Halloween

It's always the coldest day of the month, as though the ghosts have pre-ordered the weather.

We're going to our neighbor Lori Lacy's house for a Halloween party tonight. After eating and drinking, maybe some kids will go out for Trick-or-Treat in the freezing weather.

We already have too much candy in the house. If we are not home tonight, nobody will pass them out. Maybe we can go home early after the party.

We've never enjoyed Halloween as much as this year. We've Trick-or-Treated twice already. I guess there is some advantage of having a kid. We get to live like a kid again and play with all the things we have missed in our childhood.

All the staff in 24 Hour Fitness dressed up yesterday. The manager was a pirate and the personal trainers are superman, muscleman, angel, etc. Unfortunately, my company is not encouraging employees to dress up for the holiday. I remember Halloween used to be a huge festival in Office Depot. People seldom work on Halloween. Most employees dress up for work and there was a huge party all day long. It's the tradition of Florida. Key West's Halloween party is the top of the world. There are naked people painting their bodies for the special effects all day long.

Halloween Parade

Arnold's Halloween Parade at school is today. I had asked Biajee to check with the teacher on the date last week, yet he wouldn't remember. This morning he had to pay the price of going back home and fetch Arnold's costume.

Arnold will be a frog this year. He was a bumble bee last Friday when he was in my company. Frog is his destined costume tonight though, and will be his destined costume tomorrow night when he knocks on the doors in the neighborhood.

I was trying to get Biajee to take Arnold to a neighborhood with million dollar houses. Maybe he can get better goodies and candies there.

The parade starts at 6 pm, but we would get to school before that to get Arnold prepared. The camera is fully charged. Everything is ready to go, except that I would have to forfeit my workout time at the gym today. Maybe I can squeeze in a 6 mile jog around my company before going to Montessori. It'll be the biggest reward to me today after devouring a beef & bacon hamburger, a medium curly fry and a strawberry milk shake.

Baseball Fan

I just started to understand 80% of the rules in baseball when Rockies lost all four games to Boston Red Sox. Red Sox became the world champion again after being crowned in 2004.

Biajee can watch all kinds of sports games with great interest while I only watch when something catch my eyes.

All four games were really bad. It seemed like Rockies was not even on the same level with Red Sox. Biajee said it was because Rockies lacked the experience of competing in the World Series.

I was so into Home Runs in the end, but Rockies didn't swing out too many Home Runs. It looks like such an unfair sport to me. It's rare chance to hit a good swing and only the pitcher was exhausted to death.

Fortunately we were able to enjoy a bottle of wine with the game this weekend.

Trick or Treat

Nancy reminded me that from 3 to 5 pm today is the "Trick-or-Treat" time in my company. People can bring kids in for Trick-or-Treat. For some reason, I had thought it'd be next Wednesday.

I had to run out and get a pumpkin pail and some candies. Arnold was not dressed in his costume this morning, but it's just a small detail. He himself is scary enough so I think he'll do fine in his normal clothes.

I'm planning on picking him up from Montessori around 3:30 pm, right after his nap. He may have to miss afternoon snack that way. Dear me, I'm really worried about him not getting enough food and he's not allowed to have any sweets or candies at this age. Well, he never cares for sweet things.

We're going to Paul's house for Chinese fondue tonight. I think I may be able to sneak an hour's worth of gym time in between. Everyone is already in a holiday mood at the moment.

1 to 13

Rockies lost yesterday by 1 to 13. Biajee and I only watched the last hour. We were both disappointed and worried about the road rage the next day.

I still don't understand baseball, but it's quite depressing to see our home team lose. Boston Red Sox has a few Japanese players who are extremely good.

My friend Xiaohong works for Sun Microsystems and they're selling a lot of cube furniture lately after laying off most of their employees. Biajee and I went to buy 2 wheeled metal file cabinets for $10 today. I guess this company is really going downhill now that they don't even plan to hire people back.

My friend Laura is in town this week for training. She works at our company's New Jersey location. We're going out to dinner at The Bloom. Ｉ could go to the gym afterwards, maybe have some Yoga practice. Biajee will watch the World Series for me at home after he puts Arnold to sleep.

Consulting

We went to Westin to pick up Rong last night. She didn't rent a car so she had to take a bus from Xcel Energy to Westin Hotel in downtown Denver.

"How far is Xcel Energy to your hotel?" I asked out of curiosity.

"About 4 to 5 blocks." She replied.

"You took a bus for that?" I was in disbelief. "You could have walked there."

"I'm too lazy and it's too cold at night." She said. "I had to go to Banana Republic and buy this jacket last week when the temperature dropped."

That was so true. Being a consultant is very challenging. She had to get up at 4 am on Mondays, fly out to client's location and work till 10 pm. I'm much lazier than her in that sense that I could never take a job like that.

Flu Shots

Biajee and I got flu shots today at my company. It's free for all employees and their spouse and children. Arnold is too young to get it so Biajee decided to take advantage of it this year.

The Colorado Rockies' website was taken down yesterday because 8.5 million hits tried to get on there and buy world series tickets. Nobody could access that website because the company who built it didn't expect it to host such a huge traffic. It's a simple scope mistake, just like a few years ago IT people in my company designed a website that could only allow 25 users at the same time. $81 million were wasted on that project, yet no one was fired.

My college roommate and classmate Rong is in town these days, consulting for Xcel Energy. She is going to take our family to dinner tonight. We can pick either a Chinese restaurant or a sushi restaurant. We may go for the Chinese one - Chopsticks Mansion. We haven't seen each other for over 2 years. There'll be a lot of catchup.

Colorado Rockies

Colorado Rockies entered the World Series this year. We're waiting to see whether we'll play Cleveland or Boston. The tickets will be on sale on Rockies website from 10 am on Oct. 22nd. If you buy them at face value from Rockie's website, it'll be anywhere from $65 to $250. However, most likely you won't get it there so you'll have to go to a ticket holder and then you're looking to spend anywhere between $400 to $4000.

"Why do you even care?" Biajee asked. "You still couldn't understand the rules for baseball."

"It's one of the sports Colorado is good for." I snapped back. "You used to say this state is good for nothing when it comes to sports."

We have a gut feeling that Rockies will win the World Champion this year.

Desktop

The desktop computer in my company is about to die hard at any time. It takes at least 15 minutes to boot it up these days and I could not back up any files to the external hard drive.

I tried to share the hard drive this morning and use my laptop to operate the backup process. It's been successful so far, but I need to reboot to backup my email. Our fearless help desk hasn't sent anyone to rescue me since they got my SOS message last night.

The best thing to do at the moment is to back up all the data on my own and then ask IS to re-image my computer. My boss is out of the office today so it's perfect time to perform such maintenance.

I'm going to a real estate investment class tonight. Biajee will have to watch Arnold for 1.5 hours. We'll all have dinner at Chili's after work and then he'll take Arnold home while I head for the class. I think my realtor is giving the class to help sell the new house he built, but I'll find out.

Apple

Biajee and I went to the Apple Store yesterday. Our iMac has been dead for a few weeks. Biajee took it apart and diagnosed that the logic board was broken.

The guy at the Apple store suggested that the power supply was bad. It'd be $85 for parts and $85 for labor. He said that if we found out that the machine still would not boot up after we invested on the power supply, then the issue would be the logic board, which would cost $1700. We only paid $800 for the computer.

"You should buy a new iMac," he said gleefully.

"No." Biajee was livid. "I'm not going to invest in another MacIntosh product ever again."

"I only want to back up the data in the hard drive." I said.

"That'll be $135." The guy winked.

"But this model had a recall." Biajee tried to fight.

"You came here too late. The scope for the recall has already ended so you have to pay to get it fixed."

We left the store with nothing. I'm not a keen Apple fan any more.

Glamour Shots

I proposed to take Biajee's parents for a family photo last weekend. We prebooked a spot in Glamour Shots in the mall. A few friends have advised us to cancel it after our booking because it's a terrible place and it is ridiculously expensive.

Biajee never believed any of my friends because none of them graduated from the top-notch Beijing University. His parents keep emphasizing that all students graduating from Beijing University are at the acme of intellectuality.

So we went yesterday. It turned out the makeup artist did a horrible job. My makeup had to be redone for 4 times and they still couldn't get it right. The guy forced me to sign on a sheet stating that I'm satisfied with my makeup. Then they priced out the picture as $100/each, additional $100 if we want it on CD. Biajee picked out one photo only.

The photographer was not professional. An Olympus digital camera was used. No tripod was used. The picture cut was a nightmare. They cut off one foot of Biajee's dad so the whole photo was defected. Everything could have gone wrong went wrong.

We would not recommend Glamour Shots to anyone.

Meetings

I have to spend at least 4 hours a day attending different meetings. It's part of the nature of my new job. I have to adjust to the fact that I need to finish work after the meetings, which means I have to work extra hours.

Tonight we'll be calling Hong Kong at 7:30 pm. Staying in the office until that late is really not an issue to me at all. I started doing that when I first joined the company. As a matter of fact, it gives me some quiet time to appreciate life. We are only young and happy for a very short period of time.

My boss just approved me to buy two 1 Terabyte external hard drives to back up data on both my computers. I still haven't had time to stop by BestBuy yet. It's perfect time to do that after I go to the gym today. Excercise and work are the majority of my life at the moment, although I feel like taking a vacation some time soon, maybe I can just bring Arnold with me.

Single

After being a single mom for about a month, I finally agreed to let Biajee pick up and drop off Arnold because he thinks his parents are not spending enough time with Arnold. I definitely should honor my husband's complain.

What he is also responsible for is Arnold's schedule. When Arnold goes down to sleep every night at 8 pm, someone need to be in the house all the time, which means he cannot go anywhere. When Arnold wakes up in the morning, he cannot sleep for one more minute but to adjust to Arnold's schedule. When Arnold is hungry, he should cook and feed him. There are a lot of things he needs to take on aside from the pleasure of playing with Arnold.

Biajee's parents have never cooked a single meal or changed a single diaper for Arnold ever since they arrived in the US. It's about time that they contribute.

I'm going out with my girl friends tonight. It's been so long before I have the feeling of being single again. It feels absolutely great.

One thing that I cannot divest is that if Arnold doesn't turn out to be great and decent, it's Xinle Yang's name that he'll stain, not his grandparents' name. Only because there is an old Chinese saying: The father is to be blamed for an ill - bred kid. (养不教，父之过）。