Since my parents weren’t in town, my husband, kid and I had a lot of time to ourselves this holdiay season. We went to Oakland Chinatown several times. I spent much of my childhood there, so I was reminiscing a lot.
The last day in town, we went to a rec center near my parents’ house. It was built a number of years ago, but I was already grown so I never really paid attention to it. We went there for the playground so my kid could expend some energy.
I made this awesome Holiday CD for our family gathering, but could not find a working CD player at my parents’ house. Bummer. I could only get my fix in the car while traveling between my parents’ house, Oakland Chinatown and my sister’s place.
We traveled to California for Christmas this year. We have learned three things.
1) Bring food to eat at the airport. The food there is so expensive that I was dreaming of the $3 hot dogs they had at Disneyland. I got my husband a diet Coke and now my kid has to delay going to college by a year.
2) Never schedule travel that will make your 2 yr old miss her nap. She was at wit’s end on the flight back because it was 3pm and she had not had her nap yet.
3) Seriously consider putting your 2yr old in a diaper while on the plane even if she is potty training. She had just woken up from her nap on my husband’s lap and peed on him. We changed her clothes and then she peed on me. At least she told me she needed to potty, but what could I do? We were on the ground waiting for the other passengers to deboard.
I was just checking out the language feature on Jonathan’s blog. It’s pretty cool. I checked out the Chinese translation. I assume it is direct translation of the English version. I can’t read it. But it’s cool nonetheless because I can direct my mom and dad to the site. I don’t know how to explain to them what Sun does, aside from “we sell big computers.” My Chinese vocabulary is equivalent to a 3 year olds and their English is about 4th grade level. Needless to say, there is a bit of a communication gap when we aren’t talking about food or my kid.
We went sledding in our backyard this weekend. It’s like a snow park back there. My husband and I took a couple of runs each with our kid. The last couple of runs she did herself. She loved it. Kept saying, “Again-Again” after each run. Here’s a pic of the backyard.
I am finally in the Christmas spirit. I was on iTunes yesterday, downloading a bunch of songs for our holiday CD. We probably own most of these songs, but it’s worth $.99 to not have to go through and record from CDs that are in the basement somewhere. But I digress. I did have to sift through about 850 versions of O Holy Night and even more of Silent Night. I am currently rocking out to God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen by the Barenaked Ladies and Sarah McLaughlin. Here’s a list of the tracks. Just enough for one CD.
Blue Christmas – Elvis
Sleigh Ride – The Ronettes
Last Christmas – Wham!
O Little Town of Bethlehem – Elvis
Happy Xmas – Sarah McLaughlin
Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas – Christina Aguilera
Angels We Have Heard on High – Harbour Voices
Mele Kalikimaka – Bing Crosby
I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus – The Ronettes
All I Want for Christmas is You – Mariah Carey
The Little Drummer Boy – Johnny Cash
Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree – Brenda Lee
White Christmas – Bing Crosby
Santa Baby – Eartha Kitt
God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen – Barenaked Ladies
Baby, It’s Cold Outside – Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong
Do You Hear What I Hear – Martina McBride
Hark the Herald Angels Sing – The Blenders
Silent Night – Carpenters
O Holy Night – Jewel
Christmas – Darlene Love
Silver Bells – Bing Crosby
I’ll Be Home for Christmas – Vanessa Williams
I found out something that breaks my heart. One of the kids in my daughter’s class at day care is adopted. What breaks my heart is that his parents have to return him to a biological mother who didn’t want him.
He was a child born of surrogacy to a gay couple. The biological father, one of the gay men, was found guilty of being in the US illegally and of fraud and is now jailed in California. He never relenquished his rights. The mother had relenquished her rights in a letter, but Judge Lubeck found the letter flawed. The Worthington’s adoption petition was denied, but the judge left Anthony in their care.
The mother has since changed her mind and wants custody. The biological father wants his sister to have custody while he is in prison. There are so many people who want little Anthony, but who is best for him?
As I understand it, Anthony will have return to his biological mother soon. According to the Deseret News she regrets having put him up for adoption, regrets the surrogacy arrangement. But I heard that she has advertised, yet again, to be a surrogate.
I feel so awful for Anthony. He has been with the Worthingtons since he was 3 months old. He’s over 2 now and the Worthingtons are all he knows. I hope that whatever decision is made is actually in Anthony’s best interest and not on the whim of people who happen to be his biological parents.
You can tell that a lot of people are working form home based on the products created to serve them. Enter “Thriving Office”. They make an audio track that provides an illusion of a thriving office. You can play this during conference calls to mask the squealing baby and barking dog endemic to WFHers. Or you could put yourselves on mute.
We were watching our Tivo’d Survivor last night. (Love the Tivo) I got to say that I am proud an Asian American won, even though he is not Chinese. 
I think at one point Jeff Probst said that this season displayed the greatest diversity in the contestants. It’s sad that it was only accomplished by pitting the races against each other first.
I think Yul’s family and friends on stage, hugging and congratulating him was the first time, perhaps only time, I have seen that many Asian faces on network TV. It’s definitely more Asian faces than I have seen in SLC.
I’m working on a project to integrate a couple of exec escalation channels for the field. We are using a sigma framework for the project and I have a question. Who is the customer? I figured that since the purpose of the process is to get the Customer facing folks (sales, support and professional services) help with Customer issues where existing processes can’t help, the customer would be the field. Or should it be the external Customer? Hopefully, the end result of all we do is for an improved Customer experience, but how can we measure that? Especially, if some issues we try to resolve before it actually impacts the Customer? Where do we draw the line when we are defining the customer of a process?