Month: September 2005

OK, so there is nothing really wrong with the Fair Price near our house. Fair Price is the main supermarket here in Singapore with branches located everywhere. I bet you could walk all day in 15 minute intervals and just rest at a different Fair Price each time. I like to shop at the Cold Storage which is a few MRT stops over from our house, with wide isles and shorter lines and more stuff like cheese and tortillas. However, we end up shopping at the Fair Price pretty often. You can see – first, my new haircut and second the stack of Tiger beer behind me. And next to the Tiger beer and on the floor is a bunch of boxes. Basically, they are always, always, always stocking the shelves and it is such a pain to move the stroller, keep track of Vince and push our little grocery cart around. Also, since it’s always packed, I think they run out of stock pretty quickly and so you will find different things on different days. One day, the didn’t even have Kikkoman Soy Sauce. What’s with that?

Jeremy finally got a hair clipper yesterday and got around to trimming his beard today. Vince and I hung around to watch those long, long whiskers go down the drain. Edda was in the bathroom as well clutching the edge of the bathtub.

This weekend, make up time on Saturday. Stay Put on Sunday. Just relaxing.

Presenting my self in front of people properly is always a challenging job for me, especially in front of loved ones. Without presenting oneself properly, in most instances, exchanging inner thoughts and ideas is indeed very difficult and rare. This really bothers. I don’t know why, but it has been with me for a long, long time, just too long one may say. As time goes by, this bothering thought is on the precipitous rise rather than falling steadily. With this thought constantly haunting me, I have experienced a lot of uneasy moments alone and sleepless nights, going over this, analyzing, and trying to uncover culprits, but so far, without any heartwarming tale to tell. Sometimes, of course, I blamed myself on almost every thing; sometime I blamed things that I could think of; but mostly with emptiness, I had nothing tangible to lay blame on, just watching my flaw running deep, deep and deeper into ravenous ravine hopelessly. Maybe, there is no culprit at all. But it is just all coded into my “Genes” and, therefore, it is predestined to prevail, regardless of one’s preferences. Naturally, I hope not.

One can comprehend, though without despair, I am indeed concerned. But, I believe it could be better; it should be; it can be and it will be better. Right? Time can and will tell. But, at this very moment, I really don’t know “how” 🙂

Just a thought to share.

Look at these perfect dumplings. Filled with the most delicious pork which when steam, oozes the perfect amount of water and fat and yummy goodness to make the most delicious broth that burns your tongue when you bite into them. We went to Din Tai Fung which is a Taiwan dumpling place that has a few branches here in Singapore. In Taiwan, if you didn’t show up right at 11 am for lunch, the wait was an hour at least. Today we walked in and sat right down.

Vince always manages to make friends on the subway. Here he is furiously playing with a toy cell phone attached to this little boy’s stroller. We never got his name even though his mother was constantly nagging him to say hello and to introduce himself.

Last night, during my outing to Little India, I bought an outfit which I wore all day today. Isn’t it lovely?

Yesterday, I went out with Julia and Kate to Little India and had a wonderful time. It’s so nice being outside at night in Singapore, so cool and breezy. Little India is busy at night, they have a 24 hour department store called Mustafa and Dakshi tells me that you can buy anything there except for an elephant and a Mercedes. It’s nice to hang out with women, it’s been a long time since I have done such a thing. We ate at an Indian buffet and walked and walked all around. I didn’t take any pictures of the evening, so a close-up of Ruby will have to suffice for today.

Thanksgiving is in the conner. We are going to have day off and the Friday is not a working day if we still have job. If not, we can come to Sigapur or China to meet you all. Doanld, what do you think? Let me know too.

We have been in Denver for a month. It is a nice place. Office is only mile away from the studio. We are working on a project to build a plant convert the weapon grade polonium into a fuel rode for nuclear power plants use to generate electricity. The French has one of such plant and we are going to build two. One is located in SC and the other one is in Russia.

Since we are use French design, some documents are written in French. I have to learn how to read French. I told my lead that there is no problem to learn French since I learn English by reading technical stuff. As a mater of fact, I use the equation to understand the French. I have to spend lots of time to understand French if there are no mathematical equations. So I listed a spread sheet to have French and English for my reference. It helped a lot since my memories are not like 40 years ago.

In the office, there are most temporary engineers to do the works. In our section, there are 6 engineers, 5 are temporary. One of them has been here for more than year. There is another old guy (may be ~ 70 years old) in next section. Two weeks ago, few engineers had business trip to SC. They could not find him in the Atlanta airport. Later, the airport security people found him. He disoriented due to his low sugar level and fall down in the airport. They sent him back to Denver hospital had quite few stitches and he is back to work yesterday. He looks OK. But, he said that he has some problem with his legs. It is very sad that he has to work at that age. Daddy and I worked very hard when we were young and we do not have to work at old ages. When getting old, the health is getting bad to worse. That is why there is a retirement and social security system.

Our boss is very nice and most time is hand off. He knows that we can help him to do the job since he is a MIT graduate and knows very well in the field. It is nice to have a boss knows technically.

We are staying in a very small studio with two cooking tops and a small refrigerator. I still can manage to do some cooking during weekdays. We had dumplings too. Daddy now helps to wash dishes every time we have supper at studio. We also found a nice swimming pool just like Rockville’s about 6 miles away. We go swimming twice a week. One of co-worker told us that here is cheap movie theater. The cost is $1.00/ticket. It is only $0.50/ticket on Thursday. We have found the place and going to watch a movie this week.

Our medical insurance is covered by COBRA. The premium is about $750/mo which is much higher. The good thing is that we will be 65 next year so we have to spend about $10,000 total. Not that bad if we have job.

Next long weekend (every other Friday is off day); we are going to Washougal, WA on 9/15/05 and come back to Denver on 9/18/05. We are going to take our friends couple out for nice dinner since they helped me lot in moving out of the Richland. It was nice I made Bechtel to pay the moving. Moving is a big hassle. Doris knows it all well. But it is much nicer let company to do it. They packed everything and moved back to Maryland. My friend Mrs. Ling helped me to open the door for mover to move all stuffs into the basement. Daddy went back to Maryland few weeks ago and took a quick look at the stuff and opened few boxes and found everything is in good order. We moved our desk top computer ourselves to Denver. Our place is too small for printer and scanner. So we only unpacked the computer, monitor and keyboard. There is no place to put a chair in front of the screen and I only use the computer for few minutes.

Last weekend, Daddy drove 1700 miles to National parks. We went to dinosaur National park in CO first. But they do not have any dinosaur bones. So we went to UT to see the dinosaur bones in the stone. They built a building to cover the part of the mountain where the dinosaur bones are located. It is very nice place. We would like to take Vince and Adda to see this place later on.

I like Zion National park most. Daddy went both Zion and Bryce national park before when he was in Los Vegas. But he did not take shuttle to see the best part of those places. In Zion, we saw two climbers on the vertical cliff. They slept against the wall vertically that night to rest. It can not climb into the top by one day. The tour guide told us that the sand rocks are difficult to climb. But it is very safe to climb since every climber knows what they are doing. However, the day before, there was an accident for a hiker. He was off the trail and fall into the bottom of the cliff. Of course, he did not survive. It is very sad.

I picked up three big rocks. One is from the Rocky mountain, other is from the Green River at dinosaur place and third one is from Zion. They are in different colors: Grey, Red, and black.

We took lots of pictures but I did not take the cable with me and daddy did not find the cable from packed boxed. We went Wal-Mart and dumped all pictures on a CD. Hope I can mail you some tonight.