Year: 2005

On long posts

Looking at my recent posts you might be thinking something like “What’s wrong with these guy? These are like paragraphs and paragraphs of text. I can’t even be bothered to read all that crap!”. Well, if you do, I’ll tell you that I am surprised myself.

I tried to analyse this change of my writing habbits and pretty quickly I realised that it was the migration of my blogging software to WordPress that triggered that change.

As you might remember, one of my main dissatisfactions with Nucleus CMS was the editor. WordPress provides an excellent editor, which is fast, comfortable, and easily extendable (quicktags are easy to add and edit).

With editor hussle out of the way, nothing stops me from writing more, and thus I am free at expressing whatever I feel like and freeing my head from thoughts that would stay there for ages. The more I dump, the more space (or rather thinking power) I get. And the more thinking power I get, the more thoughts I get again. As you can see this is the vicious circle, that I can’t break. And even if I could, I woldn’t do so just yet.

So, for all of you out there who like short posts – my temporary appologies. I will try to put some short items here too, but they will be mostly in the Links category. That’s my educated guess. :)

P.S.: 5 paragraphs to say a simple thing… that’s graphomania or some other disorder.

Paperwork logistics

My mother-in-law is going to come to Cyprus this Sunday. She lives in a far far away town of Mezhdurechensk, which is the Russian Sybiria. In order for her to come, there is some paperwork to be done.

Firstly, she needs visa. In order to get visa she needs either to get an invitation from someone in Cyprus or she needs to buy a tourist package, which is kind of expensive and not necessary. An invitation can be send to her by anyone who is legally resides in Cyprus. That is either a local or a foreigner who has a pink slip (residential permit). Neither I, nor Olga have pink slips at this very moment, since they are being renewed, but that’s OK, since my good friend Lev is helping me with this issue. With the invitation in her hands, she needs to apply for visa in Cyprus Embassy in Moscow. It will take them a couple of days to process the application. Meanwhile, she also needs some tickets to fly in and out.

In order to minimize the organizational time and expenses of this trip, my mother is helping, who lives in Moscow.

And now for the interesting part. The logistics. The path that information travels and people involved in the process, so to speak. Olga called her mother (that is my mother-in-law) by phone and instructed her to send her papers to my mother in Moscow. Papers travelled by train. I than called my mother and she gave me all the passport details and stuff like that needed for the invitation. I than emailed these details to Lev. He downloaded the invitation form from the web, filled it in. He went to certify the invitation and than faxed it to my mother in Moscow. My mother picked up the fax and went to the Embassy to apply for visa on behalf of Olga’s mother. She also arranged for tickets.

The funny thing here is that in order for Olga’s mother to come and visit us, the only people moving around are Lev and my mother. In other words, people who won’t benefit from the trip. Olga’s mother and we didn’t have to do much except for a couple of phone calls and emails.

Also, I find it interesting how information travelled around the world. All sorts of different media were used – phone, email, web, fax, and even a train. The whole thing took about two days to complete. Now this is globalization at its best!

Day to day growth

It is really difficult to see how Maxim growth from day to day. A bit here and a bit there are unnoticable when being busy with all the baby needs. It is only when something concrete is getting measured or changed that I notice how fast he is progressing.

One of these measures is, of course, the weight. Picking Maxim up and holding him in my hands at least 10 times a day doesn’t help in noticing every gram he gains. When he gets half a kilogram in one week I can only say that I think he grew a bit. But when the same half a kilogram is measured by pediatrician, I go all “Wow!” and “Cool!”.

Today there was another noticable milestone – Pampers size. We used the last of size 2 today and went onto size 3. It seems that only yesterday we decided to upgrade from 1 to 2. But in fact it was more than two weeks ago.

Time flies and things get forgotten. This blog is an excellent memory helper. I just hope I won’t forget to blog about size 4 change, when it’ll occur.

Also, today was the first time I went for a walk with Maxim. Until today he was outside with me only when on a trip to doctor’s office or back from there. He was outside without me. That was when his grandma was here. She used to walk him every day. After she left, all outside walking Maxim was getting included few hours of sleep on the balcony. But today it happened. He and I alone. We were walking for about half an hour only. Just to the bakery and back, in a very slow motion.

Other fathers were telling me that the first walk will feel wierd. Well, it was to a certain degree. I mean I am definetely not used to walking around with the cradle and the sleeping baby in it. Am I holding it right? Where is the wind coming from? Is that sun shines straight to his eye? Is he sleeping? What if he will ask me for food? What if a crazy car comes from around the corner? These were the things running through my mind. Fortunately, nothing extraordinary happenned. We just walked down the street about one block, bought some bread, and returned home. Maxim slept through most of the walk like suggesting that I should do this more often. Probably I should. Probably I will.