Big Bend 2016

After Christmas this year, we were able to road trip out to West Texas and spend a few days at Big Bend National Park. It was my first time going and I had a lot of fun. I think I keep impressing Jonathan with my ability to eat saltines and pepperoni without complaining and go four days without a shower. Don't worry, I smelled wonderful and am healthy as ever. :)

Hubby planned the entire trip though since camping is his forte. I just willingly went along for the ride. I'll let the pictures do the talking:

Day One:

We woke up at 5 am and left the campsite at 5:45 am to drive all the way across the park to the other side to catch the sunrise at Santa Elena Canyon. We got there just after 7:30. I think we were close.

Santa Elena Canyon

Balanced Rock

Day Two:

The second day was our most heavily packed day. We set out for a 12 mile hike that hubby had planned. We woke up at 5 or 5:30, drove to the Basin, and then set out for our hike around 7:30 am. We reached the top around 10:50 am and got ready for lunch.

What a scenic view for lunch

After eating lunch and enjoying the view for a good hour or so, we started to go down. We realized we hiked up faster than anticipated so we thought we might add a 3 mile detour into our route and turn it into a 15 mile hike. After all, I had received hiking boots for Christmas as a gift from Jonathan, so why not put them to good use right?

Jonathan: "This jacket isn't very good for pictures."
Cathy: Well it's not the star. My shoes are. *cue pose*
Jonathan: You're awkward.
*2 minutes later*
Jonathan: Oh, that didn't turn out that bad.

Well, we got overly excited, started pushing forward, and then before we knew it, we were scrambling over giant boulders and walking next to a shallow creek of residual water. There was no trail in sight and I was pretty sure we weren't on the trail anymore. After blindly attempting to maneuver ourselves out of the now valley we got ourselves stuck in, we decided to turn around and go back the way we came to relocate the correct trail.

This took about a 10-15 minute detour for us having gotten lost, and I was not a super happy camper at this point. Secretly inside I was pretty set on just hiking the rest of the way down and not adding the extra 3 miles. Well, once we found the actual trail and were set back on it, we shortly came across a fork that connected to the longer trail on the other side of the rim. And walking down it was a young gentleman we had met at lunch named Jeff. So Jeff joined us for our hike the rest of the day. And yes, we did the extra 3 miles to hike to the highest point in the entire park, Emory Peak.

We made it! Not pictured: the steep stairs we had to climb up AND the tower of rocks we had to scramble over to get here.

If we hadn't run into Jeff on the way down, I don't think we would have done the extra 3 miles to this point, nor would we have met a pretty cool guy. We talked for about a good 3-4 hours for the rest of the afternoon hike and got to know each other pretty well for having just met as complete strangers. Actually, he probably knows us better than some of our friends we haven't talked to in 2-3 years or more.


Day Three:

The wind was horrible this day. We had a relaxing day planned and we couldn't even sit outside and relax on a bench because the wind was blowing and dirt/sand was being kicked up. We managed to get in one short hike but then drove home after, leaving a day earlier than anticipated.

People from Mexico row over in canoes and try to sell their wares. This happened all the time back in the day but since 2002 after 9/11, they are trying to limit the illegal crossings. They set them up in little places on hikes near borders in hopes that someone will leave some money and perhaps buy something. They are never physically at the site. 

The wind blew these bamboo to a 45 degree angle. Yes, bamboo is quite plentiful at Big Bend along the Rio Grande!

Across the river is Mexico!

There's a tiny colorful city in the back called Boquillas that you can actually cross over and visit. Had we prepared better, we would have probably remembered to bring our passports. ¡Estudió el español en la escuela secondaria para cuatros años! Pero, mi español is muy mal :( 

After that we headed home shortly, but not before taking a picture with the sign!



I also captured some pictures of desert flora! So unique.


On the car ride back, we exchanged stories about grade school. I think I remember as much in one grade as he remembered in all 12. I definitely remember my sixth grade history teacher who wouldn't let us use the restroom during class, ever, my eighth grade science teacher who swiped my agenda out of my hand one day in class to read what I had written without my permission, and the eleventh grade history teacher who played with my hair one day in class. I'm sure looking back these were not their brightest teacher moments, but I definitely have not forgotten.

This was a really great way to end the year. I can't imagine camping with anyone else or hiking 15 miles in one day with anyone else. Here's to more memories and explorations to come in the future :)

Happy New Year!

Stiff Peaks

We might've just had the strangest weather for a Texas winter. This morning was on the warmer side, potentially shorts and t-shirt weather for some, and now, merely 6:50pm, it is 30 degrees and dropping. After going out and running errands during the early afternoon hours, we came home and prepared to bunker down for the cold winter night it was going to be. Tomorrow's temperature around 7am is projected to be about 20 degrees with winds estimated at 17 mph. That means after the windchill, the "feels like" temperature will be drastically low. Now, that's my kind of weather. If you've known me at least 4 years, you will know that I walked on ice for six months of the year living in a city nicknamed the "Ice City."

After coming home, I decided to make meringue cookies. I've always liked meringue cookies but not in the same way as I like fried chicken, strawberries or dark chocolate. There's something mysteriously appealing about a meringue that comes more from its texture and less from the flavor. A well made meringue cookie is flaky on the outside, light and airy on the inside, and slowly dissolves in your mouth. I can't really describe the flavor to you besides its sweetness because it's simply egg whites and sugar. Egg whites really don't taste like much and sugar is just sugar.

As I followed the recipe and carefully watched my egg whites turn fluffy through the electric beater, I retold stories of China to Jonathan and how my teammates made meringue cookies for my birthday WITHOUT an electric beater. Unfortunately, I was not there to witness their delirious jokes or the tired arm muscles because they planned everything without my knowing, but I remember their dedication, love, and thoughtfulness in putting together my 22nd birthday.

I am very grateful that we have an electric beater as a gift from our wedding registry to bake meringue cookies. The recipe I followed was from Emeril Lagasse and can be found here. I liked this recipe because it added chocolate chips, which enhances the overall flavor of the cookie, because like I mentioned before, egg whites and sugar really don't taste like much. The difficulty is listed at intermediate, and considering my meringue turned out well (because there were two empty spaces before I managed to remember to take a picture), I think it's safe to say I qualify as an intermediate chef ;).

(I also made the mistake of dropping my meringues larger than the recipe had asked for, so I kind of made up some more baking rules using prior knowledge to get them to bake right, hence why there are 23 and not 40.)

Clearly I am not an engineer or mathematician or physicist. Somehow I managed to put
a prime number of cookies on this baking sheet in the most ambiguously random way possible.

Meringue also don't have to be in the prettiest of formations. The stiff
peaks give it more character than a perfectly piped shape.

With successful meringue cookies in the books, I will now bundle up, crawl into bed, and hide myself in a book for a while. :)

Dont Touch the Instrument

In my previous post, I started talking about hand positions and Phoebe's creative names. If you missed it, you can go back and catch up here.

The second half of the Friends reference involved Phoebe asking Joey not to touch the guitar until she said he was ready. Joey was very appalled at this technique, retorted with yellow pages of other music schools with children happily holding guitars, and walked off.

Phoebe might be surprised to learn that I heard about a piano pedagogy that does not involve touching a piano for the first 8-12 weeks of learning. This guest speaker was invited to speak and introduced us to this method of teaching that he uses.

First, for the first 8-12 weeks, he doesn't ask his students to play the piano at all. Instead, he takes the time to teach them fundamental basics to promote strong sight-reading skills and music theory. I won't go through the details of how he teaches it, but this is what is expected of his students to master in this "non-playing" stage of their learning, (written in teaching objective style sentences).

1. Students will develop finger muscles through exercises.
2. Students are expected to memorize the letter names of the keys on the piano by recognition.
3. Students are expected to memorize the notation for the 22 most common notes on the staff in both treble and bass clef.
4. Students are expected to understand musical rhythms in multiple time signatures.
5. Students will be able to create small "compositions" of their own using the notes and rhythms they've learned.
6. Students will be able to play notes on the piano in proper rhythms using blunt sticks or the eraser ends of pencils in order to produce the sounds for their compositions.

Objective 6 is basically as close as they get to touching a piano in their first 1-2 months of piano learning. In theory, and hypothetically, this is the perfect way to teach anyone how to learn music and master it quickly. Learn the basics and have a good foundation in music. And then you can pretty much learn and teach yourself any piece of music thereafter.

Obviously it's not completely all-encompassing.  There's sharps, flats, key signatures, accidentals, dynamics, musical styles, and a lot more things that need teaching. But once you nail the rhythms and the notes, it gets much simpler after that in terms of the learning curve.

I think all music majors (who of course, know 15 years in advance that they want to pursue music as their career and means of financial security), should start out this way. However, this technique doesn't work for most people. Why? Because the parents of the children learning to play who are paying the teacher want to see results fast. They want to see their child playing music from day 1 if possible. Most people simply want their children to have a grasp of what playing music means. They don't want to raise musicians.

I personally think this is a fabulous technique for learning the piano. However, I don't teach it. Also because I believe students these days need more than musical proficiency further down the road to motivate them. They want to be able to at any given moment, hop on a piano, play something, and impress someone in some capacity.

This teaching technique also involves a lot of parental involvement and discipline in asking the students to memorize the foundations of music. A lot of parents don't have this time or desire to do so. And young kids lose interest faster than ever nowadays.

There's merit somewhere in the proper context for Phoebe's instructions to Joey. And if you watched the entire clip or are familiar with Friends, you'll agree that Joey should not touch musical instruments. :)

Bear Claw

I've always remembered this episode of Friends where Phoebe teaches Joey how to play guitar. She tells Joey he can't touch a guitar until she says so and teaches him only hand positions with names she made up. I've included the Youtube clip which condenses the segments from the episode into one video.


 


Before, I'd watch it and think, "Yeah, Joey's right. He should go and learn the names of the chords. I have no idea what Phoebe is talking about in her methods." I would assume that most scholarly musicians would watch this and pretentiously turn the other way. However, aside from the comedy, I think Phoebe's musical technique has some validity in the correct context.

As I've been able to dedicate longer periods of time to practicing piano, (which I honestly should have as a child before when I actually had more time, relatively), I've discovered something I wish I knew before. There is a feeling of perfection that you can sense as you practice and learn pieces. Yes, the more familiar you are with a piece the smoother you can play it, but there's more. Once you are at the memorization stage, it's no longer about reading sheet music off the stand. It's about feeling the piece and the notes through your fingers, and simultaneously, your hand position.

I've been working on a piece I learned as a teenager of intermediate/advanced difficulty depending on who you ask. I know I learned it years ago at one point, but I honestly never remembered myself having the ability to play it or play it well. After learning it for a few months my teacher must've just passed me on it without my fully having mastered the piece. Having come back after so many years, I had to reteach myself most of the music from scratch. There were sections I remembered from earlier, but most of it I would say was like learning it again for the first time. After hours and months of practice, I began to feel a new sense of "knowing" that I'd never experienced before. The piece was so familiar to me after all the practice that I could feel the different positions my hands and fingers were in to reach all the notes and perform the musical passages.

I don't have names for all the different positions like Phoebe does, and it's not quite the same. With guitar chords, it's one position to play one chord. In piano, it's one hand position for a certain passage in a certain piece in order to keep the fluidity of the piece and musicality. In any given piece, there could be hundreds of different "hand positions."

I have yet to reach the point of being able to play a piece of significant difficulty flawlessly, but I also have to remember that professional concert pianists spend hours upon hours on one piece daily in their practice, for sometimes, years. In time, I can perhaps hope to reach that point.

Next time, I'll expound upon my thoughts on "Don't touch the guitar."

Resolution

It was Tomb-Sweeping holiday (ancestor worship in Asian countries) in 2013, early April. We had a few days of break from class and I went shopping with one of my teammates. We took the bus down a few stops and went to an underground shopping strip we had frequented that year. Having picked up a new hobby of cross-stitching during my time in China, I wanted to buy a more challenging one to continue working on. We stopped by one of the stands which sold them, and I sifted through the piles of packages. It was a difficult choice between buying one with an attractive image and trying to match the difficulty I was looking for - not too beginner, but not too advanced.

After being indecisive for quite a while, I finally settled on one that had a beautiful picture, but was probably much too difficult for my ability. I told myself I'd work on it and finish eventually. It would just take some time, right?

A few weeks after that, I was video-chatting with a friend back home in the states. He saw me cross-stitching and rolled his eyes. I asked him why he was so turned off by cross-stitching. He said, "I hate it when people start them, work on it halfway, and then never finish them." The thought occurred to me - if I didn't finish this cross-stitch, I would be one of those people he just referred to.

After moving back home from China, I made pretty steady progress on my cross-stitch that summer. However, in the fall, I got a full-time job, so my progress drastically slowed. I had a full-time job for two years after that as well so I definitely did not have a lot of time to work on it. In those two years, we also got married, bought a house, did renovation projects, traveled, and the list goes on.

Earlier this year when I took a spontaneous trip to visit friends out of the country, I brought my cross-stitch with me on the plane. On the first leg of my trip, I cross-stitched. The gentleman who sat beside me saw me cross-stitching and was very familiar with what I was doing. He knew how time-consuming it was and how detailed things were. He asked how long I had been working on it. I told him, "About three years."

He told me, "Keep working on it. When you finish, let me know." He smiled, and left me to work quietly the rest of the leg.

On November 16, 2016 at 3:27 PM, I stitched my last stitch into this cross-stitch. It is finished.

My 3.5 year masterpiece. Pre-washing.

For those of you who aren't too sure how cross-stitches work, they come two ways. The first way you can buy them is a completely blank piece of cross-stitch cloth and a template. These require counting the squares to the tee in order to complete. Extra intense. Not the kind I had, especially for this large of a scale.

The second way you can buy them is with the colors labeled for you. This entire piece of fabric had the colors pre-printed on it. The key on the right side of the fabric allows you to match the color that's printed to the color of thread you use. Don't be fooled - this still requires quite a bit of brainwork, especially when your cross-stitch has six different shades of green thread all mixed in next to one another, AND, the key used six very similar shades of green to mark these squares for you. So all six shades of green look exactly the same next to each other and you still have to consult the actual instruction manual that came with the cross-stitch which is nine pages long.



These two images give you a size reference for the span of this cross-stitch. It is 290 squares wide by 200 squares tall. If you do the math, that's 58,000 little squares. By looking at the design, you can approximate 85-90% of the fabric stitched and merely 10-15% of the fabric that's left unstitched in the top right corner. That's almost 50,000 squares that need to be stitched, not to mention stitched twice to make the X. So that's a total of nearly 100,000 stitch strokes that needed to be completed in order to finish this cross-stitch.

This was truly a labor of love, but I'll have to be honest with myself. If it weren't for that friend who made that comment while we were video-chatting, I would have been less resolute to finish it. I texted him this afternoon after I finished. He can't roll his eyes at me. :)

Unfortunately, I don't have contact with the gentleman on the plane. He was just a very nice neighbor for a two-hour flight who sympathized with my hard work.

So what am I going to do now? Well, I have more cross-stitches to work on. But, I'm going to take a nice long hiatus first.

Washing my cross-stitch to remove the instructions and grid lines.

Washed

One Special Veteran

I am not related to this man, but he is very special to me.

I met him just over two years ago. I worked at the front desk, and he would come twice in every morning to see me. The first time, I would hand him our pouch, and the second time, he would bring another pouch back to me. We got to know each other pretty well considering we saw each other for a total of maybe 2-3 minutes each day.

He was a veteran, lost sensation in his lower body later in life. He explained it to me as a "numbness." I was surprised he could still drive a car and live normally. But he told me, if he closed his eyes and stood in one place too long, he would fall over. Because that's what it felt like. He had been to the VA Hospital in Dallas numerous times to see physicians and neurologists, but none could fully diagnose his lack of sensation.

At the time I had met him, he shared with me about his wife and her accident and her progress as she healed. Some days, he told me he had to take care of her, so he wanted to know if he could come earlier/later to shift around his work schedule to be there for her doctor's appointments. Of course, it was never a problem at our office, especially with the advance notice.

I had the privilege of working with Dan for about a year. One day, Dan wasn't picking up our pouch anymore. Someone else came the day after, and another the day after that. The system also changed. We swapped pouches in one visit instead of two. The timing was not nearly as consistent. Shortly after, someone walked in, introduced himself, and told me he was going to be the new courier to pick up our pouch. I asked him if he knew anything about Dan. He said, "Dan had a stroke." Any details after that he didn't know.

I missed Dan every single day I went to work after that. The new courier and I didn't really have a relationship. It may have been that I was bias, but his personality was very different than Dan's. He was rushed, hurried, on his schedule. I asked him to wait once to make sure we were able to get everything in the pouch that day to go out, and his response seemed to have a tinge of annoyance in it. I couldn't tell if he was joking, but if he was, I didn't find it funny.

Dan was gracious, patient, and kind. I loved seeing him twice a day, even if it only totaled 2-3 minutes in all. It's been over a year since I last saw Dan, and I no longer work at the office. I don't even know if Dan is with us anymore. But I wanted to share his story through my eyes, and how even the simplest job as being an office courier can have a great impact. Thank you, Dan, for being a veteran, for being a courier, and for being someone so dear to me. I miss you.

Life Lessons from a Nine-Year-Old

I was at a party just making small talk with the people around me a while back. About halfway through, one of the guests finally made it with his son. There was a basketball game that night so they arrived late. As the boy walked over, I said hi and asked him, "Did you win your game?"

I actually don't remember whether he won the game or not, but I do remember what he tacked onto his response: "Why does everyone ask me that?"

Now that was a question which made me stop and think. Why was I asking him that? I realized my question was formulated out of a natural response to want to know the outcome of the game - did you win or did you lose? But it also made me realize that by asking this question first, I had inadvertently moved the focus onto the result of the game rather than other more important things: sportsmanship, fun, skill, etc. We all tend to do that, don't we? Caring more about the result than the journey.

His question is very legitimate. And it's true, I do not want to instill the wrong idea that winning is always the end goal of every competition, contest, or race. Instead, I should have asked him, "Did you have fun at your game?" "Did you play well/do your best?" "Did you enjoy playing with your friends/teammates?" Those are much more lasting impressions than simply winning a game in itself.

This nine-year-old reminded me of an important aspect of life that I (and perhaps we collectively as a whole) tend to forget. Rarely is it ever simply about winning the game.

Screen Time

It is officially the 1st of November, and having been a quite warm Halloween evening last night, I am ready for lower temperatures and no longer hearing my AC unit kick on. Now the screen time I'm referencing is not looking at a computer/Ipad/phone. We do have a little bit of that, but I'm talking about something else: our window screens!

This weekend, we decided to do another little DIY project. We actually attempted this project a little under two months ago and failed miserably because the Home Depot we went to was completely understocked and depleted of window screening materials. It was a big flop, although we did repair one of our existing screens by reusing what we already had.

The project we meant to attempt was creating two completely brand new screens for two windows which did not have screens when we bought the house. No idea how that happens, but with this house, we learned not to ask the "why" questions. In order to make new screens, we needed some materials and tools:

Window Screen, sold in rolls


Window Screen Frame


Window Screen Corner Frames


Window Screen Clips


Window Screen Pull Tabs


Window Spline


Spline Roller


Hacksaw


Utility Knife


Measuring tape and scissors. Of course we all know what measuring tape and scissors look like, so I don't think I need to identify that for anyone :) Safety glasses might be good to have, although nothing went violently flying for this project, but I don't want to say you don't need them because there is some cutting involved.

Needless to say, what we thought was an easy, beginner level DIY that we thought could be accomplished in an evening....took a little longer than we thought. The first screen we made ended up taking over 2 hours to finish. The second one, we finished in about 1 hour. I guess we should have known, however easy something is to do, the first time is always going to take longer. And a key note I should always remember: messing up is easier than doing it correctly.

If you want to learn how to make a window screen, you can check out this link here that has a nice video. A few things this video does not include instructions on : springs and pull tabs.

From the outside. You can see the wavy mesh material of our screen!
And if you can't...well, it blends in pretty well because it's the right size to fit :) 

Our newly screened window that can now be
opened to allow our living room to breathe a little :)

I'm excited for this fall and winter because it means I can now open two of the largest windows in our house to allow for some outdoor air to penetrate into our once extremely musty (now only slightly musty) house. We missed out big time last year, but now we have no excuse :)

Total Cost: $25
Total Time Spent: 3 hours
Total Experience Gained: Priceless

Gardenias: Pt 2

Two weeks ago, I posted about my flowers for the first time. You can read that post here. I've definitely babied my flowers these last two weeks, carefully pruning off dead leaves and branches as well as making sure they're receiving ample sunlight and enough water.

I'm proud to say that they are both doing great. Here's a look at the baby plant:

Before

After 2 weeks

I've taken off all the dead brown leaves and left everything very clear. As you can see, there are lots of leaves sprouting and slowly filling out the plant. Hard to believe this little guy was a $1 steal. I'm very excited for his future :) 

Before

After 2 weeks

This plant fared a lot better in the before picture than the little baby one. So the pictures don't quite do justice for how much this plant has actually thrived. Honestly, the plant looks to be about the same density in both the before and after, but if you'll notice, the brown leaves are gone. So actually it's more dense now with healthy growth. You can't tell from the picture, but there are multiple buds forming on this plant. In another 2 weeks or so, I might be seeing some Gardenias blossom. This $3 find is going to turn into a $15 bush in no time. I'm excited! 

Hope you stay tuned to see the first blooms. :) 

5 Ways to Save Money to Reach Your Goals

We ended up buying our first house before both of our quarter century birthdays for a multitude of reasons (timing, situation, market/economy, etc). But we also lived a lifestyle that enabled us with the means to do so. Also, I had set this goal for myself as a teenager in high school. My junior year English teacher shared with us about how her daughter was getting married and had bought her first house, paying for the whole down payment by herself. After hearing that, I made that my mental goal. Every choice I made, financially, was with this goal in mind - I am saving for a house. In college, it meant not lavishing my dorm room or apartment with decor. As an adult, it meant staying in Friday and Saturday nights instead of going out on the town. That's not to say I didn't enjoy my life or circumstances. I did, perhaps not as much as I could have, but well enough with my goals.

Buzzfeed posted an article earlier this week entitled "17 things Millennials Should Stop Wasting Money On So They Can Buy A House Instead." The article was pretty much just click-bait because it did not deliver what the title implied. So instead, I'm posting a counter article on not just things to buy but ideas to promote for a mindset of saving for big goals, not exclusive to house-buying.

5 Ways to Save Money to Reach Your Goals

1. Make Lemonade.

Literally, make homemade lemonade rather than buying it from the store. It's so easy and probably better for you, even with the sugar it contains. This also represents the bigger picture of making something yourself rather than buying it. Don't know how? Learn! Here's my lemonade recipe, described by one of my friends as "phenomenal" enough for her to miss while leaving the country for a short while :) If you make it yourself, tell me how you like it!

Ingredients:

- 1 cup sugar
- 1 cup lemon juice (bottled is fine)
- 7 1/2 cups water

Combine all ingredients in a bottle and shake well to mix.

2. Mind > Eyes

See a beautiful dress in the window while shopping that you just have to have for your next wedding? See an aisle full of snacks on sale at the grocery store? Don't buy it! Let your mind be bigger than your eyes. Don't let your eyes control your spending. You'll thank yourself later once you're able to make that big purchase.

3. Treat Your Savings Account Right

Savings accounts at the bank are meant to do just that - be savings. Don't check your accounts and be fooled at how much you have. If you're saving for a big purchase, the number you see is not the amount of money you can spend.

4. Don't Get Discouraged

One of the biggest shortfalls of saving I hear is a version of "I don't have enough yet....it's going to take forever to get there...forget it, I'm going to get this instead now." Clearly those with this mindset would fail the marshmallow test as an adult. Something is always better than nothing. If your goal is truly your goal, keep going.

5. Eat Out Less

I love cooking, but I wasn't always good at it. I'm still not the greatest cook in the world, but I do it very often. In any given month, we can count the number of times we eat out on one hand. There are always exceptions, but we definitely do not casually eat out. In doing this as a frugality, it has also helped me to realize the privilege it truly is to dine out and be served by waiters and waitresses. It becomes an experience rather than simply a meal, and I'm not talking about going to the fancy Michelin star restaurants either. Going to any restaurant that involves wait staff can become an experience when valued. Food, in my opinion, is the easiest way to save on the budget. It's the perspective to do the cooking yourself that is hard to reach.

What I've shared here are ways that I personally have done to achieve my goal of buying a house early in life. Obviously, if you don't have a savings goal in mind, you probably won't view your money in the same way, and that's fine. If you have the luxury of being able to spend freely without thinking of a major purchase in your future, that's great.

Hopefully, if you are looking to make a major purchase, you found this much more helpful than the Buzzfeed article. I'm always advocating for friends as neighbors in our lovely neighborhood (that is SO difficult to get into because everyone who's in stays...)

Happy Saving!

Gardenias

My love of plants and nature started early. I am by no means a Master Gardener, but I do enjoy spending time outdoors, taking care of plants, and watching things grow. As a child, I enjoyed coming home after school and spending nearly an hour outside watering the yard by hand. We planted tomatoes for fun one year, and I would water them everyday. I did make the unfortunate mistake of sprinkling too much fertilizer on them because I didn't understand that fertilizer was essentially poison in massive amounts. So the tomato plants that grew did wonderfully. And the ones that got too much fertilizer...died. Of course, gardening and taking care of plants takes an immense amount of work, and that didn't last too long for a teenager.

I did also compost in a 5-gallon bucket as a child. I put dead leaves and grass and a bunch of random things in a bucket and filled it with water. And then I left it there for years and years and years in our backyard on the patio, filling it with water every now and then. I think my dad finally realized one day that he needed his bucket so he dumped everything out and took his bucket back. What he dumped out though was a nice hunk of composted soil, perhaps a little too dry from lack of care, but it was compost.

Last night, Jonathan and I went to Lowe's just to walk around and take a peek at their plants. We browsed the clearance shelves and came across some bargain finds. Of course, with bargain prices come brown leaves and "seemingly lifeless" plants. However, with my love of plants and growing nature, I committed to reviving some plants with great potential. Here's what we found.

This larger friend was $3. He's got some good
green leaves and great potential. You can't tell from the
picture but there's small buds coming
out of the bottom. He has so much potential.

This little friend was $1. I know he's not the prettiest
plant in the pack, but he has potential! I see it in the baby
branches emerging.

They're gardenia plants. I absolutely love gardenias. The smell brings me back to my childhood when we used to go to my grandparent's house and I would cut the flowers off when they bloomed and put them into vases. Right now they're chilling on our back patio because they need partial shade. I'm hoping they can still grow with slightly less sunlight because the location I want to plant them is almost full shade. Of course, different sources say different amounts of sunlight, and a variety of people have had success growing in different locations, so, I won't know until I put it in. But I want to freshen them up first before transplanting. 

Ideally, I wanted azaleas to plant in my shady location, but once again, the different websites and plant tags say different amounts of sunlight requirements. So rather than taking a $30 risk, I went with the $4 risk. I actually want to plant Japanese Astilbe, but nurseries don't have any in season right now so I will wait until spring for that one.

Jonathan also found a nice bargain find last night. He got himself a cute little $4 succulent basket for his office.

What a cutie.

Unlike me, his little succulent basket will be much easier to maintain than my gardenias that need to be revived. But we'll see.

Stay tuned for future pictures and updates on my gardenia plants!

Gas Lights and Garters

My gas light came on this morning on my way to work. I just stared at it for a while as I waited as a red light. It's been a long time since I've let the tank get low enough for the light to turn on. The last time I definitively remember the gas light coming on was the evening of my junior homecoming.

We drove all over that night. I drove to the restaurant, and then we went to the mall next door to take photos and then to our high school for the dance. After that, I drove back home to surprise my date with the garter I ended up making him even though we had said we weren't doing the mums and garters. (But I had bought one for myself anyway because I thought they were so pretty and wanted one.) And then I drove to our church where we hung out with a campfire, which resulted in the police coming and telling us we couldn't have the fire anymore, which kind of fizzled the rest of the evening out. And then I drove my date home because he couldn't drive yet, and then drove home. And somewhere between all those trips through Plano and Frisco, my gas light came on, I freaked out a little, and then decided I could make it through the rest of the evening. Quite gutsy of me...

My junior homecoming mum

A year or two prior to my first homecoming as a junior, an older friend at church was making his date a mum after our Friday night fellowsip. His parents were there, and most of the youth stayed around to socialize and watch. I knew his parents, and his mom turned to me and said in Chinese, "Oh yeah, these aren't that hard to make. Cathy, you know how to make these right?" And I shyly nodded my head, even though I had never made one before. In theory, it just looked so easy, but I didn't have any hands-on experience.

My junior date's garter was the first time I had ever made one myself. I was young and naive at the time, and I hadn't a clue where to start, so I fell for the "pre-made backing" and paid about $15 for that piece to start with. Little did I know it cost less than $10 to make and wasn't even that difficult.

The garter I made for my date - junior year.

It's not the most impressive homecoming garter, but for a 17-year-old who tried her hands at a first-time DIY, it's not bad.

For my senior homecoming the year after, my date and I agreed not to do mums and garters as well. Again, I really wanted one, because you know, it was a white and silver one instead of maroon and white, so it would definitely look better on a mum and I just had to have one. But instead of buying one from the drill team mothers, I made my own. I went out and bought all the materials and taught myself how to make the military braids (Which they now sell for $7.99 each! Proposterous for mere yardage of cheap ribbon.) I like it better than my junior mum, but I think that's my own personal bias because I made it myself.

My senior mum which I made by hand. I
think it looks much more impressive than the one
I bought the previous year. Notice that military braid?
Yup, handmade!

Coincidentally, I am making garters with the girls I disciple tonight in place of our normal studies. I really wanted to encourage them to make their own garters instead of paying to outsource it for a number a reasons.

1. I want to challenge them to be able to take on a task that seems great at first and to work through it, especially when the stakes are still low. There's going to be a lot of things in their future that might seem like giant hurdles. And it's true, some of them are hurdles you may not want to attempt or are best left alone. But there are others that might be worthwhile, you try to attempt, and you fail, and that's okay. And then there are the rest that you try to attempt, succeed, and leave with a sense of empowerment knowing you did something and proved yourself wrong, in a good way.

2. I want to teach them to use their resources wisely. Personally, my opinion is that the homecoming marketing is ridiculous, and I don't believe it wise to spend hundreds of dollars on a mum or garter. However, I do believe that it is more special to spend more time on something handmade to give to your homecoming date, especially if you're actually dating the person and he/she is more than just a friend.

3. Their mentor happens to be me, and I love making mums and garters, so I would like to share my knowledge and expertise with them to help them make it and teach them something new at the same time. Also, when she can make mums that actually look good, how can you go wrong? :)

I'll have to ask them later for their opinions of my theory and process behind this and their overall experience. Perhaps they'll let me share with you after. :)

The Perfect Hard-Boiled Eggs

I can't remember anymore how I discovered this or who did it for the first time, but it was in China where I realized the secret to a perfect hard-boiled egg. Let's first define the perfect hard-boiled egg.

1. The shell has to peel easily. If the thin membrane underneath sticks even the slightest bit, you're going to lose part of your precious egg white. Or a lot of it.
2. There has to be no gray ring on the very edge of the egg yolk on the inside. If there is, you've overcooked it. Now, I know, for us Asians, there are many wonderful recipes out there for tea eggs and seasoned hard boiled eggs in stews, and you will see the gray ring in it. And that's just due to an extended amount of cooking time that the recipe calls for. And that's fine. But that's not what I'm talking about here.
3. The egg yolk is completely cooked through and opaque, not translucent. So we're not soft-boiling here. 

If you do a Google search or ask chefs or well-seasoned mothers, they'll tell you the tricks of timing it perfectly. They'll tell you to add vinegar to the water to make the shells peel easier. They'll tell you to dunk the eggs into ice as soon as you're done to stop the cooking immediately. They'll tell you to remove the pot off the stove and let it sit for x amount of time. But see, all these things require a very precise timing. Nobody tells you how to cook an egg in a kettle unless you ask them specifically about using a kettle.

When I was living in China, I discovered hard-boiling my eggs in my tea kettle. Here's the secret.
First, put however many eggs you want or can fit into a tea kettle with the automatic shut-off feature. This is key that it has the automatic shut-off feature.
Second, fill the kettle with enough water that all the eggs are submerged.
Third, flip the switch and boil the water.
Fourth, after the water boils (which is about 2-3 minutes), let the eggs sit in the water for at least 10 minutes. Anything longer than that is fine, AND, you will not develop the gray ring.

My five little eggs nesting after the boil.

You see, the reason why cooking hard-boiled eggs in the tea kettle is so much easier in my opinion than other techniques is that

a. you don't need to add vinegar to make it peel easily
b. you don't need to do any special timing methods. Once it's in, it's in.
c. If you have at least 13 minutes to wait, you're golden. If you have more than 13 minutes to wait, it won't ruin them either.

This came in handy last Sunday because Jonathan and I woke up earlier than normal for church. We had a good 30 - 40 minutes before we had to leave the house. So I suggested going out on a walk to enjoy the cooler weather. However, I also wanted to eat something decent for once in the morning instead of going to church on an empty stomach like we normally do. Conveniently enough, I popped three eggs into our kettle, filled it with water, and flipped the switch. We went out and took a stroll around our neighborhood for about 15-20 minutes. After coming back, I scooped the eggs out of the kettle, rinsed them under cold tap water to cool so I could eat it, and we had breakfast.

I will say, the one risk to doing this is that every now and then, I would say probably less than 10% of the time, you may end up having an egg explode in the kettle during the boiling process. This is more likely to happen if the egg already has signs of cracks along the shell (not actually cracked though). In my time in China, this happened once. The fortunate part is everything is cooked, so you just have to wash your kettle out.

Yolks cooked all the way through. No gray ring.

There really is no gray ring.

That's my secret to perfect hard-boiled eggs. :)

The Big Black Crow

When I was a child, my mother read a Chinese newspaper article to me. The article was about a little girl and how she despised practicing piano. She described its appearance as a black crow with giant white teeth. Eventually, they got rid of the piano and she stopped playing. The day the piano was moved out, she did cartwheels on their front lawn to display her joy that the crow was gone. She reflected back years later about how she wished she hadn't taken lessons with such disdain and that she actually missed her big black crow.

My story is similar. I really disliked practicing as a child. It was so hard to fork up 30 minutes to an hour of time to sit and devote toward practicing. So when I quit lessons, it was such a relief to not feel the pressure to force myself to sit and play. After a few months of hiatus, I realized I found myself choosing to go back and sit and play. Not necessarily for long periods of time. Maybe 10 minutes here and 20 minutes there. But I continued to play, no longer for myself but for others. I continued accompanying at music festivals for friends and through referrals. I continued to play piano at church for Sunday worship.

In college, I even continued to do so to the extent that I would drive home on the weekends solely for the purpose of rehearsing with students or playing at a festival. The money I was spending to drive home sometimes wasn't even made up by the money I earned. But I did it because there was something about it I loved. I loved playing music. I loved hearing the music and how the notes I was playing were flowing together in such a way to make melodies.

My dad never sold our big black crows. Thank goodness. And instead of watching mine be taken away and doing cartwheels on the front lawn, I stood watching it as the movers carefully maneuvered it down the front steps of my dad's house and rolled it into my very own living room while trying not to pass out from fear.

My 7'6" (not so baby) baby. 

I'm not the pianist I used to be, but I've slowly discovered to love the talent I possess. Six years ago, a friend asked me while on break, "Do you play piano a lot in your spare time?" At the time I responded, "Sometimes." I didn't have access to a piano very often, and it didn't occur to me to play when I had the chance. Things always got in the way. Here's what he said next.

"If I were you, I would spend hours playing."

That was the first time it really occurred to me that I had a talent not easily earned. And I've spent the last six years keeping my skills alive however I can. Now, with my piano in my very own living room, I hope I can continue practicing and revive some old classical favorites I used to so easily master.

And I hope that I can share with my own future kids, and that you can share with your children as aspiring musicians, a different story. My big black crow was moved into my own house in my own living room. And I still continue to play on it, (almost) every day.

Two Years a To

I wanted to get married as a young child because I wanted to change my last name. At the start of every school year, my teachers would always struggle with pronouncing my last name. I was more thankful for the ones who just waited for me to say it first before trying.

When I got married, I legally changed my name rather quickly for a number of reasons.

1. I was unemployed and had time to wait at the social security office on a weekday for 3 hours.
2. My driver's license expiration was coming up in a few months so it would make it easier to get that changed in one swift motion as well.
3. I always wanted to.

After legally changing my name, I realized that To wasn't necessarily better than Aur. Growing up, chances were I'd end up with a longer last name, because you know, the phonetics of the English alphabet don't allow for many words, much less last names, shorter than three letters. Somehow, I ended up defying all odds there. 

Then, I realized that To was "easy" to pronounce, perhaps too "easy" for most people. Being that it is an actual English word in the alphabet, people get overly confident and pronounce it to͞o. Usually I don't bother correcting them because it's a one-time interaction. I've gotten pretty used to it now, but every now and then if you catch me in the wrong mood, it'll irritate me more than it should.

One time when I was calling the doctor's office for information, I called before office hours so they gave me the option to type in the first three letters of my last name. Well, I typed in my WHOLE last name and hit # and got an error message....so I had to wait and call again after they opened to speak to a real person.

I haven't changed the name on my passport yet because at the time we got married, I had almost 6 years to go until it expired. So whenever we travel out of the country, I just have to remember to book the ticket under my maiden name. The only downside is that sometimes we don't get assigned seats next to each other and have to ask to switch. I've got just under 4 years left, and then my identity as an Aur will only remain in those who knew me as one.

Sometimes when I really think about my name, it' strange that it is what it is. Do I miss my last name? Sometimes. Would I have kept it the same without changing it? Probably not. I remember intentionally asking my students that summer before I got married to call me Ms. Aur instead of Ms. Cathy because I knew it would be the last time I could use that name.

Just before we were Mr. and Mrs. To

I was an Aur for over 23.5 years. I've been a To for 2. Perhaps we will revisit this topic again in another 21 years and I'll tell you how I feel then. :)

HGTV In Real Life: Kitchen Facelift

We thought the kitchen was going to be one of the first projects we would tackle and renovate as homeowners, and we got halfway done....but we ended up waiting over a year. It started out as an aesthetic problem, and we were able to compromise on the aesthetics of the kitchen to put it off and save money. However, when the dishwasher wasn't secured any longer to the underside of our crumbling wood-bits-smashed-together-and-covered-in-plastic counters, it was no longer an issue of aesthetics. Every time we wanted to put dishes in the dishwasher, it would tip forward and make my heart skip a beat.

One of my favorite parts of renovating has been that I can truly make it my own. I'm not overly particular about aesthetics to begin with, but when it comes to the biggest purchase and investment (probably) of my life, coupled with the fact that we bought an older house knowing it needed some renovating, I'm going to be picky. And having seen the results of our kitchen facelift, I am confident that no house we saw with renovated kitchens had one that came close to being my dream kitchen.

Before:



After round 1 of facelift:





During phase 2 of the facelift:





And finally, I present, my dream kitchen:





So...I wish I could say nothing was ever on our counters, but that would be a lie. So this is what our counters actually look like:

We're pretty clean...at least in the kitchen :)

I was in awe for a while after we finished our kitchen. Having lived with the outdated materials for so long, I got used to it. And then, I watched the contractors install pretty much every detail, so it wasn't a big reveal for me. To be honest at first, I wasn't sure if I liked it. Jonathan and I took FOREVER to pick our backsplash (like....almost a year if not more. Yes, we had been looking at backsplash for a LONG time) because I couldn't decide whether it was worth it to splurge on a fancy shmancy design or just to keep it simple and low-budget. In the end, we went simple and low-budget, and I'm more than pleased with how it turned out. I learned that visualizing an end product with just one representative piece is really difficult. Super props to interior designers who can figure this all out in their head instantly.

If you're curious on the materials we used, I've made a list below of every item we bought for the kitchen. I didn't include any of the appliances. All the current prices listed on the links are higher than what we paid for them.

Kitchen Sink - Kraus

Kitchen Faucet - Kohler

Backsplash Tile

Quartz Countertops

Cabinet Hardware

Range Hood Vent

Cabinet Paint: SW Pro Classic Satin Pure White 7005

Wall Paint: SW Marshmallow 7001

Jonathan and I don't splurge on fancy meals or new clothes on ourselves very often if ever, but we do spend the time and money to have a nice house, not only for ourselves, but to share it with others. One thing I've enjoyed most about having our home is being able to open it up to others and have them come over for dinner, host friends who are in town for the weekend, and to share our lives with others. We hope you can enjoy our house as much as we do :)