While my tkd instructor has been taking a couple of days off, I’ve been coming and filling in for him to make sure there are enough instructors taking care of the studio.  I’ve been adapting other games and exercises that I have learned elsewhere and bringing them in.  Did the 8″ abs with the adult class today, adapted a game I learned from the city to play with the adults and most of the kids classes to get them into groups faster, as well as introducing them to the joys of the the plank!

Earlier in the year, my cousins posted on facebook a chain challenge to make hand made gifts for the first five people who would post a similar note on facebook to continue the challenge themself.  A chain of gifts made and given by the heart just because. I finished my first gift. I experimented with carving into a wooden frame and then painted it to have this as the result:

The frame carved.

Close-up

Basically the finished frame, except that the word koala and the whole note was inked in black. Love you cousin!

I’ve been living in a state of complacency.
Tonight I tested myself to see if that was true, and it was. I went out for a jog with Khoa and found myself terribly out of shape as the 30 minute run left me dragging my feet in a slow jog by the end of it. Where has the person who used to be able to do 6 pullups, 90 something crunches in 2 minutes, 40 pushups in 2 minutes, run to the harbor and back and still be breathing lightly gone? Time to pull myself out of this rut and find the motivation to get back on the fast track to living life on easy street.

Putting in this work may not seem like living on easy street, but I’m convinced that once I start concentrating again and being on top of things, everything will just lay itself out like a red carpet.

Only thing to do now, is to get off this chair and put it all into action.

The House at Night (taken by me!)

Done with my academic finals. I can rest easy now for the summer.

Looking back at this year, I realize how the choices I have made result in an entirely different life style each year. With each decision, I lose some, I gain some. But I take away the same message, to savor the good times, the memories, and the people that you are with.

Watching an old TV show, I realize that journals are something precious and useful to keep, because as we get older our hold onto our memories fade and we forget. This is a way to keep those memories alive and fresh.

Vid of some photos from my trip to Vietnam this summer.

Rest of photos online at http://www.picasaweb.google.com/vivian.d.le

it’s been a lovely “something greater than a week” in Italy. Been in Rome, Assisi, Florence, Verona, and finally Venice.
Great sights, blistering cold, al dente pasta but in general yummy food, and lots of it. The parents have been shopping and spending a ton of money. Lots of pictures taken by yours truly which will be up sometime after I get back. Going to a concert tonight, and then will be flying back New Years.
Happy Holidays to y’all!

It’s finals week!
It’s finals week!
I go home at the end of this week!

Two down,
Three more to go,
There’s hope going around!

Look! Alliteration! or whatever that is, each stanza has each line start with the same letter! Or… maybe it’s nothing special.

I should be writing my cheat sheets for physics, math and that other math final that I have, but I find myself procrastinating.

But with that, nothing to write about.

So I shall end my pointless stare at the screen.

I have a pregnant arm.

I wonder what kind of image popped into your head…

But seriously, I have a fat swollen left arm that gives me a twinge of pain when i bend at the elbow a certain way. I’m not very happy if you can gather. First my right foot doesn’t work for a week, then people start getting worried about my twitches thinking I’m going to fall over and die, and now my arm.

Anyways, I went home the past weekend to help out at the tkd black belt test and also to celebrate my dad’s birthday. A pretty good weekend, with a lot of pictures from the test. Now, back in the full swing of school, I have two math midterms this friday o_O, a physics quiz, a 5 page paper due monday, and a physics lab report due next thursday. And then… BRING ON THE FINALS!!! well, not really, but yeah 3-4 more weeks of school until it’s winter break! woohoo!

So anyways, I’ll go to sleep now so maybe my arm will heal or not heal by tomorrow when I go to the health center and get a TB test for a class I’m planning on taking and maybe get an emergency consult to check out my pregnant arm and twitches. What joy.

I find it hard to believe that all of my life’s work is all in one basket. All of the pictures I have taken and digital artwork reside in digital storage in my college dorm room, on my desk, within the confines of one labtop and one external hard drive. Talk about putting all my eggs in one basket. I only think of this now, when I realize we have a fire drill in about five hours from now. Should there be a fire or natural disaster, I don’t think I would arrive back in time to save these two items. No where else is there a copy of everything I have done except for online and a few random CDs scattered in my childhood bedroom.

Wow, I really should have another back-up place of storage. But I guess in the long run, this material stuff does not matter as long as I still have the people I care for in my life.

On a more cheerful note, we rearranged our dining/living room area! Being the engineering me, instead of immediately starting to move the furniture according to every which persons’ whims, I roughly measured everything out, cut up pieces of paper to signify our furniture and drew our room layout. My apartmentmates were amazed at my ingenious. LOL.

The Blue Angels at the Miramar Air Show on October 4th.

By the way, there is no longer just a call for “shot gun”, but when there’s 5 people heading to a 5-seater car, there are also calls for “side” too. At least for me and my old suitemates when we pile into George’s car…

Students were coming down the stairs, finding seats, chit chatting with one another while taking out materials, as they waited for our physics 2c class to start. The professor sets up his laptop screen with the projector as the large auditorium filled class settles down and pulls up his PowerPoint lecture.

As he starts the lecture, a little box pops up in the corner from ichat with a little bubble saying, “hi” … “bz?” The class roars into laughter as they recognize the name of the person chatting with our professor. And at the fact that these people who teach us such complex things also use abbreviated language when chatting. It’s the physics 2bl lecturer whom most of us had last quarter! Our professor types back something along the line of “in an hour” “have class right now” and then promptly signs off and tries to get back to the lecture he was just starting. Meanwhile, the rest of us students are still laughing as having witnessed what we’ve known in the back of our heads but haven’t seen until now. He gives up and can’t help but laugh with us, and then all is back to normal.

We’ve known all our life that our teachers are people too and have a life outside of their students. But the only other time that I’ve ever seen the personal side of a teacher was back in 6th grade when we had an end of the year party at our teacher’s house and spent the entire day playing around her church. Other than that, we just see the professors as someone who is paid to be there, to teach us what they have spent their life learning, and then put us through our strides with midterms and finals. Professors are people too.

Here are some photos from my trip to Sea World. I haven’t been here since I was a little girl. And I spent all of last year rowing by it, only seeing the pylons that transport park goers from one end of Sea World to the other, and the stage where shows are performed during the summer, in the wee hours of the morning. I can finally say I have seen the inside of Sea World again.