Day 336 - Making Cake

Thought of the day: I spent some time in the climbing gym today and watched the climbers working their magic on the walls. There were many talented climbers there, but none of them impressed me as much as a young boy who was probably not much older than eight. He moved with such ease and agility that it was hard to take my eyes off him. It was a pure joy to watch him. Everybody is gifted with certain talents and this boy clearly has a gift and he is lucky to have found it so early in life.

Photo of the day:

Jasmine and Lila helped make a zucchini cake in preparation for the arrival of a few house guests.  In the background, the girls watched on in a photo taken on Pearl St. There are many things that Jasmine is good at but it's still too early for her to settle down on any one particular thing yet.

Day 334 - Playground

Thought of the day: Lila made a "train" tonight by connecting her paintings and drawing made at home and in her preschool. I was impressed by the length of her train. She had done a lot more than I had at her age. The world is getting a lot more competitive over the past few decades and children are quickly adapting or are made to adapt quickly. As long as she is enjoying her experience and is not overwhelmed or overstimulated, it's not necessarily a bad thing. With choices and opportunities abound, it's the duty, burden and pleasure of the parents to help them navigate through the maze of early life.  It's a long and arduous process but, at the end, there's no greater pleasure for any parents than seeing their children emerge as wholesome and well-rounded individuals ready for the world at large.

Photo of the day:

Lila in a playground in Boulder. With so many walls to climb on, it's no wonder that she developed an interest in climbing so early. I don't think I have seen a climbing wall of any kind until I was already well into my twenties!

Day 328 - Reflection

Thought of the day: Lila appears to be a natural climber. She just had her first climbing lesson yesterday and it was as if she had woken up and discovered a whole new world in front of her. I have been taking her to a climbing gym twice a week for Jasmine's climbing lessons and Lila loved one of the easier routes there. Today she somehow figured it all out and free climbed all the way to the top. She was so excited about her new accomplishment that she kept doing that over and over and over again. I had to literally peel her off the wall so she won't overexert herself.  The way things are heading right now, I am spending more and more time in the climbing gyms with the girls and it won't be long before I might be motivated enough to sign up for climbing lessons myself!

Photo of the day:

A wall display inside a cafe with the reflection overlaying the original image. I keep returning to cafes just like Lila keeps returning to the climbing wall. Her temptation is riskier but much healthier than mine.

Day 327 - Climbing

Thought of the day: Jasmine has recently started doing her piano practices in the morning instead of in the evening.  It's amazing how much difference such a small change in her schedule makes.  Practicing piano in the evening had always been a bit of a struggle for us because she was already pretty tired after a day of school and was really not eager to do more stuff. Now that there's no more piano practice after dinner, everybody can relax and rewind during the quiet time in the evening. Of course, getting up early every morning to help Jasmine with her practice is by no means an easy task for a night owl like me, but it's a small price to pay for more peace and harmony in the house. Change is not always good, but sometimes it can be. In fact, I believe that not being afraid of making changes is a secret ingredient for happiness and the change of Jasmine's practice time proved it!

Photo of the day:

Lila in the climbing gym getting her first climbing lesson today. Jasmine didn't start climbing until she was quite a bit older, but we are doing it differently for Lila because I think she is ready for it. I hope this change will work out well.

Day 322 - Climbing Gym

Thought of the day: It is one of those rare rainy days in Colorado. It has been wet and cold all morning. After a warm and dry summer, I have gotten so used to the sun that I am having a hard time adjusting to this new weather condition. Afternoon thunderstorms are not uncommon in the summer but they tend to come and go really fast. The stormy weather is both dramatic and interesting unless you happen to be caught unprepared on the road or on hiking trails. What we have today is none of that. A couple of year ago we made the decision to move to Boulder instead of Portland despite the many similarities between the two cities. My sense of weariness today confirm for me that we made the right choice.

Photo of the day:

Lila and a new friend in the climbing gym.A day like today is perfect for indoor climbing.

Day 308 - Apple Tree

Thought of the day: I had my car washed today and I was not very happy with the result.  It's so often the case when it comes to the quality of work performed by a third party.  The third party certainly doesn't care about the outcome as much as we do.  When the third party needs to serve a large number of customers, quality suffers even more. Every customer is not the same and they may have different demands and expectations. It's difficult to provide a customized solution for everybody. When you work under pressure - either time-wise or financially or both, you do the minimal work necessary to satisfy the majority of your customers instead of doing your best work to satisfy those with high expectations.  This is true for car wash, and is also true for so many other services like housekeeping, cooking, construction and, sadly, public education.  Sometimes there is a good reason to do things ourselves, but we all have limited amount of time and resources to do things in our own way to our satisfaction, so eventually it all comes down to a matter of choice.  What can we put up with and what can we not?  Sometimes we don't even realize that we are making such choices everyday, and when we do, some choices can be hard to make.

Photo of the day:

Girls climbing up an apple tree.  This tree is situated outside of Lila's preschool and has been there for a while.  Jasmine used to climb it when she was little and now they both love to climb it.  As parents, we're making many choices for them on a daily basis, including whether to allow them to climb a tree, whether to send them to school, what to pack for lunch, what activities to do, etc.  Some choices are made subconsciously but they may nonetheless have an impact on their lives.

Day 258 - Photo Sharing

Thought of the day: I have been playing with Google Plus for a couple of days now and I am really loving it. OK, first I have to admit that I'm a hopeless addict to Google products.  I am already relying on a bunch of them on a daily basis.  That's all for good reasons, though, as they are free, they are useful, and more importantly, they make sense to me.  I have two main issues with Facebook - the lack of control for privacy and the cluttering of messages on my wall.  I have long concluded that I have very little to gain on Facebook when it comes to getting valuable information and have a lot to lose when it comes to privacy. As a result, I have been using Facebook only sporadically. I hadn't deactivated my account yet because there were no other alternatives out there and I didn't want to lose all the contacts I had established over time. Not any more - with the launch of Google Plus, there is now a viable, and in fact far superior, alternative.  In addition to addressing the privacy and cluttering issues, Google Plus has many other edges over Facebook, at least from my perspective.  That includes, for example, my higher level of trust in Google for safekeeping my data and handling the growth of the social network, the seamless integration of Google Plus with other Google tools that I use daily.  My biggest concern for Google Plus is that many of the Facebook users may not feel the same discomfort with Facebook as I have and won't find a compelling need to switch over to a new service.  There's a chance that my online social network will be split into two - some of the more technically savvy and privacy minded folks will make the switch at the first chance they got while the rest will linger on Facebook. As a result, I may lose half of my online social network but it's still better than losing all if Google Plus had not come into being. My biggest hope is that the concept of Google Circles, which is a fundamental concept in Google Plus, will succeed and will permeate into other online services as well.  That might very well transform and dramatically expand our online universe and make it a better reflection of the real world.  After all, we don't live our lives as a singular personality. We are more complicated than that. We do different things, talk about different things, and may even behave quite differently in different circles.  It would be wrong to ignore or deny the subtlety of the real life.  In any case, even if Google Plus would not be able to unseat Facebook in the same way that Facebook had unseated MySpace, it would have already made big contributions to social networking by introducing the concept of Circles, in addition to demonstrating that our privacy and our sophisticated nature need to be, and can be, respected as much in our virtual life as in our real life.

Photo of the day:

Jasmine and her friend climbed up high on a tree - time to snap a photo and share it with grandma!  With instant upload and  tight integration with Mobile, Google Plus is going to make cell phone photo sharing even easier than before.

Day 216 - Tree Climbing

Thought of the day: A switch must have been turned on in Lila's brain right after her birthday.  She had been more difficult in the past two days - had the dreaded "terrible three" arrived?  Just like Jasmine, Lila didn't show any classical signs of "terrible two" - albeit being a little stubborn at times, in general she was a really sweet and easygoing two year old.  Friends and babysitters alike had claimed that she was an angel.  Well, it had been different in the past two days.  Even her preschool teacher noticed that and gave me a few words of caution today, which had never happened before.  I remember a similar phase that Jasmine went through after she turned three.  Is the same thing happening again?  Well, I guess the good news is, we have been through this before so we know what to expect (well, sort of).  And we know that this too shall pass.

Photo of the day:

Girls on a tree.  Jasmine is into tree climbing these days.  I think this phase, too, shall pass!