Wanderings

Taking some time off blogging

2011-06-07T23:38:00.000-07:00

In case you are passing by, thought I'd let you know that I'm taking a time off from blogging for now to work on some stuff that I have been putting off for a long time. Have a great day! Have fun! and keep exploring!

Rose Bush

2011-05-28T21:02:00.000-07:00

I like rose bushes but the last time I tried growing one, it didn't flower for years and then died because the pests were eating its' leaves faster than it could grow them back. Roses are quite prone to pests, like aphids, caterpillars, bugs including different types of plant diseases. So I had stopped trying to grow them till last year when we bought our first rose bush here in Canada. To my surprise, it survived the hot summer, the onslought of bugs, itchy worms and aphids (with the help of some bug pesticides) and even survived the thick ice last winter. It now has a few buds again this year which I am anxiously waiting to bloom. With the success on our first rose bush, my husband gave me two new rose bushes (red and yellow) last week to add to my would be collection. I can't wait to see their first blooms. This is one of them below.

Winds of Change

2011-04-25T08:46:00.000-07:00

I am learning photoshop. I was amazed at the many tutorial videos found on line. The old ways of learning something new is changing.

Here's another I am planning to explore. It is a web application in which allows one to compose pictures and convert them into panoramic 3D compositions allowing viewers to pan around the subject as well as zoom in on objects of interest. It is a great way to present images outside from the traditional two dimensional pictures. Makes me want to travel and take a lot of pictures. Here's one of the creators doing a demo of what it can do. Pretty amazing stuff. Reminds me of what someone had recently said that we are now moving from the age of information to the age of collaboration. It is applications like this that makes it a possibility.

And it is people like these who make it happen. I can't help but be filled with wonder and a deep yearning to do something.

Robert Noyce (one of the founders of Intel) once said:

"Don't be encumbered by the past. Go out and do something wonderful."

Things I saw this Week that Made Me Smile

2011-04-22T15:07:00.000-07:00

An old man boarding the bus on a sunny windy day with a big rectangular purple hat on his head (it looked like a Russian type of hat that I see in the movies)

A big block of ice on a bench, slowly melting under the sun and upon close inspection contains a flyer frozen in the middle of the ice block advertising a whalewatching trip north or somewhere cold.

A guy in the bus stop dressed in light beige business suit, brown shoes, grey socks and a purple tie.

Listening to Brene Brown's TEDs talk about the power of vulnerability.

A very persistent sea gull who patiently waited in the middle of the road (at risk of getting hit by a car every 5 seconds) intently staring across a man who was eating pizza. The man dropped half of his pizza accidentally while trying to "communicate" with the seagull and the seagull got its pizza in the end.

Seeing my now 5 year old emerge from her room dressed up with long sleeves, tight pants and polka dots skirt and a helmet all ready to go out biking.

Spring Sock Bunny

2011-04-16T16:51:00.000-07:00

Spring is here! Happy Easter everyone!

Things I learned from Suzuki Violin

2011-04-03T02:12:00.000-07:00

If there was an instrument that would "pull my heart strings" so to speak, it would have to be the violin/cello. The sound that both these instruments make feels enigmatic, nostalgic, classical and everything "emotional" for me. Although I like the fast pieces when it's played live, I prefer listening to the slow ones when played on audio players. So when we were thinking of having Julia learn an instrument, there was no question in my mind that it would have to be the violin (I do have the keyboard for her to "play" musical notes when she likes to and have tried with limited success in getting her to stick to it for more than five minutes). I looked around for a good teacher and was recommended to the conservatory of music here in Victoria. I learned that they have a Suzuki violin program for kids starting at 3 years old which surprised me. Could one really teach violin to kids that young? Julia is 4 years old, so the thought that she's a year older than the minimum at least made me think she might learn something..like maybe at least hold a violin. That would already be quite an achievement. If I found it quite challenging to have her stay for a few minutes 'banging' on the keyboard keys, I didn't think she would have the attention span of learning to hold a violin over her shoulder and putting her chin on it for a few minutes. But then, I was glad to find out later that I was wrong.

The Suzuki program required the parent to learn the instrument too and be the "second" teacher to the child. Sessions were only thirty minutes once a week, so the bulk of the "labor" in training the child daily falls on the parent. "Parent" and "daily" are the key words that made the difference. For one, it was an entirely different dynamics when both child and parent were being taught at the same time. The child sees the parent as student and the parent sees her child as a colleague. It was a very different feeling and perspective to have and it worked quite well between Julia and me and her dad (as her dad and I take turns attending the sessions). The daily practice too was quite challenging for us at first specially after coming from a hard day's work and we would rather be slouching on the couch than practicing and learning violin. But we had to do it, else we won't be progressing in the next session. And after a while, it became a habit. While on the first few runs, it was us calling Julia for violin lesson time every evenings, these days, it's her gathering us up for practice.

I began to realize that it wasn't just music we were learning and teaching her, we were teaching her discipline, persistence, confidence and the reward of hard work. I remember distinctly of the many times we had to practice correct "bowing" and it was quite hard for her not to touch the other strings, move from one string to the next and at the same time keep the arm from moving and only move from elbows to wrist. It was hard work for me doing it myself, how much more for a four year old! But we kept at it anyway, everyday for a week, we struggled through.. then one night, she finally got it and she smiled and looked at me and said, "Mama, I'm better." I didn't have to tell her. She knew it by herself. I never could have imagined this happening with a four year old.

She had her first performance on stage two weeks ago. We had just learned bowing on two strings and haven't played any tune yet and her teacher said she was doing so well, it's good to include her in her recital and gave us the first two lines of "twinkle, twinkle little star" to play. Her teacher haven't even heard her play it when she played it on stage the next week. I got all types of knots on my stomache just watching her walk up the stage, take her bow and place her tiny violin on her shoulder and played. A month ago, I wouldn't have believed it if anybody told me that my four year old could do this. It was just admirable how she stepped up to it and walked gracefully and with confidence in front of everyone. I found myself thinking, "if she could do this, she could do anything she wanted in her life."

Her last notes squeaked a little as her bow touched another string and because of this, she was disappointed with her performance. At the end of the recital when we congratulated her and told her she did great, she pointedly said, "Why do you say I did great, mama, I squeaked." She didn't want to watch the video I made of her after that and said she didn't want to play in recitals anymore. It seemed, she had experienced her first "failure". It was hard to see it on her. It took a lot of time and convincing to get her to realize she did something extraordinary. I don't even know if she even realized it yet, but at least she's back to running towards her violin again the minute she gets home. And through it too I struggled and wondered if it was even a good thing to expose ones child, so young, to these things... to failure, to persistence, to hard work/practice..to adult stuff. Maybe we should have let her have her childhood and protect her from these "painful" stuff for as long as we can... We'd never know now because we have already chosen a path for her to try on, at least on this one. And with deciding to walk, there is always the risk of falling.

It is hard to believe that a month ago, we didn't have any structure at all as we went through our daily lives. When we got home, Julia mostly played computer games while her dad and I did the chores. But these days, while we are still able to do our chores (but not as efficiently as we might have liked), we have developed the habit of practicing violin after she takes her bath, then subsequently developed the routine of "study" - which is either reading, writing, crafts or drawing. It is great having this routine and we could see her develop and grow more each day and most importantly, see her be happier and having the confidence in herself. She is into dinosaurs now, which drives me nuts trying to "read" those tongue twister names but it gets her all excited so we do it, one syllable at a time... just as we learned violin, one note at a time. Everyday. I guess that is what life is about. Taking things one day at a time.. We had enrolled her to learn violin but it seemed to me that we learned a lot more than play music, we learned about life, together.

Julia (Age 4)

Of Grief, Death and Meaning

2011-03-27T23:30:00.000-07:00

It has been sometime since my last blog entry. If anyone has come and visited my blog in between then and now, my apologies for not being able to update it often. Sometimes life brings stuff which makes me want to take the side road for a while and that has come for me when my aunt (whom I was close with) died last November 2010.

Things went too fast for me and maybe too slow for her. She was feeling a lot of pain during thanksgiving and was brought to emergency the next day where she was diagnosed with cancer in the liver. Then the day after that, the specialist told her she had a month to live, which we didn't believe. How could a very healthy being suddenly learn she has cancer and then have a month to live? In my mind, dying of cancer was having a slow and sometimes painful death, definitely not in a month. The rest of the days I spent visiting her at the hospital every night, walking through that whole building all for cancer patients and getting a glimpse of life in a way I have never seen before.

There's the woman, bald headed and wearing only her flimsy white hospital gown who sits on her wheelchair every dusk, smoking her cigarette with a tilt in her head that seemed to defy everything else around her as if saying to the world, "you can put all the cancer cells in my body but you cannot deny me of my stick of cigarette." I admired her for that. As I walked through the hall, I see a woman, softly reading the news to someone on the bed whom I suspect was her dad. One time, they reeled out a man outside of his intensive care room for a couple of his relatives to see him. He was on air respirator and oblivious to things around him but even then, just looking at him, covered in white sheets, bald and eyes closed, I could feel his strong aura. He had the charm and feel of one of those powerful men in mafia clans or that of a great politician who has come to the end of his days. I could just imagine how he might have been in those days when cancer hadn't slowly taken over. Richmond Pavillion, that's the name of the hospital wing for cancer patients who needed intensive care. It was a place where one can't pass through without having one's perspectives in life changed.

I saw my aunt breathe her last breath. It was like watching a fish which has just been taken out of the water and was now struggling to breathe. The breathe slows down and sometimes stops and then just when you panic, it resumes again till finally it stops and as one hopes the breath would come back, it doesn't anymore. And as I stared at this non-breathing body of my aunt, I wondered where was the essence that made my aunt, my aunt, go? I remember a principle in science class, energy cannot be created nor destroyed, it can only be transformed. Where was that "energy" that made this body move, and think and laugh and say "baloney me" whenever I tell a joke? As I reflected on the now unquestionable presence of a "spirit", I realized that other living beings must also have it, like a dog or bird. They probably have something which made then alive and which leaves their bodies when they die too.

My grief took me to looking for answers to my questions and I ended up reading a lot of books on spirituality these past months. One of them "The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying" by Sogyal Rinpoche gave me some comfort. I did not understand a lot of the things he wrote and I may never have the same belief as him but still it gave me comfort. It is a hard book to read when one is not in the right state of mind but if one has someone close to them who is dying or has died, it may be something that could provide comfort as it did to me.

And so here I am, finally coming back to write in my blog. And I suspect, I would write differently now that I feel like a different person and having a different perspective of things. I am still finding meaning in each moment and in everything I experience but I don't feel as lost now as I was a few months ago.

In the end these things matter most: How well did you love? How fully did you love? How deeply did you learn to let go? ----The Buddha, India

Of Monsters and Zhu Zhu pets

2010-11-08T04:16:00.000-08:00

Julia's ultimate bedtime story these days has been that of her favorite zhu zhu pets who are either attacked by a monster or Doc Oc and are saved by Spiderman. So needless to say, her drawing requests have also been of her zhu zhu pets trapped by a monster's net or are being chased by a monster. I'm pretty glad oil pastels could easily produce the bright colors that suited her imagination. In this particular exercise, I learned that I liked having a limited color palette better than having a wide variety of colors. Simplicity and bare spaces attract me.

Pictures from the Lantern Festival

2010-10-05T22:49:00.000-07:00

Face and Maira Kalman

2010-09-18T04:38:00.000-07:00

I used to think that drawing people's faces was the easiest thing to do. That was when I was still in grade school and most of my classroom doodles were of girl faces. That's not the case now unfortunately. I believe that the best watercolor painting I did was of a child's face basked in sunlight. I did it back when I was in college, during one of those hot summer breaks when I had nothing else to do and glad that I could get away from studying numbers for a while. I then gave it to my college boyfriend. Now, I wish I could have it back, as I have quite fond memories of it and that memory serves to inspire and remind me still that it is entirely possible that I could do a nice full watercolor painting of people. It took me two months to make it. I remember waking up everyday and greeting it in the morning before I start and lovingly gaze at it before I fall asleep. By the end of the two months, I felt like she was my "child". That's the thing with drawing or painting, because of the time we spend on it, delicately placing each line and color on a blank page, it sinks in deeper into our subcosncious so that when we see or imagine it later, it brings out a lot of feelings and memories of the time when we were making it.

I hope to go back to painting people and be really good at it. Below is a quick watercolor sketch of a face I did the other day. Unlike that two month portrait I made in college, this one was made in under an hour. That's one thing I like about watercolors, one can do quick colored sketches with it which is ideal for moms of four year olds. I think I'd prefer to have it more abstract or impressionistic next time. Like maybe just some blotches of color here and there to give an impression of a face or person. The background color is permanent rose which is one of my favorites. I got my inspiration on this from Maira Kalman's children's book illustrations. (You could type her name in google and see the many images of her illustrations that come up. ) I find Maira's illustrations playful, colorful and free flowing, which I like very much. I enjoy her children's books (e.g. Chicken Soup, Boots, Grand Central and Fireboat) much more than her "adult" books (Principles of Uncertainty), mainly because I could understand the point of the stories much better!

Some books of Maira Kalman that I borrowed from the library..

Day off with Julia

2010-09-12T21:55:00.000-07:00

I got a day off from work so Julia and I had our lunch out in our favorite japanese place. We splurged on our favorite roe makis: masago (smelt roe), tobiko (flying fish roe), ikura (salmon roe). Yum! yum!

Did I say it was our favorite? :)

Mindfulness

2010-09-05T03:51:00.000-07:00

Sometimes when we're not looking, great things pass us by.

Making Raspberry Jam

2010-09-03T22:19:00.000-07:00

A Small Patch of Heaven

2010-08-21T00:07:00.000-07:00

This small space in front of our house used to be barren and filled with dried leaves and weeds. Early this year, I started to plant anything that my friends/friendly strangers gave me and cuttings/flower seeds Julia and I pick up in our walks. It's astonishing how they have all grown and blossomed throughout the summer. This small patch now gives me a lot of joy when I come home everyday. It is like a collection of living remembrances. Almost each one has a story of its own. It's a patch of good memories.

Tourist lane

2010-08-13T01:02:00.000-07:00

One thing about living in a city where tourists flock in every year is that you often hear the locals commenting about how slow the tourists walk (a fact that frustrates many specially when they are going about their non-touristy business like maybe dashing for their moring coffee before their morning meetings). For me in particular, I love tourists. I enjoy watching them, eavesdropping sometimes in their conversations as I pass by, wondering where they are from and looking at what they are taking pictures of, to name a few. It amuses me to see the things that amuse them too.They just add vibrancy to the community. But unfortunately, their pace can be an issue for some locals and this video is deemed by many here at my workplace, as a neat idea that may solve their tourist woes. The idea cracked me up.
Here's the full article.

Clues for Parents

2010-08-09T03:56:00.000-07:00

It isn’t easy being a parent. I still remember not too long ago, the helplessness I felt when the nurse plumped the squirming bundle on my hands and to my utmost horror, left the room. That was about four years ago, since then, I could say that I have improved…a lot I think. But even then, each day undoubtedly still brings me my lessons in this parenting 101 class that anyone who has a child in this world have (willingly or unwillingly) signed in. I bet I still have a lot to learn and I'm taking it a page at a time. This past month, I did get to peg down one lesson I am thankful I got. And the lesson is this: Watch for the clues. Closely. If I need help on figuring out what to do as a parent, I need to pay attention to the clues my child is giving me. In her own way, in her own language, in a form that I need to learn to speak and understand.

As with most parenting advice, this is quite logical and pretty obvious but as I have realized, knowledge doesn't necessarily translate to application. Not always. Not immediately. It takes time and a deeper realization to sink it in, not to mention a widened neural pathway that remembers to use it at the right moment and right time amidst the high pitched and often dizzying chaos of a pre-schooler's world.

For me the realization got cemented, when my husband told me of a recent incident of a friend of his, who has a four year old son as well. Early this year, she had enrolled him for pre-school mainly because she was influenced by her cousin who told her about all the good things that pre-school had done for her son. His friend's mom was against it as she saw that the child was still not ready for school. However, his friend went and enrolled him anyway. Now, they’re having problems in getting the child to go to school. He doesn't want to. After weeks of transition, he still is not getting the hang of it and only got worst with time.

As my husband and I talked about it, we realized the great importance of knowing one's child and having the confidence, as a parent, to know when you'd bend in to external influences and when you'd rather follow your instincts and judgment instead. It is never easy.

With Julia, what I found challenging these days is in knowing what I need to be teaching her and when. In an ideal world, I'd like to dump her with all my/and the world's knowledge (and whatever wisdom I've gained over the years) as soon as and as much as I can. Isn't it every parent's dream of having child prodigies of their own after all? But that isn’t how it works though. Everything takes their time. Prodigy or not, as a parent, I realized I needed to keep the balance; the balance between having the string too tight and too relaxed, between too much stimulation and too little, between total freedom and choking limitations. Where that balance is depends mostly on Julia. And so I have to watch for the clues. Like Sherlock. My ears peak when I hear a phrase that she mentions out of the blue or sentences she utters just before she goes to sleep or after waking up. I watch her every move to see any change in interest. I constantly learn the art of parental interrogation to get through the invincible wall of "nothingness" - What did you do at daycare today? "nothing." Did you go somewhere? "no." What did you eat? "nothing." I learned to pick clues from anything printed that she brings with her when she gets home from daycare, studying them and doing some "experiments" to prove or disprove a hypothesis, I research existing literature and eventually come up with theories which I then validate. Parenting, sometimes it feels like doing scientific studies or solving mysteries. Much much more than that actually, as it is different with children. Our heart hangs out there.

Nowadays, I very much depend on the clues she gives me. Nowadays, she's scribbling a lot. She scribbles mazes, figures, shapes, and letters. She forms the letters into alien words which she asks me to read (and which I have great trouble reading). See picture. But I figured, maybe this is one of those clues - that she may actually be ready to spell, write words and read simple ones. (I didn’t think that it would come this soon. I thought this would come in kindergarten or much later.) So even though I was sounding like an alien from Mars, I read her strange words for the sound. Maybe this is where the concept of phonics started…with children writing the language of aliens.

And so with that theory, while she is concocting her own words, I slotted in words from planet earth which I asked her to write and read too. It's a two way street after all.

There is never a single way to learn; no single path to an end. The best path is one that suits the parent and the child. All we have to do is figure out the clues and go from there.

A visit at the Ocean Discovery Centre

2010-08-04T02:31:00.000-07:00

Exploring our world.

Seed

2010-07-26T13:39:00.000-07:00

I found a book at the library which captivated my attention. The book was titled "The Bizarre and Incredible World of Plants" by Stuppy, Kesseler and Harley. I love it when science meets art. The scanning electrom micrograph images which have been artistically enhanced with color by artist Rob Kesseler were a rare visual treat. One could never have imagined seeing these shapes and forms to be present here on earth. That's the beauty of seeing things at the microscopic level. It just fascinates me. I use to spend a whole lot of time on scanning electron microscopes years ago, studying non-living materials and not plants however, but still it always fascinated me how things look like seen under those powerful microscopes and how they would go on and change into other forms without us noticing them for most of the time. A scientist on TV have postulated that if there is going to be another catastrophe on earth, similar to the one that wiped out the dinosaurs, it would be these tiniest of living things, the algae, bacteria, plants; who would survive. Mainly because they could tolerate a wider spectrum of environmental conditions than humans do. They could survive higher temperatures for one. And from the book, I was amazed to learn about the many sophisticated ways of reproduction and adaptation that plants have developed and evolved over thousands of years, for the sole purpose of ensuring the survival of their species.... Makes one think about our own evolution and quest for survival.

Below is a drawing I made of a seed from the book, colored with watercolor.

Two in One

2010-07-18T02:04:00.000-07:00

For the past months I have strangely felt that I have two selves. One which I suspected was dominated by my right brain, and kicks in whenever I have at least two consecutive days of vacation. It would have me either writing, drawing, or painting; as I would tend to feel sensitive to the energy and connections that surround me and it overwhelms me not to express them in some form. On these days, I would fill my journal with pages of scribbles, poems and words or just sit down with my cup of tea and wonder in amazement how wonderful the world is or how I finally get things that have been eluding me before. In these days, I feel such peacefulness and calm that if I had the third day off, I'd spend it sitting near the river or harbor just watching boats, planes and people pass by and everything feels as they should be.

But then all these would be lost after I go back to work, where work is nowhere near paints and pens. That's when my second self would kick in. I could feel myself turning into a highly logical and analytic machine, being capable of working out formulas, numbers, and discussing theories for the whole day or till my computer crashes from the many statistical and analytical softwares I got opened at the same time. And I would feel segmented and disconnected from the state that I was.This had been in my thoughts for the past weeks as I alternated between days of vacation and work since last June. It felt like there was a switch button that turns it on and off to the point that the scientific part of me have began thinking of ways in which I could experiment in prolonging my right brained state of being - the one who writes, draws, paints and feels one with the world.

I thought it was a crazy idea. One which would just go away, like a dream, after I've spent all of my vacation leaves and would go back to working all week. So imagine my surprise (and delight) when I saw this video. I couldn't believe the serendipity of finding this one given what my thoughts were. To realize that it wasn't a crazy thought after all. That there is such a thing as two "selves" (the more un-crazy term being "two halves of the brain") in one. That there is a scientific explanation for the two totally different states of mind I was experiencing. And that there is such a thing as us having the choice to be in one - if we wanted to.
It is amazing. It is life changing. It is worth the 18 minutes of watching.

If the video doesn't work, you can also go to this site: http://blog.ted.com/2008/03/jill_bolte_tayl.php

"He's just not that into you"

2010-07-12T00:07:00.000-07:00

Last week, during my regular friday walk with a close friend at work, she told me she had broken up with her boyfriend of 5 months. Having been with her since I started working here in Canada more than two years ago and having witnessed the struggles she had gone through in finding this nice guy five months ago, I was devastated for her to say the least. She is the best person there is to have in a partner. How could the world not give her what she deserves? I could feel her sadness. I also remembered how lonely it felt to be in this circumstance. I couldn't sleep last night and so turned to watch a late night movie on tv.

On any other day, I would have ignored this movie. The title alone didn't sound appealing to me. Aside from the lack of "poetry", it gives me visions of women crying and getting dumped and somehow through that it has comedy mixed into it. I thought, "why would anyone want to see a movie that tells them the person they most want aren't into them?" And then find anything in that funny. But since this was a night of heartache, I thought I'd watch it. Also seeing the many famous actors in one movie peaked my interest. There were Drew Barymore and Jennnifer Connely as well as Aniston. (And even though Ben Affleck was in, I figured I could tolerate him for now with all these great girls around.) The movie started out as per my low expectation, a bit patchy, a bit on the cheesy side, trying too hard to be humorous while trying to be smart at the same time, and somewhat segmented as about four different stories were unfolded all at the same time. Also it didn't help that they kept having a slideshow suddenly pop up in between scenes mentioning a phrase which summarizies the scenes earlier and pointing out how one could tell if they are not into you and then a commentary of a supposedly real person (not part of the stories) follows, before it goes back to continue the movie again.

One of the main characters was also a semi-obsessive partner seeker and prone to over analyzing little things and so there were a lot of scenes where I found myself cringing because it placed the character in awkward situations which if I was in her shoes, I could imagine myself not going out of my room for months. Yes, it was uncomfortable to watch.

But and a big BUT, they were mostly true. And real.

By the time the second slideshow/commentary came in, I found myself enjoying it. the And then to my utmost surprise, I began liking the character I initially disliked the most. And best of all, I liked the ending very much. I won't spoil it by talking about the details but it is the kind of ending that gives a nice "closure" to the many stories within the movie. (And if you stayed a little bit more after the movie credits come up, they even show some post interviews of the couples which added I found very delightful as well.) And because it had many mini- stories within it, the movie was able to depict love (and relationships) with its many faces, the happy ones and the not so happy ones. Just like in real life. In this sense it felt like the movie was fully packed, with a lot of wisdom and humor. I also quite liked how simple things in our daily life could mean everything when seen at a right time and right mind like when Jennifer sees her ex-partner washing the dishes at the most critical time that she needed help and how that could change everything and make one realize that sometimes we already have what we want in life. As a whole I quite liked this movie. I had fun watching it. So if ever you find this one free on tv like I did, don't be put off by the title, it's a nice movie about finding love in this modern day and the realities within our most important relationships. My initial perceptions about this movie was totally wrong. The movie is deeper than the title might suggest otherwise.

And maybe after you watch it, you could then watch this teaser that some of the actors made for the movie. I think it may be best to watch this after you've seen the movie - when you've gotten to know the actors as their movie characters and not in this goofy way, but...on the other hand, it is quite funny. :)

Random Stuff

2010-07-10T01:59:00.000-07:00

It's the season for cherries! For someone coming from a country where the only cherries I know come in the form of expensive bottled artificial looking ones used to top cakes or that of the distasteful flavor they put in cough syrups, I find fresh cherries surprisingly tasty, affordable and refreshing. It is fast becoming one of my favorite fruits.

It is summer finally! And the harbor docks are packed! I sure wish I could just sit around all day like this lady.

It is a bit odd to see people picnicking just behind one's backyard.

I have been learning to use the moviemaker application lately (which explains why my previous posts mostly contained videos) and this is one use of it that I quite like too! (although I feel it might be better if the words were a bit bigger and the page turning a bit slower for me to appreciate the pictures more)

Edward Hopper

2010-07-05T16:45:00.000-07:00

I first saw one of Edward Hooper's work in the Chicago art museum. It was his painting of a couple in a dinner late at night. My bestfriend whom I was with commented that the painting was so lonely. It did feel that way to me too. But I was struck at how he could elicit that feeling of "loneliness" through his paintings; surrounding a lighted area with either darkness, uninhabited spaces, walls or forests. In a book I borrowed from the library, I found that he also uses roads in a "lonely" kind of way, having them lead to nowhere or are have them barren or filled with a lot of overgrowing grass. In his simple painting of a woman below, I am struck at how much he could achieve with just variety of colors.

Cool planter box

2010-07-02T02:01:00.000-07:00

In Victoria these days, there is much talk (and marketing) about being eco-friendly, environmentally friendly and all that good stuff and from the myriad of topics that fall under these is the increasing trend of growing one's own food. Yes, it is now really "cool" to be planting your own vegetables and crops and being self-sustainable. I feel the slow mass movement towards this in the group of people I know. And so I am finally giving in and am going to attempt to become "cool' myself. Never mind the most likely insect problems that I would have, never mind the daily tending and watering and the most likely heartbreak in seeing them wither in winter. I thought it was worth a try, on a small scale at least. (The smaller the risk, the smaller the pain of failure, I suppose.) So I bought a planter box that I'd place in our patio (as it is nearer to the kitchen and would be easy for me to water daily). I plan to plant herbs and lettuces for now. The hardy ones for sure, aside from the fact that they're the type of herbs we use a lot. Rosemary, oregano, fennel/dill and lettuce. (I'm keeping my goals small although I know I'm being a lot more ambitious with the lettuce but it is what I'd like to eat daily so it's worth experimenting.) And I'm planting the leftover old potatoes directly on the ground in the backyard. I figured that if I could successfully grow these "hardy" stuff, then maybe I could someday grow the more finicky ones like basil, coriander, and tomatoes.

I painted the planter box sea blue. This shade of blue reminds me a lot of a beach house in Scandinavia for some reason. Not that I have been in Scandinavia. Just looking at it transports me to a nordic place or a more peaceful place like heaven maybe. I could hug this color to death. It is amazing how much color, if it is the right one that matches you, can make a lot of difference to how you feel about your day. This one does it for me. Not to mention that I figured I needed a back-up plan; being that in the the high likelihood that all my herbs would die on me, at least I have a nice empty planter box to look at.

Thoughts on Blogging

2010-06-26T02:40:00.000-07:00

These days I feel like blogging is a hole in the kettle which lets out the steam that is building inside. And that is good as we don't want to end up spewing ourselves all over the place. However I realized that there are instances where I need that steam to build up.. so I could use it to "power" something else..like in a steam engine, like in powering up my dream to write and illustrate a book. In this sense, blogging becomes something that I shouldn't be spending my limited waking time on. At least that is how I feel these days when I am struggling to squeeze in working out the first pages of what I think would be my first book.

Sometimes I feel overwhelmed with all the "noise" and information available to me everyday. And I wonder, why would I add to that?

At other times, I want to change the world.

Afternoon Delight

2010-06-22T11:53:00.000-07:00

On my way home last friday, I saw this couple dressed up formally, playing their string instruments on the harbor sidewalk as if they were playing in some grand music hall. They definitely elevated my definition of street musicians. And it was such a delight to be listening to the violin and cello (my two favorite string instruments), by the waters on a friday afternoon. I hope they come and play again. I love musicians. They add happiness to an otherwise bland existence. Bless their generous and artistic hearts.

Seagulls

2010-06-05T03:33:00.000-07:00

It's always mesmerizing to see a flock of birds gliding up in the air. These seagulls, viewed through my office window, looked larger in real life than in film.
The seagulls are on the move.
The Canada geese have come back from their migration south of the globe.
The ducklings have hatched and are following their parents all around the park.
Everything is stirring.
Summer, here we come!

Book Sale

2010-06-03T03:21:00.000-07:00

Last Sunday, I went with a friend to a library book sale that is held three times a year. What is unique about this booksale is that since it is done by the Greater Victoria Public Library, its' purposes are to generate funds (instead of making profits) and to get rid of used books from all the libraries in Greater Victoria so they could replenish their shelves with newer books. It was a two day booksale and on the last day, at 1:30pm-3:00pm, instead of pricing the books individually, for these last hour and a half, they charge $5 for entrance and you can carry ALL the books you could possibly carry out within that one and a half hours.

I have been to eat all you can and drink all you can events but nothing compares to the carry-all-the-books-you-can-for-$5 experience. My friend Deb and her friend. Nadine, are "seasoned" book sale hunters, for them, this is a hunting (and social) event they book in their calendars every year and they definitely have the entire process down to a pat. First we started with an eat all you can lunch, where we stuffed ourselves up to the brim (it was definitely a day of gluttony) before going to the afternoon booksale at 2:00pm till 3:00pm and then we carried our haul to Nadine's place where she had bowls of cleaning solutions ready for us to use and then for the next hours, we clean and talk about the books that each one of us have hauled over. As a newbee, I had wondered why we had to spend a lot more time (from 12pm -2:00pm) in our lunch going to an eat all you can place instead of the faster order type lunches and hurrying up to the booksale. As it turns out, I realized later there was a method to my friend's "madness". And it's mainly because during that one hour, that we spend actually being in the booksale, I could honestly say that I have lost every calorie (and more) that I ever have gotten from all that stuff that I ate earlier. I had expended so much energy within that hour between physcially carrying my haul and putting them in the car for a relaod and going back again (and again), and mentally scanning the thousands of books and screening which ones I'd shove in my bags or boxes within a second (all the while having high levels of adrenaline pumped into my system whenever I chance upon books I really really liked). It was like being in a reality show. And I was actually glad there was a limit of one hour or else I would have broken my back carrying those heavy loads or Deb's car would have flat tires from all that weight we were stuffing into it.

I realized that there is a big difference between buying books individually versus paying for the entrance fee and carrying all you can. In the former, we are in a way forced to scrutinize each book and weigh it against how much we are willing to pay for our perception of its value. In the latter, money never crosses my mind, the main pre-occupation was in scanning and loading as much as I can, and it is my bad back that is on top of my mind. It definitely was more enjoyable to pick up books and in a split second decide if you push it down your bag or move on. And after all that hauling, you already forget which books you have picked up but then get to savor them (with intense pleasure) when you are cleaning them individually later and getting surprised at seeing books which make you wonder whatever reason had made you pick them up in the first place. And this is quite a significant thing, because I have picked up a lot of books in my haul which had topics I never would have looked at or bought if I was buying the books individually. And I am learning a lot of new things outside of my normal zone because of it.

For this round, I have limited my selection to children's books. Mainly because I ran out of time before I could even go to the adult section. So I have this big piles of children's books (the lady kept giving me empty boxes to fill), waiting for me to explore and savor every night, for days....till the next book sale comes. All these for $5 bucks. Makes me re-think the value I put in five dollars. It is equal to a cup of coffee and a muffin I consume in a morning.

Maybe in my future blog entries, I'll do some children's book reviews on the books I got from the booksale. I rarely buy children's books as I could easily borrow them from the library. However, after knowing about this booksale, I definitely am starting my collection of used children's books. I already got a bunch of old fairytale/folktale books from countries I have not heard of. And I tingle with excitement whenever I read them late at night and get transported to old far away lands rich in myths and ancient folklores where candles were still the order of the day. It is an adventure on its own. A nice refuge after a day at work, overloading my head with numbers and the issues of the modern day world.

Explore your libraries. You never know the wonders you will find.

My Haul of Children's Books

And so I've discovered pen and ink

2010-05-25T00:23:00.000-07:00

On the bus last week, a woman (in her fifties maybe) was sitting at a 45 degree angle to the side of me reading what looked like an art book. I saw glimpses of sketches and handwritten things on pages which instantly caught my eye. Fortunately, she lifted the book just enough for me to make out the title, "An Illustrated Life". I thought that was a nice title and then looked it up in the internet and found it had good reviews. I ended up buying it this weekend and had been reading it since yesterday. It got lots of nice hand drawn watercolor, pen, pencil, colored pencil drawings/paintings mostly on sketchbooks from different artists. It talks about journalling but instead of using mostly words or the newer version of journalling which makes use of collages or scrapbooking, the type of documenting this book talks about are ones which mostly contain intricate drawings/paintings/doodles with some words written on the sides. It is journalling by artists and looks at the artists' sketchbooks instead of their more formal works. It is a different kind of artform in itself. More personal, unedited and raw. Overall, it inspired me to document things I encounter in my everyday life. (I already am doing it once a week on average, obviously not as often as these artists do. They do it almost everyday!) It just feels right to me and gives me the opportunity to reflect on things which otherwise would get blurred in the hustle and bustle of everyday rush. It almost is similar to praying. As one artist in the book said (Peter Arkle), " If you make a drawing, you remember much more than if you take a photo.

Here is the blog of the book's author - Danny Gregory, which is quite inspiring on its' own as well.

While reading through the book, I did find myself yearning for much more than what the book had. Although it contained numerous examples from different artists which gave me lots of ideas, after a while, I had hoped to find some more substance or story somewhere in the drawings, instead of going through a lot of fragmented examples all throughout. Maybe it's a different book altogether that I need to read or a zine perhaps. I hope graphic novels or maybe these sketchbooks someday would soon evolve into illustrated storybooks for adults. Much like children's books with all the beautiful illustrations but which tackle more mature topics.

One thing I got from the book is that it made me experiment using pen and ink with my watercolor sketches. Here I tried the steel tip nib with plastic holder and black acrylic ink. Not having gone to art school, I have long been wondering how those comic type drawings were achieved, and now I realized, they may have used these nib pens or some other caligraphic pens and not necessarily brushes. It is quite addictive to use. I could easily find myself getting lost in making crosshatches all over my drawing. It is calming to be marking out line after line after line. I had liked the erie feeling of the crosshatches found in Edward Gorey's work anyway. It is quite nice to try something new and finding out I'm liking it... now I just need a story.

Moonstruck

2010-05-21T22:52:00.000-07:00

I find it hard to blog these days. Maybe because my mind have been quite preoccupied with work and whatever is left at the end of the day, I spend mostly playing with Julia. Not that I'm complaining but I do miss having some quiet time for myself. That's the struggle of most working moms I guess. However, I do have a really COOL picture to share. Considering that I took it by putting my point and shoot camera over the eyepiece of a $50 telescope, it was a stroke of big luck to even get a decent picture that at least resembled the real thing. Yes, it is the picture of the moon. Our beloved 4.6 billion years old (according to NASA) moon which shines upon us on cloudless nights and have inspired thousands of people for ages. To finally be able to see it myself, for real, in more detail, and see the dark and light spots and the circular structures on its surface, felt so amazing. (It looked clearer through the telescope than the picture below). This must have been what Galileo have seen. I am awed by that the thought; that I am looking at the same thing someone had looked at several hundreds years ago. Now I could say Galileo and I have something in common. :) ...4.6 billion years..that is very old. My lifespan is nothing compared to it. Someday I will die and my bones will crumble away and the moon would still be there. Shining. It is a humbling thought.

MukMuk and friends

2010-05-08T08:00:00.000-07:00

Another one of Julia's stuffy-on-face pictures..Mukmuk is one of the mascots in the Vacouver 2010 winter olympics. Further below is the styrofoam/cardboard box house we made for him and his friends. It's looking like a stuffy dormitory complete with gumball machine and a picnic table filled with goodies. It even has an upper deck where hippie kitty likes to "perch" and the unwanted dorm crasher "Octo" jams around. I enjoyed making the origami boxes for the tiniest ones. It's quite a neat way to organize tiny creeters, don't you think?

Gift in the Mail

2010-05-03T23:04:00.000-07:00

This arrived in the mail the other day. A thank you gift given by ICA (Inter Cultural Association) for a talk I gave in one of their immigrant programs a month ago. They are quite a nice bunch of people, and they have a tough job helping immigrants settle, integrate, and find jobs. Sometimes I feel guilty for helping a little but not helping a lot..the world is full of people in need. A lot of people are silently suffering. I admire people who spend every day of their lives giving themselves to others. It is amazing how they even find the time to show this simple and well thought of gesture of saying thank you.

A Good Day

2010-04-26T02:12:00.000-07:00

I had a good day today. For maybe the first time I had a small feeling of being at home here in Canada. I always have felt like I'm a stranger here, even after two years since we immigrated. Maybe because I haven't really been socializing much. I didn't feel I needed to. And even today, on my good day, we spent most of it at home. Cooked pancakes for breakfast, let Julia loose in the front yard and watched her collect cherry blossom petals from the street and re-planting them in a patch on our frontyard, rearranging the patio and hanging some pansies, cutting the grass in the backyard, playing badminton with Chris and having Julia as our net in the middle, having pizza and ice cream in the patio and then cooking dinner which was halibut fish simmered in ginger and soy sauce (my mom used to cook this for me). It is a day without much fancy stuff and filled with what we almost do everyday, nothing special. Yet it is a day which reminded me a lot of what I have felt back home.

Back home where the kitchen smells of sauted onions and ginger, where the dogs are barking at people passing by, where nothing much happens, just playing around with the leaves gathered from empty lots, walking with a stick in hand and wacking at almost any surface, and most of the time I'd just wait for mom to come home. Her presence in the house always made a difference. Today reminded me a lot of my childhood. And I find it amazing how much of my memories of it are of tiny, uneventful stuff.

My mind doesn't remember much of the details but if there is a "feeling" memory, I remember what I felt quite distinctly. Often times, I ask my husband what the purpose of my life is or was (since I'm almost halfway through it) and most of the time I was sort of expecting a grandoise answer (from myself mostly), like invent something that would benefit others, inspire and help people, or become somebody of value in this world. Maybe, just maybe, it is not as big as that. Maybe the answer lies in the smallest of things, nothing fancy. Maybe we don't really need an audience. Maybe our essence is best left in the tiniest of details or of feeling. Maybe we don't need a purpose because it is already there inside us. Maybe all we need to do is sit down and listen.

Alien loves spring! Me too!

2010-04-24T06:16:00.000-07:00

Julia has taken into the habit of putting Alien (or any other stuffies) over her face when I take pictures of her. I thought it annoying at first but realized later how creatively ingenious it was. How in the world did she ever thought of it? I guess children just do and not think about stuff too much.

Below: In our early morning walk to daycare, Alien stops and wants to smell the flowers.

He says he loves daffodils. Me too.

When you give a camera to your 4 year old

2010-04-21T04:06:00.000-07:00

This is what you'll see.

Shaun Tan and other bullets

2010-04-17T22:31:00.000-07:00

I must apologize for not being too deligent enough on updating my blog twice a week. Sometimes life gets in the way I guess. I could share some things and insights that I have had experienced the past weeks..

I watched the movie August Rush which was lent to me by a friend. I expected it to be a love story but it wasn't, it was about a boy who was discovering his genius in music. I loved the music in this movie and the best thing that it did for me was remind me to listen to the sounds around us, that music is very much an important part of our life and that being different is something to be proud of.

While riding the bus, a man boarded it and sat across me, he was wearing a shell necklace which he took out and placed in a small tranparent plastic with pink ribbons on it. Then he pulled out a toothbrush and toothpaste out of his pocket and started brushing his teeth. Right there in front of me, in the bus, with many people watching. It was so hard to keep my head turned to the window and not watch him in amazement. In the next stop, when the bus doors opened for passengers to get in, he went to the door, spit out the bubbly toothpaste from his mouth to the streets below and then went back to his seat, toothpaste and brush back in his pocket, as if nothing happened. That redefined the way I see buses now.

Sometimes, when you yearn for something so hard, the universe would contrive to to fulfill it. It speaks in ways different than we do, yet if you'd try hard enough, you'd notice and understand it. Its' language is through silent signs or soft whispers, in every day things, in the tiniest details, in unassuming circumstances and it would only mean something to the right person, with the right need at her right mind.

This is my theory, that somewhere out there, is a person exactly like me but of the opposite gender as what I am. I have a good male friend in the US whose exact female replica I met the other week. It was so uncanny to be hearing her talk using exactly the same voice and intonation as my friend. Her appearance is similar and her intelligence, wit and thinking matches him. She could have been him. I wondered if ever the two would meet would they recognize themselves in each other? Most likely not, as the hardest people for us to know is ourselves.

Shaun Tan, an artist/illustrator/author, of very similar thinking as I am. I am glad I found him under peculiar circumstances last week. I suspect the universe had something to do with it. We are so similar, he has a painting in his book with the same lines as what I have written beside a painting I had made months ago. I accidentally found that he had acknowledged Gustav Dore in his book "The Arrival", the same French artist I have featured in my past two blogs ago and whom I thought noone would notice as I got it from an old old tattered used travel book of London which I bought for $2 from the library sale. I would like to meet him someday.

I noticed that I am moving towards the fantastic and surreal these days. After watching the movie, seeing the man on the bus, meeting my friend's identical persona and finding/reading Shaun Tan's surreal works, I have learned that being fantastic, surreal and in some ways thinking in weirdly ways, can be the best thing one can ever be.

Below image and phrase by Shaun Tan from his book "Tales from outer suburbia"

'It floats gently above suburban rooftops... inspiring lonely dogs to bark in the middle of the night.'

Julia's Little People

2010-04-05T13:58:00.000-07:00

I had been looking forward to the day when Julia could draw stick figures of people. It started with balloon like drawings last November 2009 and then sometime in January this year (2010), she started putting in eyes and noses and hands and feet. It is quite cool witnessing the "evolution of man" in the hands of a three year old.

Julia, Mama, Papa, Alien, Kitty

Gustave Dore

2010-03-30T15:08:00.000-07:00

Gustave Dore is described as a famous French illustrator in the 1800's and made great engravings which aimed to preserve the essence of Victorian London. Below are some of his engravings of the London street traders, taken from "London" Time Life Book series by Aubrey Menen.
It is amazing how people in the streets define the city, its culture, the times and consequently our memories and our sense of the place.

Healthy Living

2010-03-23T01:53:00.000-07:00

I am giving in to living a healthier life.

I would say that I fall in the category of the hardheads when it comes to watching what I eat and aside from an athletic stint that lasted through my university days, I have been living a relatively sedentary lifestyle. I think it may be partly because weight has not been a problem for me and also because I grew up in an environment where eating healthy is not much of a big and conscious focus.

But a lot of things have happened recently that had created a crack in this hard skull of mine. My mom had been diagnosed with abdominal cancer early this year (and since it is hereditary, I have been imagining my occasional stomach pains as those beastly cancer cells starting to invade mine too), my husband’s mom had been diagnosed with diabetes two weeks ago, and then Julia and I got sick from something she got at her daycare. It is just too much sickness at one time that I’m saying enough. I need to start getting healthier.
My uncle who is 83 years old (and very conscious of what he eats), recommended us the GI diet book by Rick Gallop, which my husband bought and which I read. It is a nice place for me to start with since I like things to be simple and easy. So my goal now is just to stick to the diagram below (taken from the book), where I’d decrease my consumption of rice/pasta/carbohydrates (which is the big chunk of my diet) and putting the vegetables in its place and making them the main dish. My intention is not to loose weight as I don't need to but to eat more healthy foods and not fill myself up with too much carbohydrates. It is just one thing, one change and seems like a simple thing but then I realized, once you start on this path, it opens up a whole new bag of other things which basically messes up my entire life’s worth of bad habits and then other things need to change as well (and this may be a good thing). It is similar to the feeling after one has cleaned the kitchen, then we begin to want to clean the living room and the bathroom and the bedroom etc. For one cannot live on a clean kitchen alone, that's what I would now say.

I watched a late night show last night and saw Jamie Oliver’s Eat to save your life (or maybe it was eating yourself to death) show which I never watched but this time I did. And I was impressed at his passion for cooking healthy foods, horrified at how bad eating habits could accumulate all those gunk in our bodies and at how easy it looked to cooked delicious vegetable dishes. And so this is another place I’d start, trying on his recipes in the days to come. (I may be tempted to grow my own food someday as this seems to be the focus nowadays here in Victoria - the land of beautiful flowers, and maybe vegetables in the future, with a lot of free seminars on this topic and people advocating it, but I am not that evolved yet.)

I consider myself lucky for having had this realization while I’m still a bit young, before I totally become immersed with unhealthy eating in my new adopted country and before I could irreversibly ruin my daughter’s eating habits. Lately, in my exploration of North American foods, I have found myself exploring the microwaveable and ready to eat sections of the groceries which I see people buy and finding the convenience quite addictive. I’m so glad I had caught myself just in time. The convenience is not worth it. For me, with my eternal “why would I ever do it” questions, it boils down to my family and myself living longer, sickness free and happier lives. Those are good enough reasons for making the change.

Street Folks

2010-03-18T07:11:00.000-07:00

As I walk my way to and from work everyday in the streets of Victoria, I always enjoy seeing the different kinds of people that I pass by. And when you walk often enough like me, you'd soon find that what use to be faces of strangers, become familiar and seem to almost be like long lost friends that you "converse" with, mostly with your eyes and a friendly smile and greeting. Recently I was struck by the realization of the significance the street folks have in my picture and memory of what this city is to me. Without the street folks that I see daily peddling near the harbor, playing beautiful music, standing in corners or sitting in front of the church bench constantly saying "spare change", the city of Victoria would be as dull and as impersonal as any city would be to me. Street folks are a part of the city and for me make up the important personal aspect of it that makes it vibrant and human. For this I am quite thankful.

Below is one of my favorite street folks - the violin playing Darth Vader. How amazing is that? He is pretty cool.

Throwing Caution in the Wind

2010-03-14T09:22:00.000-07:00

This is more of an exercise on colors than anything else. Experimenting with colors is quite enjoyable. I don't really like minty green much but I find that when mixed with the reds and browns, it has a certain appeal.

Wind, Water, Fire and Earth

2010-03-10T21:17:00.000-08:00

Let your dreams fly

to the highest cloud

That it may be blown

by the mighty Wind

Who will take it to places

you've never seen;

Let your mind flow

with the raging waters

Over hills and valleys

Bending and falling

that it may embrace

the stillnes of the deep sea;

Let your heart burn

with the hottest embers

For even as it consumes

Like the brightest star

it gives life

To those who bask in its radiance;

Let yourself be

As unwavering as the earth

Silent with the knowledge

that nothing can be taken

which dust cannot return.

I could be

2010-03-08T13:34:00.000-08:00

It just strikes me, how when we were young, people would often ask, "If you could be anything, what would you like to be?" And I would give "grown-up" answers like, I'd be a doctor or a surgeon, or something complicated sounding to impress grown up folks. But now that I am a grown up, I wonder why noone asks me what I would like to be anymore. Maybe because we just assume, grown ups already have become whatever they had wanted to be when they were small. Or maybe we don't want them to think we need to grow up ourselves. But still I like asking myself that question and sometimes to people I know, who won't get offended. There is a line in the movie, "Memoirs of a Geisha", where Hatsumomo (the elder geisha) was thrown out of the okiya after burning part of it and the voice of Sayuri (the young geisha) could be heard reflecting from the window where she was looking at Hatsumomo walking in the dark streets, fading towards the shadows, a sad symbol of a wasted life. Sayuri's line went,

" I could be her
Were we so different?
She loved once, She hoped once
I could be her
I might be looking into my own future." --- Memoirs of a Geisha

Sometimes when I see an image of a woman in Africa,
with her frail thin hands feeding her child with brown bacteria filled water from a canal,
I say to myself, "I could be her"

When I see a child frantically weeping beside the lifeless body of her mother
just crushed by a big boulder from an earthquake,
"I could be her"

There is a man lying homeless in the streets
with noone beside him but his loyal dog,
"I could be him"

In my walk around the harbor, I often see vendors selling their wares at the steps near the docks.
One time I stopped by and chatted with a nice elderly man who was selling postcard size prints of
his artworks for 2-5 dollars each. I have a soft spot for elder people still "working" to
earn a living and decided I'd buy one of his prints. While I chatted with him, he asked me if I was from Formosa. I said no, but I've heard of it. Why do you ask? He replied, "I'd want to go there someday and see this beautiful mountain (showing me his watercolor in progress of what looked like Mt Fuji)." He looked friendly enough for me to have the courgage to ask, "Is that where you want to be in the future?" He said yes. He wants to paint the mountain. He had been painting since he was a child and never stopped. Now he paints all day with his wife painting watercolors too, beside him. I mentioned that I paint in watercolor too. And he excitedly asked me to bring my work over so he could give me advice if I like. I got curious and asked him where he lived and he pointed his brush out into the harbor. I didn't get where he was pointing at so I asked him again. He pointed out again and this time said, "There in one of those yachts docked on the side". I had to repeat myself as I was clearly astonished, "You live in one of those million dollar yachts docked in the harbor?! Then why are you here painting and selling in the sidewalk when it clearly is so much better to be painting there!" I gasped. And he replied with a chuckle, " I didn't want to spill my paint on the $100,000 teak wood floor."

What a life that would be, to be painting all day, and selling your work on the sidewalk and going home at night to have dinner in a yacht.

I could be him.

Quiet Time

2010-03-06T11:56:00.000-08:00

I'm finding it a bit of a challenge to blog these days. It feels like the more I immerse myself into painting, the more I embrace and dive into the unexplored waters of my senses, the more I prefer not to "talk". Seems like talking (or blogging) dessipates the sensations that are building up inside, sensations that I need to create. So here's to the times when we are quiet and are most closest to ourselves and to the big universe that we are a part of.

Sketching

2010-02-28T22:02:00.000-08:00

One of my new year plans this year was to fill up a drawing journal (65 pages) by the end of the year. I thought that if I just kept drawing or painting anything for more than twice a week, something's going to change and I'm excited to find out. It is just two months past and I already have noticed a few changes. I am more comfortable with watercolor and I find myself sketching things I imagined (and not coming from pictures or things I see), like this one below. I'm quite excited to be drawing unreal things. I find it more exciting to make, more unlimiting and fulfilling. I also find that in drawing/painting more frequently, I am discovering more about myself - being more attentive to my thoughts, what attracts me, what doesn't, what images and colors do I vacillate towards and things that means something to me. Illustrating is slowly becoming to be a personal journey.

With the drawing below, I thought it might be interesting to have a villain who has beautiful hair and a heroin with ugly hands, wouldnt it? Although I quite like it as a pencil sketch, I could feel my hands itching to color this so color it I will.

Harbor Walks

2010-02-26T04:39:00.000-08:00

As the weather is warming up, I have started taking walks out in the harbor during my lunchbreaks partly to get my mind off work as well as unstrain my bad back. I wondered why I haven't done this before as I work just a block away from it. I miss the warm waters of home and it is of great comfort to be able to sit there in the docks whenever I want to. I enjoyed listening to the water sounds; waves splashing against the docks, the constant creaking of the rubber "shields" that prevent the sides of the boats from scratching, the occassional screech of the seagulls... My father loved yachts. When I was little, he used to pay me 25 cents for each yacht picture I found in the magazine. He would have loved seeing the many yachts here. Being near the waters brings a lot of good memories. I was able to bring my camera today and took pictures. I found the reflections of the boats on the waters mesmerizing and the insides of the boats interesting. I wonder what would life be like if I was living on a yacht? What kind of people own these yachts? What must it feel like to be steering the wheel and seeing nothing around but the wide flat ocean horizon and the most likely chilly wind blowing across my face? It either could be exhilarating or lonely...and I think I wouldn't be able to keep myself from shouting "Land ho!"

Cherry Blossoms

2010-02-21T17:26:00.000-08:00

The cherry blossoms are blooming again. I realized that what makes them more stunning is that they come at a time when most of the other trees are either still brown and bare or are evergreens. And then you see these splashes of pink or white clumps of pregnant flowers brightening up the otherwise dreary landscape. Nature's timing is so amazing. It really feels like watching a performance honed and mastered over thousands of years.
Sometimes I feel guilty taking pictures of it as it goes against the very essence of cherry blossoms which is that of impermanence. Human nature on the other hand, is that of wanting the good things to not change, to take pictures, lest we forget. How ironic...maybe we have not evolved and learned nature's ways yet.

Remembering fun

2010-02-17T00:05:00.000-08:00

I know I am having too much of work when I hear myself footnoting my nightime prayers with, " And please God, help me achieve the lowest possible chi-square value tomorrow with a p greater than .05 for non-significance..." When I am in this state, I think my creative thoughts and peaceful energy slowly leaks out through the pores of my skin. So I need to get back to the "land of limitless imagination" before I get sucked into the abyss of severely constraining logical thoughts. And so I painted myself a picture of the things I love about my weekends, which are tea, tea, coffee, reading a book by the window specially on rainy and cloudy days, playing with Julia, painting, having great conversations with my husband, gardening, pastry snacks and more tea. Then I painted my nails black and stuck a lizard tattoo sticker (from Julia's sticker pile) on my hand to distract my mind from getting lost in work. What fun!

2010 Winter Olympics Now On!

2010-02-12T22:23:00.000-08:00

It is such a great time to be in Canada right now! The Vancouver 2010 winter olympics just started and the opening ceremony was spectacular! I love love loved the light plays and the fiddlers in particular. Such incredible artistic talents. (You can find some pictures here.) The deep nationalistic spirit of Canadians is contagious.

Go Canada!

(All pictures below are from Getty images @ the Yahoo site link above).

Gulping knowledge

2010-02-12T06:26:00.000-08:00

There is a line in Edith Wharton's short story "The Portrait" which

aptly describes me these days - "He gulped his knowldege standing.."

That's what I'm doing, with all the stuff I need to do at work.

I just love sketching with oil pastels, as in this one below. I love the texture and

the way you could thicken the color and then scratch on them.

The drawing always comes out better than what I expected it to be.

I am beginning to like the color red in trees - see Charles Vess's illustration.

A Printed page

2010-02-11T00:22:00.000-08:00

I had thought of starting an art journal the other day, which would contain simple illustrations/sketches with short phrases that go with them, chronicling some of the new things I experience or think about each day as I continue to integrate into this new country (much like scientists would do in their experiments, and yes I do miss my lab experiments. "My pursuit of nature's truth!" I use to say). But when I experimented on scanning a page and typing some words on the image (instead of handwriting them) and then printing it, I was greatly awed by how real the page feels, like it could be an actual page from somebody's book. There is something about seeing (and feeling) a printed page which has your words and artwork in it..like some "power" that makes it feel unreal, official and definite at the same time. I could feel the excitement in having created something tangible! Man is after all a creative being. We are made to create. This small moment of "enlightenment", opened up a door in my mind that made me think now that it really is quite possible that I could create something that might look like a book. Wouldn't that be just wonderful? So now, it's not an art journal I would be making but a book of illustrated reflections or poems or a children's story. It never is too late to start pursuing one's dreams after all..specially if one can print it on a page.

Meat Pies

2010-02-07T07:48:00.000-08:00

These days I am learning to cook pies - meat pies. Back home, desserts and sweet foods are for special occasions but chicken, beef, pork and fish were always the order of the day. Pies seem to be a convenient "north american" way of packing meat and vegetables up and having them ready to heat up any time anyone is hungry. It's one of the little neat solutions I find that an often busy mom needs.

Pride and Prejudice

2010-02-04T23:38:00.000-08:00

It was by chance that I picked up the Pride and Prejudice dvd (directed by Joe Wright) while buying some stuff at a drugstore. I didn't have any idea about the story nor the fact that it was written by Jane Austin, back then. The photos on the dvd cover just looked nice. It looked like a decent romantic film and I was in the mood for a romantic story specifically of an old English setting where there are a lot of rules and societal codes that fill characters with repressed emotions that had to vent somewhere along the plot causing havoc to all. Yup, that was the story I was in the mood for when I picked it up (not to mention the dvd was on sale). It has since then, become one of my favorite classical films of all time.

I specifically love Joe Wright's interpretation of it because of a lot of things unique to his style. I loved that he emphasized the many breakfasts that the Bennet family have, which made me miss the big family I have back home. I yearn for the comfort and seemingly endless chatter that comes in big families. I liked the many scenes where characters were shot through windows, behind windows or looking through windows. For some reason, this appeals to me. For me it sort of suggests that what we really see in this world is seen through our own "windows" and sometimes, if we so choose, we could separate ourselves from the world around us and can stand behind the security of our walls and just peer through our "windows". The color palette too is quite fresh yet classic and the surrounding scenes evoke a feeling of being transported in time where there were not much distractions and one can spend the whole evening watching the candle burn. Sometimes I long for the old days where simple things were the main event and relationships were nurtured through letters, visits and having tea. Below is a mosaic I made containing some of my favorite images in the movie. They might as well have been imprinted in my mind by now. Almost every scene is a masterpiece in composition. I love the shadows, the lights and the way actors turn their backs to the viewers so as not to really reveal everything. As in real life, one must still keep an air of mystery. I must say that among all these, my favorite shots are those of the faces of the actors showing their facial expressions. I am so taken by the way they stare; their stares could burn, could melt your heart, could fill you with passion and drown you with delight. Sometimes, it makes you regret why time has to move. Why can we not hit the pause button on those moments, where we ourselves were in scenes like these? And as much as we want to picture every detail of those stares now, we can't, because like laughter, those moments are fleeting. And so I contend myself with these, images from a movie so delightfully made.

Animation Hybrids

2010-02-04T01:49:00.000-08:00

It is fascinating how in our era where high technology gets cheaper everyday and anyone now could own a video camera (if they so wanted to) and can create movies for themselves, new methods of creative expressions are formed. In these two examples (1 and 2), they show what is called "Flip book animation", which combines drawings done on flip book and movement is induced by video recording as one flips through the pages. This third link shows a kind of wall art animation, where drawings are painted on the walls for each segment of the video. Pretty amazing stuff.

Seeing these, begs the question; if you are going to tell your story, in what medium would it be?

Robert Bateman

2010-01-28T05:00:00.000-08:00

A friend gave me this print of Robert Bateman's work. I was ecstatic. Ever since I came here to Canada, I see his works in shops, galleries, offices and bookstores. And although his style of realistic painting isn't exactly my preference, his works never fail to evoke in me an appreciation of nature. He depicts nature and animals in their most elegant selves. The tone of his paintings too is sober and contemplative, like the reeds at the rivebank with just a small hint of a bird somewhere just waking up for their morning feed. There is a calmness in it that is amazing. In his website, he is qouted:

" I can't concieve of anything being more varied and rich and handsome than the planet Earth. And it's crowning beauty is the natural world. I want to soak it up, to understand it as well as I can, and to absorb it...and then I'd like to put it together and express it in my painting. This is the way I want to dedicate my life." ---- Robert Bateman

One thing that I could feel changing in me as I continue to live here in Canada is my growing admiration and near reverence to nature. I could feel (and possibly absorb) it from people I see every day, in the images that surround me and the beauty of nature that is consciously preserved within the urbanity that surrounds it. I can't forget the day when I walked towards a nice hotel entrance in the heart of downtown Victoria and saw at it's side wall, in a smalll patch of pond with a small flowing fountain on top of it, hundreds of multi-colored ducks and drakes were filling it to the brim. I have never seen such beautifully colored birds in such numbers in a small area, right in the middle of a city before! (Back home, people would most likely have roasted them for dinner). The hotel doorman gave me an understanding smile while I gaped and stared at the lumps of ducks in front of me. I associate cities with trash, traffic, lots of dust and if there are creatures I see passing by, it would be rats. But apparently, not here. Here, it seems man and nature can co-exist...at least it feels that way. The ducks don't get cooked.
At near wintertime, the groceries fill up their stands with bird seeds and bird food and I wondered why that was, it was later that I realized that a lot of people had birdfeeders in there backyards and that they are helping the birds survive the winter (when seeds are sparse). Quite a thoughtful act. I felt this is the way that things should be. Man being just one of all other creatures and not living at the expense of the rest of the earth's inhabitants.

Neil Gaiman

2010-01-24T22:46:00.000-08:00

I first heard of Neil Gaiman, when I was attending a three day workshop on cartooning more than ten years ago. Signing in for the cartooning workshop was one of those spur of the moment decisions I made when the summer days got really hot and working on things that had the words "nanometers" and "microseconds" in it got pretty boring. So I thought, "Why not do something totally refreshing and non-scientific (please!), like enroll in a cartooning workshop perhaps?" I don't exactly remember why I chose cartooning of all topics but I suspect it had more to do with the venue than anything else. The venue was at this pretty elusive museum/library, an old structure located in the middle of a small oasis of a park, which was in turn sitting in the middle of very tall, modern glassy buildings. The workshop was held in the dome shaped attic of that building, with glass windows surrounding it offering a 360 view of the park area. Pretty old and unique! But I am digressing. It turned out that our teacher in that class, was a very avid fan of Neil Gaiman (he says his name with a reverence akin to ancient priests praying to their gods) and he highly recommended Neil's graphic novel - The Sandman series. And so that was when I started to read Neil Gaiman's works.

I wouldn't say that I liked him at first "read". His works struck me as pretty 'out of this world', not exactly the frame of mind I had back then. But I found his ideas pretty unique and interesting - with characters such as "Dream" or "Death" portrayed by a young punkish looking lady or a punkish looking man. He sort of grows on you after you read the variety of written mediums he had produced. I specially liked his children's books, short stories and novels like Stardust and the Graveyard book. They are quite simple, fairytale like, almost feels like they were written for children/teens but I find that his stories tend to stretch my imagination. He sees and thinks of things quite differently and his perspective is contagious. With him, I feel like I am "given permission" to think of wierd things, or things that are totally out of this world or to truly explore what the answers might be if I ask myself, "What if?"

Most specially I liked him as a person. In a way I think of him as one of my role models. He's pretty down to earth, has a great sense of humor and a wonderful imagination. His honesty and truthfulness with himself and with the people around him is inspiring and quite endearing. With him, anything ordinary can become extraordinary. He has the calmness that could only have come from having the wisdom gained with age and experience, self knowledge, humility, and an openness or reverence to almost everything around him. He is very supportive of budding writers in a lot of countries too, including the Philippines which he is due to go back for another visit in a month or so. To top all that, he is such a great storyteller! I haven't seen any other famous author who reads his writings pretty darn well like he does. Here are videos of him reading all the chapters of his Graveyard Book. Listening to him, made me feel like a child again - back to when I was sitting on my father's lap, watching his face and listening to his voice, getting engrossed with the story and being impatient in knowing what happens next. I honestly think I've improved as a reader to Julia on her books after I've watched Neil read. I would highly recommend listening to his read on the first chapter (at least) till he gets to the part where he reads the lines coming from the different characters. He also has an online journal which I was quite happy to stumble upon last month. He updates it almost daily, which given his busy schedule, speaks a lot about himself. He is currently concerned with his cat, Zoe, who has a throat tumor and is dying (or may be put to sleep). Sometimes it feels quite strange to be this close to knowing the daily/weekly comings and goings of someone you admire from afar. That's how I feel when I read his journal. I consider myself lucky to be living in this age of blogs and twits and having someone like Neil Gaiman to inspire me in my night time web reads.

Swing

2010-01-20T04:01:00.000-08:00

A chid's abandon. I would never have thought of riding

a swing this way..then again, I am no longer a child. That door

to childhood had closed on me (however I'm still trying to open it with a crank bar).

I've come to appreciate childhood more now that I am no

longer in it. Quite ironinc. I guess it is the same for most things.

We don't get to really appreciate things as much as when it is

out of our hands. But this could be changed as well.

Restraint

2010-01-16T21:15:00.000-08:00

Sometimes when things are overwhelming,

bandages can keep you from spilling all over the floor.

I thoroughly enjoyed making this one.

Spores

2010-01-13T22:31:00.000-08:00

Sometime every year, in the darkness of the night, thousands of corals release their spores to the waters that surround them. These round and tiny specks of white, fill the water like dust fills the air after cars run through dry roads during the summer. The spores, tiny lifeforms in themselves, get carried away by the waves, swaying, floating and landing somewhere where hopefully they will have a stable enough surface to settle, clean enough waters to flourish and survive the other harsh elements of the sea. It seems such a natural phenomenon, this state of riding with the tide and going where the currents flow. It is much like the way trees drop their fruits when they are ripe enough and let their seeds get scattered by the animals that feed on them or the flower that dries out and sprinkles its' seeds in the wind. Maybe there is a lesson here for me. Maybe part of our nature is to do the same, to let go of things, not hang on to them forever and let the currents take them to where they would need to go. Such a release would make us ready to take on other things, to prepare for the next year that comes or be ready for a new life, a new start. Maybe by releasing, we enable a part of us to grow somewhere else and fulfill the cycle of life.

2010

2010-01-10T22:01:00.000-08:00

I use to be fond of making new year's resolutions when I was young, but later in life I realized that although the intention of it is good, it's form doesn't quite suit what my way of thinking was. I found it to be a bit too task oriented, "listy" and in some ways short-sighted. But I still liked seeing the new year as a fresh start, a clean slate to reflect on the past, savor the present and try to gleen the future. I do find myself tending to think of it in terms of concepts more than tasks. This year, one of the things I felt I wanted to focus on is on the theme of finding "me" - my voice, my essence, my reason, my meaning. It sounds elementary and dounting at the same time. Elementary because it is the sort of thing that one would think should have been answered in the teenage years. On the other hand, I know that even the great people who lived in history were still learning about themselves up to their deathbeds. Every day, we evolve and that evolution keeps us in constant flux that if we let it go unnoticed for quite some time, it could wheel us out of our axis. And that could be confusing. Learning about ourselves is to my opinion, the easier part. Accepting what we learn of ourselves, is the harder one.

As I pondered on this, I am reminded of my conversation with my best friend weeks ago. I had mentioned to her how I didn't like putting in too many words in my blog, because if I did, it would most likely end up having discussions of "deep stuff", that may be way too boring for some people. Because much of what I do really, is reflect on things. And I didn't like that about me, in a way. I wanted to see myself on the lively or simple side, on the cool side and not on the contemplative side that reminds me a lot of the nuns and hermits in the village I used to live in. And so aside from the occassional, long essays of reflections found in the earlier parts of this blog, I have limited my recent posts mostly to pictures and short sentences. However, this year, that is going to change. This year, it is going to be filled with more words from any of the ponderings that I do. And that I think is mainly because of my acceptance (finally!) of the fact that a large part of me thrives on reflection.

I remember two things that a teacher and a famous politician have mentioned back then that I felt were very good advice but I just didn't understand it at a personal level at that time, so I tucked it in my memory with the hope that as time passed by, I would get what they meant by it. One of those advice was - "Think big" and the second was - "If you feel lost at some point, remember your role models". It is on this second one that I am thinking now in relation to this blogpost. I haven't really understood how role models could be that important. And I realized later in life that the problem was my definition of what a role model was. I use to think they were similar to my idols, which, weren't in any way living the way I would have liked to live my life as. They just looked pretty good, sang pretty good, or were pretty popular. However later, as I began to admire people who weren't popular and began to explore how they lived, what they thought, what their life's essences were, their ideals..at some point, I found myself learning from them and sharing their essences and then began to realize, role models really are valuable. They had helped me through the lowest and most difficult valleys in my path. And so in this blog, I decided to have regular posts of people that I see as my role models, people I admire and who have influenced (are still influencing) me in small and profound ways.

These changes plus I think, I'd like to increase my blog posts to a minimum of twice a week (instead of once a week) or more. It is a wonder to me that it took me nearly three years to finally feel comfortable blogging (and exposing myself to "people" out there - even if noone barely reads this blog anyway but it still feels like it when I'm writing), to even be writing and posting this entry without being conscious of those "imaginary internet people" anymore.

It's going to be a great 2010. I can just feel it.

Masks

2010-01-09T07:27:00.000-08:00

Oh I'm so proud!

Of the masks I wear

Everyday to deceive

The people who believe

That things are in everyway

All that they see

And think that everything

Is the way they think it should be

Oh what fun!

To pretend to smile

When smiling is not

What my heart desires

Oh what joy!

To cry and wail

When all I wanted to do

Was touch your hair

To look extremely hurt

And push food aside

While my heart was swollen

With extreme pride

Sometimes a mad face

Works best I find

When sitting in buses

With people close behind

Oh you'll never guess!

How good I've come to be

In wearing masks

That even deceives me.

Alien Stuffy

2010-01-06T07:15:00.000-08:00

Julia wouldn't let go of the ugly doll she saw at the bookshop.

So I made her this below (a roundier and puffier version so she can use it as a pillow). It has become her favorite bedtime buddy and calls it "Alien". I'm silently congratulating myself for having attempted to make it in the first place. :)

Happy New Year!

2009-12-31T20:41:00.000-08:00

Vintage card found at the New York Public Library Digital Gallery.

Christmas presents!

2009-12-30T14:59:00.000-08:00

Thank you Santa!

Simple Pleasures

2009-12-27T01:57:00.001-08:00

While having my tea today, I realized that my tea tray reminded me of the happy memories I had of breakfasts in bed at luxurious resort hotels and the delicious Asian meals (specially the desserts) served in Cathay Pacific/Singapore airlines, in which I end up eating in an almost meditative state, having nothing much to do on airline seats anyway and nowhere else to hurry to as in the case of being in beach resorts. Maybe I'll fill my tea tray up with some more of those nice little delightful goodies and add some tiny details (such as a flower picked somewhere). That would add up to making my daily fifteen minutes of teatime quite delightful, wouldn't it?

I am pretty much discovering that tiny details, if noticed and appreciated (maybe adored even), can add a lot to enhancing an otherwise "usual" day. I now truly understand what I have read years ago, why Kelly Preston (John Travolta's wife) would choose to drink her coffee/tea from an exquisite porcelain cup rather than from styros or paper cups, even when it's the only thing she could afford (at that time) to have. There is an elegance in living to it that is quite subtle.

Happy Holidays!

2009-12-24T15:43:00.000-08:00

Merry Christmas to All, and to all a Good-night! :)

Let's go exploring

2009-12-20T00:43:00.000-08:00

My manager have often told me that I inspire her with my clear sense of direction -that I have a clear picture of what I wanted to do with my life, which most people (including her) struggle with. In a way, I agree with her. I have sort of felt that I have always driven myself (sometimes to much more than I would have sanely wanted to) in the pursuit of that which I viewed as my life's destiny, my dreams and ambitions and in doing so, have passed through the pre-requisite and often rough journey of knowing one's self intimately. I could say with the frankness of an aged woman, that I feel I have done almost everything I wanted to do in my lifetime and now in my late thirties, I think of myself as living a semi-retired life. I feel I owe this to the fact that I have struggled to learn (and have accepted) who I am early on. But I do feel my journey hasn't ended yet. It becomes clearer to me when I face a blank piece of watercolor paper and find myself struggling to create something which would somehow show my imagined world. Although I could make the claim of having done everything I wanted to do in my career and my life in general, I couldn't say the same thing for my creative endeavor which is something I have long abadoned when I chose a non-art related career path. Now in my semi-retired state, painting is the one thing I yearn to go back to. But I realize, I do not clearly know who I am in my art work. I do have some ideas who I am not. I am not a realist. As I often find myself disappointed when I see my work resemble too much of the real thing. I am not an abstract painter either as I still like to keep some real forms in. If I am to ask myself what I really want to paint, what I really want to paint are unreal things, fantasy things, like floating jellyfishes, empty martian-like spaces, crooked dead trees, creatures in dream-like places, people in different forms, dilapidated doors that lead to magical places.. I would really love to do be doing that someday. That is my dream. And so, I have resolved to start on another sort of journey - to discover another aspect of who I am, in the drawings that I make. It is daunting and at the same time exhilarating to think that I can be whatever I want to be on paper.

Winter (in some red place)- playing with primary colors

Early Christmas Gift

2009-12-14T13:00:00.000-08:00

I am so excited in recieving my Christmas gift to myself today. It came earlier than I thought. I feel like a child! So anxious in opening my package and savoring the pages with my favorite cup of tea in my nice warm bed. So exciting! This is one thing I'll definitely start doing as a Christmas ritual - ordering a gift for myself online as my reward for all the good things I have done the whole year through ;) ...and maybe have them insert a note that says it's from Santa. That would be fun! :)
I got my gift from here.

Camilla Engman is one of my favorite blogger artists. I love her drawings, collages and paintings.

Holiday Fireplace

2009-12-14T12:19:00.000-08:00

I find it pretty amusing that there is a channel on TV called "Holiday Fireplace" which shows nothing but a recording of a fireplace burning wood for hours and hours. It is a live recording complete with the occassional crackle and all the sounds associated with wood being burnt. One could sometimes see a hand stretching out to arrange the logs and put in a new one when the wood is starting to run out. Just watching it, made me feel quite warm and toasty. It really is quite amusing.

Taking up Sewing

2009-12-05T05:13:00.000-08:00

And so I found myself buying a sewing machine because I had earlier bought five pieces of beautiful fabric from the quilt shop and didn't know what to do with them. When I was a child, I remember playing and trying so hard to sew a few stitches using my mom's old Singer and ended up spending the next hours getting the threads out of wherever it is it decided to entangle itself with. So I approached my new sewing machine with "caution" - hesitation and fear of ruining it are definitely there too. But after an hour of reading the manual and trying things up, I realized that sewing machines nowadays are more sophisticated than they were back then and are now easier to use. And so I made one of the pieces of fabric into a pillowcase. And when I realized it was that easy, I then decided to make Julia's pajamas. And even that turned out great. Just looking at the sewn threads on the fabric boggles my mind. I can't believe I could make such uniformed stitches so easily! I realized it never is too late nor too difficult to try the things one have been wanting to do for years. All I needed was to take the first step - like buying a sewing machine.

Salmon Run

2009-11-30T06:09:00.000-08:00

Once every year, around November, the salmon swims up through the streams in British Columbia to spawn. Julia enjoys watching them. Here are her colorful paintings of these beautiful fishes. (I cut it out for her to paste in the collage).

Here is a link to an artist who paints birds.

Soot Sprites

2009-11-21T10:36:00.000-08:00

Hayao Miyazaki is one of my favorite animators. I particularly love his latest movies - Spirited Away and Howl's Moving Castle (I haven't seen Ponyo yet). In Spirited Away, we see the small round black creatures in the boiler room which I later found from his older movie (My neighbor Totoro), to be soot sprites or "travelling soot". Wikipedia describes them as shy, slightly frightful creatures that live in abandoned buildings such as old houses. Julia is fascinated with them and I'm glad I found a convenient make believe substitute for her to play with. Here below the "soot sprites" in our new house are "flying" and hiding in Julia's closet. (They don't like too much noise so we need to be quiet..shhhh.) The hanging cat is her version of "Totoro" as well". Children's imagination never cease to amaze me.

Tea Table

2009-11-08T07:42:00.000-08:00

Chris found a board in the basement the other month and made it into a nice low tea table for me. Now, Julia and I have a place to draw and write among other things. It's very nice. :)

Small Balls of Learning

2009-11-08T06:14:00.001-08:00

At the office, our staff meetings always end by going around and having each one talk about a thing they learned for the past weeks. I thought that would be good for me to do here. I call it "Balls of Learning" as I see it similar to the small balls that Julia makes with her clay and which she then gathers and squeeze to make her figures. I feel those little details, mental notes I make and stuff I see or seem to feel that is like a "rule" or pattern by which our lives operate, do somehow shape me.

Things I Knew More About (or suspect is true):

1. The more uncomfortable situations I got into, the more learning I got going out of it.

2. Waking up an hour earlier everyday, to spend time alone with oneself, makes a lot of
difference.

3. When one suddenly finds that one's monetary resources are now limited (because of a mortgage loan for example), one then begins to stop "acquiring" and starts "being".

4. My books will find me at their right time.
It used to surprise me how I would tend to find the books that I need for the mood/yearning I had, at the exact moment I need it. Now I take it for granted. I always find the book (or they would find me) that I need at the time that it would make a difference in my life. All it needs is for me to be sensitive to the signal. I found one last Friday, lying face up (or more like staring at me and calling out - pick me up. pick me up!) on a shelf when all the rest of the books were "standing".

5. Like the camera, people can choose to see the world at different focal lengths. We can see it at it's tiniest detail or at the broadest view. Some prefer one over the other. I find nowadays that I tend to look for the greatest things in the tiniest details, which I find ironic.. but the "Book of Tea" seems to agree with me.

6. Speaking about tea - I learned that "Teasism" is the worship of imperfection. (A similar way of thinking is behind why in ancient Japan, when their bowls or cups are cracked, they bring it to an artisan who fixes it by highligthing the crack lines - not hiding them- with some metal filling as these crack lines now make the cup unique and beautiful.)
This gave me a big relief. And so I told an old friend, now that I knew about such a thing as "imperfection" being good, I can stop my endless (and tiring) quest for perfection and be at peace with myself at last. And my old friend, like a sage, calmly says, " Now, that Emilie, makes you perfect"...There is no getting away from the yin and yang of things I suppose then.

7. Halloween is like Christmas back home. It's the rare time we can go around knocking our neighbor's doors and being given treats.

Happy Halloween Everyone!

2009-10-31T20:14:00.001-07:00

A Day in my Life

2009-10-30T22:36:00.000-07:00

I thoroughly enjoyed my day today that I thought I'd share it with you so that you could agree with me. :)

Early morning walk to the bus stop. Clouds are

grey, some light rain showers and nice cool wind -

it's my kind of day.

Waiting for the bus and admiring my new boots.

Julia knocks on her daycare door - what, no fuss, no whining?

.... the day is definitely looking good!

Having a chat with the pink fairy backyardnigan creature

while taking her boots off by herself..definitely looking good.

And off she goes....

Walking to work and noticed something was brewing at

the parliament building..

It's the day the winter olympic torch reaches Victoria from Greece!

(Part of the pre-activities of the Vancouver 2010 winter olympics)

A lot of important people speaking..

Finally, the torch is lit and ready for the relay across Vancouver

island. The flame had been carried from Greece without once

being put off and had travelled by plane, on logging trucks,

underwater, snow sled, you name it. It came in a sophisticated

small lantern like container to Victoria on a canoe and was used to light

the olympic couldron which was then used to light the torch for the relay.

I really liked looking at this old man...he is just glowing.

Coffee at the museum - a newly discovered place. There is something calming about having coffee surrounded by ancient totem poles. Wow! Numerous pecans in my cinnamon bun? The gods were
smiling at me today.

Got a visit from a very cute furry friend.

And baby seagulls keeping me company while I finished work.

I saw an angel in the street.Snuggling up with two books from my favorite author, Neil Gaiman (Mirror Mask & Graveyard book) with a dash of my other favorite magazine, National Geographic. All lent/given to me by friends. How much luckier could I be?

Wouldn't you agree that I had a great day? :)

Canadian Geese

2009-10-29T22:56:00.000-07:00

I woke up one morning and found these Canadian geese grazing at the empty field behind our house. It was nice company to have breakfast with on a cold saturday morning. I realized later that having all or most of them facing the same direction was a rare occurrence. I wonder what could have made them look the same way when I took this picture (as I didn't see any other being or animal at that end of the field). I was reminded of a scene in a movie where all the unseen angels on earth all go to the beach and face the sun as it sets in the western sky. Maybe these geese are angels in disguise...ah, now that's a comforting thought.

The Little Things

2009-10-25T07:19:00.000-07:00

I found happiness this week in five pieces of 14" x 24" fabric cuts. I couldn't believe it myself. But apparently when one goes into a quilt shop with the intent of "just looking around", one is doomed to fail specially if one is of my disposition where the sight of paper and fabric turns on all the buttons of delight, excitement and to some degree, greed. I felt like I was Gollum (in the Lord of the Rings) as I whispered, "my preciousssssss" while lovingly caressing the soft, satinny surface of my pretty pretty fabrics... and I don't even know how to quilt.

Super Polka Dot Girl!

2009-10-05T20:34:00.000-07:00

...with her laser light powerrr! kablizzzzzt...blzzztt.

Conversation with a 3 year old

2009-10-05T19:49:00.000-07:00

Julia: "Mama, Georgee (her stuffed giraffe) has a tag!"
Me: "Yes.. (reading the tag).. and the tag says that Georgee came from China."
Julia: "Georgee came from China?"
Me: "Yes." ....(thinking quickly for words so I could extend the conversation) I asked, "do you know where you came from?"
Julia: ...."Chinatown?"
Me: " No", I replied smiling, "You came from the Philippines. Can you say Fi-li-peens?"
Julia: (in a slang accent) repeated, "Filipinss".
Me: "Yes, that's right. You came from the Philippines." (I silently congratulated myself for being quite quickwitted to have thought of using this opportunity to teach her of home country.)
Julia: (after a long silent pause)..."Mama, did you buy me too?"
(I nearly choked) Me: (laughing) "Do you have a tag in you?"
Julia: (looking around herself and me giving her time to search for a possible tag in her while absorbing her perspective).. "No, I don't have a tag..(she declared sadly)."
Me: "Ah! That means, I didn't buy you then!" (with a big smile)
Julia smiled and dropped the conversation, visibly satisfied and happy that I didn't buy her.

(I realized later that she could then have asked me where I got her then - now that she's sure that I definitely didn't buy her - and I could possibly have been in a worst predicament in this where-do-I-come-from conversation, as I wouldn't have known how to answer her next questions without digging a hole for myself..)

Musicians

2009-08-09T02:06:00.000-07:00

As it turns out, the jazz concert I had stumbled into in my last blog post was part of a music festival and it is an ongoing daily one hour concert during lunchtimes. It gloriously would go on till Sept 14. So every weekday lunchtime, one could find me sitting in the bleachers and smiling like I had won a million dollars. This is life. I missed listening to live music so much. I wish it never ends.

Last Friday's music theme was "Tango" and all the four artists played varying aspects of tango. One gave a small lecture too about it's history. I have learned that Tango originated in Argentina, in a small port city called La Buka (I hope I spelled that right). In such a place, there were a lot of different nationalities - Russians, Colombians, Africans and even Japanese. Most of them are immigrants, so it is then that Tango is also known as immigrant music..interesting.

One thing that struck me while I was listening and watching the musicians play was how visibly one can see from their faces the emotion that their music draws from them. To me, it was very moving. It was as if they were all alone playing their instruments in an empty room and noone was watching. I couldn't remember when was the last time I wore my "heart" out like that. As far as I could recall, my journey to maturity have included being able to master my emotions and for me, that also entailed not having it too visible for people to see. Cultural expectations on Asian women may have had a part of it too as well as all those trainings in honing ones job skills where one is required to stay calm in emotionally charged scenarios or not reveal anything in most circumstances. Then again, it might also be that I have always been surrounded by left-brained people where numbers and over use of the mind and logic is the norm. So it's not surprising why on my spare time, I would be drawing, painting, writing or be drawn to lunchtime concerts like these because a large part of me lives through my emotions. And so it marvels me to watch people who spend most of every day, living at that end of the spectrum. As I watched the way the artists held their instruments, the way they close their eyes as the notes filled the air, how peaceful their faces looked, how passionate their energy, the shape of their fingers as they pressed those keys or pulled those strings, I wondered how it would be like to live the life of a musician where one's work requires one to feel, to reach into the depths of the heart and soul and find that unique music that is there and then to play it with eyes closed..it must be nice.

On a Sad Day

2009-08-06T01:04:00.000-07:00

Sometimes for no particular reason at all, I feel sad. It may be because of some weird hormones, or stress or some negative energy I’ve picked up somewhere or maybe tiredness or some “thing” but whatever it is, I woke up sad today. There is this melancholy cloud hanging over my head and some emptiness in my stomach that I couldn’t attribute to any tangible cause. It was just a sad day, with nothing in it. If I was watching a movie, any movie, I would have burst crying at anytime. So consequently, on this sad morning, I didn’t pack my lunch and only packed those for Julia.

It didn’t help that Julia began crying and wailing on the way to her new daycare/preschool, nor did it help to see her sulking all by herself in a table when all the other kids were crowding in another table obviously having fun, it didn't help to see the unaffectionate face of the “attendant” watching over the many children in that preschool/daycare and it certainly didn’t help to come in my office after going out for coffee, to have my officemate visibly harboring a grudge at me because my cellphone rang when I was out and I have forgotten to turn it to vibrate mode. An apology didn’t make a difference. Of all days, it had to happen today, on my sad day. Someone had to call me on my phone at the time I was out when I forgot to turn on the vibrate mode which irritated my officemate who happens to be anal when it comes to phones ringing and sounds that I make in general. But such is life isn’t it? Things happen in moments when you least want it to happen. There is a term for this principle.. which predictably I forgot because one cannot be expected to think straight on sad days anyways. I wouldn’t have been surprised if the rest of my day was filled up with a rolling snowball of more sad events after another. A spilled lunch perhaps? My PC crashing in the middle of finishing my report? More phone calls coming? So during lunchtime, I said a short (but desperate) prayer, that I may have the courage to face the rest of the sad things coming to me today and to please, please, if possible, stop all the world's cruelty at once. Then I went out of our strained office to get some fresh air and my lunch which I've decided to get from Chinatown, giving me a nice enough distance to walk and breathe.

While I walked towards Chinatown, I heard some music. And it so happened that my feet convinced me to follow that music which on any other day, I would have easily ignored. But on this particularly sad day, I could go anywhere my feet wants to go. For all I care, my feet was THE boss today. So lo and behold, what glorious miracles happen when one follows ones feet for a day. Out in an open air stage with neat new bleachers filled with upbeat and positively glowing people, was a jazz band playing the most beautiful jazz songs from the 60's-70's that I've ever heard. It just melted all the ice that was starting to build inside me. I have never liked jazz before but today, I fell in love with it. There is nothing more enjoyable than listening to a saxophone, flute, two guitars and a viola playing in an open stage on a summer afternoon. It was like I stepped into heaven and a flashback was shown before me showing me how busy I have been with whatever plans I had in my life that now in heaven, I am being shown "the way"..all I needed to do was to sit down and enjoy a nice piece of jazz music in the middle of the open park on a particularly sad day. What pleasure! It nearly felt alien to me, I almost felt guilty savoring it. But savor I did for from now on, I am savoring life, in all it's forms and that sure includes jazz music. I never thought I'd be a jazz music enthusiast but I am now. Sad days after all are not that bad. They lead you to paths you may never have thought of taking and you end up becoming someone you never could have imagined you'd be.

Cave

2009-07-25T19:47:00.001-07:00

One of my most cherished memories was when I was paddling in a dark river that runs through an amazing cave. After minutes of going through what seemed like an endless dark tunnel filled with flying swallows and sleeping bats, it suddenly "pops up" and I found myself in a huge chamber filled with stalactites and stalagmites the bases of which I couldn't see as the light was not strong enough and the space was so emmense. It was a surreal experience. I find that the most beautiful effect produced in caves is when there's a hole in its "ceiling"and rays of light are coming through, penetrating the darkness and illuminating the water that runs through it. It is just spectacular. I wish I could go back there again.

A New House

2009-07-15T15:36:00.000-07:00

We are finally buying our new home here in our adopted country. As I told a friend, after having gone through the entire experience of buying a house here in Canada, it was really very much like looking and finding the love of your life, your soulmate. And although I had all my list of criterias, and all the things I'd like to see, as well as having viewed hundereds of pictures of people's houses (and getting a glimpse of how they might have lived their lives - which is an interesting experience in itself - I could have sworn I felt the owners' auras as I went through their rooms and looked at their stuffs), it ultimately boiled down to how you feel the minute you enter the door. It is a cliche but one really could fall in "love" with an inanimate thing such as a house. And I wonder why that is. Maybe it has to do with the life you imagine yourself to have when you are living in it, or the many possibilities that would come to you while you're cropped up in your new room as the rain pours outside or the romantic moments you imagine you'd spend in that very inviting porch or the picture of your child playing in that small patch of a yard or the many birthdays and holidays and memories you'd hope to create in this new house, in this new country...whatever it is, having a house of one's own (specially after you've left your own house back in your home country) is pretty special. Julia would say - "its fantastic!".

Butchart Gardens

2009-05-30T19:41:00.000-07:00

Jack, Mana and their 2.5+ year old daughter, Lindsey, came to visit us last weekend. I got to see the Butchart gardens for the first time. It was beautiful and very well maintained. I realized later that with all the plants and trees around, I didn't see a single fallen leaf or flower rotting on the ground or pathways. They were being picked up or cleaned even before they begin to fade and fall off the branches. Given the vast land area, that was not a small feat.

Seing the potted pots of assorted flowers in the rose garden, I began to percolate a dream of owning a similar potted garden somewhere in my future, with those round flower collections hanging on arched trellises and a wishing fountain at the side that would make me feel like I'm transported to one of the scenes in Jane Austin's novels. Flowers do that to you I guess. They add some magic into an otherwise ordinary landscape or existence. With flowers, you became aware of beautiful possibilities.

Here are some pictures of my favorites: the sunken garden, fountain and japanese garden.

(I must admit that I was a teeny bit disappointed to find the japanese garden ponds lacking of koi's, which to me was a key thing of such a garden.)

Thank you Jack, Manna and Lindsey, for the most wonderful time!

Seeing Pink

2009-05-24T07:16:00.000-07:00

It is unusual to see the color pink on the ground. I would never have thought it to be naturally associated with the colors of the ground but I was mistaken.

Julia's Paintings at 3 years old

2009-05-07T03:59:00.000-07:00

Julia just turned three last April and together with it came both subtle and not so subtle changes in her. One of them can be seen in her paintings. Her one color lines, circles and curves have evolved to multicolor spirals and rainbows. She also now begins to fill the whole page instead of just painting lines and shapes. A year makes a lot of difference when you are a child.

Losing My Religion

2009-05-03T00:21:00.000-07:00

I have found myself developing an odd behavior these days. I am sneaking in a bag of McDonalds breakdfast meal (egg mcmuffin with hash brown) in our office, as a thief would sneak in a bag of crown jewels and eating it on my desk like a fugitive. It never had occurred to me till within the past months that a majority of Canadians are very health conscious. If there was a major religion in Canada, as we have Roman Catholicism back home, it would be the religion of Healthy Living. I have never seen so many products labeled 0 trans fat on the shelves before, raw broccoli, celery and green peppers eaten like chips and such ardent followers to the cause. Eating a Mcdonalds breakfast meal is to most Canadians, THE most grievous sin on earth imaginable, that definitely buys me a fast train ticket to hell.

The first few times some of my co-workers have seen me eating the obnoxious thing, they had politely asked - Oh, you are eating Mcdonalds? (with barely hidden disdain on their face). When they found out that subtle messages didn't work, they finally just told me up front that I would die a most painful death by eating McDonalds meals. It has too much salt, too much chemicals, too much preservatives, too much fat, that if I don't "repent and change my ways", I will not only be eating McDonalds in hell but will slowly be an outcast here on earth - specifically in Victoria and more specifically, in our office.

I don't even like McDonalds. I buy it because it is the most convenient stop open at early mornings on my way to work after dropping Julia off her daycare (an activity which usually leaves me starving). And I don't even like it when I was back home either, where home is a country of McDonald outlets and McDonalds-like fastfoods (Jollibee) are found in every few blocks in the main cities and you would have been a serious outcast yourself it you haven't eaten one of those kind of meals at least twice a week. I don’t even like eating a bun for breakfast and I don't like their coffee much. So why am I risking a lifetime of hell and continue to suffer in sneaking it slowly into my desk, careful not to make the distinctive crunching sound that their recyclable paper bags make, keeping it hidden in my bag while I slowly nip pieces off when nobody is looking and praying that the smell would make it's shortcut way to the open window?

I could say that it may be because of the convenience of having the place being located on my way to work at the time when I am starving or perhaps because of the cheap price. But I guess as I pondered on it, I realized that what keeps me going back and committing the most grievous sin in Canada, is mainly because McDonalds is the only common thing between this new strange country and my own country that is home. I haven't seen any Filipino restaurants here (except for the bayanihan center which serves food during Sundays and which doesn’t look anything like any Filipino restaurant I have been to) in the year that we have since moved here. And even though I don't miss home as much as my husband does and their Mcdonald's food here is different (they have buns instead of rice) and the staff look different, the feeling of eating a cheap breakfast meal at McDonalds here still in some odd way elicit similar feelings that had gone through me while eating every single McDonald (and Jollibee) meal back home - which may have been hundreds of times by now. When nothing else around me is familiar, I find myself hanging on to the most unlikely habit which even I didn’t realize I had. And I am not sure if I am willing to let it go just yet - not even for all the years that I gain through eating more healthier foods. I think that the day that I give up fastfoods and solely eat the greens, 0 trans fat, low salt, and organic foods, would be the day that I loose my "religion" and can be called a Canadian.

PhotoFunia

2009-04-28T04:27:00.000-07:00

It amazes me what people can think of creating and then being able to do it in the easiest way possible.

PhotoFunia

A Year in Reflection

2009-04-15T03:53:00.000-07:00

It is nearly a year since we first landed in Canada (April 23, 2008) and I couldn't help but wonder how much I have changed since then. I remember being nervous the first few times I rode the bus transport and had to say to the driver, "transfer please", without really understanding what it meant, only because my uncle told me to say so, so that I could ride free on my trip back. It took me a while to grasp the concept of riding the next bus rides (no matter how many) for the next two hours for free when I've paid for every single public transport ride all my life.
I definitely am not the same person as I was a year ago. I guess that is what moving to another country does to you. Here are some of the other things I noticed about my experience.

Signs that I am changing into being somewhat similar to being a Canadian:

1] I find myself often going to work carrying a hot coffee mug in one hand.
It never occurred to me till I got here and saw all these early commuters with a cup of coffee in their hands, that you could bring coffee to work. I never had to, as we had a huge canteen inside our workplace back home that could supply 6,000+ people with its myriad choices of coffee flavors any time of the day at partly subsidized price. Here, we don't have canteens inside the workplace buildings and buying coffee outside is a bit more expensive than bringing your own brew.

2] I check the weather channel before I decide what to wear, everyday.
With what seems like an every changing weather here in Victoria, one has to check what the weather forecast is for the day else you run into major inconveniences with unsuitable clothes and freeze to death. Back home I could nearly predict what the weather would be by looking at the sky and it was mostly sunny, sunny, sunny, sunny, sunny for most of the year and rainy, rainy, rainy, rainy for the months of June-August. And if I make a mistake with my self predicting, the worst that could happen is get wet but still be warm.

3] I shout "thank you!" to the bus driver when I get off at the backend of the bus.
I honestly think, I got 80% more polite since coming here to Victoria. I've instinctively learned to say "thank you", "Please", "I'm sorry", smile politely to strangers and have the gall of asking people I don't know, of how they are doing. I think people would mistake me as a politician if I were back home.

4] I could now answer fluently, the multiple choice questions that most people in the food industry here bombard me with.
It is unbelievable how far I have gotten with my multiple question answering skill and no longer answer a question with a question anymore. It was a long process of soul searching if I was cracker jack cheese person or a white cheddar one, having no idea what each of those choices are like. I still remember being intimidated (and would prefer starving) ordering in fastfoods that don't have a number on a set of choices that they have on their menu like what we have back home where our meals are already "pre-ordained" for us for the most part and all I have to do is say a number. Now I could proudly say that I know who I am. I am a turkey sandwich on wheat, with white cheddar, lettuce, tomatoes, green pepper, mayonnaise, honey mustard with no onions and olives kind of person.

5] Like most Canadians, when I see snow falling outside, I now express my slight dismay for the prolonged cold weather and mumble something like "go away already" instead of jumping around and squealing "Snow! Snow! Wowee! Let's go outside!"

(I realized that this blog entry would be quite long if I enumerated all the signs, so I'll stop at five for now and will write the rest in future blog entries.)

A colleague had asked me, so you are already a year here, do you feel like you have fully adjusted? I would say "no" to that. I think that if there were big stones and small stones to this thing, it's the big stones that I have quickly learned to change and adapt. But I still find myself struggling (hilariously) with the small stones of daily living. They say that the devil is in the details, I agree to that. The devils are in the smallest details.

"The Battle of the Padlock"
It so happens that my colleagues and I have been working on a project which required us to work in the far dungeons of a highly secure data research center where we had to leave all our belongings in the lockers outside the room's door. My colleagues (both of them are Canadians) have decided that we'll all use one of the big lockers to place our things in for the month that we would be working there and one of them have provided a padlock to secure that locker. Now this was a padlock that has those circular plastic round knobs in the center, and numbers around it like in the vault and you turn that knob around to the codes to open it. One of my colleagues gave me those codes and quickly showed me how to open it by which I saw her mostly swirling the knob around and had thought to myself - Oh, that's easy. It wasn't. The next day, I tried opening it, I couldn't open it. I used the codes, with no luck, I pulled and twisted and had my fingers sore and nearly bleeding but it never budged. I kept at it for as long as my pride could handle (which was a long time) before I called my colleague from inside that very silent and secure vault-like room, twice (to my utmost embarrassment), to ask her to show me how to open it. I didn't know that I had to turn it counter clockwise and then clockwise in certain order and with distinct number of turns. I didn't know that if you pulled it too hard (especially with desperation), it would lock itself and not budge anymore. For all I know, padlocks (at least the ones we use back home) had keys!

So if someone asks me about my experience or advice on immigrating, I would tell them that most of the "big stones" you'll encounter, you would already know about from the seminars and from what your friends tell you or what you'll read in the web. And for sure you would have yourself psychologically prepared to face those kinds of stuff. But there are the presence of certain "padlocks" in these roads, those small and tiny details that could ruin your day, which come unexpectedly and would most probably catch you unguarded. And the best thing to do, I'd say, when you are faced in a battle with an evil looking, annoyingly haughty and horribly mocking "padlock" is to laugh. (I know my colleagues and I had a very good one.)

Julia enjoying Spring

2009-04-11T05:08:00.000-07:00

Julia is having fun

Playing hide and seek with Kitty Cat

Under the cherry blossom trees

Laughing the day away.

Cherry Blossoms (Sakura)

2009-04-11T04:11:00.000-07:00

It didn't really sink in me till after I talked with my best friend who is in Chicago, that cherry blossom trees are not as common in most places in north america as it is here in Victoria. So I thought I'd dedicate a blog entry to this very beautiful flower.

I have often wondered why cherry blossoms is one of the near revered flower in Japan. Never having seen an actual tree in bloom and just judging at the drawings on pastel color boxes and some pictures sent by friends, I thought it was just a level above the daisy and lower than that of the rose. But I guess, you have to actually see it to feel its magic.

Cherry blossoms by far, is one of the most generous and amazing flowers that I have ever seen in my life. When they bloom, they fill up the whole tree with nothing but its flowers. (And there is a very strange effect of seeing it all up there above the tree and not down below in a shrub). There is nothing like passing under the shades of a tree so heavy with tiny pink or white flowers where an occassional wind would cause it to stir and shower you with floating pink or white petals and transport you to a heaven like place you wished would last forever, like a scene in the movie...you'd almost wait to see someone you long to see your whole life walking towards you with arms open wide smiling, because under the shades of the blooming cherry blossoms, you feel like anything can happen.

But then again, impermanence is one of the nature of cherry blossoms. Part of its appeal is because it only blooms once a year during spring and it blooms for a week or two and is gone. Petal by petal, it is blown away, swirls on the ground and decays like the rest of us. In this way, for me, it embodies how life should be lived...generously and giving, with beauty, grace and full to the brim.

A Walk at Dallas Road

2009-03-29T17:28:00.000-07:00

It seems like the theme for this month (and probably for the rest of the spring and summer months) is "ocean". We just love being here in Vancouver island and being just a walk away from it. Our latest weekend beach walk is at Dallas road which is a long stretch of beautiful pathway on the edges of a cliff overlooking the coast and which has stairs going down to the beach front. I was amazed at how close we got to the seagulls. We definitely are enjoying the long awaited spring months.

Morning Walk to Work

2009-03-15T04:08:00.000-07:00

Some days when Julia is in a good mood and I get to drop her at her daycare early, I would walk to work rather than ride the bus. On these days, I feel extra thankful that we have chosen to live in a city near the ocean. I have been travelling and working in places long enough to recognize that being able to walk to work and see views like these is something extraordinary. I love seeing the waters everyday. The ocean reminds me of home (even if it is freezing cold and the harbour is filled with fancy boats). And as long as it is there, within an arms reach, I feel connected to our 7,500 islands back home.

A robin in a tree

2009-02-24T21:58:00.000-08:00

This is one image I wouldn't see back in the tropics. For one, I don't think we have robins back home, and if we did, we would have had a hard time seeing them as it is very rare to see trees without leaves, unless there has been a fire or typhoon (for which I won't be taking pictures of birds and would most probably be scrambling for clean water to drink, cook or bathe in). So this picture, taken in one of our afternoon walks here, is quite "exotic" for me. It is strange to see a robin that much exposed among a flurry of bare tree branches...feels like I am seeing something I shouldn't be seeing.

Life is Not Without Tragedies

2009-02-20T21:23:00.000-08:00

The beetle fell in love with the seaweed.

He wanted to be around her all the time.

He drowned.

Cat Necklace

2009-02-18T06:20:00.000-08:00

I made Julia a cat stuff toy last weekend. It was a bit big to fit in her pocket so I added a ribbon for her to wear around her neck. We call her Mimi, the swinging cat. I must admit, it's quite amusing to see people smile when they see Julia with Mimi the swinging cat. Now she's asking for a bird.

Birdman

2009-02-13T02:57:00.000-08:00

I saw you at the parking lot
with a bag of seeds strapped on your waist,
It was raining, but you do not mind
you were enjoying your time

The crows gathered at your feet
like humble servants they wait,
not so patiently though as they twitched and hopped
occassionally bowing to their king

Sometimes I see you ride my bus
you were always alone,
Head bowed and not looking,
you were in an island of your own

One time as we began to board
I watched your back and was startled
when you turned around and waved
your face so changed and ardent

I had to look at where you're waving,
I have to know
who could be that very person
who could make you glow

But as I turned to see
I saw noone there at all
Not a single person
not a single soul

Then I realized my error
my gaze was not in line
So I looked up and finally saw
a baby seagull perched on the parking sign.

Dallas Clayton

2009-02-08T16:23:00.000-08:00

I stumbled upon this site a week ago and couldn't keep myself from returning to it everyday. His poems make me see and think about things differently. He clearly has a unique and lovely mind. (I like his book too.)

A Family of Cats

2009-02-08T15:49:00.000-08:00

Julia loves her kitty cat stuff toy so much.

I think this is how we would have looked like if we had been a family of cats.

Julia's first snow steps

2009-01-04T10:20:00.000-08:00

We were pleasantly surprised when on one Sunday morning, we saw snow falling outside our window and porch. They said it rarely snows here in Victoria but this year it snowed quite beautifully. 15cms of it! They said this is only the 8th time in the last forty years that Victoria is having a white Christmas. Both Julia and I were very delighted to say the least.