Category: everyday life

Christkindle Market

Yesterday, I went to Christkindle Market for the first time this season. I dragged one of my co-workers (who didn’t mind), saying we were “doing work-life balance.”

Later that day, when I went to the musical with my neighbor and told her that I was at the market, she asked: why do you like it? What is in it for you?

I know that not everyone loves Christmas markets (like Boris sacrifices himself for my Christmas passions), but I am one of the people who love them! I ran around greeting the vendors whom I knew from the past years and showed “the best of” to my co-worker. We toured the ornaments shops and the chocolate shop and browsed the food offerings. I already went there one more time today, and bought a package of Christmas tea that I put my eye (and nose) on the day before. And I will go there again.

& Juliet

I saw this musical yesterday, and somehow, it left me non-engaged. Everything was perfect on the surface: great dialogs, cultural references; the audience laughed where expected (sometimes too loud). Still, it didn’t click, and I do not think it was because I was tired. Just something didn’t work.

Official photos below:

Continue reading “& Juliet” →

Life Is Happening

Once again, a million things at the same time!

One hand is doing work, another hand is testing the website for PGDay Chicago, another hand is making sure we have all things we need for Prairie Postgres, another hand is packing presents. Some other hands are submitting Amazon Fresh orders for the remaining cookie ingredients and booking three different hotels for three different trips.

Presents for Secret Santa, presents for the Night Ministry, Amazon returns, returning boots which turned out to be too tight even though the size is right. Work. Going to Chriskindlmarket, buying roasted nuts and chocolate. Finding time for meetings with friends and out-ouf town peers. Boxes for cookies. Christmas bubble mailers. Tissue paper. Work. Going to the show. Finding the right presents for half of the family who are still without presents. New Christmas tree stand.

Work. PGDay Chicago new Volunteer form. Checking the dates on the form. FInding cost allocations to close the support ticket. Schedule an email to my mom for 10-30 PM saying we are going home from the show.

And it’s actually time to go, just need to refresh my makeup!

After Thanksgiving

Boris nearly missed his flight: there was a traffic jam at the ORD entrance, and it took Uber 50 minutes to get to the terminal. I believe the better strategy would be to Uber to Cumberland and take the L to ORD. But it is what it is. I am sad about such a stressful ending to a very good week we had.

As it always happens, I have more things not done than done, just because I have all holiday things, plus work, plus the conference, plus our NFP, plus conferences where I submitted some proposals. Plus twenty different professional projects I want to start. Oh, and plus, it became sharply cold and my body didn’t have enough time to adjust.

Nevertheless, we had a very good time together and did many things around the house. Boris repaired a bookcase that started to fall apart after I returned from my last trip, and then he moved bookcases around as we planned several months ago but never did. We took down the flower baskets, covered all the balcony furniture for winter, and put up Christmas decorations.
I feared that because of how busy I was this year, I wouldn’t feel as joyful decorating the house as I usually feel, but this fear was unfounded. Everything except for the tree is up, and Christmas is in the air 🙂

Books

Just a short list of what I recently read so that I won’t postpone it for three months again.

The Song of Achilles. This was our workplace book club reading, and I loved this book! Maybe it partially helped that I read it while I was in Greece, but I think I would love it regardless.

She-Wolves: The Untold History of Women on Wall Street. This book was recommended by a co-worker. OK. Not bad, but less exciting than I thought it would be

Skin and Bones. Very good! I didn’t expect it to be so captivating—I kept listening whenever I had a minute to spare. I can’t recall which recommendation list it came from, but I am so glad I read it!

Thanksgiving

I never know what to write about Thanksgiving. We made it :). Actually, the cooking time was the least effort I remember. It took me more time cleaning up, doing the dishes, and packing the food to go, but I am done with that, or with most of that. Boris helped me a lot (probably more than ever), and I am also very thankful for that. I am tired, but also, since Boris and I were chatting all the time while I was cooking and he was helping, I got a lot of new Postgres ideas that I want to try 🙂

I know I am hopeless:)

My son-in-law said I have a secret extra day of the week – I wish!!!

One thing we always have for Thanksgiving are pies from Vanille:)

How I Beat The System – Again!

Boris tells me that it’s my specialty to get through any bureaucratic or technological challenges, citing my battle with Finnair for my missing points, my battle with Lyric Opera for my money to be returned, and the most recent for the trademark agreement. Here is one more of my accomplishments that I am extremely proud of.

The Illinois Department Of Human Services (IDHS) has a very non-user-friendly website, so it was not unusual for me to call their customer service to validate my mom’s eligibility for benefits or whether they were ever renewed because it was impossible to understand from the website. Many people, especially those who had to communicate with this system more often than I used, told me the only way to resolve issues was to come in person. A couple of months ago, I decided to try to apply for additional benefits for Mom, but when I logged into the website, I found that they switched to the new logins (they are using ILogin, same as many other sites) and that I need to create ILoging and link it to the existing account.

I followed all the steps, and almost at the very end of the process, I accidentally copied a blank at the beginning of the password I prepared, and after that, nothing worked. I could not confirm the password, and I could not reset it. I tried to use the “reset your password” buttons, but I didn’t receive any links by email or text. Then, I found that there was no phone number to call for any login issues anymore because IDHS no longer maintains logins, and I needed to submit an issue online.

The online system, as you can imagine, requires ILogin to submit an issue :). It took me several attempts to get to the page where I could submit a ticket without a login, but then I got lost in the questions like “location of the service (work/home)”, “new/old hardware,” etc.
In the next several weeks, I tried to repeat the sequence of actions with similar results. Finally, I decided that I had to break through the system, and followed all these steps about “at work/at home/new/old hardware.” In the comments section, I described the issues in detail.

Hurray – I received a ticket number! Two days later, I saw a call from Springfield on my phone, and it was customer support calling. I repeated the whole story, and they said that they would reset the login and send me a link – “watch for the email.”

Three days later, I indeed received an email. I could follow the link and create a new password! And I am more proud of myself than ever! I am only wondering how they expect seniors to navigate this system! the existing account.

Pictured From The ‘Secret Garden”

I knew, Theo would publish more pictures of the show 🙂

Skating

I opened the skating season on Monday. It was still warm, but the cooling system for the McCormick skating rink worked fine, and I made sure to come right after resurfacing. Not many people are skating yet (closer to Christmas, I won’t even try to go), and the ice quality is great.

Mom

A quick review of the past couple of weeks. Health-wise, she is doing great. I took her to her doctor two weeks ago (that was the hospital visit follow-up), and he was really impressed. He said that unless there are any concerns, he does not need to see her until June. At the same time, after we reported everything that happened to my mom, he looked at me and said: you realize that that’s just the beginning? Make sure to call her every morning to check that everything is alright.

I understand that, and that was one of the reasons I was still looking for a caregiver closer to my mom’s house. The one who started to visit my mom before I went on my trip, turned out to be great. Mom really likes her, and I asked her to meet with my mom at least once a week even if there are no specific needs. It is also great that she can take my mom to places where my help is not really needed, like the nail salon. I even asked her to take my mom to the blood test. To be honest, this small help frees up a lot of my work time, and that’s the primary reason I feel like I am becoming a human being again.

We ran out of the nurses’ visits, which was not so bad because there were objectively no reasons for them and because my mom insisted on somebody being there during the visits, even though the nurse spoke Russian. The insurance won’t cover it anymore; as I said, it’s good enough for now.

One of the things the nurse arranged was a social worker’s visit. Mom had this weird idea that if she would admit she needed help, I would send her to the nursing home, so she always said that she didn’t need any help. The social worker came anyway, and she assigned a Russian-speaking case manager for Mom. This case manager called me a week later (not three weeks later, as we were told). I had to take off work again, but at least I got some valuable information, especially regarding the subsidized housing. Now that I have learned how it works, I am not surprised that we are experiencing a housing crisis. Anyway, I contacted both subsidized housing and filled in applications. One was accepted, and another was returned, and we still need to fix the issues and turn it back. I don’t know what to make out of the fact that two houses have entirely different applications!

For a reason unknown to me, my mom believes that she will be placed in a room “with somebody else,” and she still thinks that it’s “a nursing home.” I hope she will realize that this housing is much better than where she lives now and, more importantly, that she will have Russian-speaking neighbors. To be honest, that’s the sole reason I want her to move into one of these buildings, and if I could pay the full price for her to live there, I would be happy to do so!

In addition, the case manager performed a memory evaluation for my mom, and since I know what it should look like, I realized that she did a very basic one. I guess that anything better than complete dementia is considered to be “ok” at this age. A side note: my mom got very upset with this evaluation and said that she is not a mad old lady :), which is very true!

I think those are all updates for now!