It's one of those forwarded things, but I feel there is a lot I can take away from the list. Don't know who originated this list so can't give credit.

Today I accomplished ___________________. 

38. Remember that you are too blessed to be stressed.

39. Enjoy the ride. Remember this is not Disney World and you certainly don't want a fast pass. You only have one ride through life so make the most of it and enjoy the ride. 

40. Please Forward this to everyone you care about.

LAST SUNDAY, my husband finally mowed our lawn which was way overdue to have a cut. Before that, neighbors had been eying the overgrown front lawn, dropping not-so-subtle hints, "Your husband must be really busy these days," they'd say squinting at the front yard.  I wanted to inform them that the grass was tall because I had not been doing laundry, but I knew they wouldn't understand.

Some couples work through the list of household chores by assigning which belong to whom, shortly before or soon after they first get together but we are notorious non-planners.When we got married and purchased our first house, without verbal agreement, certain tasks had become assigned to each of us; usually because we were dissatisfied with the other's performance. Loading the dishwasher became Keave's job because he could not stand, in his words, the "non-optimal" way I arranged the dirty dishes in the washer. I got no problem throwing dirty dishes in the dishwasher as long as they fit, but he claimed that his way was the efficient way to fit everything in. After he started re-loading and re-arranging the dirty dishes in the washer, I gave up on this territory. Dishwasher became his domain; like it or not.

 Laundry became mine  when he shrank my pants and shirts more than a few times. I am a skeptic when it comes to reading the tags on the clothes. They may say "machine wash," but often times, they are not really washable by machines and certainly not dryer safe by any means. When it comes to laundry, I exercise extreme prudence and  become a great believer in washing everything with cold water, and when in doubt, hang'em all dry. Keave never understood my logic so he got banned from doing laundry.

One by one, by method of disapproval or who-hates-which-task-more, household chores became very much proprietary. Taking out the trash, mowing the lawn, changing the light bulbs, loading the dishwasher, and changing the cat litter (which became his after I got pregnant, ---can't do it anymore; toxoplasmosis! I'd say)  are all his, while cooking, cleaning, laundering are all mine. The good thing about this system is that we know exactly who has been slacking when we see a mound of dirty dishes or a hamper-full of dirty clothes. On the other hand, you know only too well that if there is a mound of dishes in the sink, and dirty clothes are piled high at the same time, you better not be nagging the other about lack of "motivation." No throwing stones allowed in our  glass house.  But catch me on the day when I have been on a laundry binge, and cooking runs, I'd go all smug on him and telling him he needs to be catching up on his chores.

"I am what I imagine, not what I am. ~ Viggo Mortensen~"

EPIPHANY came to me when I least expected. I always think of myself as  having good judgment of character on others, but when it comes to looking into my own self I truly suck. The closest thing to a self revelation  is that I don't know who I am or what I want.

This morning, while sitting at my kitchen table over a cup of coffee, I pondered over what I wanted out of life and found my mind go blank. But when I look at my son, Brown Sugar (not real name), I know exactly what career he should go into: engineering or architect or something to do with meticulous computing and building. How many times I've witnessed him perfecting the design after design of paper airplanes?  "Which do you think would go further, fly higher, or be stronger?" he would say countlessly while I, the unwilling tester, flew plane after plane. "This wing is a little bit wider than the the last one, you see that mommy?" he'd point to the difference in  wing size only he can spot, "And, this one has a tilt in its tail so it will go up higher," To me, they all look like a bunch of paper airplanes, but to him, the pursuit of perfection lies just a few hundred of torn pages away. Maybe he'd grow out of this phase eventually, but for now, every aspect of his nine year old life hinges on the minute details and the endless tweaking of the designs. The boy can go hours experimenting with origami or building some unidentifiable objects out of empty paper towel rolls. We might be the only household in the country which does not dare throw away any empty toilet paper rolls or paper towel rolls because, "Mommy, I need this for my invention!"

"Cat Trap" by Brown Sugar

When I see sketches by Peach,(not real name), my daughter,I know she will be happy in a job that requires or encourages gentle creativity. She sits in front of the computer and draws sketches after sketches using Paint, a program I am barely familiar with. For  crying out loud, the girl puts out spruced-up power point slides just for fun. 

"Swim wear" by Peach


As for my husband, he's doing exactly what he is clearly meant to do, except maybe he should be at a less demanding environment, in my personal opinion. Sitting alone in front of the computer conjuring up codes and algorithms till wee hour in the morning, is really his cup of tea; bleary eye or not.

The other day at work, I watched my friend Sylvie fishing out notes after notes from her neatly labeled binders, and I knew instantly she would be a great teacher. She's organized, efficient, meticulous, and a stickler for the rules. While she's been debating about getting certification for elementary teaching, I am absolutely certain that it is her life mission. I am already picturing her classroom in my head --with neat writing on the board, all lesson planned out and all papers graded on time and most of all, all kids kept in line.  She'd be a great teacher, that's for sure.

With all my insights about who should be good at what, when it comes down to me, I am as lost as an abandoned newborn kitten. I do not enjoy math although I scored A's in calculus courses during my college years. I like writing, but don't think I can make a living out of it. I can't even attract a sizable crowd in this blog, judging from my readership here or lack thereof . I have a need to see people but I don't want to answer to them - that pretty much ruled out a career in customer service. I like money, but I don't want to chase it relentlessly so there goes my business career. I am a germaphobe but I enjoy studying and working in health or biological sciences. I have a degree in biology/microbiology/biochemistry and my job is in biotechnology/genetic engineering. However, I abhor working at the bench, and avoid it like a plague. I like to be valued and feel valid, but I am not willing to burn mid night oil or work twelve hour days because my family always comes first.  You see what I mean now, don't you? I am one heck of a confused soul; a body full of contradictions; a self-deluded drama queen.

One thing I do extremely well is telling people what to do (with their lives or just what to do in general). Just ask my husband, he can attest to how I lay out his weekend so that he can make effective use of it to carry out the tasks I want him to do. If anyone is hiring an opinionated science-educated trained-as-a-manager who values free time over a raise, I am game. Somehow I doubt this job is as available as I imagine it to be.

I AM DEFINITELY A SUMMER GIRL, no doubt or question about it. I enjoy the smell of roses in the air, savor the feel of sun on my face, take in the greenery of the neighborhood, and  just plain love the entire experience of summer: heat, humidity, and all. Worse than a school girl, I celebrate the last day of school with unnatural enthusiasm, and immediately start the count down to the first day of next school year in my head. Two months to go..Six weeks to go..Two weeks to go..I say to myself every summery day. Today, I saw  the date on the calendar, and felt the dread  set in when it revealed that we were almost at the end of June! I have one whole month of July before I need to wind down and prepare myself (mentally) for the next school year. And I am determined to make every sunny second count in July even if I have to squeeze them like the last lemon to make lemonade.

All this talk of school and summer may seem quite abnormal for a grown woman whose school days were long ago faint memories. But when your first born is going  to middle school in August, and your baby in the family is almost (not quite though, thank god) done with elementary school, you want the days to stall, and the sun to keep on shining so that we can stop thinking about homework and after school activities, and start thinking about how to have fun and what to do (or not do anything) with our free unencumbered time on our hands.

Like today, for instance; at nine in the morning, instead of going to work, I padded out to my garden, and weeded my flower patch overgrown with weeds. Normally weeding is a much dreaded task, but not today. I thoroughly enjoyed (for the most part) squatting down and pulling one weed after another. Funny how time can change you sometimes. When I stopped thinking about  how I hated weeding, I stopped hating it. Of course, as usual, I am full of contradictions. I love the idea of lovely garden, but hate insects and wiggly worms. When I pull out a weed and see a worm  then I have to move away from the area until the worm burrows again. It can gets tricky at times.

Anyway, even with supposed time on my hands, I still had to time myself (set a timer on my cell phone) because I had to run to the dentist before noon. After the dentist appointment, I stopped by at a nearby nursery to pick up some plants. It was there while I was browsing the aisles and aisles of plants, I was attacked.  No, not by a human or a vicious dog. One moment I was imagining what flowers would look good together in my garden (I do that quite often; daydream about which plants would look good with which ones and then would end up picking the worst possible pairs), the next moment I felt a sting and  flutter of wings on my arm because a bird just dived into my arm and pecked the heck out of me. I screamed like a little girl, and might have said Jesus Christ (excuse my language) but it really scared the crap out of me. I quickly made a detour from that section of the nursery in case there were more killer birds lurking around or if that homicidal bird would do another dive-peck again.

After that episode, I was constantly on the lookout for more guerrilla avian war fare, and could not concentrate on the plants anymore. When I ran into an employee, I told her that they got some vicious bird here, and her reply was, "Oh, she has not done that for a while now", which led me to believe that this bird was a serial-pecker. After learning that there were babies in a nest nearby, I had to quickly assure the employee that no, mama bird was no bother; and no, that was not blood on my arm and even if it were, I felt no pain. The last thing I wanted was for them to remove the birds thinking they were bad for the business. And I did not want that on my conscience. Homewrecking is not on my list of things to do.

Like I said, summer time is the greatest. When else you can laugh off the bruise on your arm or think about if being attacked by a bird is bad luck or good luck. All winter could offer were stories of gloomy misery and freezing toes.

"Why do you want to rock the boat?", asked Sylvie, my friend and colleague, during our half hour long walk after lunch. It was a perfect summer afternoon, not too humid or hot, with a cool breeze blowing from the lake across the road. The red roses and colorful annual flowers around the hospital were in full bloom, and the perfectly landscaped medical campus was bustling with students, doctors, patients and a few office-escapees like us who were seeking the fresh air and sunlight which otherwise would be  inaccessible inside our dungeons. Sylvie and I walked along the red stone-paved walkway that cut through the campus and turned onto the sidewalk which we would then take to make a circle back towards our office building. With our steady pace, we would return back to our respective quarters in approximately half hour.

"I don't feel valid at this place," I replied back to her question referring to my job. I knew I was being a whiner right now, but I felt like whining.  I was still reeling from the denied attendence to an annual conference. "It's the budget, you know," my boss had said without  looking into my eyes when I asked if I were attending the conference. "I'll take your data and present it for you instead, " he then added as I swallowed the bile rising up in my throat. So, here we were today with his absence at work, Sylvie and I took a walk longer than our usual twenty minutes as a way of compensating my denied right to see outside people. 

Sylvie sighed; as patient though as she was, I was sure she was beginning to feel tired of my complaints. She said, " You are valid, Amy. Your boss listens to you, and always trusts your judgment. Look at us now. In the middle of the work day, we are out enjoying the weather and he neither cares nor wants to know what we are up to," She then added with a smile, "He just does not want you to be more valid than he is. "

 She was absolutely right, of course. I came and went as I pleased most of the time, and either I was so valid that they let me do whatever I wanted or I was so invalid that no one knew what I was up to. She believed the former, but I thought the latter was more likely. Either way, having a free unrestricted personal time had got to  be a good thing. Just yesterday, while I was talking to another colleague in a different department, she complained of her boss always snooping on her. She caught him going through the drawer where she kept her personal belongings and her work notes.  He never lets her email other departments without him on it as a cc (carbon copy).  That's the ugliness of mirco-management; it ties a tight rope around your neck at all times because your boss is an insecure little person.   Although I have been told by one middle-management guy to put him on the email whenever I send my feedbacks and ideas to the big heads, he does not have the direct power over me to enforce his wishes. My boss is nowhere near controlling like these jerks are, and I am truly appreciative of this. Really, who wants to always be looking over the shoulder, or wondering if the boss knows what's in your purse.

Later, I woke up in the middle of the night to the sound of the raging thunderstorm. I peered through the window and saw the trees swaying wildly in all directions. The rain pelted down to the roof and for a moment, judging from the loud scatters, I thought it was hailing. Fearing a tornado was heading our way, I treaded downstairs to the computer to check the radar on a local TV weather website. The lights were on in the office, and I found my husband hunched over our home PC as well as his work laptop.  I glanced at  the clock; it said "12:45 am". He looked up and said, "Hey. Jerry said hi to you," giving way that Jerry, his colleague was online burning the midnight oil alongside him.  This was their routine as their company demands 24/7 attention from them. They were trapped in their databases, and were happily oblivious to the storm or the loud thundering rain outside. The buzzing of computers and the blaring of the music blocked any possible concern about  the tumultuous weather. Tornadoes or not, dataset had to be migrated or converted or whatever required it to be. He hummed along the music, and typed away at his laptop while my cat  cowered underneath the chest of drawers in anticipation of any bad weather events. I always knew cats were smarter than people. After a quick check at the weather revealed that no danger approached our little house, I paused to take another look at my husband still hard at work.

"No, I don't want to be this valid," I  declared loudly to the puzzlement of him, and quickly headed back to  the stairs noticing a new spring in my steps.

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Personal Favorites: Top  Five Things I heard from the Big Heads:

1. It won't work.  But no, I have not tried it yet.

2. I need the stats by this afternoon for the meeting tomorrow. I knew about this meeting two weeks ago, but I'm just now preparing for it. You can stay late today.  Can't you?

3. Give me your findings. I want to present them in the upcoming conference. I'll give you credit by saying "We" a lot.

4. I don't recall that. The Annual Forgetfulness Syndrome:  ( to any mention of previously agreed upon raises)

5. I thought of it first. (referrence to the ideas presented in #1).

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