General Conference

06 Oct 2008 08:44 pm | Category: California, Church, Sharn

It was great! Well, I’d missed the Saturday afternoon one cos I had to go to the airport to pick Eric up. And the Sunday afternoon one cos I fell asleep for most of it! But from what I’ve gathered, it was great! I recorded them, so just gotta find time to watch them.

The Primary children choir was really sweet. So innocent! Really reminds me how we have to become like little children in order to enter the kingdom of God.

I felt that there was a lot of words of encouragement this conference. Telling us we need to persevere. There was also a lot of reference to the early pioneers, and how like them, we have challenges, but our challenges are different.

California is now facing the possibility that gay marriage will be legalized for good. California will have to vote on whether they want to protect proper marriage or not. The biggest ramifications on legalizing gay marriage for me will be the school system. Schools actually have to teach that gay marriage is something normal and acceptable. There really is a difference between tolerance and acceptance. I can tolerate, but to accept and actually to teach it to my students? I don’t think I’ll be in the school system for very long then.

Anyhoo, since Eric and I aren’t citizens, we can’t vote. But we can only pray that Prop 8 will pass, and the ban on gay marriage will be successful. So, pray for California!

This is a video done by the Catholics, it’s pretty powerful. http://www.catholicvote.com/

This website shows what’s already happening in Massachusetts, where gay marriage is legal: http://link.brightcove.com/services/link/bcpid1815820715/bctid1822459319

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1st the worst, 2nd the best, 3rd the hairy princess

29 Sep 2008 06:21 pm | Category: Sharn, Work

Time flies! This is my second year teaching at Challenger School. I’m still teaching 3rd grade. This year has been a lot less crazier than last year. First of all, I have a smaller class. Only 18 students instead of 22. And instead of having 14 boys and 8 girls, I only have 8 boys and 10 girls. Boys are generally more rowdy, and girls more subdued. So, having a larger female population helps the class a lot! I feel like I’m getting through the day feeling actually happier than before!

There has been a few changes this year, though. Instead of having a PE teacher and an art teacher, I’m in charge of teaching PE and art now! Me? Teach PE?! The students will be doing a lot of kickboxing/pilates/yoga style warm-ups and exercises!! We have a curriculum, but I like to add a little taste of Ms. Woo to it! As for art, I won’t say that I’m a horrible at drawing, but I’m no Picasso. But, so far, so good. It’s been good for me because I have this opportunity to explore my creative side.

Talking about creation. Last Saturday’s Relief Society Broadcast was wonderful! That Saturday, I’d spent the whole day in Michael’s and Target looking for materials I can use to decorate our Relief Society board. Sounds like a trivial thing, but I want to do it real good. Basically, my day ended with me not getting a single thing! I was quite disheartened. But President’s Uchtdorf’s comment really hit home. I have a new understanding on what it means to rely on the Lord. I don’t have to struggle with making this board myself. I can have inspiration just by turning to the Lord!

Anyway, Eric’s still in England. He’ll be back on Saturday. Lots to look forward to this weekend. My honey coming home and General Conference! Can’t wait!

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On the road again

26 Sep 2008 03:22 pm | Category: Food, Sports, Travel

I’ve been on the road again for work for the last couple of weeks to Rochester, NY.Â For those of you who don’t know where it is, it’s about 5.5 hrs from New York City (by car), just over an hour from Buffalo, NY, and about 30 mins from Palmyra, NY.

(WARNING: Probably a long post cause I’m long-winded like that)

It’s the first time in a long while since I’ve been in that part of the country (I think the last time was when my family still lived in Canada and I was like 11 or something).Â Â So it was nice to get to go around and find out what’s famous around there (besides Buffalo Wings and the Church).

On the weekend, I went to Cooperstown, NY where the Baseball Hall of Fame is and Doubleday Field.Â Pretty cool stuff considering I used to play and all, but definitely a once in a life-time thing =)

Doubleday Field, the birthplace of Baseball

The Baseball Hall of Fame

Barry Bonds' Record Breaking Baseball

Of course, I took another bunch of photos of most of the food we ate out there =) The “mystery fish” I had at Bonefish Grill was supposed to be Chilean sea bass…cause that’s what I ordered.Â But when comparing the fish to what everyone around me had, it looked nothing like the Chilean sea bass that others had and it looked totally like the swordfish that the guy across from me had.Â Of course, by the time I asked about it, there was only a bite left and the waiter being the expert that he is was able to tell from just one bite what kind of fish it was…yeah right…he had no idea, he just didn’t want an upset customer =) Here’s the link…Rochester Food 2008

Anyway, asking around, I was trying to find out what food is unique to Rochester.Â The unanimous answer was the “Garbage Plate” (which is a trademarked name, so it’s also known as the “Rubbish Plate” and the “Junker Plate” among other things).Â Now, the proper way to eat this dish is at 2am after a night of drinking and everyone has the munchies.Â Seeing as I don’t drink, I had to go in totally sober.Â The original “Garbage Plate” was first made by Nick Tahou in Rochester back in 1918 as a way of offering a lot of food at a good price during the Depression and it was originally called “Hots and Potatoes”.Â The core ingredients are:

Home fries
Macaroni salad
Choice of meat (cheese burgers are the most popular but you can have anything from hot dogs to steak on it)
Hot sauce (a type of meat based sauce also unique to the area)
Yellow mustard
Raw diced white onion

My personal favorite variation includes adding baked beans to the bottom and Frank’s Hot Sauce (not the meat sauce but the Tabasco type) to the top.Â Each place that makes this in Rochester has their own unique style of doing it.Â Key differences are the type of potato used on the bottom (some like fries, some cut their own, some used frozen), the mac salad (home-made or store bought), the meat patties (some make their own hamburgers), and of course the Hot Sauce itself.Â So with all these differences, of course I had to try as many as I could.Â 4 places in 5 days.Â I couldn’t find a place open one day for dinner, otherwise I would have made 5 for 5 days.

My preferences from best to worst:

Bay Hots (overall the best)
Tied with 3. – Tom Wahl’s (just cause their Hot Sauce was really great but they only used fries)
Tied with 2. – Steve T’s (owned by the niece and nephew of Nick Tahou)
Nick Tahou’s (overall, the original was a disappointment)

If you are ever in the area, I’d recommend Bay Hots for sure but regardless of where you go, you HAVE to try this dish at least once in your life! =D (Just don’t scroll any further and see the photos and hopefully you haven’t looked at the food gallery yet…)

The Original, Nick Tahou's

The Nick Tahou Garbage Plate with baked beans and a fried egg

The Bay Hots Garbage Plate

The Bay Hots Garbage Plate after mixing

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Labor Day

14 Sep 2008 01:05 pm | Category: California, Travel, Vacation

So it’s been a little while since we’ve blogged, so I’m just trying to catch-up =D

Labor Day weekend, Sharn and I decided to go up the coast just north of San Francisco cause we’e never been that way before.Â We ended up spending the weekend in Bodega Bay which I have to say is absolutely beautiful.Â We spent an amazing weekend there pretty much chilling, having a nice drive along the coast, and just all around relaxing.Â We ate a lot of seafood, and other yummy stuff while we were up there.Â The only down side was that as the weather got nicer, it got windier =( But other than that, it was great to be there.

The exciting part of the trip was when we walked outside of our room and we saw this guy yelling at this other guy with the maintenance worker looking on.Â From what we overheard (gossipy, snoopy people that we are) we gather that basically guy #2 is the owner of the place and he must have walked in to the room of guy #1 while guy #1 and the woman he was with were doing something…talk about awkward.Â There was a mix-up in the room numbers that the owner was given by the lady at the front desk and he went into the room thinking that someone had just checked out of it.Â Honest mistake I guess.Â But guy #1 was threatening to call the police and accusing the owner of deliberately walking in trying to be a perv or something.Â Talk about drama!

Anyway, here are some photos:

View from our room at Bodega Bay

The view as the sun's setting

Somewhere along the California coast

On the way back, we decided to stop in SF for the night.Â During the day we ended up going to the SF Asian Art Museum (a first for both of us).Â We spent the most time checking out the South East Asian and Chinese art work (wonder why that is =) ).Â Just outside of the museum, they were having some sort of “all-natural” food festival promoting natural ways of growing livestock and vegetables.Â We had some really good roast chicken, a muffuletta, and natural hot dog (which seems like a contradiction).

In SF

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Too Cool of a Haircut

01 Sep 2008 01:31 pm | Category: Eric

For a while now, Sharn and I have been going to this hairstylist from Hong Kong called Joe.Â Every time I go, I just let him do whatever.Â Lately, he’s been saying my hair’s not “stylish” enough and on Friday I think he was finally satisfied =) Unfortunately…I think it was a little too cool for me =(

The almost mullet

I think the problem is that I can’t gel it properly, cause it didn’t look THAT bad when I left the store, but the more I looked at it, the more it became a mullet!Â Welcome to the 80’s…I wasn’t cool enough for a mullet back then and I’m definitely not cool enough now.Â I think it was supposed to look like this photo of Lang Lang (a Chinese pianist).

http://coolmenshair.com/

I’m sad that my hair was just too cool for me =(

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Camping in Lehi Park

19 Aug 2008 08:50 pm | Category: Sharn, Vacation

Sharn and I went camping with some friends from Church last Friday night.Â For those of you who don’t know, Sharn is pretty anti-camping.Â She deny’s it whenever other people ask her, but really, she doesn’t like it that much.Â I think it’s the whole growing up in the concrete jungle (aka Singapore) along with the idea of the bugs, the dirt, and the creepy crawlies in the dirt.Â So I’m really proud of her =) Cause we’ve never been camping since we’ve been married, we had to go and get a tent last week.Â I was leaning towards the traditional dome tent, but we ended up with this funky looking tent that kinda looks like the front of a Shinkansen train from Japan!

Our Shinkansen Tent with the front open

Inside our tent 🙂

The photo tree

Sharn after our two hikes for the morning with two of the cute kids who out-hiked her

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Baby Jasmine

12 Aug 2008 06:48 pm | Category: Birthday

Congratulations to our friends, Sudie and Felix Law. They had their first child, a girl, on Sunday August 10 at 3:45pm. Baby Jasmine, 6.5 pounds and 19 inches at birth, is a beautiful baby girl with a full head of thick, black hair. Kudos to Sudie who did it all in 8 hours and no drugs!

Beijing 2008 Olympics

10 Aug 2008 05:08 pm | Category: Sports

For those of you who missed the Opening Ceremonies on 8/8/08 at 8:00pm, you missed out!Â All I have to say is…wow.Â China did an amazing job.Â Sharn and I weren’t able to watch it when NBC broadcast it cause we were at a wedding reception for our friend, Julie in our ward.Â But I’m so glad that we used the DVR to record it 🙂 The Opening Ceremonies used thus huge membrane around the stadium to display images, there was a a massive LCD screen on the ground, and the amound of fireworks was just awesome!

Our favorite parts though were definitely the following:

The Tai Chi section (I have no idea how they managed to keep the circle the whole time)
The opening drum section (definitely intimidating, and awe inspiring)
The guys that lit up and ran around in green (getting in the shape of the “Bird’s Nest” was really cool)

On a side note, while I was Switzerland, I was able to go to Lausanne for the day where the International Olympic Committee has their headquarters and an Olympic museum.Â While there I was able to get magnets of the mascots, Beibei (è´è´), Yingying (è¿Žè¿Ž), Jingjing (æ™¶æ™¶), Nini(å¦®å¦®), and Haunhaun (æ¬¢æ¬¢).

Sarah (my sister-in-law) pointed out to me that if you put them in the right order (even though the characters are different, the sounds are the same)…it reads Beijing Huan Ying Ni (åŒ—äº¬æ¡è¿Žä½ ) or Beijing Welcomes You! 😀 Cheesy I know, yet kinda clever at the same time.

Random photo from earlier this year

03 Aug 2008 01:07 pm | Category: Sharn, Shopping

I can’t remember how this came up while Sarah was here, but I remembered that not everyone got to see the “hot” photo of Sharn, our friend Katrina, and the Abercrombie model in SF.Â So here it is…

Check out those abs!

This was taken in front of the Abercrombie store in SF when Chris and Katrina came down to visit earlier this year 🙂

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Warranty’s

27 Jul 2008 02:01 pm | Category: Tech

Why is that the warranty on whatever always runs out right before it breaks?Â I’ve never understood that.Â Just like I’ve never understood women’s intuition or how socks always disappear in the washing machine.Â My trusty Dell laptop with the all-inclusive crazy warranty for 3 years that covers anything going wrong is starting to die.Â Well, actually, it’s the battery’s that’s dead (it won’t hold a charge for more than like 30 min).Â I only noticed it a couple of weeks ago at the end of June.Â Figuring this to be under the warranty, I go online to file an order and I notice….the warranty expired on June 18!Â ARGH!!!