Life, Travels, and Daily English Posts
In July, a person from my old job texted me and asked, “Can you take one simple website and fix it?” I immediately said, “Yeah, of course! Send me the link and the list of tasks I need to fix.” After I checked everything, I told him how many hours it would take and how much it would cost. He also wanted to pay me part of the money before I started working, but I declined it, and we agreed that he would pay after I finished the work. Now I think I should’ve taken that money he wanted to give me.
My morning was a little rainy, but it didn’t stop me. After breakfast, around 9:30 a.m., I quickly changed my clothes and went for a bike ride. When I left home, I noticed that the ground and asphalt weren’t too dirty. That made me happy, so I started my ride. I couldn’t even imagine what would happen next. When I was going downhill through some trees, I fell off. While going down, I pressed the front brake, and the back of my bike lifted up. I felt it, but it was already too late — I fell. I got a big bruise (about 10×15 cm) on my knee, and now it hurts a little when I walk. I also got some scrapes on my hands and legs, but nothing serious. I tore my shorts and a bit of my sneakers. Fortunately, my bike is fine — nothing broke. Honestly, I’m happier about my bike than about myself.
Even though the day was cloudy, I decided to go for a bike ride because I didn’t want to spend my weekend at home. I didn’t bring my GoPro, though, because I’ve already filmed all the interesting places. Another reason is that the GoPro doesn’t record very well when the weather isn’t good enough. So I rode my bike for more than four hours today. For about thirty minutes, I just read Reddit and relaxed — it was a new experience for me, reading Reddit and practicing English in the fresh air. During my ride, I also met one of my classmates. The last time I saw him was at our graduation event, which was more than ten years ago!
For the past three years, I celebrated my birthday abroad. Every autumn, I used to travel to other countries, so I always celebrated it there. Also, autumn in my country is quite difficult — it’s rainy, cold, and there’s almost no sun. In short, the weather in autumn is very bad, and I never enjoy it. That’s why I started leaving my country and spending some time abroad until December. However, this time I decided to stay here for a while because I had some things to handle related to my visa.
Yesterday I ended my day with visa appointments, and today started the same way — with my visa journey. Last night, I tried to make an appointment from 11 PM until 1 AM, but everything was unsuccessful. I saw the same errors again and again, and I couldn’t move past the appointment date selection. Today, the same story repeated. I woke up early in the morning and tried again, but unfortunately, I couldn’t make an appointment even though the site showed free and available dates. I just wasted all my time and nerves on it.
Today, between 4 and 5 PM, the Telegram bot notified me about available appointments. I immediately stopped my work tasks and started trying to book one. But everything wasn’t so easy. I kept getting errors like “Request error, please try again” or “This date is already occupied, please choose another one.” Because of these errors, I couldn’t move to the next step. I was only able to select a date and time, and that’s all I managed to do in about an hour or more. However, this time I noticed one interesting thing — the website worked normally and didn’t block my IP address. I don’t know if that’s good or bad.
My morning started early because, at 6 AM, a fly started bothering me. I don’t know how that fly appeared in autumn, but it successfully annoyed me, and I had to get up. After getting up, I looked out the window — the weather was a little rainy. Even the people outside looked sad, holding umbrellas in their hands and rushing to work. Fortunately, closer to lunchtime, the weather started getting better. And finally, around 11 AM, the sun appeared, and the clouds disappeared.
This day was a little bit unsuccessful because I spent all day working on my task. It was a bit frustrating because I couldn’t find the right solution. Right now, I have no idea how to complete it correctly. Briefly, this task is about cache, and it’s not working correctly. When the user updates or adds new items, they only see the old items without the updates. I spent the entire day on this task, and I hope that tomorrow I can ask my colleagues about it during our meeting.
My morning started as usual. Morning routine, my favorite show "Good Morning America," and my light breakfast. For breakfast I ate cereals with milk and one banana. After breakfast, I continued watching my show, because my breakfast time is just 15–20 minutes. And I can't watch or listen to it fully, therefore I always finish it after my breakfast. Well, when I finished it, I decided to work on my blog again. And today I developed a comments system, but I couldn’t complete all the work I wanted. So, now everyone can leave comments without authorization, and it’s absolutely anonymous. If you want to use your name, you should sign up and log in — then you automatically can write comments with your name. Soon everyone can control their comments and other things from a private profile. I promise this, and I will do it soon.
The day was sunny and warm. As I mentioned yesterday, I planned to repeat the same route where I had previously broken my bike. Luckily, I managed to do it this time. During the second part of the day, from 12 p.m. until 3 p.m., I rode my bicycle. Along the way, I visited Black Lake and some other places where I also walked. In total, I rode about 13 kilometers. I also recorded a video on my GoPro, but I’m not sure when I’ll publish it. I still haven’t uploaded my travel videos from Portugal, Germany, the Czech Republic, Austria, Italy, Thailand, Vietnam, Singapore, and the UAE, because I haven’t found enough time for editing, and my laptop is very slow for video processing.
I want to start with my blog metrics. Yesterday, my blog was visited by 10 unique users from abroad. I found it a bit strange because six of them were from Oregon, USA. All of these users had unique statuses, but they visited at almost the same time. They used Windows, Apple, and Linux operating systems. The total time on my site was between 30 seconds and 2 minutes. For me, that was unusual. I think maybe someone found my blog and shared the link with other people. Besides that, my blog was also visited from Germany (Saxony) and the Netherlands (Drenthe). I often see these visitors, and they watch my blog actively. The metric system couldn’t detect their gender. I can’t fully trust it, because maybe someone from my own country is using a VPN. But I’m not sure, because when I tried visiting my blog through a VPN, the system didn’t record my visit.
In this post, I wrote about how I broke my bicycle. Yesterday, I received the broken part. I ordered it from AliExpress for $10 because I couldn’t find the same part in local or online shops. The part took 13–14 days to arrive from China. I measured it, and it is 100% identical to the broken one. Soon, I will try to install it on my bicycle and go down that hill again—if the weather is good for cycling.