Category: volunteering

A Cooking-Related Injury

For the past several times when I came to make a dinner at ODS, J. asked whether we can make tomato soup and grill cheese sandwiches. Both were not in my personal cook book, but both sounded like easy to make (and it was sort of a shame I never made them myself). We made plans, and she specifically asked to make grilled chees sandwiches on the sourdough bread. I told her to make sure to tell the staff who will be shopping for ingredients what they should purchase.

We started with the soup because it was more work. Everything went great except for when we desided to puree the ready soup with the blender. It was “not required” but the recipe suggested that if we would do it, we should puree the soup in batches. Again, averything went great except for the last (the third) batch: I do not know what I did wrong, but when we were done, I couldn’t get the blender off the base of the blender, and somehow turned it the wrong way so that the top got detached, and a super hot soup pored down. I tried to catch at least some of it (my mistake), and a as a result, the half of my left hand got burned: it all turned red and was hurting really badly. And unfortunately, they didn’t have the anti-burn lotion in their first aid box.

Fortunately, there was an ice box on the counter, and I had en empty plastic bag in my backpack, so for the next hour-plus, I was holding a bag of ice over my left hand, changing the ice every 15 minutes. After an hour, I saw definite improvement, and knew that there was no permanent damage. Honesty, it was the first time in my life the burning made so little harm. My hand hurt after I had to throw away the last portion of melted ice when I was on the train, but it lasted for a very short time. By next morning, I didn’t feel anything, and I only a very small portion of my left tumb had some pink on it, the rest of the skin was fine.

Oh, and we made the sandwiches after the mess was cleaned, and they turned out amazing! I will definitely make them at home, and maybe I will even give another try for a tomato soup!

Everything Happens For A Reason

When I go to early morning escorting shifts, I leave the house at 5:50 – 5:55, so that I am on the train at 6 AM, but on Friday, I left the house just five minutes later and had to wait for the next train.

Also, my pro-choice buttons are always pinned to my escorting vest, because otherwise, I often forget them. On Friday, I just pulled my pink vest out of the closet to tuck it into my backpack when I remembered that we are now supposed to wear rainbow vests on weekdays, and the pink ones – only on Saturdays. I unpinned my buttons from the pink vest and almost put them in the pocket, but since I wore a hoodie with very wide-open pockets, I thought they could fall out, so I decided to pin them to the front of my hoodie (just until I get to a clinic).

So I walked on the CTA platform with my buttons pinned at my breast, and with the train just left, and slowly walked to the front. There was a young woman, also staying at the front, who passed me to throw away a can, then passed me again and asked, “Excuse me, can I ask you something?” I saw your buttons. Do you have anything to do with clinic escorts? And I replied: Yes, I am one of them! And I am going to the escort shift right now. And then she asked: ” How can I join clinic escorts? I wanted to do this for years, but I didn’t know how!” I told her: You need to go through the training, and then you can sign up for shifts. But before I connect you to our team leader, let’s talk!

She was a teacher, and she taught in Chinatown, so until I got off at Lake, we talked non-stop. She kept saying: I am so glad I asked! And I kept saying: I am so glad I had my buttons on, once in a year! We’ve exchanged emails, and I introduced her to our team lead, and she signed up for training. I hope she will be a good addition to our team!

But what were the odds?!!

Current Events, Briefly

I have so many things going on, and so many things I am behind on, that I worry about them all the time, and barely posted anything here for almost a week. If I didn’t mention anything happening on any particular day, it means that on that day I came home from work and started crossing the things off my list; mainly different tasks, big and small, related to the conference and to the meetup, and kept doing it until late.

On Wednesday, I visited a potential new venue for our meetups. I liked what I saw a lot, but things are still in the making, and I do not want to share until they materialize.

On Thursday, I finally went to the early morning escorting shift after a long winter break, and then went to the ACM meetup after work. The meetup went well, although there were way fewer people than I expected (probably because we didn’t have pizza :)).

Then, it was Good Friday, which we have off, and I took a super-early train to Milwaukee (and I already posted about it). We had a good time there, but the weather was really bad both Friday and Saturday. I returned to Chicago on Saturday morning and walked to Lea to have breakfast there (I needed something to compensate for the cold and rain!)

Then I returned home and did the conference things until evening, almost non-stop, until it was time to go to see mom and to take her to Above the Law theater. I really like Above the Law, and they did great with “Cyrano,” but my mom was in a really bad mood and yelled at both Igor and me (and she kept doing it since then!)

On Saturday evening, our co-workers from the London office landed in Chicago, and I took them touring the city on Sunday. It was still cold, but at least sunny and no rain, and it became warmer later in the day, so we had a great time overall, and I could show them a lot!

(They still owe me my pictures, so I will post more when I have them!)

And once again, I came back home from our touring day, and started emailing/discussing/posting to speakers, volunteers, and attendees, and it feels like I will never be able to complete all the tasks I need to complete!

All this week, there will be meetings at work, and a lot of collaboration, and I still need to execute on one million community things, and I am still nervious about all of them, and about not enough conference advertisement, and mom still yells at everyone, but I have no time to be upset about it!

Egg Coloring At ODS

Same as the Christmas cookie decoration, the Easter egg coloring is an activity I do with ODS residents every year, and every year, we have tons of fun.

The most popular decorating kits are the ones with faces and hair, and also, the “golden” eggs appeared to be a hit!

ODS Dinner

This time, it was less than two months ago, but I still felt that it had been a long time since I was at ODS. Also, this whole week, I felt really tired to the point I started to question whether my energy resources are indeed endless.

There were a lot of good moments: we had three giant salmon halves, so there was enough fish for everyone, and more, and everyone was ecstatic. J. acquired new lemon/pepper seasoning, which was absolutely perfect for salmon, and we used it, and I want to get a similar one for myself. By now, J. knows all the steps and does not wait for my directions; I told her that soon I will just observe and let her do the rest.

I peeled the whole bag of potatoes and made mashed potatoes, and it was all consumed! Now I am wondering, how much will be too much, and whether there will even be too much.

Still, I couldn’t stay longer because of how tired I was, which produced slight disappointment. Usually, it goes like this: first, the residents eat, thank you, and you think that’s it, and after a while, they turn to conversation. I learned not to run out twenty minutes after dinner is ready, but on Tuesday, I just couldn’t stay longer, so I apologized and said I would be back in two weeks.

We are going to decorate Easter eggs next time, and this activity can be a huge success or a huge miss, and I had both. I ordered more dinosaur decorating sets and more “faces” sets, so I hope it will be exciting 🙂

ODS

ODS dinner on Wednesday – first time after two and a half months of absence. My emails remained unanswered, or the dates were confirmed when it was already too late, or something else. I thought for a hundredth time that I need to put my ODS volunteering on pause, but two weeks ago, when I was coming home on the Red Line, somebody called me from the seat facing me, and I saw J., one of the residents. It took me a couple of seconds to connect her face to a different environment, but both she and I were equally happy to see each other! There was a whole group of ODS residents, and I knew two others – at least their faces were familiar; and J. happily explained about the other two that “they were new.” And then she started to explain to them that I come and cook. I told her that I am finally scheduled to come on February 25, and I knew that I had to stick with this date no matter what.

When I checked in the day before, I was informed that they only have ground beef, rice, and frozen vegetables, and it’s up to me what to make. I took a celiac and some dark pink farmers’ carrots from home, and stopped at Target on theway to ODS to pick up frozen peas and brussels sprouts. I hoped they had potatoes (they always had!), but it was the end of the month, and I was told there would be no potatoes until Tuesday.

I sighed and started making my signature vegetable soup, using ground beef instead of turkey and rice instead of potatoes. I brought a jar of Vegeta with me, which helped! By some miracle (mostly me promptly removing the grease from the soup’s surface), it ended up being surprisingly good. Another miracle was that not only J. hung out in the dining area with me, but also several “new” boys and even girls were ready to socialize. They asked lots of questions about me and my cooking, came for seconds, and thanked me for the soup multiple times. And they didn’t get back to their rooms for a while, so we chatted for another hour.

N. (my favorite staff) was very sympathetic and told me to text her if I have scheduling problems again 🙂

The First Meetup Of 2026

On Tuesday, we had the first meetup of 2026, and it was such a great start to the new year! I was so happy to see many familiar faces, as well as first-timers. We had great attendance (one of those rare situations when I didn’t order enough pizza :)), and Ryan Booz, one of the speakers who never fails me, gave a great talk on configuring Postgres for effective logging and query-optimization analysis.
I liked the fact that we had thirty participants that early in the year, when people just start to get back to their regular activity level. More importantly, we now have a group of active members who not only keep coming to the meetups but also actively listen, participate in discussions, and stay long after the presentation ends, discussing what they just heard, sharing experiences, suggesting future topics, and talking about how we can make Postgres more appealing to application developers! I always have to remind the last group of people staying late that, as much as I love them all, I need to close the house, but those are my happiest moments!

On days like that, I have this strong feeling of community building happening right here, and all my work is not in vain.

Christmas Cookies At ODS

On Tuesday, I took a whole box of non-decorated cookies, along with several tubes of icing and multiple containers of sprinkles, to the ODS for our traditional cookie-decorating session.

As I already mentioned, this year was not smooth, and I was not sure how many residents would be there, and how many would be interested (because there is always this balance between these teens being teens and being “too cool” for cookie decorating and not having enough fun when they were kids). So I started decorating with one of the girls, J., who is always ready to cook with me. Then one of the male residents joined and decorated a cookie, and said he was going to eat it. I asked to take a picture first:).

Then one staff member, J.L., joined, and she was not even trying to hide her excitement and enthusiasm :). And all of a sudden, the rest of the residents pulled up to the kitchen island, eager to participate. Some of them did a rather clumsy job, some – a very neat one, but everyone was creative:).

One of the relatively new residents, M, asked J.L.: if you could get anything in the world for Christmas, what would you wish for? And J.L., who is young, energetic and anything but sentimental, replied: If I could have anything in the world, I would want my grandma back! M. looked at her and said: You know, that’s what I would want, too! I would want my grandma back!

It struck me, since one more time, it reminded me about the life expectancy gap which everyone is talking about…

I said, that if I could get anything for Chirstmas, I would want the war i Ukraine stop, and Russians being out and never come back. They nodded: yes, they kill people, even children!

We kept talking about Christmas, and I mentioned Finland, and it turned out that most of them knew about Finland, and the “real Santa living there.” I told them about the snow that falls quietly, and about the granite crumbs used instead of salt on the roads, and mentioned how many people in the US don’t even know that Finland is a country. M stared at me in disbelief: Even I know! If many people don’t, I am seriously concerned!

Everyone loved how the cookies turned out. At some point, I thought I should have brought more cookies (I had more), but in the end, it was just the right number. Here is what was not eaten by the time I was ready to leave (as “too pretty to eat”):

.. and it was one of the best nights in the shelter I had this year!

Monday Disaster

I am finally in a relatively calm state of mind to describe what happened on Monday.

I took Monday off because my many years of cookie shipping taught me that there is not enough time to pack and ship, especially when it comes to international shipping, and I end up having several sleepless nights and late shipments. This year, I decided to face reality:)

There was one more thing I planned to do on that day: as usual, I bought several gifts for the families in the transitional living program at the Night Ministry, but this year, there were multiple heavy items, so my plan was to Uber them to the Night Ministry in the middle of the day. Then I realized that I am running out of time to be able to do both mailing and Ubering to the Night Ministry, and besides, there were so many so heavy things that I started to doubt whether I would be able to load them into Uber. So I emailed a person with whom I coordinated the donations and asked her whether possibly someone from the office would be driving in my direction. She replied that she can pick up things and that she will message when she is close to me.

About five minutes before her arrival, I started moving things down because I realised I needed at least four trips.

I made two trips down with the heaviest things, met my neighbor, who was picking up her grocery delivery, and I helped her move her packages up, took the next portions, and went down. And then I could not believe my eyes: everything I had already moved to the vestibule was gone!

I rushed out of the door – there was obviously nobody! I asked the Amazon driver, who was taking things out of his car to deliver to the other side of the street, whether he saw somebody walking out of our door, but he obviously didn’t pay attention. And just then, a person who was picking up my donations showed up.

Even though I had a suspicion since my stolen cookies episode two years ago that someone had our master key, and suggested rekeying both buildings, my idea was rejected, and we were advised not to buzz in anyone we don’t know. This time, I am sure nobody was buzzed in, because the buzzing sound is always audible on the stairs, so I would have heard.

That’s it. I didn’t go to the Knox Holiday party at the Steppenwolf that night because I felt in the wrong mood for a party. It was only yesterday that I realized that if I went, I wouldn’t be able to talk about anything except for these stolen donations. Now, I am sort of-kind of-not so horribly upset.

The Night Ministry was able to replace my gifts, but the household items I donated were gone. The worst was not even the monetary value (the Night Ministry always asks to keep the costs low) but the fact that this episode almost destroyed my trust in my community. I will try to get over , but the words of encouragement will be appreciated!

Elevated Access

Did you know about this organization? I didn’t, and now I do. It’s the coolest thing!

Elevated access.