Baby earthquake in Redlands

Yesterday was the first time in my life to experience an earthquake. You think that I was frighten by it but just the reverse was true. I felt a little excited. You cannot blame me for this because I came from a country that is free from natural disaster. 

It happened in the morning of July 29, 2008. Philyra and I were in the bedroom. She was having her morning nap and I was surfing net. I felt a sudden movement. It was like someone using a digging machine to excavate the foundation of the building. Then, I heard my housemate shouting at my door, "Meier, earthquake!" I had a very clear mind at that moment. I held Philyra up, opened the door, and ran out of the building with my housemate. We were safe. 

Secret of life...

Suddenly I have an impulse want to quote some sentences from the book that I currently read -- "One Minute For Myself" by Spencer Johnson.

"I don't like it when other people feel I don't live up to their expectations of me. So I avoid setting myself up with rigid expectations and comparing me to what I think ought to be. When I am disappointed in myself, it is usually because I didn't get what I demanded of me."

"Now I simply appreciate what happens instead of comparing to what I think ought to happen. I've learned that my personal pain comes from the difference between what is happening and what I think ought to be happening."

"So if I let go of what I think is missing from the fantasy and appreciate what is already good about the reality, I'll be happier."

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The Sun Also Rises Vocabulary

CHAPTER 6

semaphore

n.

1. A visual signaling apparatus with flags, lights, or mechanically moving arms, as one used on a railroad.

2. A visual system for sending information by means of two flags that are held one in each hand, using an alphabetic code based on the position of the signaler's arms.

tr. & intr.v. sem·a·phored, sem·a·phor·ing, sem·a·phores

To send (a message) or to signal by semaphore.

he's a garter snapper.'

"Hello, you bums," he said.

bum

n.

1. A tramp; a vagrant.

2. A lazy or shiftless person, especially one who seeks to live solely by the support of others.

3. An incompetent, insignificant, or obnoxious person: The batter called the pitcher a bum.

4. One who is devoted to a particular activity or milieu: a beach bum.

v. bummed, bum·ming, bums

v.intr.

1. To live by begging and scavenging from place to place. Often used with around.

2. To loaf.

v.tr.

1. To acquire by begging; cadge.

2. Slang To depress, dishearten, or dismay. Often used with out.

adj.

1. Inferior; worthless: gave me bum advice; did a bum job of fixing the car.

2. Disabled; malfunctioning: a bum shoulder.

3. Unfavorable or unfair: got a bum deal on my final grade for the course.

4. Unpleasant; lousy: had a bum time at the party.

"You mustn't misunderstand, Jake, it was absolutely platonic with the secretary."
Pla·ton·ic

adj. often platonic Transcending physical desire and tending toward the purely spiritual or ideal: platonic love.

live by the sword shall perish by the sword


CHAPTER 7
con·cierge (kô-syârzh)

n.

1. A staff member of a hotel or apartment complex who assists guests or residents, as by handling the storage of luggage, taking and delivering messages, and making reservations for tours.

2. A person, especially in France, who lives in an apartment house, attends the entrance, and serves as a janitor.

Let's not talk. Talking's all bilge.
Bilge -- Slang Stupid talk or writing; nonsense.


CHAPTER 8

"Tight, Jake. I was tight."

tight -- Slang Intoxicated; drunk.

"You're pie-eyed."
pie-eyed -- Slang Intoxicated; drunk;

taxidermist
a craftsman who stuffs and mounts the skins of animals for display


CHPATER 10

"I slept like a log."

100 BEST NOVELS (picked by TIME's critics)

The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow

All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren

American Pastoral by Philip Roth

An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser

Animal Farm by George Orwell -- (I finished this book. Highly recommended!)

Appointment in Samarra by John O'Hara

Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret by Judy Blume

The Assistant by Bernard Malamud

At Swim-Two-Birds by Flann O'Brien

Atonement by Ian McEwan

Beloved by Toni Morrison

The Berlin Stories by Christopher Isherwood

The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler

The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood

Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy

Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh

The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder

Call It Sleep by Henry Roth

Catch-22 by Joseph Heller

The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger

A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess

The Confessions of Nat Turner by William Styron

The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen

The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon

A Dance to the Music of Time by Anthony Powell

The Day of the Locust by Nathanael West

Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather

A Death in the Family by James Agee

The Death of the Heart by Elizabeth Bowen

Deliverance by James Dickey

Dog Soldiers by Robert Stone

Falconer by John Cheever

The French Lieutenant's Woman by John Fowles

The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessig

Go Tell it on the Mountain by James Baldwin

Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell

The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck

Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald -- (I read this too.)

A Handful of Dust by Evelyn Waugh

The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers

The Heart of the Matter by Graham Greene

Herzog by Saul Bellow

Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson

A House for Mr. Biswas by V.S. Naipaul

I, Claudius by Robert Graves

Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace

Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison

Light in August by William Faulkner

The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis

Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

Lord of the Flies by William Golding

The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkein

Loving by Henry Green

Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis

The Man Who Loved Children by Christina Stead

Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie

Money by Martin Amis

The Moviegoer by Walker Percy

Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

Naked Lunch by William Burroughs

Native Son by Richard Wright

Neuromancer by William Gibson

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

1984 by George Orwell

On the Road by Jack Kerouac

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey

The Painted Bird by Jerzy Kosinski

Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov

A Passage to India by E.M. Forster

Play It As It Lays by Joan Didion

Portnoy's Complaint by Philip Roth

Posession by A.S. Byatt

The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark

Rabbit, Run by John Updike

Ragtime by E.L. Doctorow

The Recognitions by William Gaddis

Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett

Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates

The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles

Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut

Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson

The Sot-Weed Factor by John Barth

The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner

The Sportswriter by Richard Ford

The Spy Who Came in From the Cold by John LeCarre

The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway -- (I'm halfway reading this book.)

Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston

Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee -- (I read the book and watched the movie. Both are great.)

To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller

Ubik by Philip K. Dick

Under the Net by Iris Murdoch

Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowrey

Watchmen by Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons

White Noise by Don DeLillo

White Teeth by Zadie Smith

Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys

Tomorrow

Tomorrow morning hubby will have his PhD research proposal defense. Hopefully, everything is going to be fine.

Sigh!

Finally, my laptop collapsed totally!

SMILE FOR YOU

Smiling is infectious; you catch it like the flu,
When someone smiled at me today, I started smiling too.
I passed around the corner and someone saw my grin
When he smiled I realized I'd passed it on to him.
I thought about that smile then i realized its worth,
A single smile, just like mine could travel round the earth.
So, if you feel a smile begin, don't leave it undetected
Let's start and epidemic quick, and get the world infected!

Something new to me...

When you are in a foreign country, it is important to know how to refer to different ethnic groups in a polite way. For example in the United State, it is fine to refer Americans as white people or African Americans as black people. But it is often offensive to call black people as Negroes in the U.S. However, few days ago I learnt something new from a Brazilian. He said in Brazil "Negro" is a respecful word in contrast to "Black". Also, Asian group in Brazil is identified as "Yellow people", which many Asian (especially Koreans) in the United State feel being insulted. In general, be aware of using impolite terms to denote ethnic groups in foreign countries.

The Glass Castle

Well, I have finished reading The Glass Castle – a memoir by Jeannette Walls. Before elaborating further about this book, I asked myself a question: How I came to read this book? I recalled that I have no intention to buy this book; it was an additional to another book -- Harry Potter and Deathly Hallows. In order to get free shipping from Amazon, I had to make a minimum purchase of $25. Harry Potter 7 cost $17.99, so I needed to buy another book for at least $7. I would rather spend money for buyinbooks than for shipping fees). Among the recommended books on amazon.com, The Glass Castle caught my eyes. (WHY??) The price was not the main reason I selected this book. It was the highly rated-review that influenced my decision. Now, after I finished reading the book, I want to say, "I am not regret buying and reading this book. Conversely, I am pleased I have read such a well-written memoir."

Before this book, my friend who read a dozen memoirs told me one day that she personally does not like to read memoir anymore. The reason she gave was that every memoir has the same goal – tell you about the writer. The authors will first tell the readers about their past experience (99% focused on the worst of their lives), and then the writers will tell the readers how they have overcame those difficulties and became successful. Well, I do not want to discuss and justify my friend’s statement any further.

Jeannette Wall did a good job in putting together her childhood memory into such an enthralling story. Growing up in a dysfunctional family with three siblings, Jeannette has a dishonest and destructive father and a mother that did not want the responsibility of raising a family. Jeannette and her siblings learned to take care of themselves, protected one another, and eventually found their way to New York.

Jeannette is a talented writer as well as a fantastic storyteller. I was incredibly touched by her story. After finishing her book, I could still feel the anger inside me about her irresponsible, selfish parents.(EXPAND...HOW WERE THE DISHONEST AND DESTRUCTIVE) This is a piece of great writing; I have no doubt to recommend this book to other. (WHY??)

Moving

Moving house is so so painful. The whole process of packing, moving, unpacking, cleaning the old apartment takes me nearly a week. I feel myself have disconnected from outside world - without internet, i could not read news (Malaysia news especially), check emails, chat with friends, write blog, and also I could not read my friends' blogs. Fortunately the internet service will be installed in my new apartment on Saturday, then my life will back to normal again. Friends, I will back to the loop soon. See ya.

I got them finally!

Finally, a postman knocked my apartment's door at 3pm today. I was laying in the bed while hubby went to open the door. He then passed the box to me and wanted me to open the box by myself. I opened the box, got the book, and walked out from the bedroom to the living room. Hubby knew that I couldn't wait to start the big project, so he quickily said: "Don't forget to cook the rice tonight huh." Hihi ... I have already sat comfortably on the chair and turned the book to page 1.

Waiting is Torture …. Ahhhh!

While every Potter’s fan is enjoying Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, I am still waiting for the shipment from Amazon. I regret not ordering the book earlier. I also regret buying the book online – if not, I could just pick up a book from a nearby bookstore. Waiting is painful! During the period of waiting, I have to curb myself from reading any reviews about the Potter book, so that I can discover the story and the ending by myself. I don’t want to let any resources to spoil the excitement. But… the enticement is so strong. I don’t know for how long I can still refrain myself. Please, Amazon, send me the book in no time.

Home-made Malaysian cuisine

PA Greenwood Furnace

Last Saturday, hubby and I went hiking again with Alice and Brian at Pennsylvania Greenwood Furnace. We used two hours to finish a 6-mile-trail (around 10 km). Along the trail, I learned a lot of new knowledge from Brian who has wide-ranging knowledge about animals, birds, plants, geography, English literature, and maybe some others talents that I have not yet discovered. Anyway, along the trail we talked from plants to trees and from animals and birds. Now I can recognize some tree species and have more understanding about them. The Hemlock - Pennsylvania State tree - is an evergreen tree that has small cones and short dark leaves. Since Hemlocks do not lose their needles, they symbolize faith in immortality. Tulip tree that has flowers that resemble tulip flowers is Indiana's State tree. Early morning in the wood, we listened to various sounds from singing birds. Although I still cannot differentiate which song is sung by which bird, I am glad at least my ears are sensitive to birds' songs. We were lucky enough to listen to a beautiful, flutelike song from Wood Thrush (click to listen). Finally, my biggest satisfaction and excitement about the hike was I saw a whitetail deer in the wood for the first time. She is a pretty and lively creature that constantly alert and vigilant to her surroundings. I hope next time I will have chance to see male deer that have a pair of antlers. Also, I wish I can see black bears walking in the wood in the new future.

Sty

After taken antibiotics, my swollen eyelid (or they call it sty) is much better now. Now, I have a total different understanding about sty. From my old knowledge, I thought sty would transmit the virus to other people, so I should avoid seeing people in their eyes. Also, I should tie a black thread on the middle finger to prevent transmission. These are archaic thinking before the invention of advance medicine. I don't know why but I have started to inquiry about my past belief since I came to this country. I will not deny that this environment has influenced the way I think. My mind inclines to scientific thinking now.

Anyway, my new understanding about sty is that it is an infection of the eyelid caused by glands (or cells) that secrete from our skin that lubricate the eye. This is a common infection that sometimes will resolve on its own other times antibiotics are required. Although this is just a small matter, I learned a lesson from this experience. Learning is not confined by place and time; knowledge is somewhere surrounding us where we can grasp easily. Pay a little more attention to everyday life that you call it "tedious", you will find out that life is exciting and has richer meanings than you have ever thought.

y'know

"Y'know, I was going to fix that truck this weekend"
"People in this world have gone crazy, y'know?"
"I'm not very good at public speaking, y'know. Like I get nervous y'know."

Are these sentences sounded familiar to you? Are you saying this filler word - you know - too? To be honest, I do include this expression into my speaking to sound like a native. It was not until I read a grammar book yesterday that I realized I picked up a wrong English term.

You know is a vacuous expression that has been spreading (in speech) like the most virulent cancer for decades. It is described as one of the most far-reaching, depressing, and disfiguring conversation wherever you go.

But it was left to Barney Oldfield, a retired air force colonel, to launch a vigorous campaign against you knows. In 1997 Colonel Oldfield offered a $1,000 scholarship to the Nebraska student who submitted a tape recording of a radio or television broadcast the most you know in fifteen minutes. The first year's winner submitted a tape with forty-one you knows in four minutes, thirty-eight seconds. The next year, a fifth grader took the prize. His tape had sixty-four you know. After that, the contest had been continued for several years.

"Y'know, have you know in your conversation is not a good practice."
"I know it now! So, I determine want to toss out this inane expression."

Idiomatic Expressions

Following are some sayings that i collected from my previous reading:-

• Resilience speaks louder than despair.

• Poor oral and written communication skills are rampant no matter what the student educational background or college ranking.

• No matter how busy you may think you are you must find time for reading now, or surrender yourself to self-ignorance.

• Greatness inspires envy, envy engenders spite, spite spawns lies.

• Take advantage of the opportunities, no matter how few they were.

• The potential to save lives makes the risk worthwhile.

• It is by studying others that we learn about ourselves.

• If we witness injustice or the violation of another human being's rights it's our duty to take the gloves off and speak up -- even if it hurts some feelings.

• Exercise can chase off the blues.

• The cause [of quarell] was so trivial that the whole thing was a pure waste of breath.

• Hustle -- you can't survive without it. A quitter never win; a winner never quit. It's easy to be ordinary, but it take guts to excel.

• The Unied States is still the dominant force in technology innovation, productivity and profits. But American don't quite realize how fast the rest of the world is catching up.

• "Accept what you are able to do and what you are not able to do.Accept the past as past, without denying it or discarding it. Learn to forgive yourself and to forgive others.Don't assume that it's too late to get involve." -- Tuesday with Morrie, Mitch Albom (1958)

• Americans becoming a postindustrial society that specializes in consumption and leisure.

• No worker from a rich country can equal the energy of someone trying to move out of poverty.

• History is more than just a quilt or a stick of furniture. It's time to use history to understand and appreciate the role of change in our lives.

• When you forgive someone, it doesn't excuse his actions; it frees you from stress and suffering.

• When she was just a few weeks old, and I was rocking her because she was crying. I just looked at her and said:

"Chelsea, you're never been a baby before, and I've never been a mother before, and we're just going to have to help each other get through this." -- Hillary Rodham Clinton

• Putting yourself in the moccassins of the victim.

• Everything worth doing is worth doing right.

Black Moshannon State Park

Alice, Brian, hubby, and I explored an 18-mile trail network in Black Moshannon State Park Trails this morning. The park is located in Centre County on PA Route 504, and it takes about 30 minutes driving time from State College. The park covers 3,394 acres of forests and wetlands that provide recreational opportunities for thousands of visitors. Besides hiking, other outdoor recreation activities that visitors can explore include boating, bicycling, fishing, camping, picnicking, hunting (special season), and ice sports (winter).

Our mission in this morning was to hike a 6-mile trail (around 10 km). Without doubt, we accomplished it, and our record was 2 hours (Whao!!). The consequence of this attainment is that I have footsore now. However, I enjoyed the feeling of walking in the wood - cold fresh air, wet grass, beautiful birds songs, blooming wild flowers and plants (wild blueberries and strawberries are blooming), and reading wildlife signs (such as tracks and droppings ... haha, this is fun!). I hope we will go hiking again in another 2-3 weeks. At that time, our mission will be ... eating blueberries and strawberries!

Interior vs. Exterior

In the book club meeting today we discussed Harper Lee's famous novel To Kill a Mockingbird. One of the scenes in chapter 12 was about Capulnia helped Jem and Scout dressed up nicely for church. Then I raised a question: Why do people have to dress up nice for church? Arthemesia answered my question. She said, "This is because people want to show their vanities to the God." Well, perhaps she is right, but I still don't understand why is it so important to show vanity to the God. In my country, we care about human interior more than exterior. In other words, humbleness, sincerity, and respect to the God is much more important than how they dress. We do have clothing codes for every religion in my country, for instance, Taoists and Buddhists should wear clean and appropriate dresses in temples, whereas Muslim has its special dress codes for Islamic women, like clothing must cover the entire body and must hang loose so that the shape of the body is not apparent. After all, I do not mean to compare the dress code of every religion because I know every religion has its own rules. I am just currious why people wear what they do.