To all my friends, near and far, real space or online, and to any accidental reader as well, have a very happy new year! By different measures, the upcoming 2010 will be the most boring and the most exciting year for us in a decade. I wish that your year leans more towards excitement. Let it be full of joy, laughter and love, with a fair sprinkling of pure luck on top.
Happy New Year!
My oldest friends still recall that November day years ago when I came to classes dressed in a tie and a suit. I don’t know about you but at the college I attended dressing like that marked you out among the crowd of fellow students.
I explained that that happened to be my wife’s birthday and that was my way of celebrating. After all, my wife was separated from me by many miles and vast amounts of ocean water and land at the time.
I got plenty of weird looks on that day but also many respectful ones.
I’ve worked in the corporate world for my entire life and we long ago did away with suits and ties. My lovely wife joined me in the States soon after and I never felt the need again to do something as silly for her birthday.
Which does not preclude me from celebrating every occasion when she turns 18 again.
Happy Birthday Natasha! I love you!
In the fourth year of this blog’s existence, I regressed to the point of neglecting to commemorate one of my children’s birthday.
Let’s pretend that it was by design and that I wanted to conceal the fact that I am old enough to have a 15-year-old daughter…
Becky’s birthday kicked off our fall celebration season in fabulous fashion. We had a pre-birthday celebration dinner with friends, a birthday celebration breakfast with grandparents, an almost-surprise birthday celebration lunch with friends. All in all, for an occasion that we long agreed we were not going to do anything special, we had quite a few special events…
The same date also marked the anniversary of Natasha and I meeting for the first time. I have now officially known my lovely wife for exactly half for my life.
I don’t care much about Valentine’s Day. A commercially-driven imperative to inflate your expression of love for your significant other on a specific day of the year sounds like a wrong concept to me. I am not counting, but I am pretty sure that I tell Natasha that I love her every day of the year.
Natasha often accuses me of not being a romantic, but she is on-board with more or less ignoring Valentine’s Day. No romantic candle-lit dinners (although, we are going out tonight with friends), no candy, jewelry or other gift exchanges (although, she bought me a little addition to my model houses collection the other day for 20p and presented it to me as a Valentine Day’s gift). Just a regular weekend at Casa Burlak.
Some of my readers, I am sure, have an entirely different attitude towards the occasion. To all of you, have a happy Lovers’ Day!
In the end, we bought a 7-foot artificial tree this year. You may have heard loud squeals all over the place – that was Kimmy when she discovered the assembled tree ready to be decorated.
This is what it looks like now. Click to enlarge.
My lovely wife is 18 again today, prompting mass celebrations in all corners of the world. The outpouring of congratulatory notes and phone calls has been overwhelming, so a new channel in the form of the comments thread to this post had to be authorized.
The birthday girl herself plans to celebrate in style, by avoiding house chores for the duration of the day and capping the festivities with her regularly scheduled badminton practice. Various members of her immediate family have full schedules of their own, leaving the celebrant in joyful solitude throughout the day.
A glorious birthday, in other words.
I hope it is still happy, honey!
Natasha, I love you!
We’ve been together for half of our lives, and married for the last 17. Counting each year for three,1 we passed our golden anniversary a few months back. It does feel as if it has been longer, in a good sense. I can barely remember the time when I was not happily married to you.
Happy anniversary, honey! Have I told you lately that I love you!?
——
1 I am not sure if “in war, each year counts for three” translates into English correctly. Not that I’m comparing marriage to war, God forbid 
This year, Becky started celebrating her birthday a bit ahead of time, with a now commonplace invasion of her schoolmates for a sleepover. I customarily holed myself up in my study, trying in vain to ignore the squealing that permeated the house.
Today started very similarly to that famous day fourteen years ago – Natasha was making an omelette. As she likes to tell it, when she woke me up at 4 in the morning on that day and informed me that her water broke, I responded that there was plenty of time – hours and hours – before she’d be close to delivery, and that I’d rather not go to the hospital hungry.
I don’t remember it exactly that same way, but I don’t mind. Becky was born at 6:17 pm, and I spent the intervening hours pacing around the labour and delivery room in a state of heightened agitation. Never got myself another bite to eat. I could have fainted or something if not for that omelette, you know.
Anyway, Becky is a year older and more grown-up in every way. As I suppose all teenagers go, she can be both a pleasure to be around and a royal pain in the posterior. More importantly, she is growing up to be an amazing person. I hope I can take some credit for that.
Happy Birthday, Becky!
Kimmy’s heart all but melted, as we woke her up early in the morning with a chorus of “Happy Birthday to You”, accompanied by a cake with requisite candle-blowing, followed by the exciting procedure of opening presents. Just as she requested last night, before going to bed.
Happy birthday, Кузька!
My two kids have reached a combined age of 21 today, by the way, which is worth commemorating with a session of legal imbibing…
For their parents, of course. What did you think!?
If there is one day when I am wholly proud to have been born and raised in the former USSR, it is today. Anyone who shares my background has at least one person in their extended family tree who either gave their lives in the Great Patriotic War or marched to the victory with the Red Army. For that, they deserve our eternal gratitude, no less today than 63 years ago.
I can see in my mind’s eye my late grandfather, wearing his full complement of military awards, smiling on this day, and even though his generation is almost entirely gone today, I still want to join with my former compatriots in celebrating the generation of heroes and the great day of victory over fascism.
С Днём Победы!
To all my female readers: Happy International Women’s Day! Wishing you happiness, health and plenty of pleasant surprises!
(I bet that my American-born readers have not even heard that there is such as holiday).
Yes, it’s Halloween… which means that another year of married life is now in the annals of history.
Read more…
Man oh man, I am so not ready to be a father yet!
How is it that I have a teenage daughter?
Read more…
I’m back from my old life into the new one.
Jet lag is not so bad when traveling eastward, plus I uncharacteristically managed a couple of hours of shut-eye on the plane. But going to bed early today is definitely the sensible thing to do, so I’ll be brief.
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