Plumbing and Chinese

Of all the household repairs, I like plumbing the best.  I think it’s genetically programmed into me. My parents both are adept as designing piping systems in nuclear power plants so I think it is natural that I like to fit pipes together and move fluid from one place to another.  If I had a lot of time, I would do all the plumbing work in the house.  I’ve replaced wax rings on toilets in this house and I’ve repaired a number of faucets.  Plumbing involves so many interesting materials: there is the PVC piping and the chemical welding, there is copper piping and the solder with the blowtorch and then there is (if one is brave enough) the gas piping. This weekend, I replaced an incorrectly installed drain from our laundry tub.  We didn’t notice that it was installed backwards until Saturday morning when it started leaking.

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I bought Vince a five pound bag of gummi bears.  When I started working with Vince to improve his Chinese grade, I started to introduce to him all the habits I have from years of being a good (a.k.a. anal) student.  I taught him about calendars and how to write down when everything is due and how to not leave everything until the last minute.  I taught him about flash cards and how to use them effectively.  There are study habits which involve using a timer and a set reward and there are certain rituals that I invoke to delineate “study time” from non-study time.  Jeremy watched me teach all this to Vince and asked if anyone taught all these quirky habits to me.  No one taught these habits to me, I’ve always thought that everyone knew how to study.  It never occurred to me that anyone needed to be taught how to study.

Anyways, Vince is working a little everyday on his Chinese.  Most days, the studying goes fine.  Some days (maybe once or twice a week) he’s really mad about studying and rolls his eyes at me. His final is tomorrow.  He told me this afternoon he feels really well prepared.  The gummis are his daily reward for reviewing his lessons, he gets only one at the end of each daily study session.  I told him when he gets through the whole bag, he’ll be fluent.  OK, maybe not quite.  Maybe 2 bags?  3?

Small things

I – along with most of the country – have been obsessed with Serial. If you haven’t heard, its a NPR podcast based on a homicide case in Baltimore from 1999. It draws you in fast and never really lets up. Check it out if you haven’t already. There’s even a Reddit site dedicated to the podcast. Some people have done some quite amazing maps/animations cross-referencing the cell tower data vs call logs vs timelines.

Also pimping my current podcasting app of choice here: Overcast. iOS only tho.

Also, been trying to lose weight. Been decently successful tho I have not taken to extreme measures such as Jeremy. My tactic is quite simple – don’t eat meals unless you’re out with people. Snack sure, but full on meals just skip ’em.

Bidding & Long Hot Shower

This time, for my home trip,  both outbound (to Portland, OR) and inbound (to Knoxville, TN) flights were overbooked.  When doing checking-in online, an airline’s questionnaire was posted to request your lowest $$$ bid for being bumped to the next available flights.

Since I planned to stay in west coast less than 14 hours, there was no outbound bidding.  But, for inbound flight, I put a bid of $350.00.  After boarding all passengers, I was one of those being bumped. The lady agent at the gate podium asking me about to be bumped from noon flight (Portland -> Atlanta -> Knoxville) to red-eye flight [Portland (late evening) -> Los Angeles -> Atlanta (red eye) -> Knoxville (next morning)]. I told her it is handy that I have extra cash simply I, just like everyone else, have a family to support.  She looked at me and said “okay I give you $400.00.  $50.00 extra”.  So, I got $50.00 extra.

I used portion of this $400.00 to take our friends to dinner before my flight to Los Angeles.  The connection time was very tight.  Unfortunately, the plane had to burn more fuel on the runway before taking off because of the over weight issue.  It sat there 15 minutes just to burn.  Upon arrival, the plane waited another 30 minutes because our gate was occupied.  When I got off the plane, it had only 3 more minutes left.  Luckily this time, the flight to Atlanta was just next door.

At Atlanta airport, I bumped into three Chinese exchange researchers.  They completely lost with limited English skills.  Since their terminal and mine were the same, I took them to the gate.  Before that, I took them to breakfast also.  I can tell they didn’t like cheese and cold drinks.  We spent about 30 minutes together.

When arriving at my apartment, the first thing I did was taking a long, hot shower.  I lived without house hot water for almost two days.  Especially, after the yard work to remove more hazardous stuffs for Mom, it really, really felt funny.

I told Mom, for next home trip, I will book the exact same flights and bid again 🙂

Cold.

It is still cold.

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Vince had a pile of sand in his room called “kinetic sand”.  It’s a bunch of sand with some sort of gooey polymer blended in so that the concoction feels moldable and flowable.  He’s had it for many months and it does feel very nice when you run it through your hands.  Because the polymer holds the sand grains together, there was no sand scattered throughout the room.

On Thursday, Vince discovered that his sand pile was 3/4 gone and found a guilty looking dog next to the bowl.  Apparently Ruby ate the sand pile.  As a result, Ruby’s been shitting sand for a few days now.  It’s funny watching it come out because it falls out and crumbles just like the kinetic sand did when it fell out of your hand.  Poor girl.  At least her insides are scrubbed out.

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Vince got knock off Beats headphones this morning ($11 dollars, Target!).  He suddenly looks completely like the teenager that he is.

U Street Is Cold but in Good Shape

I arrived at U Street around 10:30 PM last night.  Without examining everywhere, it looks it is in very good shape.

As a student of “heat transfer”, I didn’t turn on the heat because by the time it reaches the desired temperature, I am sure I will be about to leave.  It needs to heat the whole house inside out – a lot of mass and air in it. Therefore, I went to bed right away,  a couple of minutes later, it was really warm inside my blankets.

Water is another problem.  Without it, no shower.  Well, I always can drive to Safeway, fast food restaurants to get warm water there.

For outbound flight coming to Portland, is was overbooked but I didn’t bid on the price to be bumped. However, for inbound flight to Knoxville, TN today, it was also overbooked and I did put a $350.00 bid and see what will happen.  I may do a lot of window shopping to observe all kinds of people coming and going in the airport.;

President Obama and I

Finally, this morning around 8:30 AM, President Obama’s schedule was published by the local radio station. Vice President (Air Force 2) and him (Air Force 1) are scheduled to land around noon.  And they will fly out separately around 4:10 PM. In between, they are going to visit the neighbor hood and highway that I am going to use to catch my flight around 4:00 PM.  Knoxville, TN has a very small dual purpose airport (civilian and military).  May be just too small for all these planes.

Therefore, I left my office around 10:00 AM and the airlines was kindly enough to change my flight to 11:30 AM without additional fee.  Guess what, the timing was pretty tight.  Therefore, without deplaned cleaning, everyone was rushed to his/her seat. The captain told us that we had the permission from the tower to take off.  Once on the runway, for some reasons, the tower changed her mind and denied us to take off.  We had to sit there for another 35 minutes just watching Air Force 2 landed and 20 minutes later, Air Force 1 finally arrived.  This is the second time I have seen Air Force 1.  The first time is in Houston while Clinton was the President.

It is good that both can come and visit a territory that overwhelmingly voted against them.  May be not just them but voted against those establishments inside the Beltway.  I kind of agree with them.  “Government is the Problem and Not the Solution” as President Reagon once said.

Recovery.

This is the week I’m starting to feel like myself again since I started sprinting the week of Thanksgiving.  After a very tightly scheduled fall term and an incredibly hectic and wonderful holiday season, I need this little bit of time to fall back into my beloved routines.  I have a couple of weeks before school starts up again, the kids are back in school (Vince has mid-year exams next week) and I’m closing out the first quarter at work this week.  I’m using this time to get myself up to speed on first-inventor-to-file prosecution rules vs first-inventor-to-invent rules as first-inventor-to-file went into effect last year and those cases are finally bubbling up to the top of my docket.

I’m also using this time to connect back up with friends in the neighborhood.  I essentially disappeared socially from my neighborly rounds and I expect that I will again when the term starts, so I’m meeting up with pals at the local ice cream parlor to catch up.  Yes, the local ice cream place is open all winter and people hang out there in the morning for a cup of coffee…

President Obama Will Visit East Tennessee Tomorrow

What a coincidence!  President Obama will visit Pellissippi State Community College at Hardin Valley Road, Oak Ridge, TN. tomorrow (Friday, 1/9/15)  It is about 5 miles away from my office.  As a matter of fact, we have an office there too.

Evidently, he will fly in to TYS Airport (McGhee Tyson Airport at Alcoa – Knoxville Airport) which is a small civilian airport adjacent to a small military airport.  Probably, they even share the same runway.  I could see those air force planes took off from the runway while waiting for my flights.

But too bad, I need to fly out tomorrow afternoon to west coast from that airport too.  Hopefully, his tomorrow schedules (not published yet), do not interfere mine too much.  To make things worse, in order to get to the airport, I have to drive through Pellissippi Highway which is the main highway for Hardin Valley Road.

Well, all I can do is to wait and see :0)