Last year, when my aunt from China came to visit, she brought along a whole boatload of goodies in her luggage from Chinese New Year decorations that are still plastered all over the house to this, just your plain everyday souvenir. I hung it in my car ever since. Continue reading “Lucky Charm” →
When I was young, I remember my aunt used to keep bags of marbles lying around. My cousin and I love playing with them but the marbles in the bags would gradually become less and less and then it’ll be completely gone. Continue reading “Throwback Thursday: Marbles and Chopsticks” →
Wait, it’s the “remainder of this Summer” already??? 😮
Yes! Yes, it is and before you know it, Fall rolls around and then the Winter. Time flies! I guess that’s the one down side of being so optimistic. Anyway, I’m going to savor what’s left of this summer by getting the most I can out of it.
In my opinion, this summer have been the least “chilled” and productive summer of my life. So much to do and no time to do it. Just work and study but at least now I have one less thing to study. 🙂
Thanks for reading and see you back here soon!
Don’t worry, I didn’t start any actual fire or burn anything. It’s just a way to describe what I went through this past hour. Continue reading “Sorry for Starting the Fire” →
My aunt and uncle were TV maniacs. I remembered Continue reading “Hiding behind the curtain” →
It’s raining cats and dogs outside my window! Figuratively speaking, of course. It’s been such a long time since there’s been any rain even though a storm just came through two weeks ago but nothing like this. This is truly a summer rain and it feels wonderful. Just hope it won’t ruin the air show tomorrow. Well, gotta get back to studying. 😛
I remember as a student in China, when the teacher told us that some important person was coming to the school, I would first feel this strange tingle. Continue reading “Grand Visions, Epic Preparations, and Sheer Disappointments” →
Continue reading “A Thought For Tuesday…” →
Superstitions. Don’t want to believe in them but sometimes, they are ridiculously accurate. Continue reading “Superstitions” →
Obviously, I know what you all are thinking, not a very good and attractive title but I couldn’t think of a good title and I’m too stubborn to leave this title-less. So moving on. I would first like to present this inspiring quote for your Monday.
“Never Give Up,” that’s the most important part of the quote because I managed to get through a frustratingly disoriented and distressing weekend no thanks to a certain minor disorder I call Graves’ Disease.
I sat in front of my computer yesterday, wanting to write a post, work, read a book, do something but I couldn’t. Not because of writer’s block or anything but because even after 12+ hours of sleep, I was still exhausted, the back of my head felt like a ton of bricks, and my hands continuously trembled like a 90-year-old woman trying to walk a step holding a cane. Mainly, I felt just plain disoriented, like I wasn’t the driver of my body anymore, I was the passenger hitching a ride. In the least to say, I was horribly moody and shaky all weekend.
Why?
At my last meeting with my doctor, he told me these were all symptoms of Graves’ Disease or hyperthyroidism, a small, common, and incurable thyroid disease I somehow mysteriously contracted more than a half decade back and now, the subject of my frequent doctor’s visits. Anyway, it’s never been this bad before though. Usually, the symptoms will just last for a half day max. It’s never gone on for two straight days before.
Hmm, I wonder. Can it be getting worse? Can it be the medication doing this? I’ve already reduced it to a bare minimum. Of course many other thoughts crossed my mind as I am sitting here right now trying to contain my hand muscles but honestly I think it’s either the medication or the disease.
Ugh, I just wish I can just feel good for one day and not just hoping. Everyday the same symptoms pops out at a random time, you know, irritability, rapid heartbeat, and shaking hands and legs. It just makes me miserable and frustrated. Even now, I feel like my heart is about jump out at me. I may be hopeful and optimistic but not when I have a giant headache and shaky hands.
What’s worse? The doctor is so damn calm and level-headed. He never look a bit worried when someone tells him some horrifying symptoms. He was like one of those actors from the Twilight movies! Just blank and emotionless, even when I tell a joke, he doesn’t laugh. Can you believe that? Do they train doctor at medical school to not laugh at jokes and worry about patient’s worrisome symptoms?
When I tell him my symptoms, he’s like keep taking your medications, you’ll feel better.
I’m like WHAT???
REALLY????
That’s the best you can do? He makes me feel like the boy who cried wolf! Like I’m just exaggerating about my sufferings. Unfortunately, he the only specialist within a 50-mile radius. So what can I do?
Thanks for listening to my long and tedious babbling and Happy Monday. 🙂
I can’t sleep. I can’t sleep because this land fiasco is scaring the crap out of me. My mom is having second thoughts again about the little piece of land I mentioned in my post and this time, she’s managed to dragged me into it as well. Continue reading “To buy or not to buy?” →
Spring Cleaning, that was how I spent my Memorial Day. I didn’t do it all at once though. Like those drawers, I haven’t got to them yet, sadly. All I did was clean the floors which thankfully, I didn’t have to clean the whole thing.
My mom dragged me out of my room and downstairs so I could begin cleaning the living room while my mom moved everything out of the shoe closet. The floor was seriously dusty, dust bunnies literally blew across the floor. I guess that’s what happens when you have to turn on the heat six months out of the year, dust accumulates in the vents and ducts and out it goes onto the floor.
We finally turned off the heat tonight, though. I feel so relieved to finally be able to open my window ’cause it feels so hot and stuffy with everything closed. And of course, my mom has zero patience when it comes to slow moving work. She wants me to clean but she wants it fast. Well, you can only have one of those, either slow and clean or fast and dirty.
I wasn’t even done with the living room when she took over. Then she almost flew through the house, cleaning at the speed of superman, colliding into every furniture I could think of.
My mother used to be a housekeeper when she first came to the U.S. and a housekeeper needs to clean everyday at a record rate. The house she worked for just so happened to be owned by a family of slop. So I can imagine how she became the clean freak as she is today. I’ll bet if there’s a Olympic event for cleaning, she’d be the first to win it. 🙂
Anyway, she didn’t let me mess with her cleaning but while she went out to change the water, I took the sweet opportunity to snap some pictures. I know, it’s stupid but she tends to make me watch her while she cleans so I can learn how to do in the future. I would never get it anyways. Cleaning is cleaning.
She finished the job in half of the time it usually takes me although I am still questioning if her efforts is the same as mine. I opened the window to blow dry the floor while taking another chance to snap more pictures. Then it was done, it was all the cleaning we can manage, I can at least for today. It is hard to imagine that before my neighbor introduced me to the Swiffer mop, I actually used a cloth, got down on two knees, and scrubbed the floor clean like Cinderella.
As I sit here at my desk tapping my nails on the desk trying to decide what to write for my next post, my mom is downstairs loudly rummaging through the kitchen drawers looking for the nail clipper. “Where’s the nail clipper?” She yells. Immediately, I know that is my queue to go investigate. I rolled my eyes and sighed.
I take a few steps out of my room and shout back, “It’s in the first drawer.”
“It’s not there!” I groan and drag my feet down 10 steps down into the kitchen and start rummaging through the drawer myself.
I look down into the drawer and my eyes popped out like Spike the bulldog. Didn’t I clean this drawer just a few weeks ago? Or was it a few months ago?
I shuffled through the content looking for the nail clipper and I too cannot find it. “It’s not here! Maybe it’s in your room.” I yell while wondering, could it have accidentally fallen into the garbage? Both of us are a little forgetful these days what with our work and our GMAT exam’s coming up. One of us could have used the nail clipper and attempted to put it back into the drawer but missed it and landed in the garbage.
As my mom finished rummaging her room, she came back down while I went back up to rummage through her room some more. The second I arrived on the landing upstairs, she shouts triumphantly, “I found it!”
Whew. Now I can finally go back into my room and write that blog post. Given what had just happened, a light bulb lit up in my head. However, after seeing that mess in the most used drawer in the entire house, my head begins to pound. Because this means that within the next two weeks during my mom’s time off from work, I’ll have to spend a day reorganizing the drawers. Throwing away any expired coupons, no longer usable receipts, and other scraps of paper.
And that is just the tip of the iceberg. Seeing the picture above is just the topmost drawer. You don’t even want to see the bottom three drawers but here’s just a little sneak peek at the next drawer down…
It is filled with used/unused plastic bags from grocery shopping for storing meats, vegetables, and wonton/dumplings, potentially important invitations and other unimportant mail, and all kinds of junk I don’t even want to know. Then there’s the two more drawers which I don’t even want to know what kind of mystery is hidden there.
Really makes you think about the purpose drawers serve, doesn’t it?
Aren’t drawers suppose to provide some sort of organization? To help us find things more easily? So we don’t have to run all over the house looking for the thing we need right at the moment?
This picture is so right, blogging is a journey. After more than a year and 50 posts later, I think I should dedicate this single post to tell about my journey to blogging.
One day, I was in the university’s coffee shop having lunch. I noticed the guy sitting next to me was eating a bagel. Of course, at the time, I thought about food and eating more frequently than usual. Then a completely unrelated thought hit me. My mom always said that bagels are the most traditional American food she’d known.
At once, I opened my laptop and googled “bagels” and clicked on the wikipedia link. As I read the article, I was surprised that bagels came from Poland and not what my mom said at all. I immediately opened Microsoft Word and began typing. I didn’t know what I wrote at first but after a short while, it was starting to come together like a jigsaw puzzle.
After researching two more different foods (Fish and Chips and Pizza), I became convinced that this was my 7th speech for my Toastmasters Competent Communicator. The different varieties of foods influenced by different cultures. (Need reference? Look back at my very first article from last February!)
I was beyond excited and believe me, in those days, I don’t get excited about writing. So I finished my speech about two weeks ahead and all of the sudden, I wanted to write MORE!!! But what should I write about? Also, I wanted to not only write everyday to improve my writing and communication but I also need some feedback from someone other than myself, from total strangers perhaps? 😀
A few days later, while I was doing my homework, my mom came in and asked me about microblogging, you know, what it is, how to set it up, and whatnot. The term blogging collided into my brain like a meteor. This was it! This was how I was going to get my feedback. I’m going to share my writing with the world!
As I waved my mom away, promising her I would research it later, I quickly googled “blogging websites.” A bunch of links came up but the one that caught my attention was wordpress. It sounded familiar like I used it before and I was right. I had to turn in a blogging assignment more than two years ago for my American Economic History course.
I signed a blog and posted the essay I wrote about food. Within a couple days, I noticed people were liking it and some even became my followers. Not a lot, I might add but it was progress because I never had anyone like anything I did before. I’ve been told I’m flawed at many things but maybe I’ve finally managed to find something I’m good at.
However, with my busy full-time schoolwork and two-hour exhausting commute trips between home, school, and work, I didn’t have the time to keep writing. So I went into a long blogging hiatus until last September when I suddenly thought of blogging again while sitting in my empty classroom. I began writing again.
Since then, although I’ve been spotty with posts, I managed to keep up, writing about my observations, my daily life, and most importantly, about what I know. As I posted my own articles, I was reading other people’s posts to get a sense of how can I improve in my blogging and writing.
It was a good journey for me to be able to reach 50 posts and more than 100 followers in a little more than a year. For the past three weeks, I have been persistent with my blogs and writing almost daily even though I’ve hit many bumps along the way. Like work and slight writer’s block now and then but I have fun though and I’m looking forward to reaching my next goal.
Next goal: 100 posts and 500 followers!
For about three weeks now, I’ve been looking at this piece of land with my mom. For some reason, she can’t make up her mind about purchasing the land. For me, it doesn’t really matter since I may or may not live there.
In these three weeks, she’s been coming up with excuses after another.
After once again going out to the piece of land a few days ago as well as looking at a model home, another set of excuses were made.
After her colleague/potential neighbor told her that there are snakes in that part of the neighborhood, it scared my mom out of her wits. She has been terrified of snakes ever since her high school classmates placed a tiny snake in her dresser as a prank. I don’t know if that’s the true story, although I doubt it, her classmates are way too serious to pull any sort of pranks.
Anyway, I think that’s the silliest excuse I’ve ever heard. There are snakes everywhere, does that mean you’re not going to live anywhere?
I also don’t believe in snakes just popping out from nowhere. There has to be something that lures the snake to its destination (i.e backyard, garages, house). I told her, if you see a snake in the house, you would’ve been the luckiest person in the neighborhood.
That turned out to be the ultimate deal breaker, right after she demanded the agent to lower the price. I think the agent might have a melt down after he tried so hard to negotiate the price. She doesn’t want it!!!
I feel a little bad for the agent now. 😦 On the other hand, I kind of have a feeling from the get go that this wasn’t going to work out no matter how gorgeous the view is and I have no interest of getting in the middle. The middle man always gets blamed whenever something goes wrong! I remembered how well that worked out when she purchased our current home.
More or less, I think her latest excuse is just the same as excuse #2. She just might not like the view no matter how high the house goes.
Some people are highly opinionated while some is strongly against speaking their minds in a public setting. Those are two polar opposites while some of us lands in the middle where we open and restrict ourselves depending on the situation. Continue reading “The ups and downs of speaking your mind” →
Arguing and picking a fight with old people can never end well. They will always say they’re right and you’ll most likely be forced to admit it in the end. Most of the time, those arguments and fights will most likely lead you nowhere. Continue reading “Grandpa Always Wins” →
Do you know someone who buys things without looking or caring about the price tag? Continue reading “Do these people ever care about the price tags?” →
Lately, I don’t know, I feel tired, headachy, and most of all, I don’t feel like working in school as a language tutor anymore. Continue reading “Can my English be declining or is it just my imagination?” →
It is the third day that my mom stayed home this week. Continue reading “Day #3: No work Government Shutdown Stinks!” →
Have you ever had a task where you are supposed to create a calculation program using Excel? Continue reading “Is Excel our Friend or Enemy?” →
When I first arrived in the United States, before leaving the airport, my mom said, Continue reading “The Incidence with Public Manner” →
This is Another Story