Hettie’s Reflections – Blog Posts

Twenty-Eight Years Ago, I Think

There is no specific reason to make this random photo a birthday photo. I just thought that I needed to post something different from my usual two tiny babies and me. At least, I think Anna can relate :).

Happy birthday, my extraordinary twins!

***

I used to think that Boris was not involved enough in Vlad’s and Anna’s early years, and it might be objectively so, but he often remembers things that I had forgotten.

Last week, he asked me whether I remember Vlad’s “very important question.” He said that Vlad was about eight or nine years old then, but I still can’t recall the episode. Maybe it was during the summer of 2000 when I started my consulting job, and Boris was without any job and didn’t move to Finland yet, and babysat Vlad and Anna.

According to Boris, Vlad walked into the room and announced that he had a very important question, and his whole future depended on the answer. He knew that “grown-ups don’t play with toys,” and he worried what would happen if he still loved playing with his toys when he grew up :).

***

Happy birthday 🙂

Forest Ranger Camp

The reconstruction of a forest ranger camp from the 1900s was one of the things Lena and I missed last year. The staff member (whom I didn’t photograph) was dressed as on of these very first forest rangers, and he talked about their jobs and how they had to be away from home on horseback for months. I immediately started to estimate how much they would have to carry with them. Even if we assume they didn’t take s change of clothes with them (which is possible!), he still had just this one saddle bag with two compartments. And he had to hack his tent, a blanket, some tools, his pan and a coffee pot, and a mug, and supplies like coffee, sugar and salt for several months!

Greenfield Village

Last year, when I visited Lena in Ann Arbor, she took me to Greenfield Village. We spent the whole day there but didn’t get enough, and I wanted to do it again, see more things, and show Boris what we saw last year.

Still, it was not enough :). Your mind gets overloaded with information, and you want to take in more but can’t 🙂

See the moving train on the third card!
Old diesel train ride
Wright brothers bike shop
Somebody thought of aesthetics!

I tried not to repeat the pictures I took last year… and still took them again, and still it is not enough!

To be continued 🙂

Everything The Lake Can Give

I didn’t have a single day off while Boris was here. First, I just took a week and a half of vacation, and second: there was too much work! I was glad that Lena and I chose this weekend for our visit – it gave me an opportunity to disconnect from work almost entirely. Granted, I was doing a lot of “other” things, but it was still a disconnect.

Today I took the morning off, and Boris and I went for a relatively long bike ride in the morning (the weather was absolutely perfect!), and when we returned, I told him that I saw the waves on the lake while we were biking, and I want to go and jump in these waves before the lifeguards come. Boris does not understand the joy of jumping in the waves, but he walked to the beach with me and took some pictures of me in the waves.

About The Situation Around the Clinics

Now we know why the journalists ignored our requests not to come to the clinic: see the article.

It is very well written, and it rightly focuses on Alderman Conway’s activity, which we really appreciate! Also, valid concerns about the bike lane blocking and the noise level.

Here is a picture from the article:

That day, I was there. My shift was over at 9-30AM. I saw that the situation was getting worse, but I was just three days back from our trip, and Boris was arriving on the evening of that day, so I could not stay later.

One thing I forgot to mention in my previous blog: when I was staying at the street corner on a lookout, a lady who passed the clinic entrance earlier stopped by me and asked: how are you doing this? I didn’t understand the question first, and she repeated: how are you doing this? I still didn’t get it. She continued: how can you keep doing this and not get mad? I won’t be able to do it! I would kill them! I said: I understand! But that’s why you are not doing this :). We are here for the patients, to make a safe passage for them. She paused: yea, I can see that…

To my point – that’s not the place to express your feelings towards antis. But the article is good 🙂

Anti-Putin Rally

I am sure that Igor will post about today’s event in more detail, but I still want to post a couple of his pictures. He reports that the meeting went really well, and the participants were especially ecstatic seeing Putin jailed.

In Ann Arbor

We went to Ann Arbor to visit my friend Lena. We took the Wolverine train, which was supported to arrive in Ann Arbor t 11-04 PM local time but was significantly delayed, and ended up arriving at 12-50 AM! Lena had to go to bed and then wake up to pick us up at the train station, and we were completely frozen on the train because the air conditioner was running very low! Fortunately, the dining car was open, and we went to grab some hot tea.

Today, we went kayaking, which I wanted to do for Boris – he enjoyed it a lot last summer when I booked the Field Museum kayaking experience.

It started very dramatically because, if you remember, I’ve done kayaking only once in my life – last summer, and I already forgot everything they taught us. The first thing I did when my kayak was pushed into the river I almost hit Boris in the head with my ore. While he was trying to avoid this encounter, I hit his core, and his kayak turned upside down, and he was completely under the water!

I do not know why, but he didn’t get mad at me, and he was given a new kayak, and we continued our journey. I was struggling with pretty much everything, running into the shore every three minutes. It didn’t help that for the first half of our journey, we went against the current. Lena took a lot of pictures and videos of me losing the hold of the kayak, but she didn’t send them to me yet, so I only have pictures of beautiful water lilies and of a swan. While I was busy taking pictures of him, I drifted too close to him and could not correct my course fast enough, so I was afraid he would bite me.

Continue reading “In Ann Arbor” →

Mega March for Ukraine on August 26 – please come!

Event details here

On 32nd Anniversary of Ukraine’s Independence Ukrainian Congress Committee of America, Illinois Division calls on all the communities to participate in the Mega March UKRAINE-UNBREAKABLE NATION. We will start at the Congress Plaza Garden 501 S. Michigan Ave at 3:30pm, march will end with a program on the west end of Riverwalk (upper Wacker & Orleans/Franklin. For Sponsorship opportunities and inquiries please email at info@uccaillinois.org or inquire via messenger

News In Gender Studies:)

Boris found this on Amazon:

Comfort Bike Seat Comfortable Gel Bicycle Saddle Replacement Soft Padded with Shock Absorbing Waterproof for MTB Mountain Bike Road Bike Exercise Bike Men Women and Ladies.

🤷🏻‍♀️

At The End Of The Week

I do not think I have ever had a work week as challenging as this one since I joined my current company. There was a lot of everything.

Nothing bad, just the discussions, which I had been trying to facilitate for a long time, finally started to happen. Several people came to me with problems that I could solve and at the same time, teach them some good practices. Nobody dumped extra work on me – I took it over myself:).

The backlog of outside-work items kept growing at an alarming speed, and that’s what worried me the most – I hate to be non-responsive, and I knew that most of the responses would take from five to ten minutes, not more, but there were dozens of them.

On Thursday, i pulled all my willpower and said to myself that I needed to finish as much work as possible because I will have several hours on the train to visit Lena, and I could catch up on almost all of my non-work items then. My “work-life integration” didn’t work this week at all – on most days, I didn’t take time even to pull out my personal laptop.

Now, being on the train, I believe, it was a good decision – knowing that I am detached form work until Monday afternoon, allowed me to focus on other overdue non-personal things: the book, conference submissions, Postgres User Goup, PG Day Chicago, LinkedIn, and so on. And to drop a couple of paragraphs here 🙂