a weekend at Chicago

I saw my husband, had some delicious food, enjoyed as many smoothies as I wanted, and did some window-shopping. And the entire trip was surprisingly smooth. No snow. No traffic.

It was good.

yum yum

One thing I like about Chicago is that they have the best smoothie here in Chinatown. Everytime I drove to Iowa, I debated with myself whether or not I should spend 1+ more hours on the road just to get the mango smoothie. It is just that good!

So you can image what was the first thing I did after I got here today. Now I am contently patting my belly. During my time here, I am going to have two smoothies per day!

Cinderella

Last night the topic for CC (conversation connection) was about the influential literatures in the American history.

While Brian P. was talking about Cinderella story, my thought was that "wow, she was really good at this game". See, the prince was having the time of his life with Cinderella. But she insisted on leaving in the middle of the party without any good explanation. Then she appeared another night, beautiful and charming. And then she left again mysteriously. Who could resist the temptation of chasing after her?

Don't get me wrong. I read the story long ago and I am aware of all the positive messages up there. I was just wondering why the prince had the determination to pursue her. After all, there are plenty of great girls out there. Tricky.

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Btw, this is the funniest thing ever. The one that followed this is funny too, but definitely not as good.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=wnVJZkDuVBM

a record

A lot of you will probably think it is nothing. Well, it is something to me. And those of you who have known me long enough would definitely understand why.

I made a new resolution today. I will drink less coffee and take more exercise. Shoot! Now that I wrote it down, it doesn't sound new at all.

Anyway, I didn't drink any coffee despite that I had very little sleep last night (don't know why). And the most important is that I WALKED home this evening after the class. During my 6+ years here, it was the very first time. It took me about 30 mins. I plan to do that more often when the weather is nice outside.

Someone, pat my shoulder and say "good job!". Or I will just do it myself.

something new, something old

Our new optical table arrived last Friday, which means I need to think about what we can do with it and the microscope on its way here.

I have been an experimentalist. But this is still something new to me. Everything is shrunk to about 1,000 times smaller. I don't know whether or not I could apply my experimental knowledge as skillfuly as before on this scale.

Too much to learn, too many problems to solve, yet too little time in hand.

more books

Hanging around in Borders has become one of my usuals. Today I lost my fight against the temptation of using their coupons, so I ended up with taking 3 books home, which are "the kite runner", "the elegant universe" and "eat, pray, love".

I have no idea of when I will have time to read them. I already have plenty of books with stickers in them. The only book I read everyday is the Bible.

I started to really hate books with poor printing or small fonts, which is probably one of the aging signs. So it is nice to check out the books that interest me first before getting them from amazon, if I had the control not to buy them right there in the store.

One of my dreams is to read without doing anything else for a certain period of time. Oh well, it sounds like a plan after I retire. Maybe I need to go with audio books by then.

# 42

I had nightmares again last night. It has been a while since the last time I had them. Maybe I need to keep praying about it.

Yesterday I found another interesting blog to read. It is written by a girl from the same church I go to. I hope she updates more so that I would be entertained while I don't want to work.

Her blog also inspires me to write more about my faith. Everyday I have those thoughts roaming in my head. It will be helpful to put aside some time to reflect on God's work in my life or the lives of people I know.

I suck at naming my entries. So I will do what Dave Matthews did.

yada yada

I haven't been in the mood to talk lately because of my frustration with my work. I know, I know, I shouldn't have tied my emotion to it, but I did.

Last Saturday/Sunday I slept for 12 hours. It was very rare for me now, so it was like a gift. It made me quite happy.

I will be super occupied this week. Only Monday night truely belonged to myself, which means 3 straight hours of "family guy" while I was doing other stuff.

Tonight I am going to the Tenebrae prayer service at a local Catholic church with some friends. It will be my first time to attend a Catholic service. And a prayer service! I am excited about it.

This Friday night I will be one of the hosts at NLC to welcome people from Conversation Connection who come to Good Friday service. And after the service the movie "passion of the christ" will be played. I watched it long time ago with Jia in the theatre when I wasn't a Christian yet. Although it will be interesting to watch it again, I am not sure if I want to do that.

I look forward to driving to Chicago next weekend. Enjoy some good food. Do some shopping. Spend some quality time with friends on my way there. Yup.

chills

http://www.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/meast/03/12/iraq.women/index.html

debugging

Warning: this post is going to be very nerdy.

I have been learning Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) using C language. And since last Friday, I have been strugging with the same problem. It was a very simple problem, but the results just didn't come out right, no matter how I modified my code.

This afternoon I read the code for the hundredth time. There it was! A huge bug! I was super excited about it. However, after I fixed the bug, the results didn't show much difference.

About ten minutes ago, I found another mistake. I am now confident (and pray) this is what has been crewing me up. It is rather simple, or even silly. See, in C program, you have to define the type of a parameter. And parameters of different types should not interract with each other without conversion. Yeah, it is very much like marriage between different religions.

Anywho, I happened to use "1/2" instead of "0.5" in some of the equations. So the program decided a lot of zeroes to my precious parameters. Ha!

I hope now it is satisfied.

hehehehe

lost kitten

This morning I went to meet my former advisor. There was a kitten in front of the building. I called her (I think it's her). She stopped running and sat there looking at me. For a moment she almost walked towards me. I felt very sorry that I might have given her some hope while I can't really take her home.

Someday.

everything has an end

It sounds depressing, but it is actually where the hope is. No matter how bad it is now, it will end sometime, even though in this world things don't always get better after something ends. For me, it is comforting to know that there is love and joy awaiting at the end of this tunnel if I keep walking the straight path.

A friend reminded me again of the mistake I easily make. I put too much faith in people. "The best of them will make mistakes, all of them will die." If I can't see God's hands through their affection towards me, I am doomed to get unnecessary disappointment when they fail.

down and heavy

My mood is down and my heart is heavy.

headache

This year since my husband is busy with his exam, I need to fill out all the tax forms for Federal, Indiana, Iowa, and Michigan. And what's up with Health Saving Account? I have no idea where I should put that information.

Someone help me!!!