Day 48 of the 47th year of my personal chronology

In the morning I helped Masha in the kitchen and made breakfast and lunch for her. I had breakfast with the girls. Our ordinary family breakfast is gradually turning into a tradition.

At work I had an early meeting, and we ran a system demo that went perfectly. At one official meeting, for some reason, the organizers muted our system audio entirely, so we were just opening our mouths like fish in an aquarium. Good thing we managed to connect by phone as a backup and give a brief update. Still, it was a fiasco. It is amazing how easy it is to smear an honest name and nullify all your efforts simply by shutting your mouth. Oh well—we’ll push through. The day was extremely intense: lots of meetings and very little time to document anything. Still, productivity was 8/10. By the way, it might be a good idea to give my own work a daily subjective rating. I’ll move that into the metadata.

I left work on time because I had to pick up Leah. Thank God she was not the last child there and I made it before 7 p.m. The new teacher lives somewhere very far outside the city, and if she misses her commuter train, she does not get home until after midnight. Why anyone would look for work that far away is beyond me. The last girl was picked up a minute later, and the not-very-pleased teacher sprinted to the station.

Leah and I stopped by the store and bought a cake, fruit for the evening, and some soap bubbles. Then we stood outside our building for half an hour blowing bubbles. A meditative activity. At home we had dinner, and after dinner our neighbor Ksyusha K. dropped by. She has now moved, either temporarily or maybe not, to the brotherly republic. I had not seen her for more than three years and was very happy to catch up. She met Leah for the first time. She gave her a toy dog-grooming set. Leah was delighted.

We sat and talked for about an hour, and Ksyusha left when we started putting the little one to bed. After that we relaxed, and I fell asleep early still wearing my shirt. In the middle of the night I froze like a ground squirrel, woke up at 3 a.m., washed up, and went back to bed to warm up.