Life, Travels, and Daily English Posts
Good morning, my dear friends! A new work week begins today, and I'm ready for it. What’s new about my day? Yesterday, I watched two movies about drug dealers: the first one was Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and the second was Pineapple Express.
Today I decided to take my next blood test in Kazan at a private clinic before my next dental implant surgery. My family members also decided to go on this trip with me so we could visit our relatives afterward. But something went wrong. When I finished my business at the clinic, we got a message saying they had already gone from the city to their country house. So we changed our plans and drove there instead, as we had some presents for them and couldn't just cancel the visit.
My usual outdoor activities started closer to 5 o'clock, once the weather became sunny and dry. Despite the rain earlier in the day, the ground was still comfortable enough for a bike ride, so I headed out as usual, wearing my damaged New Balance sneakers. I had cut them during one of my previous bike rides while trying to avoid obstacles on a forest trail, but they're still comfortable enough to keep wearing. Other than that, the ride was pretty ordinary. I cycled through forests and along highways, where I noticed horses and a wild rabbit sitting on the forest trail. It didn't get scared of me—it just noticed me, looked around for a moment, and then calmly continued on its way.
The day went quite well, without anything unusual or unexpected. I tried to spend it as productively as I could and complete some of my tasks while staying at home during the cloudy weather. Fortunately, the weather improved during the second part of the day, which gave me another great opportunity to leave my place for a bike ride among the trees on the forest trail.
These days have been a bit cloudy, but without any rain that could bother my outdoor activities. So while the weather gives me the opportunity, I keep working on the goals I've set for myself. Even though it's just 10–15 km across fields, meadows, and forests surrounded by hills, every ride is enjoyable. Not only do my bike rides help me keep my body toned, but they also give me the chance to enjoy nature and take photos along the way. Because of that, I've been especially busy experimenting with photography during my rides over the last few days. This time, I tried taking photos where I included my mountain bike along with parts of my body, like my hands and legs. I think that kind of perspective is interesting and a bit unusual.
Yesterday, I was wrong about the obstacles in the forest, saying that all of them had been removed. Today, when I reached the forest and started riding along the trail, I noticed that all of those obstacles had been restored. But after restoring them, some of the obstacles became much stronger than before. If they had used only small branches and fallen trees before, now that crazy guy—or guys—used huge, long logs, which can be quite challenging to move without extra help.
The day was unusual, even though I didn't do anything special or new. I just visited my relative's place and talked with my nephew about my former workplace and the military clarification summons. He didn't know that I had been fired a month ago, and he only knew about the summons from the military office through my blog when he checked it. I also returned his drill, which I had borrowed two weeks ago when I fixed the balcony floor.
Here I’ve shared some moments about how I was fired, and since that day I haven’t looked at the job market. I didn’t even update my resume because I had no plans to start working again. But today, a few messages from Telegram caught my attention. They came from my former workplace's channel, where they had forgotten to remove me. Unfortunately, after a few minutes, they realized I was the odd one out, and I was removed from the channel.
At 1 AM, when I finished my tasks and started getting ready for bed, I noticed lightning and heard loud thunder. It felt like the thunderstorm was directly over my city, making so many scary sounds. But the lightning was especially adorable because it flashed across the sky, leaving bright flashes that illuminated everything in the darkness. Honestly, it was really dark since the streetlights were turned off and the sky was covered with dark clouds.
I spent my whole day optimizing my blog's pages, and honestly, it made sense to spend my day on that. At the same time, it was also a productive and really interesting refactoring of my codebase that helped me improve my programming skills. It gave me unexpected but successful results, and I finally reached my goal according to Google PageSpeed. I also noticed and could actually feel how my pages had started loading much faster.
I arrived in the village at around 4 PM and immediately started washing and vacuuming my car. It was a mess both inside and outside, even though I don't use it every day. All four passenger floor mats were dusty and covered with frozen mud after the trip to the forest to check on the wild strawberries. Some parts of the carpet and seats were also smeared with some dirty, undefined substance. But the outside wasn't that bad. The rain over the past few weeks had basically washed it off, so it looked much cleaner. This time, I decided to clean it properly by myself, as I had a good opportunity to do it out in the village, surrounded by nature.
This post is nothing special, just sharing a bit of my experience texting with a girl from Saudi Arabia. I should also mention that I wasn't looking for a relationship or anything like that. My main goal was just to practice English, and nothing more. But during our conversations, something went wrong, and she started sending me private photos. Of course, I wasn't sure if those photos were actually her, but she deleted all of them as soon as I let her know I wasn't comfortable with it.
I had no idea this would happen, and I never could have guessed that I'd be sick today. Of course, I never wanted to get sick, but unpleasant things can happen unexpectedly, whether I want them to or not. So my day started at the hospital in the doctor's office, where I took tests for COVID, blood, and feces. But I didn't understand why I needed to take a feces test when I had a fever, a headache, and other signs of illness.