Costume Roundup

Working tonight, 6pm to 6am helping with our 24/7 production server monitoring. It's as exciting as it sounds. Then I have class all day tomorrow from 8am to 5pm, which means I'll have to drive down as soon as I'm done with work. So uh, no sleeping for me. I'm trying to tell myself that sleep is overrated. As is walking around the neighborhood with my children in costume so that they can beg for candy from strange neighbors. :sigh: I hope the engineer I'm covering will get his beauty sleep. My mom had to rub it in and tell me that the kids had a blast.

Ah well, at least I got to take them to the pumpkin patch on Friday, Evie's school Halloween fair on Saturday along with a city sponsored Halloween fair that evening (where my little dragon knight was freaked out by a dragon), and a pumpkin carving party on Sunday. Yeah, I guess it was only fair to let my parents take them trick or treating.

Here are a few pictures from Saturday. Yes, I do think they would literally die if forced to take a picture together.

Pumpkins

Yesterday, after a morning of volunteering (Evie and I helped clean up a local park, I need to write a post detailing all our volunteering efforts), our little family went to our friends' annual BYOP Pumpkin Carving Party. Here are the results of our efforts minus J's as his was too dorky to be saved. (He carved an XBox 360 on/off button. Yeah. I know.)

Our pumpkins from left to right. Sweet Pea (everyone says his pumpkin resembles him), Lien (hand-carved without a template or design y'all), Evie (who really did carve her pumpkin on her own).

Once Upon a Time

I love these pictures. They were just sitting in our digital photo archives. We never printed them out and I barely remembered they existed. What's up with that? We're terrible with our digital pictures.

J and a 7 day old Sweet Pea on our first full day home from the hospital. It was a long wait to bring him home as there were some early complications. I remember we were so happy to be home at last. J and Evie were especially happy as they missed having me, us, home. They visited Sweet Pea and me in the hospital every day and stayed as long as possible, but it wasn't the same. I think you can see from these pictures how much J loved his new little Sweet Pea. (And still does.)

Early Morning Miss

I'm in a perpetual state of cramming this quarter as I'm taking two reading and writing intensive courses (17 books in 14 weeks, total of 40-something pages due, not all at once thankfully). Add in my 50+ hour job and you can get an idea of what life has been like for the last few weeks. I realize that I've been starting a lot of posts with something along the lines of "I've been very busy, but..." I like to procrastinate. Which is why I'm in a perpetual state of cramming, which is a direct result of acts like this one where I'm sitting here typing a blog post instead of typing yet another hermeneutics paper which is due at noon (no I don't have 5 hours, I have 3, I have a two hour drive to get to class. No, I haven't fully understood all of the reading yet since I only digested it at 3am this morning and then fell asleep till 6am). What was I going to blog about again? Oh yeah, the things I've been missing.

This morning Miss Evie woke up early due to the light of my lamp and the general sound of J hovering around his wife's unexpected early morning presence (he's usually heading to work by the time we all normally wake up). I got kisses from J and droopy eyed wonder from Evie on how she "...woke up early! It's still dark out!" Like whoa! She went out into the hallway where I heard my dad say with sweet surprise as he's often out the door before she wakes up too, "Good morning Evie!" My mom followed with, "Good morning Evie! You're awake so early today, awww..." The kisses they gave Evie could be heard down the hallway and in this room above my typing where all I could do was record this moment of warmth that I would have missed had I not been cramming.

Someone I Know...

Update: I've given my mom some numbers from the International Institute of the East Bay to give to the lady. Since her initial conversation with my mom she's downplayed how bad things are. I had asked my mom if I could speak to her directly about the violence but my mom feels that this lady would be offended and angry that I know. I guess the only thing to do now is wait and see. Thanks to everyone who provided the very useful links and information and for the compliments. I don't think I'm doing much at all, although I wish I knew how to do more. I don't feel like I'm doing anything that any decent person would not do just as many of you have not stood idly by and read this post without searching for resources to help. Thank you, it's good to know I have such kind and compassionate readers.

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I've been very busy lately, but do you ever have days when you have someone or something in mind and just can't shake your thoughts until you let it out? Today is one of those days. There's a woman I know. I've only met her twice, but the two times that I have she didn't smile or talk much. She hadn't been in the US long and so I thought that it was just that she missed Vietnam. Her daughters and I had been friends in Jr. High. When I met her I was shocked that when my mom told me she was L and H's mom. They had told me that their mother had died.

I had thought about her unspeakable sadness when I first met her. I barely said anything to her other than, "Hello auntie, it's nice to meet you. How are [L and H]? Are they married now? Do you have any grandchildren?" Her husband had answered. She didn't smile the way the visitors normally smile when making small conversation. She had barely looked at me at all. I had told my mom that she seemed lonely. Perhaps she missed home. It must be hard for her to come over to the US so long after her husband and daughters have been here. Twenty or so years is a long time to be away from people you love. I felt pity for her; I can only imagine how hard it must be to be for her to be here in this strange country with grown up children you barely know and who barely remember you.

Our family was acquainted with her husband and daughters through our temple. They were just more members of our community. Not family friends but not strangers either. I knew who they were at least and didn't really have an opinion one way or the other on them. I remember her husband had chastised me for not going to temple. "Buddha's in the heart," I said and it's true.

Buddha, God, faith, kindness; it's all in the heart. You could go to temple or church your entire life and mouth the words to scripture and chants and yet still not understand what it means to be a pious person. You could lecture all you want about kindness and righteousness and never know what it means to feel proud that you've given someone a helping hand because you've never done so in your entire little life. Many people squander their existence yet think of nothing about telling others that they're wasting their lives on art or music or other things that bring them joy.

This man who lectured me. It turns out he's been beating his wife. Severely. My old junior high school friends' poor mother whom I didn't even know was still alive; whom I've yet to see smile - I feel like I should do something. She had told my mom in confidence and my mom, who tells me everything, told me. I know now why she doesn't smile and I feel just as hypocritical as her husband for not knowing how to help. She doesn't speak any English, I don't know if her daughter's know. To go back to Vietnam would be shameful for her as it's never the men who are blamed for broken relationships in these Confucian cultures, it's the women.

So I'm thinking about this lady today and about her daughters. I wonder if they know or if they were abused too. I'm taking a little time to find Vietnamese language helplines in the Bay Area for her and coming up empty. If anyone knows of any, please drop me a line. Sometimes, you can't just think about a person, about faith, or kindness, you have to act right? Unfortunately, acting out loud seems so difficult. There are many many well known stories of abused wives who left and were murdered or harmed by their husbands, very few about women who left and were able to live normal lives. Even if I found a hotline and a place for this lady, what then? Would she leave the only home she knows in this country? Would she be able to face the condemnation of the community here and in Vietnam for leaving her husband? How many people could she really tell about the beatings? How many would believe her? How many would defend her husband by believing that he was justified? I know most likely she won't call a hotline and will stay trapped even though that's the worst possibility of all.

A Piece of Paper

Today I received a piece of paper in the mail. It says, "You are hereby notified to appear for a Naturalization Oath Ceremony on:...Proper attire should be worn." Should I or shouldn't I scream to the heavens that I'm going to be a US Citizen at long last? I know that I'm thankful that my lost paperwork only had me waiting a month and a half rather than the several months or years that I was expecting.

I'm still processing the giddy excitement that I'm feeling that in a few short weeks I'll be an official citizen of the United States. Didn't I say that I knew who I was and that this would just be a piece of paper signifying only what is already a well known and assumed truth? Yes, I'll have to come back to this topic (like so many other topics that crowd my brain and my blog).

I wonder what someone wore to offend the government people enough to add the "proper attire..." line to form letter. My money's on shorts and flip flops. What do you think?

Bookish...

Daddy in a Strange Land tagged me for this "bookish meme" which is nice as I need something easy to write about. For some reason, this fall has been really busy, that and I think I'm saving some topics for NaBloPoMo. Anyhoo...

1.Hardcover or paperback, and why?

Paperback. Why? Cheaper, lighter, bendable; I’m a book abuser. I mark, I write comments, I destroy covers; it’s an awful habit I know.

2.If I were to own a book shop I would call it…

I honestly have no idea which is terrible because I actually really did want to grow up to own a bookstore once upon a time. I’d probably name it something like Marks & Co. on a whim. Alas, there are no Charing Cross Roads around here.

3.My favorite quote from a book (mention the title) is…

Like DISL I’m pretty bad with quotes as well. I don’t know if I have a favorite quote anywhere, but stuff that sticks in my mind these days are children’s books that I read to my kids. My favorite quote from a children’s book is “Where am I going? I don’t quite know. What does it matter where people go? Down to the wood where the blue-bells grow. Anywhere, anywhere. I don’t know.” Spring Morning, When We Were Very Young, A.A. Milne.

4.The author (alive or deceased) I would love to have lunch with would be…

Ursula Le Guin. I would love to meet her one day and tell her how much I admire her writing and how her books inspired me, not only that, but I'm curious about how much or if her parents influenced her at all. Her father was Alfred Kroeber who basically started the anthropology department at UC Berkeley and her mother, Theodora Kroeber, wrote Ishi in Two Worlds which I had to read one year for a cultural anthropology class. Even if we couldn't get to all that, I would just want to tell her thank you. I’m a dreamer and as a kid, I loved fantasy novels. Ursula Le Guin’s fantasy novels told me that people who weren’t white like me had a place in them too.

5.If I was going to a deserted island and could only bring one book, except for the SAS survival guide, it would be…

Does the Encyclopedia Britannica count as one book? If not, then Sophie’s World by Jostein Gaarder.

6.I would love someone to invent a bookish gadget that…

I don’t think anything could beat DISL’s time bubble so I’ll go with an effective and side effects free medicine for motion sickness for people like me who can’t read in the car. That's not a gadget, I know.

7.The smell of an old book reminds me of…

A very old and tattered volume of the complete works of William Shakespeare that I own. Its leather cover is literally being held together by scotch tape but I wouldn’t give it up for the world. One of my little uncles gave it to me when I graduated from High School. He didn’t have any money at the time, being an unemployed and impoverished college student. Despite living with us my whole life, all he could think of when he tried to buy me a gift was that I liked reading so he scraped some money together and bought me the biggest, fattest book he could find at a local used bookstore. It has a black and green leather cover with “The Complete Works of WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE” stamped on the front. Thick and heavy with brown gold edged pages and old paper smell, it was printed in 1985.

8.If I could be the lead character in a book (mention the title), it would be…

Friday from Robert Heinlein’s Friday. Why? Because she’s just the coolest space travelin’ superhuman clone, delivery gal ever!

9.The most overestimated book of all time is…

I have to pick just one? Don’t hate me, The Bible. More specifically, any Bible that was translated from the original Hebrew or Greek. (What language does God really speak? And for that matter, why did he decide to speak through some of the people he chose to speak through? How many people know that Moses had a speech impediment and had to speak through his brother Aaron? I mean, dude, that’s one major game of telephone, God to Moses who mumbles to Aaron.) Does anyone really know what gets lost in translation? I mean hell, anytime you have to separate out a canonical set of something means you’re missing some other things. Oh, and yes, I HAVE read The Bible, the King James version.

10. I hate it when a book…

Is so good that I don’t want it to end. Whenever I finish a good book I spend days and days imagining what would have happened next. Perhaps hate is not the word; torturous, that’s more like it. I WANT to know what happens next to characters like Ichiro Yamada.

Hmm, I tag halfmama, Kim, Mama Nabi and Oanh.

Now We Are Six: Happy Birthday Evie!

This thing with the blog posts on special days. It's killing me. Today is Evie's birthday and I am having the hardest time putting into words why she is my special baby girl (she's my only baby girl, but that's besides the point). I'm really supposed to be writing a school paper on Schleiermacherian Hermeneutics but I think I'm having a hard enough time writing this little blog post. How do you people who do freelance work do it?

I could, I suppose start from the beginning and write about how Evie was our little surprise. I could discuss how extremely young we were and how totally unprepared for parenthood with "our whole lives ahead of us" as if parenthood were the end of everything. I could trace Evie's steps through the 6 years of her life so far and write about her every little development, illness, and issue; how we took her everywhere with us. For the first several years of her life, up until a 4 day vacation that her grandparents brought her along for, she was never without at least one parent for more than a single night.

But this post isn't supposed to be about us, our past, or our hopes or our dreams for her. This is about Evie; about how she is special. And terrible as it is, words fail here. How do I accurately convey how proud I am of her, how beautiful she is, and what a great little girl she has turned out to be in spite of me. But again, I'm focusing on me again. Woefully and inadequately; I now have to resort to my lists. Evie is special because she is ours but also because:

1) She's thoughtful. Upon receiving a $20 bill from her grandparents for her birthday, she promptly said that she would save some dollars to buy them something. She thinks of others when we're in the store or out and thinks about what they might like.
2) She's kind. For the most part and with many caveats, most often having to do with her brother and cousin (who are rambunctious boys who don't often share back), she shares most readily and has been known to be very generous. If she sees others who are hurt or need comforting she runs over to help or comfort or asks if they need help.
3) If you ask her why she's special (as I just did because I'm cheating and I really need to get back to thinking about my hermeneutics paper) she would say, "Because I have clothes, house, food, drinks, a mom and dad, a brudder, and toys, and..."

...and many many many more reasons, not least because she is cuddly and cute.

Happy Birthday Evie! My best binary birthday girl (you know, because she was born on 10/11/01...101101, binary for 45? Yeah, she's special because she still loves her extremely dorky parents who discussed how it'd have been really cool if it were binary for 42 but that's 101010 and no way are we having any more babies much less one in 2010.)

Sweet Pea in the Morning Time

My poor little Sweet Pea doesn't actually get out much. His realm is our home where he rules alone during the working days with my grandma as his sole companion and servant. Most mornings he wakes up and goes searching for grandma or spends a few minutes yelling instructions to his sister on how to get ready for school if he gets up early enough to see her off.

Trips out the front door during weekdays are therefore quite rare for the Sweet Pea and so weekends foster fervent excitement for him. This morning was no exception, however, there was the slight difference that the Sweet Pea woke up early rather than late. Normally he wakes up around 10am but today for one reason or another, most likely having to do with my yelling asking Evie to get out of bed before she's late for Vietnamese school; he woke up early. Since he was up early and it was a Saturday, I had mercy on his poor confined soul and took him with me to drop off Evie at Viet school. Had I realized what HE thought of being brought along, perhaps I should have left him at home with his snoring daddy.

Upon dropping Evie off at the school gate, the Sweet Pea started screaming, "Evie! Evie! I'mago Evie mommy!" He kept crying and screaming, "EVIE! EVIE!!!" as if we were abandoning her for eternity as we watched her walk into the school building. "EEEEEEeeeeevvvvvvviiieeeeee!!! I'mago Eeeevvvieeee! [Scream.flail.SOB]"

The only thing I could do was drive away and promise breakfast. Thus with dry tear tracks on his cheeks, the Sweet Pea and I went to the local Whole Foods and he was ameliorated with a morning bun. We then ogled the produce and bought a tub of unneeded snickerdoodles and a sister was temporarily forgotten.

How was your morning?

The Lien Life: Tales of Madness and Stupidity #4

I just took another insane pill and signed up for NaBloPoMo. Why? For what purpose? To please whom? Perhaps I should stop scratching my head lest my hair falls out completely.

Most of my posts for November will probably look like this one.