Random Brain Dump

I was helping Allison finishing up her bathroom “duties”, when Allison stepped on the stool in front of the sink and looked at herself. Then she grinned and said:

“Hello gorgeous!”
Then she bursts out laughing…

That girl is too much!!! 🙂

I received news that my last-surviving grandparent passed away yesterday. She was 95.

I haven’t seen her in the last 30 years. My last memory of her was when she took my sister & I out to the market to sell a basket of fruits that she harvested from her orchard one day; my parents had sent us to stay with my grandparents on their farm during the final days of the war. It was dangerous and chaotic time when the communists were launching the offensives that eventually overtook southern Vietnam.

When I was little, our family usually celebrated the new year by visiting my grandparents for a few days. It was always a treat to visit a small village and stay on a farm for a city boy like me. My grandparents’ place is by a river and has all sorts of fruit trees and farm animals. The best thing was eating all the home-grown fruits. Jack fruits being my favorite. I loved wandering among the trees and sometime I’d work up the guts and go all the way to end of their orchard and check out the people working in the adjacent rice paddies. I never stayed there too long for fear of getting lost– the place seemed huge to me.

Each new year, my grandmother would bake up all sorts of bake goods for the celebration. I do remember fondly of her ginger cookies. She was constantly busy. I’d jump at the opportunity of helping her feeding the chickens and the pigs. I remember one time, she chopped down this young banana tree and sliced up the entire tree and cook it as part of porridge for the pigs. She’d sometimes reward me with a fresh egg. She’d drop it into a glass of hot water and voila, hard-boiled egg.

My grandmother was a small and skinny woman. She was surprisingly resilient though– remaining strong even in her later years, my Dad told me. She stayed all her life in the same village: born and died there. The hard life she lived showed through on her rough hands and hardened face.

I regret that my daughters never got a chance to meet any of their great-grandparents when they were alive. I guess they’ll have to learn about their great-grandmother through the stories I will be telling them.

Goodbye Grandma…

I use Flickr for sharing my photographs. While I like the social aspects of it a lot, I always find the page rendering to be too minimal for sharing (after all these are pictures not search results).

Shutterfly is a “personal expression” site and is one of few sites that store photos in full resolution, with no storage limits. Your photos are guaranteed never to be deleted. All free of course. Check out the photo books, they’re pretty awesome!

This isn’t meant to be a shameless plug. But Shutterfly is beta-testing a new photo share service. It’s very cool and super easy to design pages and render photos. Since I started to upload pictures on a monthly basis mainly for online storage, now I can effortlessly share them and make prints all in one place. I’ll use Shutterfly for family photographs but I’ll definitely continue to use Flickr for my other type of photography.

Anyway, check out Our Lives In Pixels of regular updates of our family pictures…

Allison is known to be the drama princess in the house. Here’s proof from yesterday when the sisters got into a small arguments:

Katelyn: “Stop that …”
Allison: “You stop it, Je Je (big sis)”
Katelyn: “I said stop it, Allison!”
Allison: “No…”
Katelyn: “Keep your balloon over your side…”
silence… then Allison: “Je Je… you broke my heart!”

McCain surely is chuckling seeing how democrats are showing how dysfunctional their party is.

The Clintons are sore now even after DNC resolves the Florida & Michigan delegates with a compromise. The states’ votes will count , well half a count to be exact. The Clintons still haven’t learned to play by the rules, what a shame…

Man, what the hell with Floridians? They are always messing elections up for the rest of the country. Must be the blinding sun… May be we should just give the entire state to non-democratic nations like Cuba or Venezuela or something, since these folks just can’t deal with voting! 🙂