Liam Used the Toilet Today

Liam after taking a bath this evening was walking around the living room naked like he usually does before settling down for a diaper. He told Ahmie "potty" and lead her to the bathroom and stood on the stool and peed into the toilet.

Hopefully, he is ready for potty training.

Well I'm Back ... (home that is)

The trip back to New Rochelle was eventful and while traveling I took notes on my trusty palm pilot, but I need to go back and finish editing and adding to those entries as I took spare moments to jot down my thoughts. Hopefully they will be posted soon.

Thoughts on Changes in the Old Neighborhood

Audioblogger Test

Old Friends don't die or do they?

(I know I haven't written at all for the past several months and I should write more often, but you know that life happens while your making plans to something else)

Every once in a while I get an urge to try to get back in touch with old friends. This would not be very difficult if I was an organized person. For those who know me, they should know that being organized is a difficult thing for me. Having a two year old in the house does not help either.

I have a crate that I have my very most important things in the world. I try to rifle through them and find things that I do not need as urgently and sort that out somewhere else and then place other things that I do hold high in importance in. Mostly I have old journals and yearbooks that I hold for memory and names. I also have correspondences filed in there for recollection.

Usually these are the same times that I get nostalgic and have an urge to get in contact with friends that I have lost touch. So if I know you and have not seen or have talked with you in the past year look out, I may just give you an e-mail or possibly a phone call to try to get back in touch.

With Google on my side who knows who I may find!

When Stepfamilies don't mix

I haven't written much lately but I was watching Primetime tonight and was outraged by their story on Stepfamilies. It was shocking to find out that within the next few years that there will be more stepfamilies then the traditional first marriage family. However what was more shocking was the segment on the Nelson family where the segments shown on how the parents Joe and Lynn targeted the daughter Kyle who came from Joe's first marriage. Kyle is a teenager who had depression bouts and ADD. She lives in a home environment where she is belittled and terrorized by her parents on a regular basis. On one occasion shown in the segment Joe (father) jumped on top of Kyle and slapped her many times. I was shocked that there was no mention of Child Protective Services called on the Nelson family by the producers of the segment. I was so upset that I wrote this letter to Primetime.

All of the people involved in this program dealing with the Nelson family should
be ashamed of yourselves. It is abhorrent that when the abuse surfaced the story
should have stopped there. But instead of doing the right thing you allowed the
girl Kyle to be subjected to further verbal and physical abuse. The abuse does
not end at her, your own footage shows that the other children in the Nelson
household are clearly affected by the verbal abuse, the children covering their
ears and saying prayers is telling.

From the shaping of the story there seemedto be NO consequence for the parents in the Nelson family to the physical abuse and verbal abuse that they inflicted on Kyle and the other children. Child protective service should have been called the moment you observed abuse.

The message that I get from watching your program is that it is OKAY to physically
and verbally abuse your children, BECAUSE there appeared to be no consequence.

I hope that the people involved in the production of the Nelson family segment,
are found guilty of child neglect and endangerment because they failed to their
human duty to report the abuse of the children in that family.

Anyway from reading the message boards for Primetime I believe the Nelsons address is this Joe and Lynn Nelson 1166 Fletcher Farm Road Bloomingdale, NY 12913
I hope that CPS is called upon that family and that the remaining children in that family will be given a better environment to live while the "parents" get the help that they desperately need.

And I hope the Primetime segment producers gets charged and found with child endangerment.

Meeting Strangers

Last week I finally sat down for an entire service at church. Usually I try to sit for the service but eventually I would have to walk Liam down to the Nursery room so that he could play and not be too distracting in the sanctuary. The sermon last Sunday was titled "Guests in our own home." The ministers were talking about meeting strangers, the ones without and the ones within. It was a very moving service, or perhaps it was so moving because this is the first time I attended service with Liam in the Nursery. Anyway during the sermon I was thinking about the strangers that I have meet on my travels on the Greyhound bus.
Before I met and started dating Ahmie I went everywhere by bus. I grew up in the suburbs of New York City; I grew up riding the subway and the busses everywhere. I remember before my dad bought a car we took the train and subway to Chinatown Sunday for Chinese school and grocery shopping. As I grew up I went into the City all by myself to wander around, go to shops and museums, I loved being able to go anywhere I wanted by public transit. As my junior year in high school rolled by I started to visit colleges on my own by taking the Greyhound. I visited University of Rochester, Cornell University, and Case Western Reserve University (now known as Case).

For the most part the University visits were fairly generic and did not stand out very much in my memory. What do stick in my mind were the discussions that I had with some of the people traveling on the Greyhound with me. I remember a discussion that I had with an elderly gentleman on my way to Cornell. The elderly man was taking the bus to visit some family upstate. Although the key points of the discussion are lost in my mind, what I remember was camaraderie and the almost instant connection we had when discussing the many topics we talked about, I remember talking about Kierkgarrd and existentialist philosophy.
I also remembered talking with a black gentleman on my way to Cleveland to visit Case we talked about family and family obligations and how he is helping his sister move and that is what families do for each other riding hundreds of miles to help move and drive the moving truck. What I thought about during the service was that I was able to open up to strangers, not necessarily minute details about my life. But rather having an honest discussion with no pretense.
Perhaps it is my introverted nature that I find these transient conversations worth thinking about. I think it is being in transit that people are the most purely themselves, knowing that the scenery will change as surely as the people will change there is no need to pretend to be someone that you are not. Since the people encountered while traveling, are not in the usual cast of characters in ones life story, there is no need to be guarded and play the same role that one normally plays.

Sometimes I miss riding the Greyhound.

Looking into the long past

Over the Christmas break I worked on digitizing the family tree. It was quite interesting work, apparently my family from Liam goes back twenty nine generations. From the fourteenth generation on there was detailed description of birth day on the Chinese lunar calendar, birth year under which emperor's rule, marital status, sons born, and when they died. I know that at least the family goes back to the Qing Dynasty but what my parents have is only a copy of the cliftnotes version of the actual family history, apparently there is an entire box of books with family history somewhere out there my father believes with one of the uncles.

My parents want to at least scan in the documents so that there will be a record somewhere in case the paper copy disappears. I want to do one better, I want to do as through a genealogists work up with a computer program so that we can have a more meaningful understanding of where and when my ancestors existed. Also I would like to have that genealogy reach to the modern generation of Yeung/Young family members (the east coast 楊 are spelled Ye/the west coast 楊 are spelled Yo). My father is one of ten children and from looking in the history my grandfather had the largest family in history. My grandfather and grandmother had 6 sons and ironically of those six sons only three of those sons had male children, which would make it my generation there are in total four male children who carry the family name, two already have children, myself and a cousin in California who is the son of my fifth uncle. My cousin Gene who is not really into making a family, and my brother Marvin. I would love to see the Yeung family name carried on to future generations.

Of course there are a number of problems in finding a genealogy program for recording the family history.

1. That is all of my ancestors had Chinese names, therefore any software I use must be able to support Chinese characters if nothing else just for their names.
   
2. I want to use a program that will exist for years and generations to come so I need a program that will be continued to be upgraded for a long time.
   
3. I don't really know enough Chinese to do justice for my ancestor's history.

I have been looking for a software that will do family trees but the only one that I have a sustained interest is Personal Ancestral File which is published by the Church of the Latter Day Saints. I do not agree with the beliefs and practices of the Mormon church, but the thing that they do well is genealogy, I know that this software will be supported for years to come since they have a fascination with genealogy.

It is somewhat humbling to realize that I am part of a much larger family, a family that has history that goes into the past for hundreds of years, that has survived war, plague, and hardship that are inconceivable today. I look at Liam and hope that he will help carry the family name for generations to come. On the other hand I hope there will be a world for Liam's children and his children's children to inhabit. I fear that humanity may have reached its peak, I fear that life will become increasingly harder, our resources depleting, the rise of extremism all around the world. I fear that within 30 generations humanity will cease to matter because we would have choked ourselves out of the picture with war and or pollution.

I hope that thirty generations from now some one like me is pondering the same questions as they try to create or update a family history for the Yeung family.

Garvin, its nice to meet you my name is Garvin

When I post enteries on the blog I often click on the Next Blog button and scan for interesting blogs to read while I perculate my thoughts. Well tonight I stumbled upon GARVIN. From scanning his blog and reading his profile I find some interesting similarities between us.

1. He is Canadian and I was born in Canada.
2. He is Chinese or of Chinese heritage and I am also Chinese.
   
3. He likes pho and I like pho.
4. He is an Aries and I am and Aries also.
5. He is a technophile and I am a technophile.
6. He dislikes the Bush Whitehouse, I also dislike the Bush Whitehouse.

I emailed him, I hope that he writes back.

What a strange little world.

The Christmas Plague

I love teaching; there are very few jobs where you can have Christmas and New Years off and all the days in between. The trade off of course is that when you are teaching the rest of the year you do not have a life.
I have been working myself too hard in December. It seems for me work doubles when I am preparing for time off, you know tying up loose ends, grading everything and so on. So naturally when I have some down time I get sick, almost no fail. I started feeling unwell Saturday the 24th and by Christmas I got full blown sick, coughing, feeling like you cannot breathe because you are so congested, ears clogged, sinuses hurting because you are stuffed up.
I should have known something was coming up when my ears felt like something were inside them on Wednesday the 20th. As usual I went on, and kept going on and on.
My parents arrived Friday Dec 23rd, of course Ahmie and I spent all day cleaning preparing for my parents visit. It was not too bad mess wise, we are settling in our apartment and much of our things have a place. They came on Greyhound and arrived about 7 in the morning, I picked them up and showed them a little bit of Cleveland, and where I work. Liam slept in that morning and Ahmie and I got a chance to chat with my parents, which was nice, and Liam had a chance to sleep well and greeted his grandparents (nai-nai, and yeh-yeh) with bright eyes and full of cheer. It has been several months since Liam has seen them. Later that day we went out for Dim sum at C & Y Chinese restaurant. We also invited our friends from church Serena, Jasmine (who returned from her first semester at college), Carlos and Sharon (Serena's parents). The food was wonderful; it was interesting having dim sum with two vegetarians. They do have some excellent dim-sum dishes for vegetarians. Afterwards we did some shopping for Asian goods.

We decided to lay low for the rest of Friday and Saturday to have a nice dinner, relax and enjoy each other's company. Saturday night we attended the Christmas Eve service at Westshore. Saturday night we enjoyed a delicious turkey (which started the week of turkey leftovers, turkey soup, turkey lo-mien, turkey fried rice and so on). Sunday we opened our Christmas gifts before church. I started feeling unwell Sunday morning, my throat started getting horse before church, however I was convinced to do a reading that morning and apparently I did some justice to the piece even though my voice was a little horse. I got to feeling really unwell Sunday afternoon, I had to sleep a little bit and I really felt sick.
I felt unwell until Wednesday, which meant I could not participate in the usual after Christmas bonanza of clearance deals, probably a good thing. Of course Wednesday was when I went to see my doctor. The doctor gave me a prescription for antibiotics, and a steroid/broncodialator for my cold and chest congestion. I started feeling better almost right away.


Starting Thursday I worked on scanning in some family documents for my Dad. By then everyone at the apartment was feeling a little under the weather except my Mom. Ahmie and Liam had a bit of a cough, and dad was coughing also. None of them got as bad as I did.


My parents returned to New York on Sunday night and it was a very long but enjoyable visit from my parents.

Christmas Service

Even though I was feeling sick on Christmas day, my parents and my family all went to church on Christmas day. The service was very interesting, the congregants were asked to share something with the congregation, which was very nice. I was asked to do a reading for a fellow church member; I was told that he could not read what he wanted to share with out getting very choked up. I agreed to do so even though my throat was full of phlegm and my voice seems to be on the verge of going.

I got the reading, it was titled Christmas at Aunt Ida's by Dick Feagler who is a long time columnist at the Cleveland Plain Dealer. I read the column twice before I read it aloud before the congregation. I was very moved by this piece, since I am so moved I would like to share this to the readers of this blog out there in the blogsphere.

Christmas at Aunt Ida's

Sunday, December 25, 2005

Dick Feagler

Plain Dealer Columnist

With a nod by Dick Feagler to the issues of today, we republish his Christmas column, which first appeared in The Plain Dealer in 1993.

On Christmas, when I was a kid, we all went over to my Aunt Ida's house -- an old house in the old neighborhood.

Just what did you think I was going to do today? Talk about politics? The chaos and uncertainties of Iraq? All of our fellow Americans who dream of a white Christmas but see one the color of sand? All of the fears and uncertainties that lie before us? Not today, my friend. No fears today. Not on the day when an angel once said, "Fear not!"

Let us rest our weary brains. Let us consider matters more lasting than the day's headlines. Let us turn our backs on all earthbound dramas and traumas. Let us ignore notorious tyrants made famous in headlines for their infamy. Let us visit some people whose names get into the newspaper only when they die. And even then, just in the tiny type of the death notices.

Let's go to my Aunt Ida's house. Come on. It'll only take a couple of minutes.

You'll be home in time for the 11 o'clock news, I promise you.

The house wasn't far from the steel mills, and the fallout from the mills made the dirt in Aunt Ida's yard black and rich. When the wind was wrong, the air in the neighborhood smelled like a chem lab. Breathing it might have been bad, but nobody knew that then. My Aunt Ida had great luck with flowers.

On Christmas, we'd all be there. The old folks, the young folks and the kids. The young folks were the young men and their wives still recovering from the great upheaval of World War II. The old folks could remember World War I.

The kids, like me, weren't old enough to remember much. We were busy collecting memories, and this is one of them.

There was no TV. The only one among us who had a TV was my cousin Stanley, who sold them. He hasn't yet sold one to any of the rest of the family, but he keeps trying. He knows it's only a matter of time. For, what isn't?

"I have a 10-inch screen," he tells us, a cigar stuck in the corner of his mouth, a tall brown beer bottle at his elbow. He's sitting at the dining room table with the rest of the young men, playing pinochle. You'll notice that they have all, just for a little while, assumed the present tense. A Christmas present tense.

"They are never going to be able to make a screen bigger than 10 inches that will give you a decent picture," Cousin Stanley lectures. "According to the laws of electronics, 10 inches is as big as you can go."

The Army Air Corps gave Cousin Stanley a job fixing radios. That's where he got his electronic knowledge. So my Uncle Ziggy, who flushed out snipers on Okinawa, and my Cousin Melvin, who knocked out tanks in Italy, listen to Stanley with respect. Stanley - the trumpeter of the dawn of the age of television.

By now, the tiny type has recorded Stanley's name. And Ziggy's. Melvin's, too. And my Aunt Ida's. Time killed them. The tanks couldn't do it and the snipers couldn't do it. But Time? It does it every time.

Time erased my cousin Billy's name. He crossed the Rhine River in the bloody, final act of his war. He lived through obscene and notorious battlefields. He died at 85 cutting wood in his front yard in Parma.

Time is the inevitable eraser, but it does not erase cleanly. If you look hard enough, you can still see traces of them all, faintly. And if you look even harder - why they are right here!

The women are gathered in the living room, talking about babies and recipes and operations. Nylon stockings that have come back again, so you can throw the leg makeup away. Electric stoves that practically cook your meal for you. Jobs they can quit now - are expected to quit now - because the men have come back from the war.

Their woman talk would make a feminist despair. They talk of "female trouble" and permanent waves. And the Christmas crowds at Halle's and Taylor's and Bailey's. And the big Sterling-Lindner tree that looked even a little bigger this year. And Hough bake shop cookies. And trolley cars that turn on Public Square, showering the safety zones with a blizzard of sparks.

Jay Leno is not here. I told you, there is no television set, except the one Stanley is describing - sketching it in the air with the smoke from his cigar. Nobody has bothered to turn the radio on. There is just talk - endless, trivial, sometimes mysterious. Sometimes, if a kid comes into the room, the talk suddenly stops. "Ix-nay," one of the aunts will say. "Little pitchers have big ears." There are things, in this long-ago time, that a kid is not supposed to know about. If for some unfathomable reason anybody said the word "condom," it would take the room an hour to recover its equilibrium.

Where are the kids? Would you mind, my friend, if I went in search of myself? It won't take long. I know just where to look.

I am with my cousins in the unheated bedroom at the back of the old house. We are burrowing under the piles of coats that have been dumped on the bed. Moutons, mostly, with a few Persian lambs, for animals do not yet have rights. Just a glimpse of myself is all I want. I don't want to look too hard. Because for me, this trip is a wistful mirror.

The bedroom door opens and Aunt Ida is standing in a rectangle of light.

"You kids go into the living room now," she says. "Santa Claus is coming soon."

We go. And as soon as we leave, Aunt Ida opens a bureau drawer, reaches under some flannel sheets and pulls out a moth-eaten Santa Claus suit and a scraggly beard. The pants of this suit have long since disintegrated. So my Aunt Ida hikes up her dress and yanks on a pair of my uncle's blue serge pants. Over these she tugs galoshes.

She takes a pillow from the bed and plucks off the pillowcase. She stuffs the pillow under the Santa jacket to give herself a tummy. She fills the pillowcase with toys from Woolworth's, Kresge's and Grant's She puts on the beard, the cap. She tiptoes out into the hall. Then out the back door and into the night - air so cold it makes her nose sting, sky lit with a faint glow from the mills.

Around the house she goes and up on the side porch. She pauses and peeks in the window.

She sees what we see now. Me at 7. My young, handsome father and pretty mother.

(Death took my mother gently, during a nap. My father followed her the next year. But memory brings them back now, and makes them young again.)

On the frosty porch, my Aunt Ida sees us all - the old folks, the young folks and the kids. Moving, though we can't feel the current, down a river of time.

We don't see her. She is on the other side of the dark windowpane. The adults know she's out there. We kids aren't sure. It's a moment of great suspense for us. We are not yet old enough to understand that life is fairly predictable. That you can usually tell what will happen next. That there are only a handful of plots, endlessly repeated.

I promised I'd get you back. But let me take a last look into that room. Almost all of the people we see there are gone now. But they haven't gone far, and on Christmas they are very close. They are just the other side of the windowpane.

We can't see them. But we feel them there, those simple people who loved us and took care of us. They left us blessings we too rarely count. And, if we let them, they come back at Christmas with gifts of everlasting life.

The church member who could not read this himself I could only imagine that many of his family members are now on the other side of the windowpane and that he would like to be reconnected with those dear departed family members.

I was also very moved myself fortunately I never had to deal really with the passing of close family members except for my Uncle Joseph in 2004. I have been blessed with a child hood where nobody dies, nobody that matters, that is. I however saw myself in Dick Feagler's character and some day in the future thinking of resplendent Christmases of days gone by.

I know that my aunts and uncles will die someday, I know that my parents will die someday also however I hope that it will be far off from this Christmas, and many Christmases to come.