I’d like to think that I am long past having to come up with excuses for the absence of any blogging activity. I simply ignore the blog these days when I’m too busy. And I am very busy. Employment-related busy-ness aside, we are currently entertaining house-guests who’ve never been to…
Kept assembling the various piece of furniture that the wife had bought. Wrote checks for ungodly sums of money to various home service providers. Discovered a couple of inevitable future expenses related to the house equipment and services. Cleaned the pool, worked on the backyard, drove back and forth for…
Even if the assembly manual for a fairly complicated contraption explicitly states that two people are needed to successfully complete the work, a determined and resourceful individual should be able to come up with ways of achieving the desired end result all by himself. If said individual has a history…
Becky has recently taken to riding her bike around the neighborhood. Weather being what it’s been the last few days, she obviously doesn’t wear track-suits on her rides. We live about half a mile away from a synagogue. There are some people who drive to services there, but many people…
Hello, my name is Ilya and for a pretty smart guy I must be the stupidest homeowner in the Western Hemisphere. April Fools’ Day came early this year, and, boy, did it make me feel like a fool! Remember my note about not having any water damage in the mid-March…
Today’s Russian word is захолустье. Most closely translated as “a God-forsaken place”, it means a backwater, marginal, more likely than not unattractive, sparsely-populated periphery town or village with rudimentary, if any, modern infrastructure and nothing to be proud about. (To pronounce it, start with “z” as in “zoo”, followed by…
All houses but three on our street lost power on Saturday, and it is yet to be restored. Ours is one of the three lucky ones. Becky says more than half of her friends said today that they had flooded basements. We found one single glass doorway that had water…
Don’t tell my younger daughter, but I am awfully late with what she surely expects will be my gift to her on her next birthday. Given that the similar enterprise for the benefit of her older sister six years ago took me roughly nine months to finish, I shouldn’t have…
A junk-mail envelope felt to touch as if it had some sort of a card inside, and my curiosity took upper hand. As it turned out, a run-of-the-mill “invitation” was accompanied by the following: How do I end up on their mailing list, I’d like to know!?
The best snow-blower is four guys with snow shovels. 20 minutes, 40 bucks, and I have not had even to step out of the house. I don’t know why they did not show up and offer their services after previous snowfalls, but I sure hope they’ll be showing up the…
The second big storm of the winter – and just like the last time, northern parts of the Tri-State metropolitan area got no snow to speak of, while we got over a foot and parts to the south of us even more than that. Is geography broken? Shouldn’t it be…
Both of the teams I was rooting for lost in conference championship games on Sunday. The Jets were exposed as a lower-class team with mostly toothless offense and only occasionally stingy defense. The Vikings turned the ball over four times and yet had the game for the taking with 2:29…
I took a few days off blogging after New Year’s, mostly on account of being busy with various friendly get-together engagements. There have been only a couple of days in the last week and a half that we did not spend in company of good friends. Which is, as I…
A few days ago, Natasha found a couple of small items that we thought were lost during the relocation move, stuffed into a decorative box that we did not think had anything inside. A souvenir small Russian wooden bowl, one of the hedgehogs from Becky’s collection, that type of stuff.…
I’m walking towards my bus stop one morning, maybe four minutes into my fifteen-minute walk. It’s a crisp clear morning, so I don’t particularly mind the walk. A car pulls up next to me, the driver rolls down his window and asks: “Are you going to the bus stop? Can…
One thing that we missed in our years in England was costume parties that our group of friends holds a couple of times a year. Upon our return, we are finally able to participate in that good fun again. This fall’s party was styled after some Japanese fertility festival (豊年祭,…
From the “useless trivia about me” department: I always typed with just three fingers. Middle and index fingers of my right hand and index finger of my left – more than sufficient for yours truly. Thumbs for spacebar and some limited use for the other middle finger, otherwise. I am…
Finally, a Halloween to my kids’ liking. As I mentioned on a few occasions in the past years (for instance, here), the girls did not get to enjoy much of the Halloween in England. Back in the States, it is all different. Houses decorated in dozens inventive ways, with whole…
It did not take me long to realize that if I sleep for 15 minutes longer in the morning, but then wake up Natasha to drive me to the bus, instead of walking, I’d be catching the same bus while shortening my door-to-door commute. The weather of the last couple…