Hills of Hayward

Christine and I take turns hanging out with Anders in the afternoons. Sometimes we do what Anders wants to do, which is invariably either the library or the park. Some days, we do what we want to do like go to the mall, hardware store, go to the bank, or run errands.

On the days that Christine and Anders are out romping, I try to head out to the Hayward Hills trail in the next canyon over. It is 3.5 miles of uphill and downhill rolling terrain. The entire trail is under a dense canopy of trees that shelters hikers even on the hottest days. The trail follows a two streams that carve out the canyon face.

What I like about the trail is that it changes every time I hike. The steep terrain makes it hard for the trees to establish a firm foothold. Any rainstorm will cause a number of weaker to trees to fall. The dense vegetation amplifies the competition for sunlight. You see trees bending their trunks, growing parallel to the ground, to work around other more established trees. Naturally, these two factors don’t work well together, and calamity ensues, big trees fall, some with trunks larger than my arms in a bear hug.

I used to run these trails when I was in better condition. Lately, I’ve been trying to slow down. Bringing my camera along with me, I had goals other than to use nature as a treadmill and spend more time in appreciation.

We have an abundance of entries from designers all over the interwebs… over 100 logos! I weeded the logos down to the final 5 below. All of you out there can help us choose which logo to use by giving your opinion in the comments.

Peter and I took over this piano video lesson website earlier this year. This site shows video lessons of popular songs (not classical) for users of all ages to learn by ear. The emphasis of the site isn’t to properly learn piano, but to have fun and play the songs you like.

Seems like I lied.. I narrowed it down to 6 choices. Our site will have a light background, so focus on the logo examples with white/gray backgrounds.

Please put your favorite in the comments section.

EDIT: 8-16-2010

New Logo G game in last night.

Somehow I was already annoyed by many things this past Tuesday and here came the UPS guy.  I happened to be around so I signed the package.  However, my nanny was in such a hurry to call Harrison to pick up the package even while I was signing.  “Didn’t you see that I’m signing the package already?!”, was thinking in my head.  I was annoyed again!

It turned out that it was my birthday gift and Harrison has been coming upstairs to check on the delivery the whole day!  LOL…

My nanny and I were chatting after dinner and she accidentally spilled out that we’ll not eat at home this past Friday according to Harrison.  I couldn’t recall any lunch plan with friends until I realized she was referring to the dinner.  So both surprises planned by Harrison were ruined at this point. 

But I love my gift.  Harrison bought me a new 24″ all-in-one Acer desktop with everything configured, all needed programs installed and all my data transferred without me even noticing when he did it.  The new computer is so fast and watching TV or movies on this monitor is such a joy.  (Hehe, yes, I am addicted to the TV series, The Wire and Battlestar Galactica these days.)

Anders didn’t quite understand birthday vs. people and kept saying, “It’s my brirthday, I want my birthday cake!”  We had a Starbucks zucchini muffin, an iced mocha and Anders’ Mother’s Day gift that he made at school.  Harrison and I had dinner at Kirala in Berkeley.  I haven’t had such a good chawanmushi for a long time.

Thanks to all dear friends who gave me your birthday wishes!  It was a nice day and hopefully a nice coming year too.

It’s been more than two months since Anders started his school.

We started visiting various schools in the neighborhoods trying to find a suitable one for Anders.  He was already 2 years old and started having more energy than he could spend at home and parks for his daily routines.  After a few visits, we decided to send him to a Montessori school.

The first day, he was happy to go to school since he didn’t know that Mommy will not stay there with him.  I sneaked out.  The second day after he realized this important fact, he started crying on the way to school and kept saying that he wanted to go to the library instead of school.  The “why” is easy to think of – because Mommy always stayed with him at the library for the play and learn classes.  After exact 1 weeks of crying in the morning, surprisingly he stopped all of a sudden and started liking to go to school everyday.

Three weeks after he started in January, it was a Saturday morning and Anders kept bothering me asking for going to school…  “Mommy, I want to go to the school!”

Until now, he still likes to go to school every morning and seems to have progresses day by day in different aspects.  He now does more activities at school, starts speaking English in sentences, stops pushing other kids, recognizes numbers and letters, picks up lots more meaningful and surprising words in Chinese, sings different songs from the start to the end, runs much faster and steadier and so much more…

We’re glad to see that he’s happy at school.

自從妹妹開始會玩以後, 喝奶總是很不乖, 喝喝停停, 只知道要玩．

今天早上妹妹又沒心喝奶了，哥哥在旁邊聽到阿姨在唸妹妹，馬上骑著他心愛的腳踏車，咚咚咚咚地到了他自己每次不乖被關的 “小屋屋” (一間黑黑的儲藏室) ，叫著，”妹妹呀! 這裡有一個小屋屋唷!　這裡有一個小屋屋唷!” 接著又咚咚咚咚地骑到妹妹旁邊，有模有樣地說，”壞蛋妹妹!　壞蛋妹妹!”

不知道妹妹長大後還要被哥哥管多久呢?!　我親愛的兩個妹妹, 文文和珊珊, 一定覺得這情景很熟悉吧!　哈哈!