Another habit that needs to be eliminated:

Thinking too much into things.

Was hesitating to check something out online. Wasn't even sure what I will see or read, but had a feeling that might throw me off balance for a short while. Eventually, I decided that whatever I see - I can always use as my own motivation, rather than getting emotional.

In reality, what I saw (and read) made my day; showed me I've been on the right track all along and must be doing much better than I expected. Now all these "what ifs" look ridiculous.  I am just happy this reminder to stay reasonable and focused went off in an insignificant situation. There may be bigger opportunities coming up...

Before Monday even comes, my to-do list for the week stretches Monday through Friday.

And every line of every date's space is filled; does not matter if I break down appointments and tasks by timeframes, or group them into blocks. Usually both :)

Today, closer to afternoon, a feeling of helplessness stoke me again. My agenda's been filled with stuff to do for weeks now, and for every item I cross off, two new are to be added to the list. And what's worse - none of the items that I do not consider routine did not yield any significant results or life improvements in the past few months! Keep reminding myself that many important things just take time to happen. But then I glance at the achievers that I used to look up to - and it seems that they all are shaping their lives exactly the way they want them to be and not breaking a sweat, while I'm pretty much  running around in circles. It's mid-March and none of my 20 goals for the year is close to completion. Even the reading goal is at 7% - what a joke...

And then having thought all this over, I suddenly got another strong feeling arising: "Enough!".
I could live this life for months, and nothing would change, but...
Enough!

In the next several hours I cleaned up the whole house and did the laundry, ordered the course free trial, put old stuff for sale on Craigslist, sent the Baby Shower invites and started planning the menu and decor, after some totally fruitless research on Glion's website - emailed the university and requested transcripts, cancelled the old credit cards with the clothes stores, cooked dinner and went through the pile of mail pinned to the kitchen bulletin board, and worked out some other unfinished business.
Felt stronger.
With some order around and within, it's time to think over a strategy to better leverage all the time, knowledge and energy I have. The way things used to work do not seem to fit my life goals anymore  :)

Finally. It's spring.

 It's about time this long uncomfortable winter was over.

What's good about being 6 months postpartum - is starting to feel human again. Change of the seasons might have something to do with that too, but I prefer to blame the hormones for the veil of dumbness over my brain for the past half a year, as well as for the behaviour and thinking pattern that were not quite... typical of me :)

I like the motherhood experience. I like the actual idea of motherhood: it shows you your strengths and weaknesses without sugar coating, makes you set your priorities straight, poses a lot of new questions and challenges, but may also help work out some of the old ones. Not to mention a booster in time management and patience ( yes, the latter is especially fun when being hormonal :) ).
Motherhood does not allow you to give in in certain moments of your life - there are pros and cons to that.

Now that I feel like I'm being more objective, reasonable and adequate  :)  I would say that the experience of being pregnant, having a baby and bringing him up for the first 6 months did make me stronger, smarter and wiser. I know it won't really get easier   unless I actually get a full time family in town  but I do already see it work as an upgrade for myself in many ways.

Geopolitics statistics :) countries visited by 2013

visited 14 states (6.22%)
Create your own visited map of The World or jurisdische vertaling duits?

For the past few weeks

I've been waking up in the morning and Couldn't understand: who I am, where I am, what day of the week it is, where it is that I am supposed to go now, and what I am supposed to do...

The Big Read by BBC

http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/bigread/top200.shtml

1. The Lord of the Rings, JRR Tolkien
2. Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
3. His Dark Materials, Philip Pullman
4. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
5. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, JK Rowling
6. To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
7. Winnie the Pooh, AA Milne
8. Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell
9. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, CS Lewis
10. Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë
11. Catch-22, Joseph Heller
12. Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë
13. Birdsong, Sebastian Faulks
14. Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier
15. The Catcher in the Rye, JD Salinger
16. The Wind in the Willows, Kenneth Grahame
17. Great Expectations, Charles Dickens
18. Little Women, Louisa May Alcott
19. Captain Corelli's Mandolin, Louis de Bernieres
20. War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy
21. Gone with the Wind, Margaret Mitchell
22. Harry Potter And The Philosopher's Stone, JK Rowling
23. Harry Potter And The Chamber Of Secrets, JK Rowling
24. Harry Potter And The Prisoner Of Azkaban, JK Rowling
25. The Hobbit, JRR Tolkien
26. Tess Of The D'Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy
27. Middlemarch, George Eliot
28. A Prayer For Owen Meany, John Irving
29. The Grapes Of Wrath, John Steinbeck
30. Alice's Adventures In Wonderland, Lewis Carroll
31. The Story Of Tracy Beaker, Jacqueline Wilson
32. One Hundred Years Of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez
33. The Pillars Of The Earth, Ken Follett
34. David Copperfield, Charles Dickens
35. Charlie And The Chocolate Factory, Roald Dahl
36. Treasure Island, Robert Louis Stevenson
37. A Town Like Alice, Nevil Shute
38. Persuasion, Jane Austen
39. Dune, Frank Herbert
40. Emma, Jane Austen
41. Anne Of Green Gables, LM Montgomery
42. Watership Down, Richard Adams
43. The Great Gatsby, F Scott Fitzgerald
44. The Count Of Monte Cristo, Alexandre Dumas
45. Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh
46. Animal Farm, George Orwell
47. A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens
48. Far From The Madding Crowd, Thomas Hardy
49. Goodnight Mister Tom, Michelle Magorian
50. The Shell Seekers, Rosamunde Pilcher
51. The Secret Garden, Frances Hodgson Burnett
52. Of Mice And Men, John Steinbeck
53. The Stand, Stephen King
54. Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy
55. A Suitable Boy, Vikram Seth
56. The BFG, Roald Dahl
57. Swallows And Amazons, Arthur Ransome
58. Black Beauty, Anna Sewell
59. Artemis Fowl, Eoin Colfer
60. Crime And Punishment, Fyodor Dostoyevsky
61. Noughts And Crosses, Malorie Blackman
62. Memoirs Of A Geisha, Arthur Golden
63. A Tale Of Two Cities, Charles Dickens
64. The Thorn Birds, Colleen McCollough
65. Mort, Terry Pratchett
66. The Magic Faraway Tree, Enid Blyton
67. The Magus, John Fowles
68. Good Omens, Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman
69. Guards! Guards!, Terry Pratchett
70. Lord Of The Flies, William Golding
71. Perfume, Patrick Süskind
72. The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, Robert Tressell
73. Night Watch, Terry Pratchett
74. Matilda, Roald Dahl
75. Bridget Jones's Diary, Helen Fielding
76. The Secret History, Donna Tartt
77. The Woman In White, Wilkie Collins
78. Ulysses, James Joyce
79. Bleak House, Charles Dickens
80. Double Act, Jacqueline Wilson
81. The Twits, Roald Dahl
82. I Capture The Castle, Dodie Smith
83. Holes, Louis Sachar
84. Gormenghast, Mervyn Peake
85. The God Of Small Things, Arundhati Roy
86. Vicky Angel, Jacqueline Wilson
87. Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
88. Cold Comfort Farm, Stella Gibbons
89. Magician, Raymond E Feist
90. On The Road, Jack Kerouac
91. The Godfather, Mario Puzo
92. The Clan Of The Cave Bear, Jean M Auel
93. The Colour Of Magic, Terry Pratchett
94. The Alchemist, Paulo Coelho
95. Katherine, Anya Seton
96. Kane And Abel, Jeffrey Archer
97. Love In The Time Of Cholera, Gabriel García Márquez
98. Girls In Love, Jacqueline Wilson
99. The Princess Diaries, Meg Cabot
100. Midnight's Children, Salman Rushdie

Over 7 mln views on Youtube...

 

Somebody just had to come up with this!

 

The funniest part though is how quickly the popular song was picked up and played around with close to November 6 :

Of course Republicans could not have leaft this unanswered!

And next weekend we're going to a Gangnam Style dance Flash Mob in Washington Park =)

It was an interesting and intense week

Presentation of management consulting groups  - definitely broadening horizons of my understanding of the industry. Interesting how companies being together in the same service fields have quite different vision on their perfect hires and yet same vision of the result they want to achieve. Some of the presenting managers are easy going and confident and look for hard working and innovative graduates, others - are pushy and focus on perfectionism, GPA scores and other qualities that usually define a Type-A worker easy to manipulate :) Yet - the consulting services, tactics and goals are similar.

IBC soiree rocked as always. Interesting acquaintances, great atmosphere, mind-challenging topic for conversation. God bless this club that clears up the despair and stupidity buildup from my brain in a few hours!

Midway into my last semester it turned out a graphic calculator is required for my Senior level Financial class. For just one topic.  Last and only time I used it - was for my Calculus class. And I sold it right after.

Von Zobel is done with his lasik. Knocking on the wood and feeling proud for this guy!
Thanks to him we now have our fridge full of super tasty food! :)

Dad... might be able to get out of that Forge Plant swamp eventually. Knocking on the wood for him as well.

Certain things just started to fall back into place.

It's past midnight

and I am watching a video in Thai on Youtube on how to use TI BA II Plus to calculate MIRR.

.... Just For my information  - years later - on how I got to such a life...

Woke up
Drove to work
Worked
Drove to school
Sat through two classes
Drove home
Cooked
Ate
Worked out
Took a shower
Worked again
Started a group project
Crawled to bed lighting up my way to bedroom with a cell phone
Slept.


*****

They say it's labor that turned ape into a human... I think labor has just the opposite effect on me! ;)

In the light of recent visit to USCIS

I remembered how I stopped at their office a couple of months earlier to drop off some pictures and documents.

It was a Monday morning, and apart from one applicant of African origin there was a European looking couple with 2 daughters before me in the wait line. The couple had a French accept and in an upset tone were explaining to the officer why they exceeded the length of their stay per their visas. The officer was explaining them their two options - both in accordance with V&I legislation and by the upset voice and long pauses of the man I could tell he was not quite happy of losing the opportunity of getting entrance visas to the US. And it did sound like their visas applications might be denied forever now...

The little girls behind my back were reading a book in French, sharing the replicas of the characters and making up details and stories about them. That was too cute and they had no clue what was going on. Their parents sounded even more upset and demanding; as if in disbelief that they have to cope with the rules, and no exception can be made for them.

I heard all these voices in my both ears and ... could not help smiling! Wondering what their nationality was, I thought that life is not always black and white, and that one can never rely on the immunity of what is perceived to be widely-recognized and generally accepted characteristics. And then I also thought that maybe life is not so unfair after all :)

UCSIC is definitely was the best investment in my life! =)

*** Feel free like a bird and - hurray!!

Lipetsk saw me in

with abundant greenery, heavy heat and gloomy faces. From time to time it is less and less like the town I knew and grew up in.

Every time I come there I feel like the place got more crowded and stuffy. People in the streets in mid-Summer heat: pressed down. Humid, sticky heat. Heavy air.  Few teens and kids: are they all in summer camps? Are they not let out in the heat?

 More cars on the road, more trafic jams,  but few parking spaces. The first floors of houses are made into grocery and clothes stores, hair salons, notaries, watch and shoe repair... Shops are everywhere. You'd think everyone's in retail and sales.

Ads painted right on the pavement - "Eat Sushi at Home" and - a phone number. Men and women handing around in parks at night. Beer in bottle. Laughter, music, kids, dogs. The contrast between women 35 and under and over 35 - is too obvious, but I could not describe or explain it if I had to. Maybe it's all about self-perception and expectations and perspecives for the remainder of your life based on achievements and social status? And looks?..

It's amazing how many clothes stores are now in Lipetsk. Good style, good quality, higher prices - that I got used to in...   the past years.

In my Maternal Granmother's courtyard the pavement is ruined, big wholes in the asphalt and no benches to sit on. Iron entrance doors with codes. The Chestnut tree outside Granny's window grew huge; a shield against summer sun.

Sokol - looks and feels like Costa-Rica: incredibly green, hot and casual. The park became jungles... Houses are well painter from front sides with paint cracking and chipping off at the back side.
Paternal Ganny and Grandpa's courtyard is filled with cats and pigeons. Holes in pavement and slabs are crushing. Granny and Grandpa's birch grew tall and... branchy. Older women occupy the benches outside and just like 1.5 decade ago look at me with curiosity. Granny never had time to sit outside with them, neither does she have time now. Grandpa has not been outside in months.

"Stolpovskiy is a goat" read garages nearby. Ha! Someone got angry with Uncle but is feeling powerless ? Politics :)  He is starting up a new project - Sokol district got a new, clean, well equipped and professionally staffed medical center. With the remaining space around building wisely made into parking spaces :)

What does it mean when you meet people you have not seen in years, some for just a couple years, and some - in about 7 years - and they do not ask you questions, and do not tell you anything about their lives? And behave so naturally as if you just left yesterday?

Doctors and clinics - make me feel like a cripple who won't live past 40. Because:  *fill in with a long list of symptoms * . Oh, this long-forgotten feeling.

Dogs barking at night. I am so knocked out by day's marathons in the heat I sleep right through.

The river is monopolized by motorboats. Loud and stinky. You have to pick the swimming area just right - so you are far enough from the shore with silt, shells and roots of the water plants and not too close to the middle of the river where a drunk or careless driver of a motorboat can run you over.

Did not make it to Rechnoe garden. Maybe it's best to keep it in my memory as it used to be?

Dad's worried and offering help. He and Angelina never slow down. They have a whole garden with greenhouses. Fresh tomatoes and cucumbers for breakfast every day. Some special cheesecake bars from Voronezh :)

Prices kill me. Economical natural selection in action...

The shelves in the office in Dad;s house are full of books. And foreign language study books and tapes. Dad is hooked up on cosy, good feel comedies. I feel him.

Watermelons are sold right from big trucks parked along the freeways. Friends are giggling: "Only on August 2 you can't buy a watermelon. No, you just try to explain to somebody from abroad why on August 2nd you can't buy a watermelon anywhere in Russia! Who can figure that out?!"
A somewhat  sadistic joke. Hmm.

Never made it to the forest. I wonder what it looks like now. Will preserve this for my next trip and conserve this piece of the past together with my other souvenirs...

It's the beginning of the end.

My brain does not cooperate.

Sometimes morning news

can change in a split second a thought "I made a mistake" to a thought "Whatever. At least I have time to set things right".