radish times

On this morn of the New Year I look back over a year that was truly spectacular for us. I can’t imagine what more a year could bring than a new child, a new home and a newly-immediate family. There were some pretty scary times for us last year and I am deeply thankful for what we have here at the end of it.

As the year started off, I was moving into my fourth month of pregnancy. We were just letting friends and acquaintances know about the coming baby. My parents, Peter and I had just agreed that we would buy a house together and were beginning the search in earnest. January, February and March were open houses, quick lunches and trips from Cobble Hill to Forte Green to Park Slope and back (for those of you unfamiliar with Brooklyn: trips in circles in Brooklyn). April found Peter and me in Italy on a long promised vacation. We visited Rome, Florence, Naples and Ischia Island. We hadn’t been back for a week when high blood pressure put me in the hospital and brought Katya into the world two months early, a tiny screaming kicking red ball of skin and bones. May was full of trips to and from the hospital for me, Peter, Peter’s mom, Peter’s sister and her family, my mom and dad and finally for Katya herself. For me, June, July and August were pumping, feeding, pumping, feeding, pumping, breast infection, feeding, pumping, another infection, and feeding. For the rest of my family these months were packing and unpacking divided by our separate moves in the same week to our new Brooklyn home. September marked one extremely important transition for me: I stopped pumping. Wow, what a difference! I could finally see the world beyond the ground where my next step would fall. October marked the other transition for us and the ascent to the peak on which we now stand: Katya started sleeping through the night. On these two transitions, hung all recovery and healing.

It is odd to have life be so intense for so much of the year. The fall for me was like a reemergence from out of deep water. Since then, everything seems to have started blossoming, especially Katya. She is now quickly approaching adulthood: she can almost sit up by herself, she eats solid food, and she yells randomly whenever enough attention is not being paid to her. She can chase the dog in her walker and grab the cats’ tails as they pass. I think we have a few more months until she hits adolensence.

Wishing you and your families the best of the new year.

I am writing this update with a kind of unidentifiable uneasy feeling which often comes in the lull after great activity. Two major events, having a baby and moving, have kept things hopping in our lives for just over three months. Now the activity is done and I am left with the reverberations still coursing through my body and life. I am not even sure I know what “relaxation” means anymore or, rather, I have found that it doesn’t seem to mean what it used to mean.

Peter, my parents and I just moved into a two family house in the Gowanus/South Slope area of Brooklyn. We have been here just over three weeks and finally we are mostly unpacked. It is great to be here together with my parents. They have helped us in every possible way, including cooking for us, helping with laundry, baby sitting, helping with unpacking, shopping, driving us around. It is simply amazing. Without them, we would very likely still be scrambling to live out of half-unpacked boxes.

Katya is doing great. She is just about 10 lbs now and she’s very active. She has started smiling, laughing and cooing. She has new facial expressions everyday now. It is astounding to watch our relatives and ancestors flit across her face. One moment she looks like Peter, then like her grandfather, then like her uncle… then like something quite new, expressions that must be hers alone. She is eating well and often. We are waiting for her to truly start sleeping through the night. Now she sleeps about 6 hours at a time during the night… better than 4, but worse than 8. If you haven’t recently looked, we are consistently posting new photos to her website, http://katya.shkin.com.

Sagas, my friends, never end, but sometimes there is a happy sub-ending (a cousin of sub-total). Today was one of these.

Today we had an interview at the USCIS (the INS, for those of you who haven’t followed all the name changes) and Peter became a PERMANENT permanent resident.

What does that mean? It means (1) he is no longer CONDITIONAL permanent resident (2) he now has 10 years or so before he has to renew it [really permanent, huh?] (3) we proved that we were really married by answering four questions, including “did you have lunch?,” and providing bank statements, retirement account statements, our lease, airplane tickets to Seattle and San Francisco and three pictures which we printed on our bubble jet printer (4) Peter can apply for citizenship this weekend - which should talk about a year (5) We waited two years, six months, 23 days and four long hours this afternoon for this.

Also exciting news, although it is not news yet, just exciting, is that my brother Paul and his wife Amy are expecting a baby any day now… (two official doctor due dates: Oct 18 or 20)… we are all waiting expectantly. And the couple requests that if you send out thoughts for their well-being that you send thoughts which concentrate on bringing on labor as soon as possible.

PRE-PERUSAL NOTICE (read this before you read the rest):

Not all the words in the following update are words which can be found in the dictionary. Two of the most prominent (and possibly the only two) are updateness and unupdateness. Therefore the definitions are provided here: Updateness: the urge to write an update Unupdateness: the absence of the urge to write an update

BEGINNING OF UPDATE:

Ideal Equation: 4 months of relaxation + 2 family weekends = the beginning of regular updates

Equation Proven So Far: 4 months of relaxation + 2 family weekends = a lone update in the midst of the state of unupdateness

or (alternatively)

1 weird sci-fi book + 1 ridiculous but tenacious family joke = a random update in the midst of the state of unupdateness

HELLO!

HOW ARE YOU? LONG TIME NO HEAR AND SPEAK (through updates, at any rate)

The summer is over. Fall has begun. And fall is the best season ever ever ever. Fall means new beginnings, new energy, new projects. It is the time of year that I get a giant energy boost - which I particularly need this year after having such a long resting period (4 months working part time with no graduate classes!!!).

Several interesting things have happened recently which have made my mind bubble with updateness:

1) Peter & I went out to Seattle to visit my brother for the first time (barring our trip out to his wedding) ever. Amy, Paul’s wife, is pregnant and expecting in October. We trekked all over Seattle and country side. I even made a fabulous suggestion for a name for the baby…

… I am a little afraid to tell you all, in fear that you will think it such a great name you will tell all your friends and there will be a positive explosion of babies with this name. Right now I am fairly certain that no baby yet has this name. But, if you swear not to tell anyone about it, I will allow you to read on….

… This illustrious name was inspired by two factors: 1) Paul and Amy have not yet devised a list of possible names for the baby, making it impossible to tease them about any of the names they had chosen 2) Simon and Garfunkel sang a song which included imperfect rhyming.

In the song, “20 ways to leave your love” Simon or Garfunkel sings the lines “Just get of the bus, Gus. You don’t have to discuss much.” “Gus” and “much” DO NOT rhyme nicely. Much nicer would have been: “Just get on the bus, GUCH. You don’t have to discuss MUCH.” Ahhhh, what beauty. What satisfying perfection.

It was this which caused me to advocate to my brother and his wife that they name their baby “Guch,” pronounced just like much. I think they really liked the suggestion. How could they not?

2) On the other side of the family, all our nephews are growing up. Alex, Peter’s sister’s son, is completely grown up (18 yrs-old) and living on his own in New York City (not far from us ). We hope to see him often!

His little brother, Andrew, is almost 2 years old and is walking and almost talking. He answers important questions clearly and emphatically… that is, questions such as “Do you want to eat?” to which he responds “Da!” (Yes!) and “Do you want to sleep?” to which he answer “No!” with a single short shake of the head. He has not yet learned the word “mine” so he is a pleasure to play with. He very much likes pigeons and motorcycles which he demonstrates by pointing at every one that he sees.

3) Sagas continue with the INS, now the USCIS. I will not record them here as it is too late at night to recover my mood before going to bed. Perhaps if the ideal equation turns out to be true, I will devote an entire update to these continuing sagas.

4) Our cats are doing well. They behaved very well this weekend when our nephew Andrew was here, meaning that when they swiped their paws at him they held their claws in - so that they hit him but didn’t scratch him. He only got one small scratch - although he had many warning swipes. This pleased me greatly.

They (the cats) are also getting older. Pippin and Kisco turned the amazing age of 10 years this spring. TEN. Quite a few.

END OF UPDATE: I think that is all since I start to dribble-drabble.

I have made the same error today, several times in a row. I have typed Merry Christman. It makes me giggle. I think, Happy Birthday merry Christ man.

Anyway, I wanted to wish you all a very merry Christmas.

I have had a good Christmas here in Moscow - starting with a 4 inch Christmas tree with gifts beside it, a beautiful walk in the snow to the edge of Red Square, a delicious moist fruit cake with tea, and moving to a simple dinner with some old Christmas favorites from the traditional Lorimer Christmas - and finally, if we are lucky, ending with two beautiful and delicious loaves of cardamom bread (this part has not happened yet as we are waiting for our somewhat slow dough to rise).

The only missing piece is the rest of the family…

So here is the first update from Moscow. You ask why I am writing it at 1:18 am – the answer is part of the life of couples separated by oceans: I am waiting for Peter to get home from work and call. I just talked to him on ICQ but there is only one computer in the house with a working internet line and I am not the only one who needs the computer.

Two full days in Moscow and already I have seen and learned a lot. At this rate, I can’t imagine how much it is possible to learn in a month.

- The escalators in the Metro remind me of 1989 in Moscow with Peter. So do young kissing couples in the subway. Though I haven’t yet seen any kissing on the escalators like we did.

- The subways are perfectly beautiful. Every one is different with amazing decorations and style. You can ascend the escalator into a white ivory dome and walk past stained glass windows hanging on the wall. And those are the most mundane subway experiences.

- I haven’t even begun to make out the metro yet – but there are two destinations I know how to get to and they both require the same subway trip of bear to the left, two stops, transfer, one stop. One requires only going to the left and crossing the street. The other involves an underpass, a right turn and a left turn. ?

- Language is much easier than I had feared. Three years ago the signs on the street made me tired trying to decipher them. Now they don’t take any energy to understand. I get the biggest thrill when I recognize a new work somewhere, like this evening walking home from the subway we passed the “парикмахерская” meaning barber.

- Spoken language is also not as hard as I thought. It seems to me it is like this: When you don’t really have to speak another language but you do, it takes energy and will power because you are trying to get it right. When you have no choice but to speak a language, you very soon start doing it without energy and will power because 1) you have to 2) you are going to make mistakes no matter what you do 3) people don’t have all day to wait around until you have found all the right words. Therefore, you just speak.

- I, of course, by no means understand everything everyone says. I walk a narrow line in this regard: I want people to speak freely with me, so I often let them know I understand when I am only just starting to understand because to interrupt with a “what?” will only disrupt their speaking and my understanding. On the other hand, I don’t want to let people think that I have understood something that I haven’t. So I hover somewhere in this range most of the time. It is something like playing catch with multiple balls. Someone starts throwing you a series of balls and you must let them know you are catching them (i.e. you are in the process) before all the balls physically get to you. So really you have no idea if you will catch them all when you indicate you are catching them. This isn’t bad in many cases. However with jokes it doesn’t work at all. If you understand everything except the punch line, you haven’t understood anything.

- Still, everyday is hard work and I come home at night pleased simply that I have made it through the day, learning as much as I can.

It is of course always harder for me to write about serious things than the mechanics of life. But, the work of the organizations I have been to is very serious and important.

In the last two days I have visited three offices (whose organizations are closely interconnected), been to one round table and one wedding celebration.

- The first office is home to the Migration Rights Network, a program of Memorial Human Rights Center, which is a network of lawyers throughout Russia who provide legal assistance to refugees, internally displaced persons, and others. For this organization, I have started editing an English translation of a document on the guiding principles of dealing with internally displaced persons and how they are embodied in the Russian Constitution but not in practice.

- Memorial Human Rights Center was the second office I visited. Memorial has a library, museum, archive and great staff dedicated to the memory of what happened and who died during the Soviet repression, especially in the camps (the Gulag) and during Stalin’s time. The small part of their collection that I saw is extremely moving. Memorial also has programs actively protecting human rights in Russia, including the Migration Rights Network.

- The third office I visited was the Civic Assistance Committee, where refugees come for legal advice and support, material goods such as clothes and shoes, and much more. It was amazing to be there. It was extremely crowded and busy, moving at a non-stop pace. People getting shoes, asking for money for hospital bills, asking for help getting a passport or registration. For this organization, I may help out teaching English to refugee children & youth.

- The round table discussion was on film and terrorism and my mother-in-law spoke there.

- The wedding celebration was at Memorial between a Russian woman and a Chechen man – quite a big deal during war time – and it was quite beautiful.

- And in all this, I have gotten to spend quite a lot of time with Peter’s mother – who is head of the first program, a leading person at the second and one of the founding directors of the third. It has been great!

Tomorrow (actually today) is Saturday. Time to finish one paper for school, get a better grasp on getting around Moscow, see some friends, and maybe relax a little and hang out with my mother- & father-in-law.

Good morning! I can’t tell if I am procrastinating this morning or preparing to do great studying and writing today. Anyhow, my reasoning for writing this update was to get my writing juices flowing so that it would be easier to get going on my papers. I have also had an update sitting in my outbox for weeks. I just had to erase it because it irritated me - which is why I didn’t send it in the first place and I just realized, why I would never send it.

Lots of things are going on here in Brooklyn. I am in the home stretch of the second to LAST semester in graduate school. I leave for Russia to do an internship for a month and live with Peter’s family before school actually ends. Only a few weeks after I go, Peter will come to Moscow too - so that we will spend the New Years there together with his family and come back in early-mid January.

Peter’s mom is in the States. On Thanksgiving weekend, she came with us to my parents house for the day and then we all drove down to see Peter’s sister and her new (now 1 year-old!!) baby. He is an adorable and very happy baby.

At home, we just got a new receiver and speakers (surround sound) which Peter has been setting up and adjusting for several days. He is busy with both work work and freelance work. We have been working on figuring out how to print his photos. It is something of a learning curve - to figure out how best to print, what sizes, how to frame them, etc.

So that in a nut shell is what is going on.

Now, as I can tell from the tone of this update, I am in a very “get down to business” type of mood. This should be good for paper writing! So off I go to finish writing about the experiences of the nomads of Kazakhstan and why it is important to know about them.

If only the days could be stretched out. If only one hour of sleep gave the strength of two. There seem to be simply too many things to do these days. With work, and school, and fixing up the apartment, and trying to relax, there is no time for anything else (and the trying to relax doesn’t seem to be going too well).

Anyway, with all of that, there are little points of peace and pleasure:

- Our closet has shelves! We no longer have to live out of boxes, which is where our clothes have been since we moved in a month and a half ago. When we will find the time to move our clothes from the boxes to the shelves is an open questions - but at least it could be any time.

- All our doors have door knobs, except one.

- There is the reasonable hope that next weekend all our kitchen cabinets will have handles and we will be able to get rid of the electrical tape tabs which work only when your hands are dry.

- We have six new little plants which are ever bloomers, meaning that if they are carefully looked after they will have flowers all the time. That makes our sum total 14 plants now, 12 little ones and 2 big ones.

- Pippin has not recently attacked anyone. We have had several guests in the last month and he hasn’t been mean at all. He even let a male guest pick him up and cradle him like a baby TWICE. Maybe he feels happier in this apartment.

- We walked across the Brooklyn Bridge yesterday. It was beautiful and we figured out that it would take me only about an hour to walk to work that way, which is not too bad. It would probably take Peter 1 1/2 hours, which is long.

- We met the very cute 21 month old son of our friends who just returned to New York from Michigan. He is not very talkative yet but he is a power walker and he likes cats.

- We tried an Indian restaurant in our neighborhood which seems to be pretty good.

- Peter made an extremely tasty lamb and bean soup, which we will be eating for the next two weeks. I am unsuccessfully trying to make tasty salads to go with it every night. So far, the best dressing we have had has been plain sour cream. I think my love of Marie’s Bleu Cheese salad dressing stunted my ability to made good tossed salads.

- We found a bakery that sells fresh bread we like. It stays open late enough for us to buy it after work.

- We have the ugliest front door in many a block. I set out to paint it green. But we ran out of paint and I tried to creatively apply it so that it would cover the whole door. I failed and the door just looks sad and stupid. We will have to get some more paint to fix it. Of course, our landlord chose this day (the first day of the dumb looking door) to drop by and see how things were. He didn’t mention the door but it probably wasn’t the best introduction to his new tenants! He did mention that our cats look healthy. I wonder if he meant that they look fat.

Anyway, as I seem to be digressing from nice pleasant things to sad stupid things, I will stop and get ready for bed.

It has been a long time since the last update. Many things have happened and many people have been busy.

We just moved, about (actually, exactly) one month ago. We are now in Brooklyn in a two normal size plus two tiny-size room apartment with a kitchen and free washer and dryer in the basement. It has been a long time coming together since there were/are so many renovations being done that it is not possible to put everything where it ought to be yet.

Also, September is Peter’s busiest time at work as his company, campusfood.com, is selling to college students who all return to school and establish their eating and food ordering habits in September. He has been doing a lot of interesting things during this time - all of it in high demand from everyone working with him.

I started school. I am taking Czech (since I got a scholarship which covers the whole year’s tuition plus a giant living stipend expressly to study Czech), statistics, and two classes on Central Asia - one contemporary and the other history.

And, with all of this going on, we found a way to spend today completely (or mostly) relaxing in our new and wonderful Brooklyn neighborhood. It seems that the last weekend of September is “stoop sale,” “garage sale,” “street sale,” “street fair” day in Cobble Hill (our neighborhood). We wondered the streets and must have stopped at 10 or 12 stoop sales (a stoop is the stairs going up to an apartment building, usually about 10 stairs). We bought two CDs, one lamp, and one triple hanging basket set to hold onions and such in the kitchen and spent $10. There was also a mile long street fair (with lots and lots of people, food, and things for sale) on Atlantic Avenue. We had a great time walking around, seeing the neighborhood, buying things and relaxing.

That is all for now. Sleep is calling.

“I would like to beg you to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now.”

Rainer Maria Rilke, a Prague-born poet who wrote in German.

This quotation helped inspire the day and the said update.