking just a porrige today. He said: OK, let’s go! He walked down to the cafeteria with me and told the cashier: she is booked for today, she just doesn’t have the app, can she have porrige?
That was very sweet, and although it looked like I could get the same porrige for free just showing my QR code, I was very thankful to him for taking care of me 🙂
And I can’t miss this opportunity to show VALO Works one more time. I never read the inside of the cards which are placed on the shelves in each room:
Friends And Chocolate
I can’t be in Helsinki without meeting with my friend Natasha! I was so thankful that, even though she now works full-time, she still found time to stop by my coworking space after work, and we sat and talked for almost two hours! (And yes, I love that we could do it in the same space, and it was OK with everyone)
Natasha brought me a bag of Ukrainian sweets: there is a new store operated by Ukrainian refugees, and they ship directly from Ukraine. She was happy to support their business, and the sweets taste great (and it’s a terrific idea to mix all varieties in one bag – I can barely find two of the same kind!).
(I might still bring some of them home, althought I can’t guarantee :))
Morning Biking, Season 6
This is going to be my sixth summer in Rogers Park. On May 9, it will be five years since I moved here, and six years since I discovered biking along Lake Michigan. That being said, even though it’s not even five years just yet, it’s definitely season six 🙂
Prairie Postgres March Meetup
The Weather
It’s not only that the temperature jumps up and down, not only that we have snowfalls and thunderstorms within a couple of hours, but it’s also something in the atmosphere that affects people’s minds and moods.
I felt completely dysfunctional both on Monday and today. Well, today I was mostly tired for no good reason (I mean, there was no more reason to be tired today than on any other day of the week), but Monday felt really bad.
There was an accident on the Red line, and the trains were rerouted, and I only realized it after I stayed on the platform at Lake for more than ten minutes. I knew I had to visit my mom as well and be back for a yoga class, so, without any ETA for this transportation crisis, I called Uber during rush hour, which I never do!
My mom was also quite emotionally disturbed for no good reason, which made me think it was something “in the air,” but nevertheless, I did not feel like my usual self, and was tired like a normal person 😀.
Also, I felt like I was getting a cold, which I didn’t get after all (maybe, just “so far”). It was exceptionally cold on Tuesday, and it was supposed to get better today, so then I got out of the house this morning and saw it was snowing again, I was ready to cry. It’s started to warm up by the afternoon, but now I do not trust this weather 🙂
Orchids
I know, I know.. I promised I would never have more than three orchids, and I already have four :). My excuses are that the new one is mini (on the left), and that the oldest one (on the back) is not in great shape. When Lena visited, she helped me nurture this one, cut the burned leaves and unhealthy roots, and I just replanted it in a more comfortable pot. Still, Lena thinks it won’t bloom this season, and if it doesn’t bloom next year, I will probably say goodbye to it.
Until that – let it be three and a half!
Bureaucracy
That’s the mildest term for how things went with registering our NFP with the Office of the Illinois Attorney General. When I started this journey in October 2024, everyone who was ever close to the NFP business would tell me that getting the tax-exempt status with the IRS was the most difficult and time-consuming task.
Indeed, registering an NFP took two days and was all online; setting up our EIN took only days and was all online as well. The trademark business took a couple of weeks, but only because we ran into some inconsistencies on the trademark holder’s website, and it took time to resolve it. Our greatest surprise, the tax-exempt letter arrived only fice weeks after we applied! Nobody could believe it, and I counted our blessings.
The last step was registering with the Illinois AG office, and that was the first thing we had to do on paper. We checked the list of documents we had to submit, both Anna and I signed them, I printed them and sent the package by Priority Mail.
A week later, I saw our registration fee check cashed, and I thought that we will recieve the confirmation letter soon. However, when the letter arrived, it was not the confirmation of the registration, but the list of things we did wrong!
We submitted the corrected package, and after that, somehting weird started to happen. People were not returning our calls, the documents we mailed were never received even though the tracking showed it ws delivered. It took many hours to reach anyone, and at some point, we were told that we abandoned the registration, because we never mailed missing information, and we had to start all over.
At that point of our odyssey, I started walking to the AG office and leaving the papers there, making sure they are all stampted as received. This didn’t stop the stream of the lost items. Also, by that time, the AG office finally introduced the online application submission system, but since we started on paper, we had to continue on paper, and it took even longer. Finally, when we received a new list of missing items, Anna and I got together online and wrote an email to our State Representative Constituent service, who saved us!
It still took several weeks! However, each time “something was missing” we took a note regarding how long it would take if our State Rep office won’t interfere. I believe, they saved us anothe six months!
My biggest regret is that I didn’t know we didn’t have to wait for this registration to apply for the Illinois Tax Exempt status! We could already have it, and now it’s another six months wait! At least, I could apply online!
And the moral of the story – Long live Constituent Service!
Conferences
The weather is miserable, which is good at the time when I am spending yet another weekend on conference-related work.
The first one is my presentation at PG Day Nordic, which I absolutely had to finalize this weekend, and I just did. When I submitted this proposal, I thought that this would be just the second half of the “long queries” part of my Prague tutorial. However, I realized that it won’t fly immediately after I set down for my first “cut and paste” session.
Then I had been nervous and procrastinating for a very long time, because each time I would start to modify this presentation, I felt it was falling apart, and had too many slides, and at the same time looked like “something from the middle of a tutorial”, not a complete presentation. I changed the idea of what and how I want to talk about several times. Finally, two days ago, I realized I wanted to make this presentation completely different from what I originally had in mind, which meant a significant rewrite.
Since I had several other bullet points approaching deadlines, I had a number of good excuses to keep pushing this rewrite to an uncertain future date, except that I couldn’t, and I finally finished it, and really happy with how it looks now! I don’t even want to think about how many hours it took.
And the second one is a never-ending list of things for PG DATA. I am genuinely puzzled because several volunteers are busy doing a lot, for which I am very thankful, but at the same time, I am busy with conference-related projects all the time, and there is no way to ignore them. A never-ending chain of email – check – submit – respond.
I know, nobody forced me! 😂
Hettie's Reflections 