Burlaki on the Thames

Yes, it’s Halloween… which means that another year of married life is now in the annals of history.
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My kids like to play general knowledge quiz with us. No specific rules, just various questions and answers. Since Kimmy is obviously a bit young to have answers to more advanced questions, we expressly target easier questions at her.

At some point recently, I had the bright idea to ask her who was the President of the United States. She thought for a second and pronounced: “Hamburger Lincoln“.
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So, the Red Sox won the World Series again. The next 86 years of the life of the Nation turned into just 3. Somebody, please, curse that team again, quick!

My dislike for the Sox stems not only from the fact that I support the Yankees, but also from the realization that for all their blustery talk about New York being “the Evil Empire” having accumulated all the high-priced mercenaries, it was actually Boston who had fewer homegrown regulars in recent years. In 2004, for instance, the only such player in their lineup was the altogether remarkable Trot Nixon, whereas the Yankees for years boasted the core group of Jeter, Pettitte, Posada, Willams, Rivera, just to name the obvious stars…

But coming back from 3-1 ALCS deficit to sweep the next seven games is almost as impressive as coming back from 3-0 ALCS deficit to sweep the next eight games. And that is something that I find hard imagining the Yanks of late do.

So, for the few of my acquaintances who are Sox fans, congratulations! May your twice-in-the-lifetime moment never become a third!

For the first word, take our Ruslish-fied family name. You know, the one that appears in the URL between “www” and “com”. For the second word, take a three-letter word that describes every adult’s favorite thought. You know, the one that starts with an “s” and ends with an “x”. Plug the two-word phrase into a Google search box and proceed to view the results…

Somewhere near the top of the first page, you will get a link to my report of our spring Amsterdam trip.
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From the ship - on to the ball! (those of you more apt linguistically, is there another English equivalent for с корабля на бал?) Ok, not exactly a ball, but for my taste, a good circus performance suffices…
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Our last long trip of the year has come to its end, leaving us not exactly looking forward to the cold and drab months ahead.
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Continuing with the driving license thread, Natasha finally has scheduled her practical test for sometime in November, and in the meantime, decided to take a lesson or two. The rationale is obviously not to practice driving, but to practice passing the test. At the first lesson, as soon as she pulled out, the instructor remarked that she made five mistakes in the process. Are you kidding me?! The guy is probably looking to scaring her into signing up for additional lessons. Yet, there is little doubt that an examiner during the test will be pedantic in looking for very specific behavior and actions and unreceptive to the notion of prior driving experience, so it makes sense to learn the right formula.
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We celebrated Becky’s birthday on Thursday with a family dinner, which was regularly interrupted by congratulatory phone calls. Thank you all who called or wrote, we appreciate all of the attention more than ever, and Becky certainly enjoyed being continuously congratulated. We love you all!
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Man oh man, I am so not ready to be a father yet!

How is it that I have a teenage daughter?
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I wrote in the past about tax situation that a humble expat family is stuck in. Now, there is a little twist to ours.
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Why can’t the weather always be like today? Pleasantly cool air. Pleasantly warm sun. Clear blue skies. The type of weather that literally demands that you put aside whichever chores you saddled yourself with for the day, get up from in front of the TV (or the PC, for more electronic-age-inclined) and go spend time in the fresh air.
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Socialism in action! The Royal Mail has been on strike on and off for the last couple of weeks, throwing all mail delivery into chaos.
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Another first in my blogging career - three unrelated posts in one day.

As I was sitting in my home office, typing away, I glanced out of the window and saw skies so beautiful that I had to take a picture and post it here.

Now that the Yankees have ignominiously exited the stage yet again, I cannot understand all of the hubbub surrounding potential firing of Joe Torre. While he is certainly a great person, who holds especially dear place in Natasha’s heart as the keynote speaker at her college graduation (not really! - he was totally eclipsed by Larry King!), I think that Mr Torre is, at best, an average manager, just one lucky enough to have an enormous amount of talent at his disposal for his 12-year tenure.
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Natasha posted my Bath travelog entry on Fodors and the traffic to my website immediately shot up. A little marketing never hurt anybody, I guess.

What’s rather weird, though, is that the most frequent internet search that led people to my website in the past month has been one for the word “ziraffe”, which is what this picture from our Holland trip earlier in the year used to mistakenly have in its title. The link to the picture comes as #8 for this particular Google search, even though the misspelling has long been corrected. It’s an incorrect link, too, but it still attracts quite a considerable number of people, five out of six of whom then stay to look at other pages on my site. I’ve seen enough posts of how people find my friend Brian to realize that strangers’ attraction to one’s website works in peculiar and inexplicable ways, but this is the first such experience of my own.

And now that I posted the word in this blog entry, it will surely get even more play…

Becky complained that she spent twice as much time on the bus during her class trip to France than actually touring. While I suspect that she is exaggerating, there is certainly a bit of a shortcoming with the whole day-trip to France concept: Getting to Calais takes at least two hours from your door. Add the same two hours to the return leg, and you end up with quite a chunk of time just spent getting to/from the gateway to the country… Objectively speaking, there is a limited range of what you can go for as far as a day-trip is concerned, and most of the time it involves getting up at five in the morning to make a start…
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It’s all about your mind-set. A couple of days ago, having to slalom through the obstacle course of the cars blocking my way on a roundabout, I caught myself thinking, “This is kind of fun!”… Seriously, a car that handles well gets a workout on British roads like nowhere else. When you have to change lanes, swerve about or evade traffic-calming measures every few yards or so, it can even get exhilarating…

If only there were less traffic. No matter how well your car handles, it’s all for naught when the fastest you can go is just barely fast enough to keep you awake behind the wheel. Sometimes, not even that…
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The historic town of Bath, in Southwestern England, was for quite some time on our list of prospective destinations. We finally found our way over there last weekend.
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Another day, another momentous anniversary to celebrate! Yes, exactly a year ago, I landed for good in this country that I currently call home.

Has it really been this long?
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