Back From Russia - Lesson learned, never give up!

I had some business to attend to in Russia and I did not get to study chess at all. It's a huge shame, but on the positive side:

1. I did manage to grab a book in Russian by Mark Dvoretsky, the world famous trainer, and an exercise book for players rated ELO 1700 to 2000. We'll see how I get along with those...
2. I played 2 games of chess in a park against some man with seemingly tons of experience.  
   
   
   
   Every move he made seemed strong to me. I came off better in the opening and middle game of both games but he refused to give up (even 4 points of material down!). He waited for me to blunder my advantage away in the end game, and then overturn the match. Lesson learned, never give up and... study the endgame! (I should have recorded the moves, duh!)

I have kept my on-line (correspondence) chess games going on and I am very surprised that I have won about 5 in a row of them. It looks like me studying is paying off, seeing as I thought I was worse off in most of those games but I ended up winning anyway against skilled opponents.

I will be getting back to studying next week and hopefully make some more progress. I really hope to achieve 99th percentile on 15|10 and On-line chess really soon. Currently I stand on 95.7% and 92.9% respectively. Not too far off, I suppose.