It’s hard to believe that the election day is finally upon us. The votes have been cast and now it’s on to waiting. About 4 more hours before the news start to appear. Keeping the fingers crossed.

What a great day, what a great night. I’ve been following the events of this election cycle for a year extremely closely and today came the culmination that I’ve been waiting and hoping for. Barack Obama will be 44th President of the United States of America with a landslide win.

I woke up at 7:30am and got a call from my parents. They were already at the polling place casting their votes for Obama. There were no lines. Our polling place was right across the street from us. I was there at 7:55am and was out of there in 5 minutes. No lines, no problems. My sister voted soon after.

I drove to work and everyone there voted as well, for Obama, and just couldn’t wait for the resolution. The waiting started. I don’t think anyone was very productive today. The election was on everyone’s mind. We discussed and talked and thought about it from any possible angle. Then everyone ran home.

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At home Maruk and Sag joined Alёna and I. We ordered a pizza, I grabbed the laptop and opened up all my news sites and we started watching — NBC, CBS, ABC, start over.

I expected Virginia to set the tone for the rest of the night early on. But it came so close that nobody would call it. PA got called early on and that wasn’t really a big surprise for anyone. Why McCain spent so much time there is unclear. Obama won it easily with 11% margin!

The first real excitement came around when suddenly OH was called for Obama. That pretty much was “game over” for John McCain right there. We all understood it, and started jumping. The rest of the night was just to see how big the win is going to be. More and more states was falling into the blue column.

What a great night after all. The final results are still not ready, but Obama not just won, but won in a landslide victory, at least per Wikipedia definition. We even dug up some beer and did some toasting. Here is some for the great future of our great country.

P.S. Of course only the future will tell how President Obama handled the huge mountain of problems that he will inherit from George Bush. And of course there are still a lot of people out there who are scared because his skin color is different and he didn’t come from the Washington establishment. But hopefully as the time goes on the country will again become the United States of America.

The election was just the beginning and it was the easy part. Now he has a lot of hard work ahead of him and only time will tell how well he fares as a president.

Now that the election is over the header of our blog is going back to its original form. I changed it on January 10th, 2008.

One of the cool things about working in Manhattan apart from the abilities to admire the city’s architecture and to shop in a variety of stores around is that sometimes we can go to museums.

Of course, a lunch break is kind of short for this purpose, but if you skip lunch one day and then add additional half an hour to the lunch hour that you’ve got the next day, you’ll get just enough time to take a quick look at a couple of masterpieces.

So this Friday Galya took me to the Museum of Modern Art, more widely known as simply MOMA, which is located just two avenues and one street away from our office building. I must admit that it was my first visit to the place, even though I wanted to check it out for a long time. To my luck, Galya has some museum membership which provides free passes for two people, so we got in free of charge (although, as I ones wrote, I usually don’t mind those fees).

We saw some very nice paintings of a very famous artists like Claude Monet, Pablo Picasso, Joan Miro, Ludwig Kirchner, Gustav Klimt. There is a special exhibition of Van Gogh works which will be there until January 5th, but we weren’t able to attend it due to time constraints.

I was the most pleased to see a couple of paintings by Marc Chagall. I truly love his works, and I also feel a special sentiment towards him due to the fact that he was born in Belarus.

I wanted to see a photography section of the museum, but, again, 1.5 hours is a very limited time. I hope that next time we’ll be able to do it.

Вчера готовила новый для меня омлет, рецепт которого подсмотрела на блоге у Юли-Sweetlady. Получилось вкусно и сытно — вобщем, отличный завтрак для разнообразия!

С разрешения Юли, я просто хочу вставить её вариант перевода этого рецепта (оригинальная версия напечатанна в книге Barefoot Contessa Back to Basics):

На 2 порции:
Бекон, порезать на кусочки по 2 см – 3 куска Continue Reading

Yesterday we went out to celebrate Maruk’s birthday. Maruk picked Red Bowl — Williamsburg Chinese Restaurant, owned by a long time friend of Maruk — David. David’s wife had a birthday as well, so they spent the whole evening at our table. We had a good time.

Several weeks ago we did a small photo-shoot on Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn. We were mostly taking photos of 2 cars — 300C and Caprice. However I think I ended up with several pretty good portraits, and that doesn’t seem to happen often to me.

I don’t know why I’m posting this. When we went to Utah we bought a bag of potato chips at the airport, I think. Somehow we ended up bringing them back. And they were sitting on our kitchen table all this time. I was feeling hungry so I ate our Utah chips. However they did expire it seems on June 3rd. That’s it, end of story.

I really enjoyed my birthday this year!

It started at midnight, when Danya presented me with a very homey and cozy flannel pajama (first PJ in my life I must add). I didn’t sleep in it though since it was warm in our apartment, but I put it on in the morning (I know, I know — normal people do the opposite) and took it off only when we went outside to get something to eat.

I got a lot of birthday wishes from my friends and family — and this made me feel so loved and important. Thank you all very much for thinking about me and sending me your love!

In the afternoon Danya and I went to get some crapes in a little Russian place nearby, and then we went hunting for a birthday cake. I wanted to buy a cheesecake, but since it was nowhere to be found, I settle on a “tiramisu”. The cake turned out to be good, but it has as much to do with tiramisu as a sea cow with a real cow. Yeah…

In the evening we had a dinner at Wasabi Shushi Restaurant on the 86th Street. Our family and friends (those of them who live in New York) came — and I was so happy to see everybody! I got very nice presents too!

After dinner some of us went to our apartment for desert and conversations. Both were good. We had an improvised concert — Sasha and I switched playing guitar, Danya and Maruk drummed using iPhone (don’t ask ), and pretty much everybody sang at some point.

It was a very fun night, and again — I really enjoyed my bithday! Thank you so much everybody!