Month: June 2009

Here are 10 Best Places to Live 2009, USA.

1. Albuquerque, N.M.
2. Auburn, Ala.
3. Austin, Texas
4. Boise, Idaho
5. Durham, N.C.
6. La Crosse, Wis.
7. Loveland, Colo.
8. San Luis Obispo, Calif.
9. St. Augustine, Fla.
10. Upper St. Clair, Pa.

For No. 8 – San Luis Obispo

Tucked into California’s sweeping Central Coast region is lovely San Luis Obispo, Calif. Its warm, gentle climate, with temperatures rarely surpassing 90 degrees, is perfect for hitting nearby beaches or touring local vineyards. In addition, California Polytechnic State University, which is located in town, infuses the community with intellectual energy.
Although area home prices have fallen by as much as 35 percent over the past two years, the national housing bust may have also created another reason to make San Luis Obispo your home, says John Day, a local real estate broker. “There are just plain good deals” in the current market, he says.

Jane loves make-up (she’s 12) and I volunteered to be her model at Sunday night dinner. Growing up, I somehow completely skipped over the makeup phase. I loved hair, but I didn’t care very much about make-up. Jane turned me into a completely different person who I now affectionately refer to as Mrs. Wong. Look at them eyebrows! Jane started to pluck some of my white hairs and I told her that she needed to stop because there are a million of them now – you can clearly see them in the first photo. Ack!

Edda’s been fussy and complaining a lot lately. I just spent 45 minutes in bed with her listening to her cry and trying not to go crazy myself. It’s pretty hard to do. Lately, during the day, she’ll be happily watching TV and then all of a sudden, she’ll cry at the top of her lungs for 15 minutes while we try and change the video, take her to the potty, try and feed her, etc and then as suddenly as it started, it’s all over. I don’t know if she’s constipated, reflux-y, tired, hungry, in pain, or just pissed that we are having chicken again for dinner (trust me, sometimes Vince gets the most angry at us for our dinner selections, so I wouldn’t put it past Edda). I reminds me of her crying jags in the midst of her regression a few years ago, I hope that it isn’t her brain somehow rearranging itself to regress again. Who knows?

Interspersed with all this fussiness have been some really fantastic days where it seems like she loves to do everything that we are doing – for example, a few weekends ago, we went to Target and Edda acted like it was the most amazing shopping trip evah! Laughing and smiling and walking for over an hour, why can’t everyday be happy? I know, everyday can’t be like a trip to Target, but still, one can hope and wish.

See? Even doing the famous bath/soap/mohawk thing-y couldn’t cheer Edda up.

On the other hand, Vince loved it.

This morning, I found the following article in italic. It is funny. When my professional becomes the number one “hardest jobs to fill in America“? Even with that, if I could start all over again, I probably would become a politicians first, then a lawyer, followed by a doctor. Engineer? No, of course, not.

My family, the immigration-generation of Lees are all engineers. For our next generation, only few engineers and scientists left. The majority of Lees are gradually but surely transforming its into more doctors or MBAs. For our next-next generation, probably no Lee will become an engineer.

The Hardest Jobs to Fill in America

In today’s economic climate, it’s hard to believe there are jobs that employers are having a hard time filling. But they do exist, according to the staffing firm Manpower’s annual talent shortage survey. From the 2,019 employers who responded to the survey in January, Manpower created this list of the 10 hardest jobs to fill in the U.S.

1. Engineer

There are several reasons it’s hard for employers to find qualified engineers, says Jonas Prising, Manpower’s president for the Americas. First, employers don’t want to hire two or three engineers with a variety of specialties, they want one engineer who is trained in several areas. Another reason is that there are far too few new college graduates in engineering to replace retiring engineers. Also, the Obama administration’s pledge to rebuild America’s infrastructure is increasing the need for talented engineers.

2. Nurse …

3. Technician …

4 Teacher …

5 Sales Representative …

…

We all went to Vince’s ballet demonstration (do you see him running in the mirror?). Vincent loves ballet, but he also knows that it’s a girl-y thing – I got a little lip from him for that this year, but nothing too serious.

The light was wonderful.

Where are the results of our shovel-ready stimulus plan? The only thing that I personal witnessed was along Interstate Highway 5 in Oregon. Workers there were pretty busy doing somethings. Probably a lot of them were illegal immigrants. Who knows?

One estimate suggests the bail-out is costing us 30K per American. I would rather the government just give the money to our average Americans and let them spend as they wish within a certain time frame – 6 months?.

In China, they have their stimulus also. Quote it from an article which said that money spent (there) in the first five months of the program to the end of last month had built 214,000 flats for low-income families, with construction also begun on a further 650,000 (units).

About 20,000km of new roads have been built in rural areas, 445km of freeways completed and 100,000 sqm of new airport terminal buildings opened around the country. Safe drinking water has been supplied to a further 14.6 million people. And 6500 health service projects — unspecified — have been funded…

Of course, it may not be true completely. But, at least, something is coming out of their pipelines. Here, I guess that lawyers, officials, insiders and campaign aides are pretty busy to decide what to do. In the meantime, most of the available money, probably has been already spent unwisely. T

Today after dinner, Rena and I took a walk to the Shell Beach as usual. It was just half block away. At time we came back along the beach. We watched at lease two whales playing. One could see them even with bare eyes. There is a public standing 20×80 binocular at the beach. One could see them even better with that.

A lady told us there were at least 6 of them playing all day. This was the first time we saw whales from the shore. They are beautiful animals. The sunset was as pretty as usual, especially with whales out there.

Today, a rather ugly scene, a very large dead seal was being washed to shore. Its tail was all gone, probably eaten by sharks or something else.

We are trying to set up a regular Tuesday “date night”. Tonight was the first one in the series. It’s always a challenge to figure out what to do – something interesting & pretty cheap. Something adult, but not too fancy, something that doesn’t go on too late because it’s a work/school night. We settled on going to the Natural History museum which was open late – until 7:30 pm.

Parts of the museum are the same as when I was a child and I just love that I can remember standing in front of the same display 30 years ago. I also love the retro font and I’m a little sad because I know someone is already thinking about how to renovate it to make it more up to date with computer touch screens and interactive exhibits.

Leatherback turtle:

This is also the first time that I remember seeing the Mall on a weekday evening. The light was beautiful and there were lots of kickball games.

Self portrait: