It’s been over a month!

23 Dec 2007 05:00 pm | Category: Celebrations, Church, Vacation

So, many people have been complaining that we haven’t updated our blog in a while. Yeah yeah! It’s been so busy. Now, even vacation time is busy.

Anyway, a little bit of what we’ve been up to.

Over Thanksgiving break, we went to Santa Maria, California, the hometown of Katrina Nye, to send Thanksgiving with them and their family. They’re awesome!! All we did was ate and played the Wii all day. Their parents took such great care of everyone! Did I already say they’re awesome? Because they’re awesome!

Well, after Thanksgiving, the next exciting thing in my life was my class’s Winter Program. What can I say? The parents loved it! It was nerve-wreaking. Writing their lines and arranging their positioning and practicing their dance with them. I thought they were going to totally blow it, but we did it! Yeah!! I’ll post some pictures later.

Another thing that went surprising well was our branch’s choir performance at our Stake’s Christmas Program. Phew~ We practiced really late, but we pulled it off!

And now, it’s Winter Break! The last day of school I came home with five bags full of gifts – one of the perks of being a teacher! The kids and their parents are so thoughful! I was so surprised!

Eric’s mom’s here from Australia, so we’re being pampered with homecook meals every night she’s here. Yay!! And we also got a great christmas present from her: A piano!! Yay! Thanks mom! It’s an electronic keyboard, but it has all 88 keys and great sound, with a pedal and everything! Eric and I are playing it every day.

More to come after the Christmas festivities!

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Interesting way to show your faith…

17 Nov 2007 12:05 pm | Category: Church, Life

A friend of mine from college back in Sydney sent this link to me about some former missionaries doing a top-less calendar.

Click here for the news article: Syndey Morning Herald

Click here for the calander website: www.mormonsexposed.com

All I have to say about this is that it’s definitely an interesting way to show your faith (notice that the website link has the word SEX in it?). Normally, I think I’d be laughing about this…but this time, I’m not too sure how I feel about it. Anyway, anyone gonna order one?

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I teach 3rd Grade now!

06 Nov 2007 09:02 pm | Category: Sharn, Work

So, as some of you know. I was a full-time substitute teacher. I traveled between campuses to substitute wherever needed. This was Challenger School’s training system for their new teachers. It was great! I really learned a lot and met a lot of people.

Well, last Thursday & Friday, I was interviewed again. This time, it was to take up a class on my own. There is a teacher who is resigning and I was interviewed for the position! And they’ve offered me the position!

This position is for a different campus. My home campus is about 20 minutes drive from home. But this new campus that I’ll be teaching at is only 4 minutes drive! Seriously not even 5 minutes! It’s great! Only thing is that I’ll miss my kids and my colleagues at Harwood campus. I made great friends, and I got to really know and love the kids there. I was so sad to leave, but yet excited about this new endeavour!

When I was a sub, I just showed up to work and go home when I’m done for the day. But as a teacher with my own class, I have to plan lessons, grade, meet with parents, prepare report cards, the whole nine yards! I’m feeling a little overwhelmed right now. But it’ll probably get better after a couple of weeks.

Today was the first day I was in the class, and I can tell that I’m gonna love it!

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5.6 earthquake hit South Bay

30 Oct 2007 09:37 pm | Category: Earthquake, Life, Work

So, my first earthquake experience. It was just past 8 p.m. and I was lounging on the couch watching “The Family Guy” and talking to Eric on our cell phones. He was just driving home from a recruiting event for work. I felt the apartment shake for about 10 seconds. I heard the building creak and our light fixture jingle really hard. It was scary! I jumped up and lost balance because the floor was shaking. I got a little hysterical. Funny enough, Eric didn’t feel it. Probably because he was driving. Then the connection of our cell phones cut off.

The next thing I did was to pack up our emergency kit. Eric got home about a few minutes later. He didn’t feel it, so he’s all chill. But I felt it and I’ve still got the chills up my spine now. We’re about 15 miles from the epicenter. Thankfully, nothing is damaged. Nothing fell off our shelves. No cracks in our walls. No pipes busting. We’re really lucky. Even though this was an intermediate quake, we learned that it wasn’t deep enough to really cause any major damage.

The last time this fault line (the Calaveras fault) that hit us today caused a quake was in 1988. And that time it was about a 6.2 (I think) and it did cause some damage. I’m just watching the news on TV now. It’s saying that a big earthquake is due next year, on the Hayward fault (about 30 miles from where we are).

It just hits home how unprepared we are. Even though we have some things for our 72 hour kit, I realized now that there were a lot of things that I forgot to pack; and that’s not good if the situation were more severe. We really need something that we can grab and go. Because in emergency situations, I think I’ll be too hysterical to think straight. On the news, many people are calling in and saying how their cell phones also lost connection for a while – we need walkie talkies!!

Anyhow, I’m still a little shaken. Eric is totally chill. I don’t know how he can be! He’s out in our living room playing Guitar Hero. Yes, we bought that for the Wii! It’s fun, but I’m really bad at it! And certainly not in the mood to play now, but I guess Eric’s ok.

Well, just a little update on what’s happening with us so far besides the earthquake hoohaa. Eric is working on a client up in Emeryville. Coming home today, he was stuck in traffic for 2 hours. Poor guy. It’s a really long drive. I’ll be needing to sub for music because our music teacher is out recovering from surgery.

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This week

21 Oct 2007 02:30 pm | Category: Life, Work

So…really I have nothing new to say about this week! Well, I finished my training (yay!) and am at a new client. The super plus about this client is the free food! Double yay! I’ll have everyone know it’s actually helped me become a bit healthier in my eating habits. I eat breakfast now which is really rare and I have a smaller lunch that has more salad than meat in it as a result of being able to have breakfast.

Well, I guess there was drama in Sharn’s work this week ….. duh duh duh. Have to edit this. It’s probably not appropriate to publish this.

On a more positive note, we also started using the gym at our complex this week! Hahahaha….we’ll have to see how look this’ll keep up!

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Training and other stuff in our lives

08 Oct 2007 05:52 pm | Category: Church, Life, Work

Not much exciting this past week, I finally started my new hire training for work (only 4 months after actually starting 🙂 ). It’s kinda nice to be able to understand some of the theory behind what I’ve been doing since I started working, and it’s been nice to meet other new people, but overall, pretty boring. Another good thing about the training is that it’s just in my office down the road, so there isn’t any travel involved and I can leave when the training for the day is done (usually around 5pm) instead of having to work the 45 hour work week like I have been due to my “busy season”. The first day we got done with training, I came home and had dinner with Sharn, and then realized that had it been the previous week, I would still have been at work with another hour to go!

This past weekend, we helped my uncle, who’s a doctor, move offices. So we didn’t get to see all of our Church’s General Conference (but we DV-R’d it, so we’ll catch up this week), but it was nice to be able to help out. The major stress from that we mounting the new LCD tv on the wall above the fish tank….I tell you, I really don’t know how I feel about putting such expenisve stuff on the wall….especially when it’s not mine. But it managed to hold (as of yesterday…and finger’s crossed, it’s still okay).

Oh, we also managed to eat ourselves silly in between moving and General Conference. Our friends from Church invited us and another family over for Chinese Hot Pot on Saturday night! Yay! (There’s definitely a lot more selection of food down here than in Provo….no more eating only fish balls) Then on Sunday, cause there was a ton of food left over from Saturday, we went back over and ate everything else! Good food, but we definitely ate too much this weekend 🙂

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Women hui shuo zhongwen!

30 Sep 2007 08:30 pm | Category: Church, Language

That means, we can speak Chinese! As some of you might know, we’re attending the Chinese branch here in San Jose. We love it! The people are really fun. It’s a small group, so we’re getting to know everyone in the branch.

Today, Eric and I had the chance to each give a talk in Chinese! It wasn’t easy! Our topic wasn’t simple either. It was “Purity of Thought”. We had a friend over on Saturday from the branch to help us translate some words from English into Chinese. Eric served his mission in Hong Kong, so his knowledge of church words is pretty good, even though he knows it mainly in Cantonese. But since our branch is held in Mandarin, he did it in Mandarin. And he was awesome! He actually spoke for about 15 minutes. I was really nervous because I’ve never given a talk in Chinese before! But, of course, we survived! Everyone was so impressed at how good Eric’s Mandarin was. People at church usually speak to him in English because they think he doesn’t understand Mandarin, but after hearing him speak, everyone’s speaking to him in Mandarin now. Good! More practice for him!

Today Eric was also set apart as the second counselor in the Elder’s Quorum. It’s really awesome because it’s the first time that the branch has enough Melchizedek Priesthood brethren to form a quorum. Previously, it was just a Melchizedek group. I’m serving as the music director in the branch. I love it! I pretty much get to do everything associated with music.

We’re learning so much from this branch. The members are so humble and have so much to offer. They are such great examples to us! It’s also such a humbling experience for us because it’s both our first time attending church in Mandarin. But I’m glad we made this decision. It’s been great!

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Sharn’s New Baby

23 Sep 2007 05:16 pm | Category: Sharn, Shopping

IMG_2419  As I mentioned before, we’ve been car hunting for a while now. We started off just looking for a second-hand car with great mileage to be used by me for commuting. What we finally ended up with is the new “box” from Scion (the 2008 Scion xB) 😀

A sign of how much Sharn loves this car is that she normally prefers me to drive wherever we go, but since we’ve gotten this car, she’s insisted on driving everywhere! Sadly, it was raining yesterday when we bought the car, so it’s already dirty but I’m sure that as soon as the rain clears she’s going to go and get it washed. Also, we’re still waiting for some accessories to arrive at the dealership so we’ll have to take the car back sometime to get those installed (and no, there’s no spoiler…at least not yet…I have to convince Sharn to get it first 🙂 ). But other than that, she’s loving the car.

At first when we went to the Scion dealership, we were looking at the new xD which is what we had seriously looked at previously. But when we got there, we thought we’d look closer at the xB and Sharn pretty much fell in love right away. I liked the xD with the mileage and the fact that it was smaller than the Nissan Altima, but after Sharn test drove the xB, she loved the power (it’s a bigger engine), the fact that you can fit a car seat very comfortably in the xB, and cause you can fit a stroller in the trunk. Let me be clear before anyone asks…she is NOT pregnant. So that’s how we ended up with the “box” after we’ve spent many a day commenting on how we’d never drive one.

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Challenger School

20 Sep 2007 08:25 pm | Category: Sharn, Work

It’s been a while since I’ve blogged. Work’s been pretty busy, but really fun! I got hired by Challenger School, a private PS-8 school (Preschool through 8th grade) actually started in Utah by an LDS woman! Small world! And to think I didn’t even hear about Challenger until I moved to California.

I’m not a full on teacher just yet. They’ve hired me as a teacher-in-training. It’s great! I feel like I’m paid to have fun and learn with these awesome kids! I have to learn their drills and procedures. My main responsibility is substitute whenever needed. They have several Challenger Schools here in the Bay area, so they’re always in need of a substitute teacher. And it’s because of the traveling up and down the Bay area that both Eric and I have to do, that we need a second car! Thank goodness we both get reimbursed for mileage! Anyway, substituting is a great experience for me to practice my teaching skills. So far I’ve taught kindergarten, 1st, 3rd, 4th, and 5th grade. I’m always asked which grade I would like to teach, and seriously, I don’t know! Every time I go teach a new class, I like it even more! So, since my last substituting assignment was kindergarten, I like it the best now!

Anyway, I tried applying for an ESL teaching position since my training was in ESL teaching. I applied at a local community center to teach ESL, and realized that in California, you need a California teaching credential. So, since I don’t have that, I went into the private sector. I’m thinking of getting my credential so I can have more options open. But, as of now, I’m loving my job, so I’ll take my time with the credential.

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Car shopping sucks

14 Sep 2007 09:14 pm | Category: Shopping, Work

Hahahaha….the heading pretty much sums up my feelings about car shopping. Not only are there so many choices, but why does pretty much every car salesman have to be so pushy? I don’t think it helps that we’re planning to finance 🙂 There’s no point having a good credit score if you don’t have a long enough credit history!

Anyway, enough whining (I seem be doing that a lot since I started working 🙂 hehehe), hopefully we can find a loan and a car soon! If we don’t, I’m just going to get a bicycle and get ready to start riding 50 miles to San Ramon cause it’ll be easier in the long run! 😀 Hahahahaha 😀

Update 9/16/2007 – Yay, things are starting to look up, financing’s not an issue. Now we just INS to hurry up and confirm our legal status so we can get our CA licence’s 🙂

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