A very wet afternoon

When there are a bunch of young kids (and adults who are young inside), a relaxing afternoon in the courtyard can quickly turn into a crazy water party... :)

















BTW, this little warrior turned 5 today!

That's what friends are for

Quite unexpectedly, an old friend from college called to congratulate me on some great things that happened to me recently. More importantly, he volunteered to offer some very useful info that I didn't even know I need (but found extremely helpful after I learned about it). The kind act was deeply appreciated.

A short trip back to Taiwan

Still recovering from my trip back to Taiwan. It was a great trip, but in the same time totally exhausting.

During the trip, I took a chance to visit my alma mater, National Taiwan University, and had a lunch to catch up with some old friends from college.

It is stunning to acknowledge the fact that we all graduated from college more than 10 years ago. When we talk about all the amusing memories, they all seemed to have happened in last month or so. It is also very funny to see how almost everyone is pretty much the same as they do back in college.

Outside of the campus, I saw some interesting sights in Taipei. Here is a restaurant called Tamago Ya (literal translation: Egg House):

I wonder what they sell inside.

Right next to the campus, I am surprised to see that Taipei is running out of the space for everything, including bicycle parking:


The main point of taking this trip was work-related, so as rare as this sort of things happen, I need to be in suit and tie:


The evening before my return flight, I met with my mom and my brother's family. Here is my only nephew who was trying to have some fun making a mess for his mom to clean up:


Anyway, really need to get some sleep now, which is very hard to do. Will see how well that melatonin pill works.

Running a desert resort

It looks like our home is becoming a popular resort among our old friends from college; three weeks after Ho-Yi's visit, Yung-Yao came from Cambridge, UK for a short visit.



We are very happy to see another old friend here; there are just so many things we can talk about, from our old days in college to our current life as a postdoc in biology.

The weekend was extremely busy and fun. Together, we went to:

Saguaro National Park


Rillito River Path


Halloween trick-or-trick at Tucson Electric Park


Artist's market at Plaza Palomino


Kartchner Caverns State Park


Sabino Canyon


Biosphere 2


And of course, we ended the wonderful weekend with our long-running tradition since college, a dumpling feast:


Also because YY received the great news that one of his papers got accepted while he was here (you lucky bastard, how come I never had such good luck when I was taking a vacation), we had a good excuse to enjoy a bottle of nice wine.



So that's pretty much what we have done over the weekend. Now, who's the next? :)

Ho-Yi is here

Ho-Yi, our old friend from college, was in Phoenix for a conference and we invited her over to stay with us for a couple days. After we picked her up from the hotel this afternoon, we went to the Saguaro National Park (the west side) to show her some views that she cannot find in NYC.



Kids still remember her from her last visit, which was more than an year ago, and quite excited to see her again.

Defense party and goodies

Jessie and Daniel kindly hosted a party for me after the defense. It was very enjoyable to chat to everyone and hear the "Congratulations!" over and over again.

I also received a bunch of books from Jessie as my graduation gifts, including two Tucson guides (very thoughtful and practical) and a "The Visual Display of Quantitative Information" by Edward R. Tufte (looks like a really interesting book).

SRH at library

Short Road Home (Daniel's band) had a show at our local library this afternoon and we took the whole family there to enjoy the nice music.

To me the fiddle really stood out among all the instruments. Not sure if this is because the sound of violin is so familiar to me now (with all of Alyssa's lessons and practice) or it's just because I have been contemplating about learning violin recently. Anyway this experience certainly made a big impact. When I told Ann about my thought of learning violin, Alyssa got really excited and shouted "Yeah I can teach daddy". As I think about this more seriously I am really surprised that my daughter are so good at so many things at such a young age.

Imagine that, I may take violin lessons from a 5-year old.

Valves and carbs

After we are done with Hugh's bike last week, it is time to adjust the valves on my Ninja250 this weekend. Hugh kindly offered to come down to Athens with all the tools to help me do that in our house. Without hesitation, I shamelessly asked for all the help I can get.

To make things go faster, I took the bike apart the day before Hugh came. The fuel tank is so huge and oddly shaped, I had a hard time finding a place to store it. I ended up had a lot of fun with it. Here is a joke from my trial and error when finding a place for it:

Dad, can I have that fuel tank?

I want to build a super trike!


That's too big, I am going to get rid of it.


I actually tried to put it on the trike first. David's facial expression was really interesting when he saw it. After tried a couple different places, I finally settled with the recycle bin. It is fairly stable, plus the color is a good match.



Alyssa and Vivian watched me to take the bike apart and they were both surprised to see that their dad is capable of doing such things. Alyssa is always wondering about how things work so I spent a little bit of time explaining to them how motorcycle works, things like here's the fuel tank, gas flow from here to the engine, engine burns gas and turns the gears, gears drive the chain, and chain drives the rear wheel. I hope this is a good experience for them and wish I had experience like that when I grew up. While my dad spent a lot of time taking care of his cars, I've never seen him working on the cars himself and the whole mechanics thing is just a big mystery for me. Sometime I still wonder how I developed interests in these sort of things given my childhood experience (study, study, and study....).


Hugh got to our house around 10 on Sunday morning. I was kind of embarrassed when I found out that we don't even have any coffee in the house for our guest, maybe we should stock up on coffee next time. Ann took the kids to the Memorial Park while we were working on the bike. Here is a picture of us and two under-age mechanics before they go:



Since we had just done the same job on Hugh's Ninja250 last week, we both thought that the second time should go very smooth. To our surprise, it actually took longer to adjust the valves on mine. But anyway, we eventually got everything right (hopefully) and even have the carb sync'ed before lunch. Here's a picture before we went out for lunch, it serves as the evidence that we didn't screw up:



We took West Lake Dr to get to McAlister's and it was a very good ride. The weather was very nice today so we sat outside to enjoy the delicious sandwiches. I am very happy to have such a good friend to share my hobbies and hope we can go for another ride soon.

Where are my high school friends?

Ann's friends from high school are organizing a reunion, which reminds me that I was out of contact with my high school friends for a very long time now. With the help of Google, I managed to track down one email (OMG! He's a real doctor now!). Will see if I can find more.

Also discovered that Wikipedia has an entry about Tainan Second Senior High School BUT NOT Tainan First Senior High School!! This is almost criminal, will need to get it right ASAP.

Old faces in a new book

Upon the invitation of Yung-Yao, I (hesitatingly) joined the facebook.

Being a not very sociable person, I am not a big fan of the social network craze (the bust of Friendster doesn't help either). Plus I am much slower at adapting new technology compares to the younger GenYer. Maybe we GenXer should move out of our text-based BBS from the 90s to keep in touch with each other.

[update]
Also got into contact with Szu-Wei Chen ("The Priciple"). It is a lot of fun reading his blog, the broccoli story is a very funny piece.

Old friends and very old motorcycles

Today we got together with Kate and Robert at the Barber Motorcycle Museum in Birmingham, Alabama. Kate and Robert are among the first people we know when we moved to Iowa. Ann and Kate both started their graduate program in Landscape Architecture in the same year and become best friends with their countless hours together in the studio. It has been four years since the last we saw each other in Ames and they have moved to Mississippi shortly after our move to Georgia.




So this weekend we decided to meet half-way in Alabama and I get a chance the visit the Barber Motorcycle Museum. The museum is really great in almost all aspects (other than that you don't get to ride the bikes there). The building is beautiful and the collection is amazing, from the earliest to the latest motorcycles in history. I'm also very happy to see that a Kawasaki Ninja 250 is included in the exhibition.



Although a Honda NSR 150 is nowhere to be found, they do have a Honda NSR 125 in exhibition.




There are some very interesting bikes in their collection, such as this one with a beautiful wooden sidecar:


This one for riding on icy road:


Two from Michael Jordon's team (I don't know he was into motorcycle racing):





Folding scooters:




This one that I've no idea how to ride:




One more great thing about the museum is that you can see a part of the racing track next to the building (a tight U-turn). They happened to have a event going on today (don't know if it's a race or just a track day) and we get to see a lot of bikes racing down the track. All kids got very excited to see that, David keeps jumping up and down in the stroller whenever a bike passed by. He also complains a lot and keeps pointing to the track whenever we moved away from the windows. It's great that he's showing such good potential, we probably can have our track days together pretty soon. :)

Old friends from NTU Botany

Yung-Yao and Ho-Yi are here for the New Year. It is so good to catch up with old friends but I still find it hard to believe that our shared memories are from >10 years ago...

On being 30

To my friends from NTU Botany,

This is a very interesting year indeed, seeing us passing the line of being 30 one after the other. I always think about the old saying that one should be independent by 30 and constantly worrying about not being able to do so.

Now that I passed the line, did I achieve this goal?
Well, it depends...

I do have (nearly) complete freedom at work, but I'm still a lowly graduate student after all. I can support myself (and my dear wife to some degree) financially but all my children rely on their grandparents’ love (and $$). I used to wonder if having kids before having the ability to support them is an irresponsible decision but now I am just grateful to our parents.

Anyway, being 30 or not, having good friends like you guys is a really wonderful thing and I wish you the best.


On a side note, this year I am very pleasantly surprised to get a Nintendo DS Lite as my Father’s Day’s gift (Father’s day is the third Sunday in June in the US). A couple of video games bring back a lot of sweet and bitter childhood memories. It is a complex feeling to discover that my childhood experience has such a dramatic effect on how I think and how I feel about things around me.