Humdrum Homily

So back from Houston last night. Been a busy week attending a technical forum and working on the blackberry and into the night on server and application problems with my team. Because a new application was being used for the first time by the people it was designed for and in a large group. Suffice to say, I was multi-tasking like crazy.

I'm all alone fresh from cleaning out all the bathrooms and the kitchen and doing part of the weekly laundry. The half man helped a little with the carpet downstairs. I am satisfied. While I was away, the Man pruned the garden plants that had really grown all through spring and summer and cleaned out the backyard. Looks really neat now. And the garage as well ):.

Everyone's out. Nic to marching band and the two to the boy's golf lesson. Things have reverted to the routine yet reassuring humdrum pace of life. Good to recalibrate before the next wave of events hit, whatever they may be.

I suppose the mid-Autumn festival is over. I don't really know. Hard to keep track in this country - I am guessing because while I was away, the rest got invited on a week night to Nic's house for moon cakes. For weeks now, the two newly opened Asian supermarts have been selling them and the boy had a craving once so we bought some.

Tomorrow will be tennis. I am looking forward to it. Since Chinese lessons started up again for the half man, we have been playing close to 4 hours of tennis every Sunday. Because Ryan is also taking chess lessons after Chinese. I need the exercise to take the stress off.

Big Breakfast

This coming Monday, I shall be off to Houston for a week of learning, I hope. It has been a very busy few weeks in the office and it would be nice to get away and just learn new things. There will be much changes coming and about time to re-tool. Actually, I have been re-tooling since coming here. Learning about applications using technologies I have not known about before. And in the past few months, routing back to more familiar but still new MS technologies. Really challenging - lots of issues and problems that had to be quickly resolved, yet so interesting. I guess there is more than a fair bit of the chip off the old block in moi - like my dad.

The kids have been doing fairly well so far, I think. I know the half man is, the girl is more reticient about sharing. The half man has no choice, his teachers send the results electronically. Check out schoolnotes.com - the teachers post homework and other assignnents there so parents can keep track. Pretty cool.

Summer is one day away from being officially over. It has been a glorious and very enjoyable season so it shall be missed. Fall is here and today, the first rains of the season started falling. So we went off to the high school pancake breakfast to raise funds for the school band with raindrops falling gently on our heads. The kids were also washing cars, ostensibly for free but donations are always expected :). The whole day has been rather gray on account of the rain.

It was quite enjoyable at the breakfast - familiar faces like Keng and Nic and some others. And a colleague and his family who were, to my surprise, also part of the social circle of Nic. He has been a great help to me on getting licences and software for our project. Nice guy.

I can hear dinner coming in through the garage. So more later...

Nimble Nic

I have been really spotty in updating all of you. Sorry, lah. Too busy and tired at the end of the workdays. Also, company now blocks blogspot so cannot even use lunch hour. A lot has happened in the summer and it was very enjoyable. There are a tonne of photos to sort through and I have a very strong suspicion they will forever remain unstructured because it takes time to organize them and that is one commodity in very scarce supply.

Today is Nic's 17th birthday - we got her a new bedset and a chocolate mousse cake from the Cheesecake factory at StoneRidge Mall. However, almost the whole cake is now in the fridge because we are so full from dinner at Applebee's. In her senior year at high school, she has turned all brown from marching daily in the sun. But she looks more athletic too and in my heart of hearts, I am actually glad because it is exercise that she would otherwise not get. She used to be so hard muscled. Let's hope she puts as much energy and heart into her studies. This is a critical year for her.

Today, I made a boo-boo. I hassled everyone (save Nic who was off to marching band in school) into waking up early to go to the dental clinic by 8:30 am. But of course, the appointment is three weeks away so the receptionist was very amused. She gamely tried to help by trying to see if there was another date that would serve us better. So silly. So we went shopping instead broken in between by the half man's first golf lesson with First Tee. 'Cept it was his usual coach at the golf academy so in reality, it just seems like more of the same. Life's joke on us.

Fall is only six days away. The nights come earlier now and you can start to feel a bit of the chill in the air. At the golf academy, even though the sun was out, there was a merciless wind just at the spot where the kids were having their putting lessons and I gave up the fight and retreated to the relative warmth and calm of the car. And took a power nap.

By the way, we decided to renew the lease and would not be moving. It is just as well. Too much work and costs. We did get the carpet steam cleaned though - I just feel so much better knowing at least it is somewhat cleaner. The kids are helping out more too -Nic with the bathrooms weekends and the half man with the vacuuming.

And did I mention the half man now is quite the chef? He has been taking delight in whipping up cookies, brownies, pancakes and french toasts for the family breakfast and tea. Today, he made a bunch of muffins that really looked very pretty - they are for his sister for her birthday and still sitting in the oven. But usually he leaves a mess for his poor mother to clean up. And we cannot eat them brownies and cookies fast enough to keep up. Help!

And in the latest twist to father-son bonding, he has been giving Spanish lessons to his dad. Mucho gusto.

Manifestation

We have an invasion of the creepy crawlies, of sorts. Ants and flies have appeared out of nowhere in the summer heat and make a nuisance of themselves in the kitchen. It is fascinating. One day the kitchen is clean as a whistle and spick and span because of a certain obession with cleanliness on the part of a resident who shall remain un-named and the next day, an army of ants is running up and down the counter. And this morning was the turn of the flies, the ants having been vanquished by suitable application of anti-ant antidotes (is that an allegory?). From whence they came? So out with the newspapers and wet towel and with many a swatting by the young and senior, the situation is under control, I think. The trusty vacuum cleaner probably needs some disinfectant soon but hey, the flies are losing...

This past week has been hot. The heat is a searing 105 fahrenheit or more and it is hard to sleep without the fan. But soon, before you know it, the colors will start changing and you will miss the long lazy days of summer.

Cabling Crawl

Almost 11 hours after the venture began, our internet connection has been repaired and the connection is now, like FAST! After living for about 2 months with somewhat better than dial up, this is lightning speed. Didn't bother at first, because I thought the computer probably had tonnes of spyware because of where the kids surfed and what they downloaded everyday, Ad-Aware notwithstanding. Then we were busy with college visits and summer roadtrips. Two weeks ago, I discovered we were almost out of disk space (seems 250GB is not sufficient these days for the kinds of things we store) so went on a mad clean up hard disk rampage and also got a 500GB external drive to free up disk space and get more virtual memory and pagefile space for the poor computer. Still didn't help. Must be the miserable cranky router that seems to be dying bit by bit on us. But also a sneaky suspicion that maybe the ISP modem is not quite up to scratch or getting senile.

So today, bought a cable modem to replace the ISP modem. Woah, fast! But router was also flaky. The old one from Singapore has more or less died and the small newer one from Fry's would not connect more than one machine. So got a high speed router at the same time as the cable modem and thought I would try a brand I had not tried before. It was DOA - wouldn't even power up. So back to the shop at dinner time to exchange for a better known brand. Two hours later, after running cables all over the floor, everything works. And works securely too. I like!

Faster speed also means more vulnerability to spyware and such. Hope the kids exercise good judgement and restraint and remember always to surf safely.

On another note, this is the long Labor Day weekend. On Friday, I brought the kids to another A's game at Oakland McAfee Coliseum and the A's won against the Detroit Tigers but after a tough fight. The tickets were FOC, courtesy of company. And the A's scored two home runs by hitting the balls out of range so again, free pizzas for everyone in the stadium. So for dinner, we had 4 personal pizzas at Round Table and added some garlic twists. Nice!

Will write about the long lazy summer days another time and post the tonnes of photos we took from the two road trips. YY have almost all of them too and so has Ah Yee. Wonder how she is and whether she has shown her children and grandchildren all the pictures from her month's stay here in North America.

My back is sore from crawling around laying the cables and making everything work. So I am done for the night. Cheers!