a digital scrapbook

It rained today a lot. For some reason today’s gray skies left me feeling lethargic. In an effort to battle its grip on me, I hit the IMA for almost two hours. Okay, well twenty minutes of those two hours was me eating a roast beef sandwich in the cafe there, haha. But it felt good to move.

I miss Kung Fu. Am beginning to realize exactly how much dedication it took me to block off every Friday night and Saturday, to walk, bus, ferry, and drive to my studio for those couple hours a week to practice. For the last three years “What are you doing Fri–” was always followed with, “No. Can’t. Kung Fu.” I probably missed a practice once every six months. Currently I’m not taking any martial arts classes (four months now), the feasibility level of a mid-week commute given my current course load floats around a -10. Have been feeling idle, longing to reach out to grab, strike, and parry.

At the end of my workout, I went to the IMA studio and video recorded the last form I learned this summer. It’s hitting me that I’m forgetting my forms and I worry the lapse in memory won’t be temporary. Time to get them recorded while I still can so I can “remember” them in the future.

Friday night I drove home to Port Orchard to find my parents’ house blanketed in snow! It was awesome to come home to the quiet of my parents’ house and witness the snowglobe effect.

The backyard the next morning

The visit was short though. Was conscious for maybe three hours of it. Awoke Saturday morning for a day out with the fam in Federal Way, Chinatown, and lastly in Shoreline.

Drove up to Federal Way with my dad to pick up a futon from my cousin’s that I’ve inherited. Then it was lunch in Chinatown with the relatives. Learned about the closure of King Cafe and wished I had gone at least one last time. Used to go there with the family when I was little, where I would sit and watch the dumbwaiter with curiosity while refusing to touch the food because at age eight, all I wanted McDonald’s–not dim sum. I would eat the sweet bean-filled sesame balls (boochie boochie!) though, oddly enough. I’m glad I’ve learned better. I <3 dim sum.

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Some of you heard about the worst user I’ve helped at work, who worried about “the computer taking the ink off the photo” while trying to scan by inserting her photo into the CD-drive. Worse yet, the photo was of herself, an image she wished to adorn her resume with, a resume which listed computer skills as her first qualification. But I can’t tell that story here, as I find it more effective to flail my arms around as I retell the anguish of that day and my urge to hide under the desk everytime she arose from her computer in the lab. “How am I supposed to know that’s where you put CD’s?”

Today, it was the woman who just now went up to the desk asking me to extend the library’s wireless access to her classroom upstairs. “Why can’t you do it? Can’t your supervisor do it? We use laptops in class. It’d be really really nice if you could do that.” Then she tried explaining to me how wireless Internet uses microwaves (or was it cell phone technology?) and reasoned it can’t be difficult for me to “bring it upstairs” or to extend the wireless access everywhere in Health Sciences. Right, let me leave my desk and do that real quick. I’ll bring the microwaves you speak of.