After years and years of struggle with many battles won, and even more lost, my legal immigration war ended in my favor about a week ago. I am now officially a permanent US resident. Among my rights are the right to reside and work in the US and the right to leave and re-enter the US freely as I please. The coolest of all is that I'm going to have this status permanently, so I'm not going to have to renew it to keep my rights (except for when I apply for my citizenship in 5 years).

Continue reading "Immigration" »

Posted by Vova at 04:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Here's a video of me and Lindsay playing the piano and my parents singing for you:

http://www.galchenko.com/vova/videos/WH1.mov

Posted by Vova at 01:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Humans make plans. Plans to have a family, walk the dog, get a job, play piano... all kinds of plans. Making plans helps us get things done in a thought out, organized manner. In addition to making short-term plans, some humans make long-term plans. Some humans make 5 and even 10 year plans. I don’t believe anyone actually sticks to long-term plans they make. Life is so unpredictable that it is impossible to make plans that are going to stay relevant for as long as 5 or 10 years. Hopefully people’s plans change as they acquire new data and circumstances change. 5 years ago I could not even think of ever getting to where I am now, as I had no idea I was going to be fortunate enough to meet people I met who helped me and guided me along. I adjusted my plans accordingly.

Continue reading "Long-term plans" »

Posted by Vova at 08:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

I’ve gotten behind on my blogging – quite a few interesting things happened lately and I’m going to go ahead and try to catch up.

Firstly, there’s the GPA golfer, Jesper Parnevik gig. That was on Monday (October 16th) near West Palm Beach, and it was a lot of fun. Jesper had a sponsorship party and contacted me on Saturday (October 15th) about doing a 20 minute show at the party. Mark arranged a deal with him and that Monday at 3 am I was in the car driving to the airport to fly to West Palm Beach. Exhausted from getting up early I got to the party at around 7 pm. That was my first ever corporate gig and I’d never done a 20 minute show all by myself, so I was a little nervous about it. I ended up doing real well, in front of some rich and influential people that were there. They seemed to have liked me a lot, and the coolest part (for me) was that I did 20 catches of 7 clubs on the first try in the show eventhough the ceiling was so low that I had to crouch a little bit and juggle lower to do it. Due to some misunderstandings I didn’t get to the hotel until about 1 am and I had to wake up at about 4:30 or so to catch the flight. So eventhough the gig was fun and it went well, it started the theme of not getting enough sleep that week with the average of like 3 hours a night.

Continue reading "GPA golfer gig, going-away party, Lindsay, car accident" »

Posted by Vova at 11:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (32)

I got back from my Philadelphia/New Jersey trip last night. I stayed with Lindsay (AKA pinkpanties, sweet bazoongas) and ended up spending most of my time with her. We did go to the juggling convention and I did 20-25 minutes closing the first and second halves of the show. It went pretty well, considering the ceiling height and the amount of time I used to prepare for it (none). I ended up doing 3 clean runs of 7 clubs of about 20 catches on different occasions during the show. That was cool. Lindsay took a whole bunch of pictures and videos of us hanging out and of me in the show. Here are some decent ones:

Lindsay and I

Lindsay and I at Target

Lindsay and I at Target 2

Lindsay, her sister Jen, and I

Lindsay, her sister Jen, and I 2

Lindsay and I 2

Me in the show

Me in the show 2

Me in the show 3

Me in the show 4

Lindsay and I passing

Posted by Vova at 10:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (25)

So I was picking up Olga from school and taking her to golf this afternoon, when I realized that my gas gauge was on "empty". So we stop at a gas station. For some weird reason the pump didn't seem to want to pump any gas in the car, and Olga was running late so I just took her to golf before figuring out how to work the pump. So then I headed to the closest gas station to the golf course and I ran out of gas about a hundred meters away from the gas station. I was able to cruise right into the gas station and pull up right to the pump. Now whatchu know about THAT precision, baby?

Posted by Vova at 07:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (26)

I'm an atheist. A lot of times when I tell people that, they assume I must be some kind of horrible person with no morals. Some have even tried to attribute morality to something God originated. Whether I'm a horrible person or not, is not really up to me to determine, however, I'd like to say a few things on morality as it relates to atheism.

Continue reading "Atheism and Morality" »

Posted by Vova at 01:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (71)

Why is it that some words are labelled "bad words"? That's what they tell us when we are little - "That's a BAD WORD!" That makes no sense to me. It's not words that are good or bad, it's what you're trying to communicate via those words. There are no bad words as far as I'm concerned. There are bad thoughts, bad intentions.

Continue reading "Words" »

Posted by Vova at 04:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (41)

We're back home! Hope you guys liked the NBC thing we did. There's really a lot to it, and I don't want to talk about it right now. Maybe we'll make "The making of the today show appearance" video. But I'm not going into it now. Now I'd like to talk about smoking.

Continue reading "Smoking" »

Posted by Vova at 08:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (23)

Hey guys. So yesterday sucked. I went to the Promenade to street perform and I did like 3 shows (from 8 to 8:45 pm) until it got so dark that I couldn't juggle anymore. It turned out there was a fire somewhere in Santa Monica and the street lights on the part of the Promenade I was at were out. So I ended up wasting like 2 hours of my time going there and back... That was upsetting. A couple of people who read the blog came to see my first few shows. Thanks for doing so, and sorry to people who came to see me after 8:45.

Continue reading "Street performing, Hair, Spelling" »

Posted by Vova at 11:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (27)

Hey, so I heard a few complaints about the black-on-red font being hard to read. Never really occurred to me it would be a problem. Seems fine for me to read. But both, my dad and Mark agree that black on red IS hard to read. So I guess we're changing that eventually, just not yet. There's some really cool stuff happening right now that we're all busy with. You guys will see what it is soon. So bear with us, Mark will fix the readability issue eventually. I hope it doesn't keep you from reading our blogs.

Posted by Vova at 12:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (12)

I hate it when people say "you miss 100% of the shots you don't take" in relation to things other than hockey, basketball or similar sports. If one follows that logic, you also HIT 100% of the shots you don't take. So really, what they're trying to say is you should take as many "shots" as you can, because there's no penalty for missing them, which oftentimes is not the case in real world. So really, unless you absolutely have to say something that makes no sense, don't say "you miss 100% of the shots you don't take" in relation to real life situations.

Posted by Vova at 04:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (20)

I'm super tired right now, as it's really late and I've had quite a hard day. I can't go to sleep though, because I'm exporting a new video for galchenko.com. That's being launched within the next couple of hours. Mark's in his room finishing it up. You guys better like the video, because a lot of my pain and suffering went into that. Since I'm waiting for the video to export anyway, I thought I'd post on my blog.

Continue reading "Expressing yourself through juggling, "woot"" »

Posted by Vova at 01:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (24)

Well, this is my first blog entry ever. As a matter of fact I'd never thought I would ever even have a blog until about a week or two ago when Olga, Mark, my dad and I agreed it would probably be interesting for a lot of Olga and Vova fans to read our blogs. So I'm going to make entries here when I feel like I have something interesting to say about juggling or anything else really.

Posted by Vova at 03:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (13) | TrackBacks (2)