When life gives you lemons, make lemonade. Press play below.

Next year, I expect Asians to be portrayed as not intellectual enough for American society.

	VS
Pack Rat		Materialistic Minimalist

Christine can be described as a pack-rat or hoarder; she still has boxes of memorabilia from her first job and even her notes and ledgers from her college days.

I am best described as a Materialistic Minimalist.  Although, I do have some pack-rat tendencies, I try to keep those efforts in the virtual or digital worlds where everything is neatly encapsulated in a RAID storage device.  In the real world, the less I possess, the better I feel.

Needless to say, sometimes the rat and the minimalist don’t see eye to eye.  So they made a bet.  If the rat organizes her two desks and office floor such that they are free from any loose papers or debris for two months, the minimalist will get rid of any old raggedy t-shirts or shorts that the rat objects to.  The minimalist will also be required to purchase new t-shirts or shorts to replace said items.

Oh the horror for the minimalist… throwing out perfectly functional clothes, and even worse, replacing them with new ones!

To be continued…

My cousin Diana will be a sophomore at the National Taiwan University next year.  She is spending a couple weeks in the Bay Area to visit a family friend.  We kidnapped her for a handful days and subjected her to:

• Mexican enchilada verdes
• Japanese fried chicken
• A visit to Stanford
• 200-person tour of Berkeley
• Intense Wii boxing workout session
• Hayao Miyazaki’s Nausicaa: Valley of the Wind
• 2/3 pound beef patty hamburger at Fuddrucker’s
• Krispy Kreme Donuts
  
• Long conversations

We hope to see her more in the future.

Couple of little priceless moments from the last week:

• Trying to convince Christine that the nusery rhyme was in fact “Itchy Bitchy Spider”
• Anders points at things he wants to examine
• Taking Anders on his first hiking adventure and he demands to have Mom hold him when we go uphills
• Anders demands to drink what we drink during meals
• Pulling a bait and switch by giving Anders our cup, but filled with soymilk
• Tivo’ing every single second of NBC Olympic coverage on 4 channels
• Staying up to wee hours watching the Olympics on Tivo
• Cassandra and Mike’s Amia Bakery Tres Leches cake… yum
• Christine insisting that the Hayward Zuchini festival was pronounced ZU-CHEE-NEE
• Fried zuchini sticks at the festival were out of this world
• Anders now can kneel on the ground
• Playing catch with Anders, he sometimes throws the ball back

We have known about the Japanese Garden in Hayward for quite a while, but have not made a trip out there until this last weekend.  This garden was quite the hot spot for photographers.  We ran into my friend Ricky Wong who was doing a photo shoot for a wedding party.