cindy's world

This is seriously freaky. While I was collecting photos to put in my mom’s photo frames, I had looked thru all the albums at my disposal. I had some fairly recent stuff that I’d taken, and my mom had also assembled my infancy and childhood photos and given them to me in several albums a few years ago. I had enough for my mom’s frame set, but not for my dad’s. I’m doing the same thing for him, in an identical frame, for Father’s Day. The day that I was to go with Vanessa to scan and enlarge the photos for the frames, I found an album, or maybe it was a portion of one, that had a bunch of photos of me in the later elementary school years, which was a stage missing in the collection I was building for my parents’ frames. I remember telling Mr. W over the phone that I’d finished selecting the photos and I had discovered all these pictures in an album that I didn’t know I had and that I was happy I filled in the age gap. That, incidentally, is also where I found the Halloween pictures of me with Vicky and Karen. Now, having completed my dad’s frame, I’m putting the originals away back into the albums. I can not find the album from whence those later elementary school photos came. I’ve gone through my albums several times already, one by one. I’ve scoured my bedroom and the living room just in case I’d pulled the album but didn’t put it back on the shelf. Nothing! Now I have a bunch of scattered photos on the floor and no album to put them back into! Where was this album when I was first searching for photos? And where is it now? Why has it only appeared for one day, the day I needed to make my duplicates? I would be freaked out if it turns out those photos belong in an album that’s still at my parents’ house. Or if I were to go upstairs right now to check the shelves for the umpteenth time, and those loose photos are missing, having evaporated back to the nonexistent space from which they came.

I’m scared now! And all alone! Waaah!

This is Vanessa (Navy Girl) making a special guest appearance. Thanks you for the applause! 😮 j/k

What is a girl to do when she does not have a printer, the print online to a local FedExKinkos software will not download and you have less than a couple of hours to print mapquest directions to 20 different sites for Japanese business guests in the AM? Now picture mighty mouse theme music playing in the background . . . We are here at Cindy’s work and she saved the day CINDY IS DEFINITELY MS. WONDERFUL! THANKS GIRLIE!!! YOU ARE AWESOME! Peace out!

Since Mr. W’s parents live out-of-state, I made him take my parents out for Mother’s Day. Well, actually, I invited him along, he very graciously accepted, there was a slight misunderstanding on the phone when I spoke with my mom about our taking them out and she thought he was going to take everyone out, I didn’t correct her but told Mr. W that I’d pay him back since I’d told my mom that money was no object, and he insisted on paying anyway. My mom strangely had a craving for pizza, then changed her mind and decided on Italian, and Mr. W suggested Portofino. To avoid the crowd, we made reservations for Saturday at 5:30p altho Mother’s Day was on Sunday.

Mr. W and I met my parents at their house first, and I presented my mom with the 8-photo 3-D frame that I’d been working on all week. She seemed to like it. I dunno. Asian parents are so stoic. The photos are of me with my mom at various ages from infancy to early adulthood. Some are cute, some are tender, some are silly. I’d scanned the photos in at a Sam’s Club kiosk and enlarged them to fit in the frames.

After that, Mr. W drove us to Portofino where we had a fancy schmancy Italian dinner, a bottle of wine, and dessert, then went back to my parents’ for tea. You can’t escape the Asian-ness, haha. Mr. W attempted to fix my parents’ leaky kitchen faucet when we returned, and altho he couldn’t find the leak to fix it, the effort gave him big brownie points. He offered to return and change out the entire faucet if they’d like.

Oh, I did receive an email from my mom today. She said she couldn’t sleep last nite so she was tampering with my photo frame and tried to switch out a photo I have in there for another one in her possession, but discovered that the sizes weren’t right. She asked if I’d enlarged the original photos, I responded that I had, and then she seemed to appreciate the gift a bit more as more work than she’d originally thought had gone into it.

Man, in the past year, I’ve eaten at a lot of restaurants, and gotten a lot of massages! The coolest receipts are the massage receipts from Cancun’s Dreams resort. One says “IMPORTE $1,550.06” and the other says “IMPORTE $1,880.02.” Things look so expensive in pesos! I have no idea how much that actually is in American dollars.

I love this. Windows open, airing out the smell of bills and the incoming breeze distributing the scent of honeydew melon from my large jar candle burning in front of one of the windows. The radio alarm lightly playing “Slow dancing, swingin’ to the music…”

And to think, if I hadn’t procrastinated on a year’s worth of receipts, I wouldn’t be having this nice time spent in my room doing this with the great breeze and great music and great scent. I’d be, uh, at jujitsu. *sheepish*

Hey, yeah, I’m alive.

Today, I woke up at 9:30a and got out of bed with my radio alarm cranking out a morning show with 3 on-air personalities that I’ve come to be familiar with, and I walked into the bathroom intending to take a shower. Suddenly, hearing something interesting, I paused and backed out of the bathroom and went back into the bedroom to listen. Since I was just standing there, I may as well lay back down on the bed. The next thing I knew, I was waking up at 11:30a. Oh well. But I did manage to get lots of stuff done. Went to the bank (where I was told by the teller that a letter accompanying my new ATM card telling me all PIN numbers remain the same did, indeed, “lie”), went to Trader Joe’s and picked up stuff for my parents, Mr. W and for Jordan (all my loved ones get flax seed meal, haha), got a smog check for my car, went to the post office and got stamps, mailed out some bills DMV registration renewal and sent a package of flax seed meal out to Florida for Jordan, hand-delivered other stuff to Mr. W, went to Home Depot and got a garage door spring, and am halfway done with my Mother’s Day project.

I’m putting together this big photo collage in a multi-dimensional frame for Mother’s Day. Photos of my mom, proud with a month-old infant at age 24; laughing with her adult daughter pouncing on her back in front of a famous memorial in Taiwan; holding her young daughter up between herself and her husband in a national park. I’m going to do a counterpart for my dad for Father’s Day, also. I already some photos set aside of him sitting on a large rock with his year-old daughter asleep across his knees, rowing a boat with his young wife and daughter sitting at the other end… It wasn’t until starting this project that I realized how few photos I have of myself as an adult with my parents. I am so not hanging out with them enough. We should do more on my weekend visits aside from watching TV and having a home-cooked dinner. Maybe I can take them out and take some nice photos soon.

Nope, don’t miss work yet. I did call my coworker over the weekend to check up on him. This would be his first weekend without his girlfriend in a long time. He says it’s rough at home because it’s so quiet without her, but he’s hanging in there. Being at work helps because he can laugh and joke with people, but it’s a different story when he’s alone. I remember those days. I was so scared of the weekends and of the silence. That was one of the main reasons I took up jujitsu.

I just found out this morning that on Monday, the day when immigrants supposedly all ditched work to make a point about their impact on the country (altho around here, the only immigrants that participated that I know of are Hispanic), the traffic was so light due to their disappearance that the news did a segment on it. Los Angeles traffic that Monday was compared to the traffic of the previous 2 Mondays, and the previous 2 Mondays were light already due to Spring Break. But that Monday, it was even lighter than those days. I’m not sure if this is the impact on our community these immigrants meant to highlight.

It kinda just hit me this morning that my vacation is NEXT WEEK. Which means, after today, I’m off!

Vanessa’s not gonna be working next week, either, so we’ll probably goof off all week and, like, repair the garage door spring (that broke last nite) and do laundry and vacuum and stuff.

And Vicky, I gotta go up there and give you your bday present! Lemme know when you’re free.

P.S. Remember that one post about how I wish I could gripe about someone not doing something good, and then that someone would do something good and make me eat my negative words? It happened yesterday! Yay! I felt appropriately bad. I was griping to Jordan or Vanessa on the phone about how I got to Mr. W’s house to meet up before yoga and he was on his computer talking on his headset and didn’t even acknowledge me, and I’d been out in the living room for like 10 minutes and he still hadn’t come out even tho I’d nudged his chair 10 mins prior. When he did come out, he brought with him a 3-red-rose bouquet and said, “This is for you.” I asked what the occasion was, and he said he just chose Thursday because he knew I’d be going over for sure to meet up for yoga. Awww! I would’ve thought he got the idea from that prior blog entry, except that he doesn’t read my blog anymore and hasn’t for weeks, so I guess he gets full credit for that one.

Happy Birthday, Sandy!

Sandy is the very oldest friend I have in the world. She’s 30 today.

Wait. That came out wrong.

Sandy is the longest-time friend I have in the world. We go way back. She is my first friend in the United States, we met through my cousins Diana and Jennifer’s parents when Sandy and I were 6. We’ve seen each other through a hell of a lot of roller coasters, and even tho we may not talk all the time, we always pick up right where we left off when we do talk. Our parents used to have get-togethers for dinners, karaoke (during which we’d retreat upstairs and talk about boys), and fishing. We still have fishing horror stories that we share with our boyfriends when we all meet up. And sometimes one of us will recall something we had not reminisced on before, and trigger the other’s memory, and we’d laugh like a couple of lunatics.

At 30, Sandy, you’re more successful, more wise, more beautiful than you have been at your previous years. Regardless of what you may feel. Happy birthday.

Man, I should dig out an old photo of us at age 6 and post that. I’ll make that a project soon. Altho…nothing comes to mind. Did we not take any photos back then?! I can’t wait for Vicky’s bday around the corner. I KNOW I have photos of THAT!

In my cousin Mark’s blog last week, I saw this paragraph:

Next up, I FINALLY saw Better Luck Tomorrow which actually has John Cho (Harold from Harold and Kumar) in it. It was a really good movie; I enjoyed it quite much. I think it has a plausible plot, and really interesting social overtones. I think it appeals more to people around the teens to mid 20s, as my dad didn’t like it much, and he usually has pretty good taste in movies. Speaking of which, Cindy, have you still not seen it yet? Go rent it! Highly recommended!

Since he mentioned me by name, I wrote him an email saying I’ve never even heard of the movie. His email response today reads “WHAT? You’ve SO HEARD of the movie. In fact, you were the one who TOLD me about it 2 years ago!!! =P ”

Eh???

I think my memory’s slipping. If 30 is truly the new 20, then I’m really in trouble.

This past weekend, Mr. W had restored my old computer at his house, so I printed out a short story I’d written in college for him to read. It’s the first piece of fiction he’s read of mine, and he called me just now to discuss it.

I realized I have very little memory of the story and wasn’t able to discuss it very effectively. It’s kinda embarrassing when someone else can shoot you down regarding some detail or impression of a story that you’d written yourself. But it makes me happy that he has opinions and thoughts on it at all. I think a greater compliment to a writer by far is someone closing your book and saying, “Hmm…”, as opposed to closing your book and saying, “That was nice. I enjoyed it.”

I just looked at the first page of the short story. Yoga is mentioned by one of the characters. I had never taken yoga at the point in my life when I’d written this story. Interesting. I wonder what other elements in the story I now relate to (short of the fact that the Chinese character is married to a Caucasian man, and I’m now dating one, too).