I took a curious personality test at work the other day and figured it’s worth describing in a post. The test is called Keirsey Temperament Sorter and aims at identifying your temperament from amongst four standard types, and then further detailing it into one of the sixteen common “characters”, or…
The weather turned truly nasty for a couple of days. Nasty with a twist. Mockingly, around 7pm every day, the skies clear, the sun comes out, and our hearts fill up with hopes of nice tomorrow. Alas, the mornings leave a lot to be desired… We were at the marvelous…
Our best friends from New Jersey have come to visit us for a bit over a week, which means kids are happily playing, beer is freely flowing, fun is being had all around. Notably less sleep can be secured in return, but I managed to catch up on some this…
As I pass myself off for an expatriate blogger, I guess I should at least occasionally post entries that fellow expatriates could use as empirical advice. This lengthy entry concerns relocation package negotiation. Actually, I am hardly qualified to say anything about the negotiation itself. Primarily, because I did a…
The latest disruption in my posts was caused by a long-weekend excursion to Paris, which was immediately preceded by another round of problems with the website, which hopefully have now been resolved once and for all (but claimed as their victim the recent Tuscany gallery album, which I am yet…
Contrary to my regular protestations of an utterly routine boredom, things happen to us all the time. As it happens with the rest of humankind, only the biggest things tend to leave an imprint on our memory and, later on, resurface at a point of writing a blog entry. The…
Ah, the joys of commuting! And the power of jinx! Just yesterday I had a stray thought that there had not been major transportation problems on my commute for quite a while. Lo and behold, today was a disaster. When I arrived at my train station in the morning, the…
In our many years in New Jersey, we cannot recall ever having a breakfast outside. Barbecues, parties – yes, but never a breakfast. There were several excuses for that, such as absence of a deck and complicated logistics of carrying stuff down wooden steps to the patio, but the fact…
It took me a while to emerge from under the pile of emails after a protracted absence from work. But I did emerge from that battle victorious, if in desperate need of another vacation. Nice trips, I always found, have an annoying quality of appearing insufficiently long, when recalled after…
And the Spring Break holidays came to the end. We are home, in excellent spirits and feeling perfectly rested after a week in Tuscany. I am quite sure that that feeling will not survive through Wednesday… But allow me to dwell on this pleasant week, and talk about Tuscany a…
I will only manage to get in a single blog entry in between two vacation trips, so I better write as much about the first one as possible before going onto the second one. So, here we go, briefly about Cotswolds… Cotswolds is an area in Middle England that has…
One of the favorite types of company outings in England is The Quiz. Guys from one of my partner technology teams has invited me to theirs. They must have thought that having a Russian-American on their team would give them some competitive advantage… The quiz works very simply. There are…
A funny realization has hit me a few days ago – in a certain sense, somehow, we have been living for free for quite some time. Ok, that statement is true only when applied to gas, electricity and broadband internet. And more likely than not, it will catch up with…
The car is in a driveway and has already been properly appreciated by all family members, the new TV looks great and works great, and the new food processor performs its magical duties like crazy. Things are looking up. Natasha, actually, demands a couple of corrections to the previous post.…
That hail on Sunday was a precursor to worsening weather – with the official start of the spring, the temperatures dropped to near freezing, the skies turned to mostly grey, and several short snowfalls made an appearance, melting instantly. Natasha’s dad continued his exploration of London nonetheless, only devoting more…
It has been a while since we managed to stay active on both Saturday and Sunday of the same weekend. Winter weather is hardly conducive to outings, and you can only go on back-to-back museum trips so much. But with spring-like weather, hundreds of places that we want to visit…
It really only takes once to disrupt regularity of posts, and then it becomes very hard to get back into the habit. Or, maybe, it’s too much booze… Going out, at least, if not the booze. We were out with a friend who was on a business trip from Geneva,…
Sincere apologies to my faithful readers for such a long gap in my posts. I was not in much of a mood for writing. My family in New York has suffered through an inconceivable loss, and a beautiful little girl has never got a chance to open her eyes and…
It’s nothing short of amazing that I don’t impersonate Natasha-without-her-voice today. Try singing karaoke for a hundred songs in one sitting, and you’ll understand… We went to visit our new friends Valera and Zhanna (whose daughter is Kimmy’s classmate). There was a nice meal, highlighted by Zeppelins, traditional Lithuanian stuffed…
Well, it was bound to happen and it finally did happen. Our New Jersey house is no longer ours. The process took longer that we initially hoped for, and caused us enough nerves. The house was sitting empty since October, with my parents having to periodically visit and check things…