Now that just another Kate's half-year is over yesterday she departed to her parents for vacation. I found no other joy this whole night than to play HoMM 5 from 10 pm till 2 pm. Yep, that's 14 hours in a row. Strange that my eyes didn't start bleeding.

Mom called yesterday, she sounded uneasy and sad, she said her brother told her once again she didn't have a lot of time left (just like he said six years ago). She's terribly unsatisfied with staying in this city, where you cannot even go for a walk in the morning, because our poor car owners don't have enough money to leave their cars in a roofed parking (place), so around 5 am in the morning all cars engines are ignited so that the cars were warm and ready to go when their non-respective drivers move their asses outdoors. Car owners do that because it's terribly cold outdoors.

I've been doing nothing lately. Literally. Aside from posting in different forums and filing bug reports for different Open Source software (and there are too many of those problems to call Open Source software, namely Linux, namely KDE even remotely usable).

Two days ago I visited my parents. Mom and dad just returned from a month trip to the southern part of our country. They brought some stuff from there including two perfect Chinese cups, and one of them mom gave me. Alas, on my way back to my apartments I lost footing due to very slipper road (it's iced everywhere) and broke the cup. Damn this country.

Like three years ago I've spent this hNY all by myself. I sent K. to her parents yesterday and refused to follow her citing my fear of her ancestors (in fact I just don't want to make our relationships that serious, I mean meeting her parents is like announcing an engagement), my parents and my brother are somewhere in the western-southern part of Russia, Vladimir is in our capital, so I'm left on my own. BTW, my cell phone is switched off since yesterday's (I mean 31 of December) morning, so no congratulations may come even theoretically (except from my brother who sent me e-mail, and skype's note from Vladimir).

Welcome, year 2010. Let's really want to change something in this miserable existence.

An hour ago K. broke a mercury thermometer in our dining room - God, I'm so fucking angry.

I've just had delivered a washing machine and haven't paid a penny. Delivery guys didn't know it's a web purchasing so they didn't have any necessary documents - they went away to come with them again. Funny!

The weather held a new record - earlier this day it was raining (yes, on the third of December). Usually at this time of year we have a temperature around 10 degrees below zero.

I've been sick for roughly a week. Five days my temperature was above 38.6 degrees Celsius. I've no idea what was that - since the only symptom of my illness was a temperature.

Only yesterday I got better and visited my parents. My mom looked very bad, she didn't go out that day since she felt a terrible pain in her leg (probably it's her knee tumor). She described an attack of rheumatism she had at the age of fourteen - she spent sixty eight days in a hospital unable to walk. Onset happened at her home, she fell on her knees and couldn't walk. Her mom beaten the hell out of her but she couldn't stand up, only then her mom called a doctor. Her doctor told her she would suffer till the end of her life. Later at the age of twenty three she had an attack again spending this time eleven days in bed. If I haven't put it in words yet, mom has massive problems with her eyesight nowadays. Her diopters fell to minus thirteen-fourteen range and she has a permanent veil of fog in front of her eyesight.

I've just watched the Memento movie and I didn't get it at all. I've read the plot written in Wikipedia both in English and in Russian and I still don't get this movie. I have some people around me who literally loved this movie, but I don't get it.

I don't f*cking get it! Could someone please spell the plot out for me?

P.S, This f*cking sicko slept for just two hours today. Too sad, I'm talking about myself.

Here it is. It's stored as a picture, so that nasty search bots couldn't index it :)

I was semi-fired on November 7th, on the same day when Vladimir's wife gave birth to their child (damn, I don't even remember if it's a girl or a boy). On November 4th I was three hours late for work, then went missing for three more hours, so I spent only three work hours out of eight. On Friday when I came to work, I discovered that all my SSH consoles died and I couldn't login anywhere (in fact I tried the only server). Instantly I understood everything. I didn't try to justify my Wednesday behaviour, because I knew that the real reason of my dismissal was different. I just hadn't carried out a lot of work assigned to me for quite a long time.

In the middle of this week K. learnt that they would have a week off due to the flu quarantine. I tried hard to find a tour to Egypt for us both, but since I started really doing that only on Thursday, there were no free plane tickets and yesterday K. went to her her parents.

For a whole week I haven't done anything, except some random earnings by configuring and repairing different people computers'.

Last night I almost didn't sleep because I went to bed at 7am and I was woken up at 11am due to repairs of neighbour apartments (on the top of mine).

This year's winter began on Saturday with a heavy snowing that lasted the whole day. For last three days temperatures kept below zero and snow doesn't want to melt at all. Most likely the winter has come for a long.

Around two months ago K. and I had a very bad quarrel. We went for a horse riding but the first horse given to K. was hyperactive and K. could hardly curb it. So till the middle of our ride we were walking instead of galloping or running. I couldn't bear that any longer so I asked our lead to swap her horse with K.'s one. They did that. That could have helped our ride but it didn't - K. was too tied, she rode for the first time in her life and she wasn't really ready for galloping. To take the edge off of the spoiled riding I stopped frequently, waited till K. and the lead got enough far away from me and gallopped to them.

In the end when the owner of stud-farm asked K. if she enjoyed the ride, K. said the she liked it a lot. That answer infuriated me. Instead of galloping we were walking all the time and to my taste it wasn't a horse riding at all. On our way back to my home we busted up. It took three hours for us to reconcile.

The night we went to Israel I didn't sleep at all. At first, in the evening I wanted to send an SMS message to K. via my brother's laptop but he refused me to do that. I became angry and went out the room and rambled around the hotel. Around 2 a.m. I returned to the room but I couldn't fall asleep and at 3.30 a.m. we were awoken by a call from the reception. At around 4.10 a.m. we went to the Antalya airport. If my memory serves me well our flight was assigned to 7.30 a.m. and we took off at this very time.

Upon arriving to Tel Aviv we were given 0.5 liter of bottled water and moved to Jerusalem. On our way there we visited a lousy open air restaurant where we were fed with some shit. Kebab was disgusting, the only thing that I could eat was flat bread cake. I also took four more cakes with me since I didn't know when or whether we would be fed again.

Our tour guide as many others was a mildly greedy person so before we arrived to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre we visited a Christian store where many Christian related thing were sold like crosses, icons, etc. I should mention that prices for all the items were over the top. Simple wooden little crosses (20cm) were sold for 15-45 bucks. Some people left over $200 there, insane people I should say (or maybe they were just rich).

Then we arrived to the aforementioned church. Right before that I left my photo camera in the bus so I had no shots of those two places, the second one was the Western Wall (which funnily sounds like the Wall of Weeping in Russian). We spent more than three hours there. Our tour guide made us hard believe two gravestones in that church were genuine and that Jesus Christ was indeed buried on them. People were all so excited I couldn't believe Christian can be so devout.

The Western Wall was it ... a wall. We were notified in advance that we could feel some inconceivable emotions upon touching it, but, well, I touched it and fell absolutely nothing. The funniest thing about these two places was of course a great number of Jews males which worn very funny clothes - no matter the weather is they always were black trousers, a black jacket and a black broad-brim/fedora. One thing I've forgotten to mention is that a heavy shower met us when we just left the bus to go to the church of the holy sepulchre. My brother spoiled his foreign passport a bit, because it was in a pocket of his shirt.

Then we went on the bus to the Church of the Nativity. Jews want to argue it was built exactly in the place were Jesus was born ... but a known fact is that no one knows were Jesus was born.

Then we proceeded to the most fascinating and the shortest part of our trip - we went to the Dead Sea. We were swimming there for just 50 minutes because we needed to get back to the Tel Aviv airport. I like that most of all, we were swimming like pigs - you cannot sink there - your head and your feet are always above the water/sea surface. It was a lot of fun.

We arrived back to out hotel around 2 a.m. so I spent on my feet roughly 38 hours. I was very tired when we came back but the Dead Sea was incredible.

Yes it did happen, for the first time in my life I visited a foreign a country. My brother and I left our city on Tuesday 29th of September and arrived to our hotel at 7am local time. We flew for four hours. We were immediately placed in our room and went to the beach.

These eleven days were quite remarkable - never in my life I've eaten so much - smorgasbord leaves you with no choice. I tried hard not to overeat but nevertheless gained probably up to a kilo of fat (I'm not sure since I did not weigh before departure). BTW, I didn't much like the fact that melon was unripe, watermelon while looking red-ripe wasn't very tasty, apples were uneatable, grapes were given just three times and weren't eatable either - they were sour and hard. We were not given dried fruits at all. That's all kinda sad since from people we were flying back with I got to know that even in four stars hotels different dried fruits were given daily. Yet another upset was the fish - all eleven days they cooked the same sort of _river_ fish (you may guess it was with a lot of bones).

One day we went to the nearest surroundings to see how the locals live, we saw their dwellings (quite big two storey neat brick houses), local vegetation. There were almost no animals, except some domestic ones like cows, chickens and very few dogs.

Several times at the beginning of our time there me and my brother played table tennis, at the end we played (big) tennis exclusively (since it was included and granted to us).

I tanned like never before.

Tomorrow I will write about the rest of the vacation and about out one day trip to Israel.

I've just come back from our dacha. Mom briefly cried when we were sitting at the train station waiting for my train to come. She said "I don't want anyone to go away" meaning that she wanted all our family to stay together.

She told me a new story of her horrible youth. When she was living in a railroad dormitory some neighbors-girls heisted her and took all valuable things including her new very expensive shoes which costed 32 rubles. That's the third part of an average wage of that time. Mom didn't want to tell anything to her mom (my grandma) so she decided to earn enough money to buy everything back. She and her friend Kotel'nikova started working in the central neurological-surgical hospital. They worked daily from 8 pm to 7.30 am and then went back to the(ir) studies. Two faint girls often had to carry dead bodies to the nearest morgue. People who came there couldn't feed themselves, couldn't even pee or shit on their own. It was a nightmare. Mom didn't tell me for how long they'd been working there, but she worked a lot, didn't sleep, and ate almost nothing. That of course led to dizziness and a couple of times she even lost consciousness. She even mentioned that she lost consciousness at opera rehearsals she took part in. Her supervisor was very infuriated and threatened to deprive my mom of her scholarship but later that women got to know the truth and never bothered my mom any longer.

That hospital is the worst hospital ever. Most its visitors come there just to live their last days or even hours, most often with sever head injuries. One of the women who found herself there in that hospital was a young 17 y.o. girl who fell in love with a married man. Once his wife caught them together in their 9th storey flat and flew into a rage. She said to that girl - either I kill you with a knife or you jump out of the ninth story balcony. The young girl chose the latter. She broke almost all her bones including the spinal cord. The doctors told my mom that girl had just a few days left before she dies. Luckily the spinal cord returned back to its place and the girl survived, remaining completely paralyzed.

My uncle's daughter is shocking. My mom hand me over such words: "Mom, don't worry, you will soon find another husband". I'm astounded.

And now the most important thing which I wanted to write down. Mom's twice bumped against the wall since yesterday. She didn't pronounced that but she definitely had a strong concussion of the brain. God, with her eyes problems she absolutely shouldn't get into troubles like this ...

Why? Why? Why? She's the kindest woman in the world, who helped hundreds of people, some even could survive only thanks to her advice ... This world is absolutely unfair.

Sometimes I literally stop to a halt. Like in the last few days. I don't know what I want, what I am living for, why's everything the way it is. I was planning to go on leave quite soon, maybe as soon on the next week ... but lately I started questioning myself - whether I go there (to the sea) or not, what it is for? I'm questioning even my own rest.

Damn, I'm totally perplexed.

BTW, I long hesitated whether to share with everyone my personal movie rating. You can enjoy it by clicking this link.

A funeral was it, a funeral, however even this event was spoiled - my uncle's son was dressed like a rapper with dreads instead of a decent haircut (I suppose even being hairless would have fit better into that ceremony). A visitation took place in a little church near my uncle's flat. A lot of people came to bid farewell (and everyone from my family too). After I left the church I started quietly crying, few other men were crying too. Uncle didn't look quite right, his face had an appearance of a mummy - almost white and totally lifeless - it was the third day he died. Mom told me a day before the funeral a body looked as if he was still alive. He was buried near the city, near his father who died just two weeks before his son's death. A tragic sequence, let's hope the last male of their family won't keep on with this death row. I didn't attended the funeral repast since I wasn't sure if my parents would go there and I didn't feel like discussing my uncle with people who I don't really know well. Besides I'm just not into that.

Later my mom confessed that the day before the funeral she stayed for four hours with the late and his family (our relatives), but she didn't feel like they are really our relatives, she said "I felt like they were strangers to me".

On Sunday my uncle (a husband of my mom's sister) was accidentally shot to death. I have a strange feeling I could divert that horrible event but now it's just too late for such deliberations. My mom dissuaded him from going to that very district where he and his friends went for fishing - as if she felt what would happen. He was around forty-five years old, his younger daughter is just thirteen. Insurmountable shit happens ...

Yesterday after my work I went to them and stayed there until 1:15 a.m. His daughter was sitting on my legs for some quite time. There were a lot of people there, mainly women. One women told my aunt that her husband was killed because of his sins. What a bullshit! Another man said "Live over it" as if anything was required to utter at all. I wished they all just shut up and sat nearby her without saying a word. This evening my mom told me that they are just a special kind of friends, envying and hating kind. I have no words.

I have to stop playing any computer games now and forever. It's now almost 2 am and I could went to bed as early as at 9 pm. Stupid boy! All the time after my work I was playing Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six: Las Vegas.

Today I've slept for 14,5 hours, however I'd have better slept more on the week (when I slept for 5-7 hours daily with no particular reasons).

This summer is crazy. Right now it's just 11C and slightly raining.

A dermatologist told me these two spots are just a sting of some terrible fly or blackfly. So I will live. This week otherwise has been a slow news week. The only aspiring news piece is that on September 21st, Mika will release his second album.

In the end of the day two bright red spots have appeared on the inner side of my right calf. I'm f*cking scared. A visit to a dermatologist tomorrow is strictly required. A medical insurance policy and my passport too.