If there's only one good thing about being a witness to a nasty online fight

between a group of... women who howl about all the difficulties of being a women in the modern world and a group of women and men who push back with "oh, why being so negative?" and "let me just tell you about all the problems men have" respectively - it's the happy realization on how lucky I am not to think in such terms and not to live in a world where there is always some fat bully above me just waiting for the next chance to ruin my life.

Not that I live in the perfect world of sunshine, rainbows, puppies, zero gender pay gap and adequate maternity support - I have had my experience with job loss following having a child, being pushed around by male colleagues and managers who did not know what was going on in the department close to how well I knew it (parce que c'est il qui "porte le cravate" (c) ), was approached with random offers of sex by random men and was denied a bank account opening and apartment rental... no, wait, the last two actually occurred due to my origin, not gender :)  But I absolutely can not understand how bashing men online for something they screwed up years ago can help improve somebody's life. And having a thread of dozens of comments where anyone is trying to out-misery everybody else with her own miserable experience indicates there's clearly something more than mere venting going on. Men can never understand us because they don't get pregnant, give birth or "even bleed every month" <sic>. Right. How much more can this fact ruin your life?

I can handle the feeling of "life is not fair" coming around every couple of months and always being replaced by the feeling of  "I'ma show you how great I am"(c), but I can't possibly imagine living 24/7,  year after year feeling insignificant, misunderstood, ignored, abused, used... Growing this feeling inside me, nurturing it, giving in to it...  I wouldn't be able to.

5 am. Dinning room.

It's chilly in the house and the entire dining table is covered with kinetic sand and molds, colouring books and pencils. The birds outside are just starting to go crazy, and I have a huge mug of coffee and hope I won't wake anybody  up  with the sound of keystrokes.

I have - again - hit the "no time to do it all" wall. Every so often I start to realize at the back of my head I start to run out of resources - time and energy. It obviously is cyclical although not periodical or proportional to the amount of work complete - so hard  to predict when it will happen next, and at what point exactly and what projects will affect.

The last exam is coming up - and this time I'm glad I allocated 1 week more for preparation, than for REG. I'm half way through the section and not only I can't memorize all the rules and regulations for every single audit situation for Issuers and Non-issuers... I can't even always soak up the logic behind this and constructively organize the principles in my mind, or draw the pictures to enhance mnemonics (by now I've used Castro doing a presentation for a group of retirees, Snowden abandoning his citizenship, the monuments of Washington DC, terrorists targeting a group of Japanese tourists in Paris... but I feel I'll have to get really creative with the AUD section!), or -bad enough - even understand the meaning of a homework question sometimes!

Every morning starts with a 5K followed by abs exercises. Every morning as I step on the treadmill I keep telling I have to be super careful today not to have an accident by losing balance and falling down on treadmill, or falling asleep behind the wheel, or poisoning myself on caffeine, or smashing into something while trying to attend to both demanding boys at the same time, or just giving up and falling my face down into a frying pan while cooking dinner.

And then there's a deadline for 2 articles coming up. And so many things to be completed and arranged before mid-June. Just in case I ever feel nostalgic about this time in my life: I know long and hard period of growth always precedes a big growth spurt, and judging by all I'm into right now... well, I can't wait to see what the next level I'll get to will be like!

Adding a stack of those to my wishlist

 

April. Year 2016.

Not enough time. Days are crumpled, rushed, turned inside out and at the same time each following day is the perfect copy of the preceding one.
I will soon start to recognize all bums between Capitol Hill and Colorado Secretary of State's Office. Next time I come to notarize another document I will be at risk of being hit in the heat with the Notary's stamp.
BEC section is not that challenging when you look at the content, but not that easy when you look at the amount of random information to memorize. It does give an impression of a less complicated FAR part.

Grandma N. died. Just between me typing in guilt, panic and anger to my cousin, trying to explain that I can't enter the country now, and me trying to find a way to get some sort of an expedited emergency visa as an exception - she did not make it. It can probably be called one of those cases when death is more of a mercy than being sustained in such sick and miserable condition for much longer, but I still can't cope with the thought. It was not fair she ended up in such a mental and physical state to begin with; and it was not right I couldn't have done more.
Thoughts come and go: I'll never be able to take Chinchillas to see her, I'll never buy her a bag of her favourite cottage cheese pastries and salted red fish ever again, I have never told her I have read Martin Eden - she was always too exhausted to talk about something other than day-to-day stuff and by the end could barely hear and understand me - and I'll never be able to discuss this book with her.

Granny, I do hope that in your next life, at the same age as now when you've ended up in bed for weeks, you'll be able to put on a beige hat with tiny forget-me-nots on the side, put on bright lipstick, get into your red Renault Clio with two of your best girlfriends and drive away from... Utrecht towards Barcelona, laughing and singing with the windows rolled down all the way.

The extreme will and inner strength defined.

1. Meeting a woman at a playground who says her family is with the Church of Mormons, introducing her to my... gypsy past and hearing "Oh! My cousin was just sent on a mission to this city in Russia... Vla-di-vos-tok!". 
2. And upon hearing this - forbidding myself to make Uganda jokes.
3. Walking away from the playground without making a single Uganda joke or reference.

The 3-4 exam hours are always the most exhausting ones.

While at the computer I never feel tired (except for my eyes that dry and hurt), but once I'm out of the test center I'm ready to collapse. What's funny is that despite how many times I've been to this test center location, I always use navigator. The first time I came here was in 2008, and even now every single time I come here I can't remember the trip to the center or back.

Meanwhile... it was time to think what to do with the remaining time, and as NASBA seems to have extended this testing window by 10 days, I thought it was a sign and scheduled 2 exams back to back. So me.
Now I've 1 month (less actually) to study for the next exam, and a few days more than 1 month - to study for the last one. One final stretch...

Apart from that, I managed to make another donation with Bonfils (Oh, God of Taxation and Litigation, take my blood sacrifice!...)  and even replace jeans before the fabrics became so worn down near the seams they would fall off me. By the way, Bonfils included new questions about Zika virus in their questionnaire. Big deal it is. Scary shit.

Now, taking a deep breath and... getting through the next 2 months to live happily ever after.

March. Year 2016.

Night. The 9 month old wakes up at 1 in the morning. Then at 3. Then around 4.30 and refuses to go back to bed on his own. He's teething and miserable and the only way he calms down and snoozes is if I hold him tight and close to my body, with his head slightly elevated. Von Zobel needs some sleep- it's tax season and he works on Saturdays - so I swirl myself into a pretzel-asana in the chair, manage to fix the iPad on the chair arm with my right knee, so I can flip through it with my left hand, so I can hold the baby on my right shoulder-elbow-side, and lean in such a way so that in the next two hours I do not accidentally fall asleep myself and wake him up.

Morning. Following a large breakfast of fried eggs (aka OVAL! - Chinchilla Sr) with onion and turkey breast, bread and fruit,  and weekly call-around for grandparents and grand-grannies chinchillas demand entertainment. We walk to the remote playground, the Vice-president of our house riding in a sport stroller, the president - walking along upset for not being allowed to take his bicycle, tricycle or a van with him. I really hope that on the playground I can exhaust both of them and get some study time during their long nap.

Afternoon. The long walk brought Chinchillas some very good appetite, but - alas! - no sleepiness. Chinchilla Jr. skipped the morning nap altogether, and is now misanthropic and miserable. I spend another 30 minutes with him in my arms before he finally falls asleep, still jerking in sleep from my slightest movement while I try to put him in bed. Meanwhile Chinchilla Sr has already sung all his lullabies to himself, dropped out all his books from the bed and is now standing in bed demanding bathroom break. Ok, looks like he needed one. I put him back in bed hoping he can nap now. Go back to my bedroom as he continues to mumble and whine. Before I complete my first testlet though I hear him scream at the top of his lungs, rush to his room and find him on the floor by his bed. That's the first time ever he fell out of his bed. His screaming wakes up Chill Jr.

Evening. Chinchillas are exhausted, feeding or bathing them becomes a challenge. Junior gets a portion of Tylenol, I keep my fingers crossed that it works for him better than last night (when nothing worked at all). Takes some time to put him to sleep. Takes some time to put Chill Senior to bed - he can't go on, but is upset on the actual fact of being put to bed; however he seems to have passed out a minute after I closed the door of his room behind me.
I can come back to my testlet now.

Night. Sometime between passing out as soon as my head touches the pillow and Chinchilla senior waking me up at 5 again for a drink of milk, I find myself at a strange place. More like an ugly huge arena with an ugly outdated amusement park inside, and grey tall ugly Soviet-style houses with dark windows behind its walls. I'm with a group of people, knowing I need to get out of this place, because I need to get to my exam, but no one has any idea where the exit is. As we wander around the non-working rides, old garages and some other weird constructions an announcement is made that there're terrorists inside with us, getting ready to blow up this whole place very soon. Of course, I have to make it to the exam and other have some.. plans for the rest of their lives, so we divide ourselves and start running and searching for terrorists trying to catch them.
El sueño de la razón produce monstrous (c). Again :)

Love the exam multiple-choice questions that are available on... different sources:

 

That would be a challenging question on the exam. Reasonably foreseeable, huh?

 

 

 

And this sounds somewhat outdated :) I wonder when the questions were last updated...

A day ago I got dragged into a quick online comment exchange with two young ladies on - and that's scary - a woman's determinism and purpose in life. Other people's ideas on what a woman's life should be like and what her - thus mine - purpose in life should be, do occasionally reach me, but apparently last time they did was a while ago and reading this again yesterday soured my day a little.
The girls jumped in to reply to one of my comments on the importance of self-sufficiency and self-reliance as woman becomes mother, wrote a few long comments full of irrelevant thoughts, random accusations of being a selfish money-loving child-neglecting control-freak (not necessarily in this order!), threw in a couple of examples that would prove my point rather than theirs, and continued to rant about the outrageousness of women like me long after I retired from the conversation :)

Every time I have somebody approach me with a persistent advice on how I should immediately change my life so my family benefits from it, I facepalm myself.  In my mind, if it is absolutely necessary that I do not appear rude. And while on the World Wide Web it is easier to ignore a well-wishing comment than to start explaining my views to every random person, the though of how many of such people are out there makes me want to facepalm myself anyway.

I get quite emotional over the idea that being a wife and mother  (TM) - means devoting all your life to the needs of your family - is the only true and natural way for a woman to live her life. Has it been perfectly natural for women of the past few centuries to take full and complete care of their babies from birth to age 3? Absolutely! I can easily picture a peasant girl in her late teens, who delivers a baby in Western Europe some 300 years ago and receives a paid maternity leave right away! Or a female factory worker a century and a half ago, a single mother with no relatives in town, who is of course entitled for maternity benefits form both the government and the plant she works at so she could stay home with her baby, and take care of him. Yep, for the next 3 years! Or - on the other hand - a Victorian upper middle class mother would surely stay with her baby daughter day and night, and as her daughter grows up - her mother would be able to cook meals for her from the scratch, go for walks with her, teach her painting, French, horseback riding, dancing, good manner and read her books  - all by herself, of course! Nothing more natural than the history of mothers being attached to their babies from birth until and being multi-functional at all times.

Another concept I could never fully embrace is - what exactly a mother with no life of her own can pass on to her kids? Being a stay at home Mom of 4 kids looks great on Instagram , but what if it did happen to me and I ended in a... career, social and personal interest isolation for a while - what would I be able to teach my kids about the world around, about problem solving and importance of social bonds forming? How would I be able to train them on the skills I no longer had myself? How would I be able to tell them right from wrong in their teenage years if hadn't expressed my own opinion for years, teach them to persist in getting what they want if I forgot what it means to stand my ground, show them the benefit of creative thinking when I life in a Groundhog's day, advise on applying their skills and knowledge if I never used what I had studied in University? And - that's irrelevant to me now, but what if I had a daughter? What behavioral model would she soak up watching me?

Lucky are those women who get all the support from  their family, friends and peers to continue moving in the direction that suits them best. Otherwise, making yourself ignore dozens of discouraging and disorienting voices coming from all around may eat up a good portion of the energy that could otherwise be spent on just moving ahead quicker.

Love cleaning my laptop.

Turns out I had quite a buildup of PDF presentations dated almost a decade ago of various beautiful cities and places of out planet to visit - quite a few of which I've already visited (hello, proper goal setting!), PDF presentations received from someone full of "words of wisdom" that have never really been applicable to me, nor will they in the near future (esp. in the light of recent... life philosophy change), a bunch New Year and Birthday wishes (I've no idea who wrote some of those, and can't recognize the style), a stack of documents with some interesting facts or words (which are always so hard to get rid of... esp. for a girl who grew up reading encyclopedias for fun).

A special type of importance for me once must have been:

•  a presentation full of Geneva pictures (all of them apparently taking in a rush, and looking ridiculous now - it's easier to go to Geneva again some time soon and take some nice and meaningful pictures!),
• a study of... Ancient Egyptian (ok, I'm still an Egyptologist deep down my heart. Had to keep this one),
• a document titled "URGENT - to finish" - completely blank inside :)  (I guess I should have finished URGENTLY when I had a clue what it was about. Or at least started it :) )

Some documents, often coming from a folder with a proper title Pubelle are even amusing:

So, what does work for time management?

So much for being... a  bit less than tolerant to people who waste time :)  Now that my life is quite unpredictable - or let's refer to things by their names - my life is in nearly complete chaos - the mindset that has been helping me recently to squeeze out more from the 24 hours is thinking about the next task while still completing the current one.

This does not necessarily relate to the work or study projects where complete concentration is required, in fact, I'd rather allot some time blocks for anything that would require me to "dive in" and then not be interrupted for anything else. But when moving through routine tasks, running errands, following up with people and getting from one place to another it helps immensely not to let myself get suck in the present moment. Having started with an Item #1 on my list that does not require my full 100% focus, I start thinking about Item#2 - the next thing I should be doing or the next place I should be at, also finding the best way to get through the next thing quicker and move on to Item #3 etc. The next few items on the to-do list are thus rolling over constantly in my head, reminding me of all the upcoming deadlines and pushing me to move on quicker. The second benefit of this method is that it helps perfecting the execution  since, as I think about the next Items on my list over and over again, I find better ways to approach them, combine similar tasks and do them all at once, or get rid of some steps of a big project altogether.

What are the cons of this approach? Pretty much that while it is very pro-active in execution, it requires prior planning. Before I start mapping out in my head in 20minutes, and in another 20minutes, I need a clear list of all 7 places I need to stop by/visit - all on paper, any notes to be taken into consideration about them - all on paper. Any project should be penciled down step by step, and should circumstances change or another person get involved - it should all be added to the original plan before any actions on the amended plan are taken. Sometimes a to-do item or a small project comes up and I write it down without a slightest idea of how to approach it or when to find time for it - and it will get done timely.

Sound easy and banal? It is. Plain pen and paper, and lots of self-discipline and thinking outside the box. But just as efficient given where I am in my life now. I keep reminding myself that as soon as I reach all my biggest life goals I will definitely hire a PA :)

Just being curious.

Where do all these people around me get their time from?

I've never been jealous in my life, but if I were, I would have wished to become one of those people who seem to be at no rush regardless of where they are. Slowly walking down the hall of a Fitness Center, taking their sweet time to take a right turn on an absolutely empty road, walking at a speed of 10 steps a minute at Costco and as if that wasn't enough - stopping to taste each free sample available.

I can't imagine what life with no deadlines feels like. Still just as fulfilling as the one where you dodge around all the time?  Does not being in a rush help at all? Does speeding up through the day make any difference?

I really think one day I should try - for a change - walking sloooowly with a couple of friends of mine towards the gym exit, all three of us in one line in a narrow corridor. Preferably with strollers. Even better - chatting in a high pitched voice to completely block out the steps of the people behind and those excusing themselves trying to pass. The time when I split thinking and doing into two separate processes with two separate timeframes for each - will come! :)  I will be watching peacefully people half-stuck in a Costco egg fridge for more than a minute without looking at the fridge door with homicidal urges.

But today is the one extra day I got this year, - to be spent on achieving something important or catching up. And I neither caught up, nor moved ahead. I still wasted a lot of time dodging around and am still very far behind. All this is very, very personal of course.

Some doctors just know their stuff.

My new ob/gyn is prescribing me a new type of oral contraceptive ("just in case"), and meanwhile is refreshing my memory on its proper use (apparently, again, "just in case"):

-It's important that you take the pill every day...
-Yep.
-... preferably- at the same time every day.
-Yep.
-For example, every evening at dinner.
-Yep.
-So it's best for you to keep the pack in the kitchen: when you cook dinner, and the kids are tired, running around and screaming, and throwing tantrums - you think "Please, God, don't let me have any more kids!", and then you remember to take your pill!

...Too bad she switched to the next subject before I could ask her how on Earth she knew...

My pre-Birthday Grand cleen up brought me 3 new online points of inspiration within a few days!

In particular, 2 blogs and 1 website/Facebook group =)

A few weeks before that I finally put together for myself the reason I would never become a professional blogger or, for this matter, an Instagram-mer (although the feeling that there is something wrong with posting your thoughts and pictures full time had been flown around me for a while). I wouldn't be able to commit to religious posting of sheets of text or pictures online because at some point I would also have to commit to sticking to a certain personality I had developed through my blog and used most often. And my Alter-Ego strongly objects this idea. I would have to translate everything I do, have or feel into the realm of the person my readers or viewers are already familiar with and expect me to be. But at some point the need to constantly these expectation would ruin the genuinely of my self-expression and hold me back on all those ways I want to show my growth, changes and development throughout life.

I notice it more and more often, when bloggers try to maintain not just their writing style, but their life-style and personality so hard - the things they write about finally stop making sense. It shows when bloggers try to appear casual and care-free, positive head to toes, and projecting love and acceptance to everything around, and suddenly switching to depressed wishing he wasn't so lonely and life wasn't so tough - nearly in every other post.

It pops up when a "professional mother" of 5, who has a whole mosaic of Instagram to prove a happy mommy's life with 5 kids born 2 years apart and all doing distance learning at home is possible, with a working husband, without a nanny (ever), a housekeeper, or any other help - forgets herself and starts posting pictures of her with her mother, who's staying over for a couple of months...  Followed by series of pictures of her kids playing with her in-laws, who apparently, flew in right after to take over after her mom...  Topped by a picture of her with a stroller and a list of her time management secrets, where a super-secret tactics of "Plan everything in advance" is followed by an unthinkable "Delegate! My husband takes 1 full day off work every week to take the kids to a park or playground, so I can have some me-time or meet with girlfriends for coffee."  Closing curtain...

This nowadays fashion for being happy and absolutely self-sufficient tends to push people to extremes, which eventually come up as fake and completely not belonging to lives of people with the strengths, values or abilities they claim to have. Or, as one of my Regulation course instructors says, - "When you see an answer that starts with All, Always, Never, Only, Must - it is almost always a false answer". :)

Anyway... The 2 blogs I stumbled upon (or maybe they found me once I was ready and had space for them) - proved to be extremely useful so far, filled less with claims of the writer's ability of Having-It-All in the Land of Rainbows and Unicorns, and more - with precise examples of how they coped with every complex situation and life challenge using resources they had. Some wisdom for me to soak up during my 2am nursing sessions :)

Chinchilla Sr. & I put a start to library classes.

I finally decided to give a try to the kids' story reading in Russian session, and it went way above my expectations!
Instead of having a meeting room full of parents and kids sitting on chairs and listening to a story all the way in the back in complete silence (Dr. Chill. Sitting still. In complete silence. Ha!) we found a small group of toddlers of same age (3 out or 4 were also 2.5 year olds), hanging around a blanket, listening to  "teacher" Librarian and making all sorts of random noises. Apparently we were in some extra luck that morning, because no one of the kids really spoke, so we were all on the same level of stubbornness.

The "teacher" started over by asking the kids their names and ages (to be shown on fingers), and then to point at their ears-noses-eyes-teeth-necks, and go through some more physical, mental and vocal stretching before getting on to the actual story reading. The story du jour was a tale of Masha I Medved', in a beautiful book with picture cut outs on the page, and cardboard figures of the characters to go with. The kids were kept engaged on every page of the story:

- Once upon a time there were... (The teacher shows the cardboard figures of the Old Man and an Old Woman).
- A  Grandpa and Grandma! (the dialog was conducted with the oldest boy in the group who actually did talk).
- That's right! Now raise hands those of you who have a Grandma and a Grandpa!
- ... (moms, me included, raise hands of their lucky kids)
- That's great! Now, for your grandparents you are a... (facing a boy)
- ... eeeh.... Vnuk!
- That's right! And you would be... (facing girls). You are Vnuchka (since girls did not reply). And you are, for your grandparents... (facing Chill)
- Ai-ai!! (*the curtain falls*)

The story was followed by taking pictures in a Hoberman Sphere, playing dominoes and finding animals on a farm poster. Dr. Chill was multi-tasking by running around from one protected electrical outlet to another and opening and closing the covers on them, one at a time. Finally, the teacher said she had something for this young engineer  and took out a whole... tool box full of plastic tools!
- Sweet! - Said Dr. Chill... in a non-verbal way, grabbed a screwdriver, run to the wall and stuck it in the electric outlet.

...For the next weekend, I've been told to bring my youngest one along too.