Sometimes the brain needs to be restarted.
Whole body needs to be mobilized before another year long leap of faith.
Auxiliary decisions need to be made.

All I can say is that's I am happy to be thousands of miles from home and slowly float as a grain of sand in a stream of yummy and concentrated life.
Interestingly enough this country has anything I could only wish for to fill my 2 weeks with, and no signs in English - which is a bonus bliss.

Facebook as a great tool for

 evaluating people. 

This thought crossed my mind from time to time when I was glancing through the friends' updates, but I never bothered to find time and right words to put it down on pixels paper.

Facebook makes you defenselessly public. All the pictures, personal info, statuses and places updates you put in - crack open your mind to whoever sees it - scanning through your profile reveals your priorities, fears, weaknesses by how you want yourself to be perceived. That's nothing new.

But. Another way you reveal even more about yourself is your reaction to the way others want you to perceive them. Your pattern of thinking shows much better in the way you comment on others' pictures posted and updates than if those were carefully picked by you. "LIKE" is a great shortcut to find out who is either in line with certain values, or supports somebody with those values or is playing neutral on expressing their opinion.

And so, it is with mixed feelings that I note to myself that a person I thought of as smart and interesting, can actually "like"  his friendless's girls' night out drunk pictures, updates on 0.7 pound weight loss by another friendess, an ongoing romantic correspondence between a friend and his fiancee, and a status updates by rhetoric questions obviously determined to emphasize the friendess's high moral and feminist values as well as self-perceived high IQ.

Online social networks are simply online social networks. But they can save a great deal of time in evaluating a person with just a few quick Litmus tests. That is, if you do pay attention to shallow and superficial friends' activity - your are either not such a profound person I thought you were, or - you care enough about your shallow and superficial friends to know you support them.

Priceless if you are unsure about how close to keep a certain person; although does not work on those who have a deep and sophisticated plan behind every comment and "like" :)  

End of April...

My first Baby-shower organized for a friend with another friend. Since the pregnant friend had airplane theme registry, I decided to try do the baby shower in airplane mode. The funniest part was putting the plane diaper cake together with the second friend: apart from diapers, wash clothes and a baby bottle, it took a load of scotch tape, double-sided scotch tape, staples, bamboo skewers, a needle and thread and a button, cardboard, ribbon and lots of cursing. Thanks to Sis the plane made it to the baby shower with only one skewer fallen out )) and then people started arriving to the clubhouse with food and help with the preparations, so everything was completed on time. 

The most surprising thing was to see that the contest of making and flying the paper airplanes was so much fun for those who participated and watched. Sometimes the simplest solutions work best! 

Our first hike with Artie. Went well, although I did not notice the baby hike carrier have pairs of rings and a pair of hooks for adjusting the baby seat until almost a mile down the road. But once the seat was adjusted, Art was able to look around, started to jump and smile more and stopped losing his hat )) a hiking backpack/carrier, baby sunblock, diapers and spare set of clothing, bottle of water and a pouch of purée - and  the freedom of the outdoors is all yours again! 

I can't picture a family like ours living  a hundred years ago, and am very happy to live at the time we are living now: no need to slow down your life, no need to make dramatic adjustments or unreasonable sacrifices. Depending on what angle you are looking at things, of course, there's so much more that needs improvement and so much more that simply makes me roll my eyes,  but there's more to the hope that the evolution of the quality of our lives will continue.

Thought of the week: need to immediately start getting rid of people that slow me down.