Tuesday, November 4, 2008

November 4th

Photo from Maruk taken early this morning.

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.

In: Life In General Tags: election, Obama, president
Time: 14:40 Comments: No Comments Post a Comment

Wednesday, November 5, 2008

President Obama

Voting machine in Brooklyn, NY. This one is heavily leaning Obama.

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.

Polling place is right across the road from us.

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.

At home Maruk and Sag joined Alena 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.

Waiting for results. Checking CNN and MSNBC online. Watching NBC, CBS and ABC on TV.

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!

Ohio gets called for Barack Obama. This is "Game Over" for John McCain.

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.

West coast states get called and Obama over-jumps the magical 270. It's official. Senator Obama was elected to be the 44th President of United States.

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.

Tired, yet happy. Some light toasting with Sag and Maruk.

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.

In: Life In General Tags: election, Obama, president
Time: 12:23 Comments: 2 Comments Post a Comment

Thursday, November 6, 2008

Blog Header

The header that our blog sported during the election season.

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.

In: Software Tags: blog, election, header, Obama
Time: 14:31 Comments: No Comments Post a Comment

Saturday, November 8, 2008

Lunch Break at MOMA

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

"Symphony Number 1." Vladimir Baranoff-Rossine.

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.

In: Life In General Tags: Chagall, MOMA
Time: 16:44 Comments: 1 Comment Post a Comment

Sunday, November 9, 2008

Country French Omelette

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

In: Food & Dining Tags: breakfast, omelette
Time: 14:41 Comments: No Comments Post a Comment

Sunday, November 9, 2008

Maruk’s Birthday

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.

In: Food & Dining, Life In General Tags: birthday, Maruk
Time: 17:32 Comments: No Comments Post a Comment

Monday, November 10, 2008

Alena’s Portrait

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.

In: Photography Tags: Alёna, portrait
Time: 12:09 Comments: No Comments Post a Comment

Made a rather grim discovery today — our car that is less than 2 months old got keyed on the passenger side, most probably by a bum that we didn’t give money to. I was quoted $700 by a body shop to get it fixed. Needless to say, I’m pretty upset, but I’ll get over it. NYC has its minuses, and we just have to deal with it.0

Wednesday, November 12, 2008

Potato Chips

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.

In: Food & Dining Tags: expired, potato chips, Utah
Time: 16:44 Comments: 5 Comments Post a Comment

Guys and gals, yesterday was great. Thanks to everyone who could come. Alena and I had a great time, hope you all did too — except for Eugene who didn’t get his vodka maybe.

Monday, November 17, 2008

My Birthday

Ignat, Alena, Daniel, Alex, Eugene, Galya, Alina, Maruk, Lina

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.

Getting our breakfast at a local crapes place on Coney Island.

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!

Alena's making a wish and blowing out the candle.

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!

In: Life In General Tags: Alёna, birthday
Time: 22:00 Comments: 4 Comments Post a Comment

The bags are packed and we’re almost ready to depart (well, we’ll get to sleep for a couple of hours first). This vacation is in a sense historic for me — it is my FIRST ever PAID vacation. Hip-hip-hooray! I sure hope it will not be the last one (paid vacation that is).

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