Category: Personal

Despite being at work all the time, and being constantly busy, I am still a human. I am social. I have a life, family, and friends. I have thoughts and experiences. Once in a while I share them, and when I do, I do so in this category. If you don’t know me personally, chances are you’ll find posts in this category particularly boring.

Back to the gym. Again.

Finally, my Christmas / New Year break is over.  The gym was closing for a couple of weeks, but, as always, I had some troubles getting back to my P.T.  The resulting two and a half month break devastated all my previous achievements…

Before I left the gym for Christmas, I weighted about 109 kilos and could run 3 kilometers for the first run, and another 1 kilometer after a short break.  Today, when I got back to the gym, I weighted an ugly 116.5 kilograms.  My running was even worse.  After half a kilometer down the way, I noticed a really old woman in black coat with a hood over her head running nearby me.  When I approached 1 kilometer, this woman picked up a really scary scythe, which was standing against the wall nearby.  At that precise moment, I decided to stop.

I went downstairs for some belly pain.  Here I managed to catch up with my previous results of 4 attempts of 30 exercises (whatever they are called), and then another 3 attempts of 10 other exercises.  I had to take longer breaks though, and it was more painful than I remember it used to be.

Going back upstairs for the second run, I felt really tired.  And noticed that the woman in black was still there, and still with the scythe in her hands.  She looked like she was waiting for someone, so I decided to skip it this time.

Overall summary: 116.5 kilograms of fat, bones, and flash.  1 kilometer jog is almost fatal.  That will need a lot of work to get back to the previous state.  And considering that the previous stage was far from perfect, it feels like there is really a lot of work ahead of me… Ouch.

Quotes from the office

There is this fun side to working in the office – you get to listen to all those small talks, little arguments and what not. Here are some quotes from the recent discussions. I’ll remove the names to protect the innocent.

– I don’t like football!
– What do you mean you don’t like football? How is that even possible for you not to like football. You do.
– No I don’t!
– Even you kid loves football. Look at his pictures, he’s always with the ball and in football clothes…
– Dude, the kid is just a couple of years old. He doesn’t know what he likes and what he doesn’t. He’ll play with whatever you throw at him…

– If I remember correctly, you were married and now you are divorced, right?
– Yes. I was married twice.
– Some people… they never learn…

– Are you going to eat with us?
– I’m on a diet.
– Again?!!
– Still…

– What are you planning to do then?
– I will be a teacher in the public school.
– Teaching what?
– Computers.
– Listen, if I will ever know that you are teaching computers in school, I’ll come over and personally kill you.
– Why? You think I am alone like this? Other teachers aren’t much better anyway.
– I don’t care. I warned you. And you know what?
– What?
– I don’t have a limit of killing just one person. If there is more like you, I’ll take care of all of you…

del.ishli.st – my wishlist is back

Long time ago I used to have a wishlist on this site.  If I remember correctly, I even had a few.  It was a rather helpful piece of information for the times when I was doing online shopping, as well as for my friends and family before the big holidays (hint: presents).

There were two problems with keeping up a wishlist.  One was rather small – people couldn’t find it easily, since it was hidden in the archives.  And one big – it was a lot of effort to keep it up-to-date.  I kept losing it myself all the time, and I was always forgetting to update it.   These two problems caused it to finally be lost in the sea of other posts on this blog, and, probably, never to be found again.

I’m glad to say though, that a better version of my wishlist is back.  It’s something that I wish I had years ago.  It’s dead simple, easy to see (no registrations required or anything of such non-sense), and it’s also extremely easy for me to keep updated.  This new wishlist is on del.ishli.st.

The name sounds good, but the link is impossible to remember, much like the original del.icio.us one.  del.ishli.st is a very simple, yet very smart way of wishlisting.  It utilizes my del.icio.us account and the “wishlist” tag, which is something very natural to use for tagging items of the wishlist.  And so that I won’t try to remember the URL, or, even worse, attempt to type it, or lose this wishlist in the history of posts once again, I decided to make a big and important link to it, at the top of the site.  Yes, that’s right, you can see it together with the rest of the main navigational menu.

February – the month of family migrations

My family is not very big.  And it’s not very mobile.  My parents are divorced and they leave in Russia.  My brother lives in Cyprus, where I stayed together with my wife and kid.  And has been so for a long time.

And suddenly, here comes the movement.  First, just before February started, Olga and Maxim went to Russia.  My mother-in-law is very sick and my wife went to stay by her side.  Then, my mother came over to Cyprus to visit us for a few days, as well as relax for some time in the mountains and take a short break from her work.  She then left back to Moscow.

But she didn’t go alone.  My brother went with her.  The guy stayed in Cyprus for a few long years, and now urgently needed to leave the island for a few days, related somehow to his paperwork.  I’m going to pick him up from the airport tomorrow.

My brother wanted to travel to Togliatti, Russia, where our dad lives.  Dad celebrated his 50th birthday recently (Happy Birthday, Pa!) and it was very unfortunately that neither I, nor my brother could attend the party.   It so happened that the planned trip to Togliatti had to be canceled – once again due to the virtues of the paperwork.  However, dad took the initiative and the train to Moscow, so that he could meet with my brother Alex even if just for a few days.  I hear that they had some really great time.

Maybe for some, this all looks like a routine. But not for me.  People in our family don’t travel all that much. (Except maybe with the exception of my mom, who moves around a few times each year.)  And during this month they all jumped up and moved somewhere.  I managed to stay so far, but the month isn’t over yet.

Weird, very weird…

Snow in Limassol

Yesterday I observed a really weird thing – snow in Limassol.  The temperature dropped down to +2 degrees Celsius, it was very windy, and it was snowing for at least two hours.  Of course, the ground is too warm for the snow to stay, but other surfaces, like, for example, my car, were covered in snow.  That was really wicked!

In my 12 years in Limassol, I’ve seen snow like only two or three times.  Previous experiences weren’t even close to yesterday’s.  They seemed more like accidents.  But yesterday … it was snow for real.