Friday, December 31, 2010

New Year

I don't want to draw lines and list my achievements for 2010 as I used to and many people do. When you draw line, you close a period in your life and start something new. I don't want to do that. Not now maybe or not anymore.

Maybe it has something to do with my dad's death last October - if I close the year, he will stay behind and we will move on - I don't want to do that, I want to keep a connection to him inside me. It's not that we did not have our hard times - oh yes, we did - but the fact is - there will hardly be ever a man in my life who will love me as much as he did. And that is making me sad. It might sound selfish, I know, but there is not much I can do about it.

Happy New Year, anyhow! :)

Tuesday, December 28, 2010

3 days till new year

Last few weeks have been pretty busy for me – it’s quarter end – the busiest time at work and I started volunteering as technical editor at local Russian community newspaper. I am now responsible for creating the whole issue – writers send me the texts, I search for pictures, insert text and pictures into the newspaper using Corel Draw program. I also create and edit ads and put them into the issue. The newspaper is issued monthly, there are usually 16 pages. The issue I worked on is a 19-pages one –many people wanted to post greetings cards and ads due to holidays.

I really enjoyed the process – it’s where you can follow the creation of a newspaper from scratch and not only follow, but actually manage it – awesome! I won’t say there is a lot of creativity involved – not really, but I had to decide what pictures to pick for certain articles, how to put them on the page to look the best way. I always enjoy new challenges and this one I guess I managed well! J

Monday, December 20, 2010

Easy money

There are always people who dream of getting rich fast by not doing much or anything at all. Whole industries depend on such people – gambling industry for instance, but not alone. There are many courses where people are promised to get famous, rich, and popular or all of it at once – all they need is to get the training. Sure, they must pay for it. Sometimes they have to pay a lot – but they believe that it couldn’t be other way – if everyone could afford the luxury training on how to become popular/rich/famous/glamorous etc. , then it wouldn’t be worth taking.

If you look at the income of those course gurus, you will find a very curios trend – these great teachers of greatness, wealth and prosperity do not gain from shares, stocks or other investments they encourage their students to buy in accordance with their top-secret and extremely successful techniques. Their sacred ways of getting money lead to the simple pyramid – where they recruit new bounty hunters and get money out of them by promising them their so-called “highly efficient ways of getting rich”.

To me it looks like another kind of gambling – and a really well-planned one – where the customers are adventurous and easily deceived – since most of these people believe that they are the ones who are really good at cheating – they are used to being the predator, not the pray and do not feel suspicious of a promise to get rich fast and without effort – this has been their dream for most of their lives and they still believe that the fairy tales should and must come true – you only need to wish hard enough.

Monday, December 13, 2010

Nazism under the Kremlin's wall

Knowing that my blog is not popular at all, I still want to share the news from Moscow hoping that better awareness of the issue will help avoid the worst scenario from development.

Here you can read what happened in Moscow another day. Here are the pictures. The comments are in Russian, but the pictures talk for themselves. I was especially shocked by pics # 23 and 24. The grandparents of these idiots fought and died not to let the brown plague - fascism - take over their country in the Second World War. 10% of the country's population died then - to let the rest survive.

The situation in the country is not easy one - corruption allows those who have connections or money to avoid proper prosecution if they break the law. They can get away with anything - including murder. I am not saying that the southerns from Russian Caucasus region behave properly in Moscow - many of them are indeed rude and violent. However, it is the local law enforcement who must take care of the issue. Also the hooligans that comprised most of the mob on the riot are not peaceful or well-behaved either. When the rage of the people is not aimed at the rotten system, but at a certain nation - that is scary once you know German history of 1930s. The country population was struggling with poverty as well - and Hitler was one to point his finger at Jews to blame for the situation. Everyone knows how that ended. I am sure that there are certain people in the government directing the situation this way, being sure they will gain more power, control and money out of it. Big German corporation leaders were also supporting Hitler with the same rationale. They did not gain anything eventually.

There is a citing - unfortunately, I do not remember who said it - "People that does not remember its history, does not have a future" - I do wish that those who took part in the riot were more aware of their own history!

Another big step in immigration - buying our first home

I was pretty busy last week - we were looking for a house to buy.

Before looking at the market we went to the bank and got an approval from them for a certain mortgage amount. With that being our purchase budget we started searching. At first we just went to different areas and went to open houses. But this felt like blind date - you are not sure if the house is "in your league" when you enter it and you feel a bit awkward when you see that it is above your budget and still walk around it just out of curiosity - I've never been a window shopping supporter - I do not like the idea of just seeing without the ability to actually buy what I like.

So after some open houses we decided to contact a real estate agent and ask her (in our case) to find something within our budget that meets our needs. We did not have many "must haves" on our list - more of "nice to have" - we were certain about one thing - not to look at the houses that were older than 25 years. You never know with the old houses what might eventually go wrong and how much it would cost to fix. Also, we preferred bigger backyards - those small patches that most of the new houses have looked pitiful to me - one would hardly be able to get a BBQ on it... I also wanted one bathroom to be on the ground level - I have seen some houses where the bathroom was on the second level or there and in the basement, but not on the ground floor - and I felt it was hugely inconvinient. The last wish was to have the house in a nice area. No social housing next door or stuff like that.

Our real estate agent was really lucky with us - she showed us two houses and we loved the second one so much, that we decided to make an offer on it. It is a detached 2-storey house in a really nice area - close to highway and malls, quiet place, a big backyard without neighbors behind (there is a playground next to in from the back), windows and carpeting all over the house were replaced in 2010, furnace - in 2008, roof - in 2007, bathrooms were renovated this year as well. There are 3 bedrooms and 2 bathrooms, a finished basement and all of it fits well into our budget!

We made the offer on Friday night - they accepted it with some editions on Saturday morning. We wanted the closing day to be in the middle of April, they were hoping to get it sold beginning of February, so we met halfway on the 15th of March. :) They also made the price reduction of 5,000 we asked for to be 3,500, which was even more than we expected. :)

Now they are waiting for mortgage approval and house inspection that we should have ready by Friday. If everything goes well, we will be prospective homeowners in less than a week from now. I just cannot believe it!

Tuesday, December 7, 2010

Winter time

I love it when snow is fresh and clean all around. These first days when grey and brown all around turn white are so exciting. Add the Xmas songs and decorations around and you get the holiday spirit inside within no time at all.

It was a bit different in Moscow - though the spirit was there as well, but I was not that excited about this time of year because people would turn even more rushing and traffic jams would get more intense - everyone was preparing for the new year holidays. It felt somewhat nervous, not holiday-like. Maybe it's only my impressions though.

Last night I was driving country highways at night and snow was swirling around me - it felt so peaceful and festive I did not want to arrive to the place I was heading - I wanted to keep driving the deserted white roads listening to the radio forever. It was one of the moments you want to prolong and keep in your memory as long as possible.

Wednesday, December 1, 2010

BFF?

When I was 8 years old, I did not have any girlfriends - they appeared to be boring and too obsessed with themselves. They were interested in showing off, discussing boys and playing with their dolls. Though I sometimes liked to play with the dolls, boys topic was boring to me and I did not understand showing off at all. So for some time I preferred boys' company over girls'. Boys were all about playing different games, always full of ideas and ready for any adventure we could think of.

That lasted for some time until one day boys started telling me they liked me "like a girl". This sounded silly to me - yesterday we were climbing trees, discussing our war strategies against the team from the next yard - and all of a sudden they tell me these weird things! I felt betrayed in a way - I did like to be in the center of attention, but did not mean to get attention of that kind. I remember how I returned the boys all their presents to me and had to return to the girls' company.

My first girlfriend was a real bitch to put things straight - she enjoyed manipulating people, loved to be admired by boys and plotted nasty things for everyone around her. I did not blame her a lot for such behavior - her case was a sad one - her parents divorced and were building their own lives she was no part of - she was left with her grandparents and I guess her behavior was her way to gain some self-esteem. I was no exception to her intrigues - got my piece of them all right. We eventually broke up when I realized that she was actually enjoying making people around her feel miserable.

My second girlfriend is still my good friend - we were separated by geography, not difference in characters. We were best friends for a decade - through high school and university years. We did not look alike, but at some point people kept asking us if we were sisters - we were behaving and talking in the same manner.

When we graduated from the university, she went on to study for her second degree in Italy, married there and now is living in Switzerland working there. We sometimes talk on Skype - but our lives are so different now, that we don't have many topics to discuss - being as far apart as we are. The only subject to discuss is to provide short update on our lives which is not what I believe to be equal to a real friendship relationship.

There were more girlfriends in my life, but once we were separated - either they immigrated or I - relationship would cool down. I do not see a big tragedy in it - it is just a natural pace of life - we change, circumstances change - so do people around us. We will always have warm feelings and affection towards people who we spent some part of our life with, but it does not mean we have to try to keep to our past just because of good memories we have together...