blogging, weekend

The idea of blogging is not new to me. I've started blogging over 8 years ago as some of my friends introduced to me a huge Russian community blogging and interacting on LiveJournal. I took a deep dive, started making friends and writing on different topics that were of interest to me: music first of all, and the books, movies, and simply about my life. At that time I was at the doorstep of the Church and did not know it yet. Soon I came in contact with Orthodoxy and started learning the basics of spiritual life. That significantly changed my priorities and also my behavior. I quickly realized that all or most of my online writings were at least idle talk, and often with a lot of vanity behind the subject or style of my postings. Thus, I removed almost all my previous blog posts and from that moment limited myself to only certain topics which to me seemed useful. That gradually changed into a blog that mostly consists of quotes from the Fathers of the Church or contemporary books and articles on the Christian topic (99% in Russian). Over the years I probably made literally a handful of personal posts - where I was actually telling something about myself or events of my life. (Although, I was reading other Journals and talking to people in the comments to those, so during these years I connected with a lot of good people and made a few of very close friends, for which I'm very grateful.)

On the contrary, this blog is intended to be personal. That doesn't exclude some quotations, but it's really going to be about me, my family's life, and some personal thoughts too, as this is a type of diary. In that respect, this new beginning is really somewhat unfamiliar ground to me.

So, to begin that, I'm going to tell you that this weekend my childhood's dream has finally come true. I'm the only child of my parents, no siblings, and I wanted to have a little sister when I was a boy. I asked my parents for that but somehow that didn't happen for a long time... And now, 3 decades later, my mom has become a God-mother of a little girl Anna, whom I now like to refer to as my God-sister. :) Of course, I'm partly joking; but on the other hand she is my sister, my God-sister, as we have the same Father.