Just regular folks.

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.

A low-key day today for me and the kids, we spent the day going to the library, eating at McDonalds and Vince taking a nap (Yes!). For about 45 minutes today, both of the kids were napping and I had a few moments to myself, which I spent asleep. Vince really dislikes taking a nap and I don’t often force the issue, but I felt today that he really needed one and he went to sleep after about an hour of “I DON’T WANT TO TAKE A NAP!” But if he takes a nap, then we can go swimming and on an ice cream run before bed. If he doesn’t nap, we usually have to put him to bed right away. I know, exciting stuff, but what can you do? Thank you Kiki for the wonderful Edda name puzzle. It was just waiting for us today in our mailbox. Oh also in the mailbox was a wedding invitation to an old MIT friend. It’s going to be in Puerto Rico in April of next year and I’m hoping we can make it!

Last long weekend, we went for another long trip. We drove about 1,700 miles altogether and visited 5 National Parks. Mom got her National Park’s passport stamped all over and they filled all the blanks.

We went to Dinosaur National Monument in the northwest corner of Colorado and northeast corner of Utah. A lot of Dinosaur bones are still on the quarry wall which is enclosed as a building wall, very interesting. We also walked along the Green River, an upstream of Colorado River. After that, we went to Fruita, Colorado; it is about 30 miles west of Grand Junction, Colorado. We then drove along Grand Mesa near by. We discovered a housing development right along the mountains there. Those houses are huge and with pretty views. 5 acres log itself is about $150,000. They are really nice just like those houses right along side the Scottsbluff Mountain at Scottsbluff, Nebraska.

The next day, we went Archers National Park and walked a pretty long distance to see the famous Landscape Arch which appears on many covers of the traveling maps. Its length is more than a football field and the thinnest point is just about 6 feet. Then we drove to a small town just west of Zion National Park which was named by first Mammon settlers about its beauty and its remoteness, and apparently, without religious persecutions.

The next day, we went to Zion National Park, Utah. There we saw two climbers on a wall. They stayed there overnight half way before going to the top. It is a pretty sight to see two small dots on this wall of a huge vertical sediment rock formation. After that, we went to Bryce National Park. The oldest tree in the world is there, it is about 5000 years old. In both places, we took park shuttles and it is a very neat idea, less driving by individuals and less pollution to the park environment. After that, we drove north to Capitol Reef National Monument, Utah. It is also very pretty. One segment of route 12 is right on the top of a tall mountain. It was very scary when we drove on top of that because both sides are deep cliffs without anything to block your view, very scary indeed.

We stayed in a small town at east side of this park. Next day, we drove home and passing by the famous ski town of Vail, Colorado on route 70.

Well, this week, we have to work to makeup our 40 hours a week to schedule. It is better this way because our per diem and payment rules.

With Mom, I do the dishes; prepare the bed; iron the clothes and move out the trash. Mom is quite surprise to find this 🙂

We had a really nice day today – Jeremy turned 37 and we celebrated by going to Jade Garden at the mall. It was a nice dinner, but the kids were wiped out from a long and wonderful day. We spent the afternoon with Kate, the wife of one of Jeremy’s coworker. She’s from Texas and we met at Julia’s party last Friday. Anyways she’s a cool pregnant lady, (not in the temperature sense, just in the attitude sense) and we had a nice time hanging at the pool at her apartment complex. Then afterwards, we went to the mall near Kate’s house and Vince loves to “craft” which means that he gets to make this plastic window cling. He gets to do this once a week when I have to be out of the house to get it cleaned. Anyways, Jeremy arrived just in time to help out with crafting which took way longer than I thought it would and we were all starving by the time we sat down to dinner.

Well. As we all know, Edda is almost 18 months old and not yet walking. She is the speed demon crawler, but no independent steps – almost no interest in walking. She has inherited the flared out feet – a la her mother and will most likely walk like a duck. I’m a little bit concerned, not like OMG concerned, just a little corner of my brain knows that she’s a bit behind other kids in the walking department. Anyways, I’m happy to report that just in the past few days, she’s been making a lot of progress and seems to really enjoy standing up, clutching a couch. In the morning, when she wakes up, I bring her to our bedroom and then I collapse into our bed hoping to sleep another 15 minutes. She spends the whole time cruising around our bed clutching our bedspread and standing. Woo hoo!

After story time, Vince, Edda and I went to some mall on the island looking for yarn. Vince wants to learn how to knit. Well, we didn’t find the yarn store, but we found a sushi place that has the plates of sushi rolling by on a conveyer belt.

Went to the Botanical Gardens for a storytime today. We didn’t get very far into the gardens, we made it only to the storytime pavilion and then to the cafe as it was rather hot. The orchids were lovely as is Edda in front of them. Vince was a little nervous at first, but eventually moved up to the front row to participate in some of the games, Simon Says and I Spy.

Our friend Shelia in Austin has been working non-stop during the past few days helping some of the displaced people of New Orleans who have reached all the way to the middle of Texas. She has been working her tail off trying to get money, supplies, donations to the people who need them and also working the phones getting families reunited. Bless her heart!

Finished this book by John Irving a few days ago and while I am a fan of Mr. Irving’s this was not his best at-bat. I’d go with Son of the Circus anyday, now that was a good book.

Tonight we had spare ribs with orange/maple sauce. I thought it wasn’t worth the effort, which actually wasn’t that much, it just involved marinating the meat in the morning, then starting the cooking 2 hours before you want to eat and finally preparing the glaze. Jeremy thought it was OK though.