The Facts of Life

i do love me some dylan o’brien

Oh boy… where do I start?

Trump won the election and based on his picks for White House staff, we’re looking at four years of Hell on Earth. (And that’s my sugarcoated opinion.)

In happier news, Ukraine was a sort-of success.

I didn’t use as much Ukrainian as I wanted to because some of the waitstaff in the restaurants and coffeehouses made me feel foolish. Although I could order off the menus, I asked for English versions so that the Hubby could read them as well. That said, I did manage to understand a lot. Too much.

And the coffee… OH MY DOG. Lviv’s reputation as having the world’s best coffee is definitely well earned. I can’t believe how much coffee I drank.

I definitely want to go back. It’s a beautiful city. One I could probably happily move to. IF the Hubby could get over the culture-shock.

That aside, it was a life changing vacation.

Part of the trip was a visit to my grandparents’ village and once we got there, our interpreter/tour guide jumped out of the van and started asking people on the street if they knew any of the names on the list.

They knew Maria and Stefania Winarska. They still lived there… despite the War and everything. In fact, they escaped being captured by hiding in the woods. I was totally expecting a house or a gravestone. Instead, I found my grandmother’s cousins.

 

Yeah. Living, breathing, shared DNA.

I still can’t get my head around it.

As our luck would have it, though, the Lufthansa pilots went on strike just in time for our trip home. Loved Lviv, but we were so ready to go home by that point that we were not happy that we were essentially stranded. It cost us over $4K for a one way ticket home. With a 9 hour layover in Madrid. (That sucked in so many different ways, I can’t even describe it. Never, ever, ever flying through Madrid again.) The only silver lining is that I got trip insurance and that should reimburse us for all our extra expenses.

Work is continually weird and stressful. I can’t go into too many details, but let’s just say that I’ve been dragged into a power struggle. There are things that aren’t right and I’m confirming suspicions. However, that puts me squarely on The Other Side… the side that’s going to get someone fired, or cause them to quit. I’m not comfortable with where I wound up, but I know it’s necessary. It’s stupid things like taking over the bank reconciliations because they haven’t been done properly (I KNOW!) and I’m the only one without access to the bank account. Of course, the person that involved me in this mess may quit if they don’t get their way. If I get passed over for their job AGAIN, I’ll follow them out the door.

There’s absolutely no winning in this situation…

And finally, I decided that I wanted to focus on learning Polish. I need a break from Ukrainian and it’s a similar enough language that I should be OK. I was going to take December off from everything, but I am chomping at the bit to start. So… I signed up for PolishPod101 and will start doing the homework in earnest today. I also signed up for two other classes - one about motivation (because I’ll need it to jump back into the Ukrainian in January) and one on using social media. The three were so cheap due to Black Friday that I couldn’t help myself. I also bought a German course for J. I suppose I’ll end up learning German myself at some point, but for now, I’m going to focus on PP101 and going back to old Ukrainian textbooks and focusing on acquiring new vocabulary.

Oh. I lied… I gave up on the artsy-fartsy BuJo and moved into a little, itty, bitty Field Notes notebook. It works ridiculously well for work and my personal life isn’t that packed chock-full of to-do items to justify the time making pretty spreads. I may do an excel spreadsheet for work (I found a beautiful template) in order to track the skills I’m learning at work (as part of the power struggle). I deserve another raise and I’m going to prove it…

Also, the Field Notes subscription plan? TOTALLY WORTH IT. I have more notebooks than I know what to do with. I have $70 worth of notebooks and I’m only halfway through my $97 subscription. Amazing!