At 4:00 AM a couple nights ago, Christine and I were hearing intermittent sounds that were jolting us awake. They were soft noises, semi-muffled, which made it hard to determine what it was. After multiple trips walking around the house, the sounds stopped.

Some sounds we have heard in the night are much more obvious — neighborhood dog running through the woods and barking at the moon, deer walking on our wood deck, or the screech of surprised turkeys. This sound we couldn’t identify.

We found out what the sound was last night. An owl has taken residence in one of our trees.

Our redwood trees tell us that the end of summer has arrived. Sun-dried and wind-swept petals gather in a corner.

	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…

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.

Gosh, I still can’t believe this could have happened. Let me tell you the story.

Harrison was in San Diego with Paul for the Anime convention so I also took Anders and the nanny out for lunch and a walk in the mall.  Since I have to fit Anders’ stroller in the trunk, I took the new bedsheets sets I bought out from the car and left it at the front door thinking it’s safe here and I’ll also be back soon in a few hours.

By 5:00 pm, we arrived home but the front door became a little bit different…  Yeah, it’s too clean.  I suddenly realized that everything around the front door disappeared.  The things includes a foldable outdoor table rolled up in a green bag (kinda like Yoga mat bag), a Macy’s shopping bag with new bedsheets and two rolls of carpets left over from our installations.  They were all gone.  I thought we had a break-in and ran into the house to check on stuffs.  Nope!  Everything is fine.  I asked Qiang who was working downstairs if anyone came by.  He said that some gal knocked on the door and also walked around the house but he didn’t bother to check… Sigh!

For the whole time, I thought someone stole my stuffs but it’s sooooo weird… Why did she/he want junks like those?  I blamed myself by not putting things in place and was very upset about my new bedsheets.  However, there was nothing I can do.  I made sure that those were the only things missing then I started taking care of other house chores.

Then I went to check my missed calls and voice mails on my cell phone.  Someone from the post office left me a message that she came for package pickups but didn’t see any packges at the front door.  When I called back, it turned out that she took every single thing at the front door away to the post office since she didn’t see any “packages”.  Can you believe this?  They were absolutely not wrapped.  There were no shipping postage and labels.  The carpets were not even tied up.  And what made it worse was that when I called the gal who came by, her only answer to all my questions was “I don’t remember.”  It took her a long time to “remember” the things she “seemed” to take away when it only happened 3 hours ago.

I don’t know what to say.  Can someone be so stupid?  Or it’s just someone who didn’t take his/her job seriously.  People should have pride in what they do.