A little hindsight on January 2015.

Good month. I was as productive as I could, given the circumstances (like a big family reunion around the New Year and stomach flu that turned me into an eye-blinking vegetable for a couple of days).

Took 1 trip  - to Maui; which fall under "Visiting new place" line item of my plan.
Proceeded to REG part of classes.

Read 5 new books. As part of stocking up with new books for the next month, brought home 2 books by Osho: The Book of Children and Belief, Doubt and Fanaticism. But before I even opened one of them - I suddenly felt something was not right... Read Osho's biography for the first time  - et bien sur! - he did not have children of his own.
And then his citation about Jewish Guilt caught my eye.
The books went back to the library. Unopened.

Started doing research and got some free materials on the side project and C2. If done correctly, both are extremely time and financially consuming, so... these elephants are to be chopped down to bite sizes.

Cleaned our house from useless stuff; tossed lots of my own belongings that became unusable over the past couple of months. Looking at other households I'm glad I've never had a problem getting rid of stuff, especially when it can't serve its purpose anymore; now not even a huge garage and a basement would allow our house to turn into a junkyard.

Stopped sleeping on my belly. That's a huge loss of comfort for me :)

Maui is much more of a tourist place compared to the Big Island-

just as Von Zobel warned! Hence - more traffic and less solitude on picturesque stops around the island on Maui :)

More of green vegetation; less of volcanic dark rock - tastes differ though...  Maui views look more like most card pictures and less real. Maui fish in tourist snorkel spots are way more cheeky, throwing their schools at and around the swimmers. It was the first time in my life that I had fish swim so close to me, almost feeling that it is about to stretch out its fin and knock on my mask.
On the whole - very nice snorkeling by Monokini crater, although not as nice as by Captain Cook Monument.

Von Zobel, who snorkeled religiously twice a day, did claim there was way more to see by our hotel too than by Monokini crater. Quite possible.

Sunrises and sunsets are just as peaceful and romantic on each island.

The fruit stands are more impressive on Big Island though. The fruit were larger, juicier and tastier. There are fewer fruit stands by our hotel on Maui, and of those we saw of the other side of the island over half were abandoned or closed, citrus fruit were not as flavourful as on the Big Island, passion fruits were sour like hell. In addition to these first world problems :) ice cream shops were not everywhere to bump into. Shame - would love to try local ice cream without making a detour from our route.

That was compensated by great seafood and drinking coconuts.

The weather was amazing; not too hot during the day, and still in the lower seventies-upper sixties in the evening. Not a single cloud; no annoying humidity. Yes, on top of everything we were extremely lucky with the weather, the ocean and the beach. Von Zobel claimed the beach to be one of the best in the US - that might very much be so! :)

All in all - we had a wonderful time in a wonderful place. I would come back. To try local scuba diving, boogie board and local beer I missed this time.
A very much needed rest and adventure before being grounded for the next 18 months :)

While it's still impossible for me to win a game of chess with AI,

- I now came to the point where I can at least revengefully leave it nearly piece-less...

God knows who else plays chess with computer on vacation...

Valkyrie

What I find hard to do after finishing a happy ending fairy tale is to adjust my brain back to the day to day flow of life, my mind is still grabbing on to new concepts too easily... Or it might be that it is still not too good at distinguishing between the real ideas of life enhancement and the fiction ones, even though they might date back to over a thousand years ago.

Not that I expected more from the book, - I expected it to be different. By the description and reviews I was picturing more battle scenes and a tale of a self-made super hero, and thank God the novel was nothing like that. After all the recent literature on women written by men, with the attempts to depict women's inner world that were - quite ridiculous, - this was finally a true to life glance at a young female's psychology, and showing thoughts and actions that did make sense.

All wrapped in Semenova's amazing style, as always.

And Soaked with her amazing vocabulary, as always.

It would not have been such a sweet fairy tale without the cornerstones of the plot being - having two brave brothers, a wise mentor, a fearless leader and eventually all your hopes and aspirations come true. Outside the books, an outsider leaves her home and family - and this is the end of the story. 

On the other hand, the Valkyrie emphasizes a great deal the need to belong: either to the family you were born into, or the family you create yourself. The objective reasons a young woman could never be fully independent in Slavik culture over a thousand years ago are obvious, and yet I have always been curious what is it like - to be an integral part of a larger community, what it feels like to belong to something much bigger than yourself... 

Finding yourself by the ocean, on a warm sunny day

In the middle of winter in priceless.

I finally begin to listen to my body again. Not just live the "right way" - automatically doing what I know is right for me and what I got used to - but to also deliberately listen to how my body responds to food, exercise, emotions, surroundings, air, body cosmetics. Now the time to take a step closer to myself is especially right :).

It's a great feeling -to have 5 days and so much to fit into these 5 days. 

The first hours of the new year

poor Dr. Chill with some nasty infection. Literally, what we had to deal with a few years down 2015 were the consequences of this bug. Thank God, this little guy is a fighter...

A couple of days later, just as Dr Chill got better, the infection got to Von Zobel & myself.
I was on a semi-knocked out mode for a day with breaks for drinking and watching the X-files with one eye. I honestly can't remember when was the last time when I could just spend a day in bed recovering: lying like a log and not doing a-ny-thing at all, but watching something that easy and entertaining. Phoenix, 7 years ago probably...

Actually, the reason I remembered about the X-files series at all was because I stumbled across an old... erm... FBI ID I found among my old child's stuff I was going through to find something interesting for Dr Chill to play with. My school best friend, when she got a PC at home AND access to internet - which was incredibly cool back then, - downloaded and made us both FBI badges.
Which stated each of us was a SPASIAL AGENT.
And which we wore for our class's school duty week on top of our official class badges, because class badges were boring.
And which we, at the sight of our class teacher at the horizon, would hide behind the Geometry books, or by turning around, or by putting right hand on heat and starting to sing: "Take my heaaart! Take my souuuul! I'm so lonely at this hour, I wish for deaaaath!". Apart from the class teacher's raised eyebrows and a command to stop singing rock songs when on duty - that kept us out of trouble.
Spasial time indeed.

As for the actual series, they're still entertaining and fun, and still a slideshow of beautiful-beautiful picture of the US it is a pleasure just to look at. Some 15 years ago though, all the UFOs, abductions, special powers and paranormal activities looked rather creepy if watched after 10pm. The only way to fight off the chills was to convince yourself that all the scary abnormal stuff is only happening THERE - across the Atlantics and far far away from here :)