This winter in Washington state was the most intensed in the years I’ve been living here. Every month since December through March we had more than an inch of snow. Just today there was flurries of snow mixing in with the rain. Man I wish I was somewhere warm. One thing that comforts me through this, has been a tasty hot cup of cafe latte…

Reading an article in th WSJ today on the occasion of the new theater release of the movie The curious Case of Benjamin Button, I came across this syndrome which, quoted, “makes objects (including one’s own body parts) seem smaller, larger, closer or more distant than they really are. It’s more common in childhood, often at the onset of sleep, and may disappear by adulthood.” Thus I realized this was what I occasionally experienced in my childhood a couple times when I was sick, lying in bed half asleep and half awake. Interesting, they even have a name for that.

We drove down to Portland OR on the afternoon of Dec 24th and stay with relatives for Christmas. We haven’t had this much snow for a decade, so it’s a good thing that we had an AWD sedan, and it provided a rare opportunity to put the car’s AWD system to the test. Once put into Snow mode, it had no problem navigating the treacherous hilly side roads which were covered with as much as 6″ of snow. We’re glad that we bought the AWD model of the car, it paid for itself right there.
After this winter season, I’m sure the car wash stations would be in for a good business.

This is a very big deal for Seattle, which, despite being the northernmost major US city, rarely got prolonged snow or low temperatures. The last comparable snow level in Seattle was in December 1996. This time, we got 7 inches in our house, then 3 more inches the following night. This hilly city makes driving in the snow challenging. This artic air lingered around already more than a week long, dipping temperatures at nights down to 17, then 12F.

9am Saturday morning

Seattle has been one week into this artic cold stretch, with temperatures dipping into the teens in our area. Of all the years we’ve lived here, this easily is the coldest stretch we’ve known. Earlier in the week, I think it’s Monday night, it got down to 16°F. Then last night it was 12°F, or -11°C!

The snow was dry and glittered like diamond dusts. So far I’ve left the 2 pond pumps running, and 1 de-icer heater in each pond. Hope the koi will come out OK after this record cold.

We love nature with all its unpredictability and thus making it even more beautiful. This desire to recreate nature for our enjoyment has driven us to creating the pond that we have today in our backyard.

With the pond comes the fish. From fancy comets and sarasas, to domestic koi. Which lead us naturally to the debate of whether a natural pond can reconcile with the fancy koi. If you are a koi purist, this is a no-no. Koi must be kept in pristine crystal clear water in a “pond” that has a bottom drain, with no rocks or water plants in it. But that’s just too unnatural for our taste. We want to savor nature for its own sake, not taking a piece of nature out of its place and put it in a sterile environment with too much apparent artificiality. I must give it to the Japanese, they are masters in this respect: think about bonsai and nishikigoi.

Thus we stay away from imported koi, and go with the stronger domestic koi instead. And we have enjoyed so much our rock pond with our goldfish and koi all together in it, for the last 5 years. So let others chase after the purist koi that they can show off in their clean blue tanks. We rather sit around our pond and feed our happy fish, watch them play under the lily pads, and enjoy our backyard.

This is a French animated short film which was nominated for the 2007 Oscar but didn’t win.

It is a hilarious short with a great funny twist at the end, with nice plays on religious scams and the relativity of luck. The word pigeon here means a sucker.

Look for it in A Collection of 2007 Academy Award Nominated Short Films.

The new search engine just made its debut today. Pronounced “cool”.

Besides the UI eye candies, I’m not cool the 2 quick searches I tried there:

1. “bibo”: my website is not found! The excerpts shown in several of the presented links are not real, or from domain parking sites. And instead it shows a lot of stuff from other spellings like bebo

2. “Johnny A”: one of my favorite guitarists, again not found. I just bought one of his CDs last week.

This is my first try at blogging, and I intend to use this first for my Thought of the Day. I will move all my previous Thoughts here, and start posting my Thoughts here from now on. Then I’ll see how to integrate this into my website.