Hey there!

Thank you for stopping by.  Here are a few words about this place where you landed.

What I do here is, primarily original essays.  There are sprinkles of original photography.  There are mixed media.  There is an occasional quirky quote from elsewhere, and an occasional somebody else’s poem.

The blog was semi-anonymous for a while.  It’s getting less and less so as lose interest in hiding.  Most of the readers know me.  My identity is easy enough to figure out.  The pseudonym is from here, by the way:

Speaking about the readers who know me…  Some of you would appear in my posts.  As a rule, I only use names when I feel that wouldn’t be upsetting to you; I avoid names or make them up when discretion is called for.  Still, if you recognize yourself, named or not, in a post, and are uncomfortable, please let me know, and I’ll correct that. Chances are, that will not have gone viral yet, not by any measure.

Most of the writing is in English.  A few early posts were exclusively in Russian; there may be more of those in the future.  These days, posts in Russian include translations (by me).

Some posts turn out better than others; my favorites are here.

For a couple of months, the blog had two weekly features.  Each Saturday, Ex Libris featured a new quote from a good book that I’ve read; the quotes in Russian are translated.  More ambitiously, each Tuesday or so, I wrote about someone I either met or got to know better in the prior week or so; this feature is called Happy to Meet You.  They went mostly dormant in September 2015, but might come back.  Ex Libris, the more active of the two, a new, as of January 2018, series, Sabbatical, and my favorites are linked to from the main menu.

As time goes by, the mood changes.  There are gloomy posts, there are cheerful ones, and neutral ones.  Between May 2017 and December of 2017, there was a gloomy streak, but we seem to be out of the woods now.

The menu also has links to some of my favorite blogs by other people.  I even met one of them after I started following his blog, and he is just as wonderful in person as in writing!

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Thank you for reading and stop by again soon.