Wendy Is Married

Yesterday evening, our niece was married at Il Buco, an Italian restaurant at #47 Bond Street. Paul and I were expressly invited to this rustic and intimate wedding held in the hustle and bustle of Manhattan, the heart of New York City. Needless to say, it is one of the most special weddings for us.


At a long table, 28 of us were treated with numerous courses of Italian delicacies consisting of a great variety of wines, cheeses, olives, seafood, meats, pastas, fruits, and vegetables. In addition, we were greeted with a pronounced friendly atmosphere: the 85-year-old Grandma shared her artistic and professional career with younger generations, friends/schoolmates encouraged each other, aunts supported their nephews and nieces, and cousins spoke about their own academic experiences and tips.

Both Wendy and Peter, the bride and bridegroom, have been well-loved and tendely-nurtured since the day they were born. Like everyone else, both of them have gone through their own life lessons and setbacks. What sets their story apart is their unquestioned family love and dedication. Despite different family backgrounds and cultures, they have finally tied the knot and begun to build their new life based on the same value system, i.e., love for education and challenge for the unknown. With two forces combined, they are now stronger and more resourceful to overcome one obstacle after another. Cousin Nick is a living example.

Halloween Night at Jack O’ Lantern Blaze

We celebrated our 2017 Halloween night at Jack O’ Lantern Blaze. It was a clear but cold evening, with an all but full moon in the sky. After visiting Mom at 8:50 pm, we went on 9A, and chose the exit for Harmon Station. We had to stop hard well before the exit, for there was a longest line of vehicles ever seen, waiting for the right turn to go to the blaze. Five minutes’ motionless wait later, Paul decidedly pulled our car out of the waiting queue, and raced to the next exit. He used the local route and ShopRite parking lot to be not only on time, but five minutes earlier than our 8:30 entrance time.

Once inside, we were delighted to greet our old friends of the Headless Horseman, dragon, mushrooms and sunflowers. There was an endless throng of visitors, many of whom were dressed in Halloween costumes, such as a family of skunks, owls, or fully decked female Michael Jacksons. As if echoing to the public desire’s to return to animals, the blaze featured and introduced variously carved nocturnals, such as bats, opossums, and rats carved out of pumpkins, in addition to long standing animals like cats, snakes, spiders, dinosaurs, or favorite world of the dead, e.g., Washington Irving and other early settlers, tombstones, ghosts, vampires and zombies. 

We were also treated with a series of new programs like a moving train of circus animals. According to one of the posters, Westchester County is the earliest place to start circus animals in America, with an elephant as its first actor. The Statue of Liberty is another new addition, raising visitors pride as well as patriotism to be an American, especially on the very day of lower-Manhattan’s terrorist attack. 

One greeter told us that 10,000 pumpkins were used for the blaze. Several companies were contracted to work on the project since the month of May. We were so delighted to learn that the blaze’s group of four pumpkin carvings won USA 2016 special post stamps. 

The feast of pumpkins made us forget both time and ourselves. It was closing time, past 10:00pm. We left the blaze, with an almost full chip on Paul’s camera. 

Uitwaaien²

This morning, we ventured out to Croton Landing after a day and night’s rain and wind storm. It was cloudy, with the sun peeking out once in a while through multiple layers of grey clouds. There were white clouds, too, floating in the two-toned blue sky, the deep blue overhead, and baby blue near the horizon. The normally calm Hudson River had turned into a sea of choppy brown water full of whitecaps.

Courtesy of Paul Titangos Photography  

There were fewer people walking along the path. However the low number was immediately compensated by ready windsurfers. Before long, one surfer was joined by three more. The especially strong wind, or Uitwaaien² (Uitwaaine squared) as Paul puts it, has its unique functionality: it provides us with both land and water activities.

We experienced the walk in the wind in two entirely different ways. When against the wind, we needed to brace the resistance with all our might. It swept away and scrubbed clean warmth as well as cobwebs from body and soul. It was kind of a refreshing feeling. When with the wind, we needed also to heed its rhythm, or it would brush us off the path easily. A realization dawned on me that it was just like a re-enactment of life. When torrents of change come, following blindly with the trend might not be adequate and secure. Resistance can be also richly rewarded. That’s the beauty of Uitwaaien².

Uitwaaien along Hudson

Paul told me that BBC had broadcast a report on under-used words and mentioned a special Dutch word for “walking in the wind to clear one’s head.” Out of curiosity, we Googled it at our breakfast table and located the spelling and pronounciation for “uitwaaien.”

Even though I did not know it in the past, I was instinctively aware of this special wind’s effect on me in my weekday walks along Chestnut, or weekend walks on East Cliff. So grateful that countless frustrations and disappointments have been dumped roadside, which makes it possible for us to go forward and onward.

This time in our walk along the the Hudson River, uitwaaine is particularly pronounced. It is cool and soothing, reminding us that life is beautiful, even though it is full of ups and downs. It is also like a gentle healing hand, patiently helping us to rebuild our health, by incrementally increasing the duration of our daily walks from half an hour to a full hour and more. 

The walks along the Hudson in Croton-on-Hudson, New York is not quite the same as strolling along California’s Monterey Bay. But it has the same uitwaaien, enabling us to create a newer and clearer mind. I understand that such a state of mind will be again contaminated in no time once back to our daily work. It is a pure joy to relish the pristine uitwaaine once in a while!

Courtesy of wordables

Thursday Evening with Louise Penny

Last Thursday evening, I was treated by Dody to a book talk by Louise Penny at the Peace United Church in Santa Cruz. Also joined us was Gail. I was amazed by the massive crowd turned up in an endless queue waiting for the church door to open. By the time we found out seats, I looked around at the packed hall. There were at least 700-800 retirees, according to our Leslie A’s estimate of the hall capacity.

Penny is a very lively and personable author. After photographing her audience, she dived right into her personal and professional life. Candidly she recalled her childhood. She was a girl with vivid imaginations, visualizing her mother as a queen. Her dream pastime is read alone with feet up in her bed, since eight years of age. She suffered from a mild symptom of Arachnophobia, which morphed later into a fear of failure. She wanted to be a writer, but did not dare to announce it. Penny worked as a journalist for nearly two decades with Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, and learned to listen to people. Tired and unhappy about politics in Quebec, she became a full-time writer in her forties, at the wholehearted support of her husband Michael.

Still Life was her first book. It took her three years to complete. Once the book was finished, she went to a local independent publisher, and was advised to contact crime fiction agents worldwide. In the next two years, she received only one reply, with word NO. At the suggestion of a friend, she entered British Debut Dagger by The Crime Writers' Association. She received an answer that her book was on the shortlist among 800 contestants. The real reward for her was sit with a roomful of people she had wanted to meet. Three names were given, but she neither saw any of them nor win the award.

Discouraged back home, she was asked by Michael to a private fundraising party for Afghanistan refugees. It was there she met Teresa Chris, one of the third names she failed to meet at the award ceremony. Teresa has become her agent ever since. As a journalist, Penny firmly believes that she realized small or worst possible things can lead to opportunities. 

For her political viewpoints, Penny and her late husband lived in Toronto for nearly three decades. She preferred to live there, because it was her home. Despite the conflict between French and English cultures, she has no strong view toward Franco or Anglo, but has sympathy for both sides.  

For her literary devices, Penny has drawn her poetic sources from her friend’s posthumous poetry, and Margaret Atwood who provides the poetry for Ruth, a character in her books. She described her writing process similar to a squirrel’s lifestyle, hiding, burying, and planning.

Penny had a writer’s block lasting for more than 5 years. Eventually her husband stopped asking her how her day went. As it happened, she met a group of artists, and was allowed to join in. In them, she saw the strength: when things that did not work at the end of the day, they still got up and continued the creation the next day. Finally she came to two realization: 1) Not trying is the real failure; and 2) Her real writer’s block is a fear of failure and need to be the best which includes her childhood dream of her mother as a queen.

Through the experience of the group, she also got her idea of village and characters. She realized that she needed to write for herself, and enjoy the process of writing. Thus she populated with people in such a village. As for the creation of Chief Inspector Armand Gamache, the main character in her mystery series, Penny has created him as a man she will enjoy the company with, and a man she will marry … perhaps based on her late husband Michael Whitehead? 

Brother Ying in Santa Cruz

Last Monday, Brother Ying paid us a surprise visit in Santa Cruz, while I thought he had left New York for Beijing the previous Sunday. When the phone screen flashed his name and number around 3:00 pm, I could not figure out where he was. “I am in Santa Clara,” he said, “I will treat you and Paul to a dinner,” he told me.

At 6:30 pm, I got home and saw a shining black Mercedes Benz sports car parked before our RAV-4. “Ying is here already,” I mumbled to myself. It was him. As usual, he got a good bargain for his rental: the rental company let him choose any cars on the lot. Of course, the Benz was chosen for a rate of $29 per day. “I remained on the left lane of 17 all the way, effortlessly,” he told us proudly.

We went to Riva Fish House on the Santa Cruz Wharf for our dinner. It was a beautiful evening. At the window table we three sat, enjoying the sunset and our generous seafood plates. Ying had the day’s special of snapper and polenta while we picked Mexican prawn and fish. Afterwards, we sauntered and visited sea lions perched on their usual three places at the end of the wharf. To our delight, we also saw many sea lion families resting on a wooden landing further away.

Paul drove us home on the scenic route. Sipping our green tea and sampling white peaches, we talked about our kids, their present and future, and new technologies. For the first time, we learned about the difference between the deep leaning and incremental learning robotics, and the possible realization of AI (Artificial Intelligence) in the 21^st century. It would be a brave new world, that is for sure.

Around 10:00 pm, Ying bade us farewell to go back to his hotel in Milpitas. Early the next morning, he was due to fly to Beijing. “I will be back September 17,” he told us. His daughter is going to be a new student at Stanford.

Are Reference Services a Thing of the Past?

It has been a persistent opinion that reference services are out of fashion in libraries, with the paramount presence of search engines like Google, and many more newly developed ones to come. Three months' work at Service (Combined) Desk of Santa Cruz Library has proved otherwise.

Take yesterday afternoon for instance. I inherited a query from the previous shift that a patron wanted to know about rivers and streams in Live Oak, Santa Cruz. "She would need topographic maps," I was warned. As predicted, the patron came to the desk. It turned out that she needed to see what Berkeley Way looked like in the 1930-40's, thus the Sanborn map of 1905 would be called for. After snapping a few photos of the road, she was curious about Santa Cruz Sentinel Archives, since she could use it only from a library in the system. I demonstrated to her how to use, print/save and email the result(s). In the end, she got the exact result she wanted, but ran into the snag of the Catalog terminals' limitation, i.e., one could not email or search on the internet. My desk partner suggested that she use one of internet computers in the back. Before she left, I recommended to her a local historian on Live Oak. She hadn't returned for more information by the time I left the desk after 3:00 pm.

There was a woman at the desk asking for audiobooks on travel, as she was going to Thailand, Vietnam and Egypt. Ordinarily she would be shown to sections of 9XX for travel and 4XX for language learning, which is a normal practice. Seeing she had finished the sections in question with an armful of audiobooks, still unsatisfied, I gave her available titles by Colin Cotterill (for Thailand) and Lawrence Durrell (for Egypt). She was thrilled, especially seeing Justine, the first part in Alexandria quartet. After she left I lost no time in entering a request in our internal request database for more travel titles on DVD, particularly on the three countries in question.

In the Audiobooks section, I saw another patron who had asked me for a list of all books on CD. I gave her a tour around different categories, as the signs were either missing or too small to be seen. She stayed there quite a while before she came to us to check out her 5 audiobooks. But it is not the end of the story to serve. Her library card was lost, therefore she used her partner's card. Seeing our welcoming and inclusive atmosphere, she decided to do a replacement by paying $2.00. After hearing my recommendation of downloading/streaming digital audios, she was all ears. We went to RBdigital, and got her registered. She was so happy with her own new card which transferred 5 items from another account, and, moreover, provides a valuable newfound resource.

On my way back to my office, a smiling patron stopped me politely. He was interested not in books on CD, but in one piece, i.e., Playaways. I led him to the area and helped him figure out the unmarked section for Science Fiction. He immediately squatted down to select titles to his Sci-fi heart's content.

Once sitting in my relatively dark office, I could not help but wonder who said reference services were a thing of the past; audiobooks on CD were dead; and Playways were not circulating. All we need is to get our hands dirty by working at the desk, and serving the public with professional skills and enthusiasm!

Google and other smart search engines are truly magical, but from time to time they will encounter familiar problems such as copyrighted content or filtering out overwhelming data.

Wendy is a Doctor at Rockefeller!

Yesterday morning at 7:55 am, my brother in-law drove Paul and me to Manhattan. Wendy, his daughter and our oldest niece, was ready to defend her Ph.D. thesis based on her new findings on protein at Rockefeller University. The agenda was she would present her project, followed by a Q&A session. Afterwards, she would go through a closed-door defense of no more than 2 hours. My niece who I baby sat in May-October 1989 was really grown, calm, logical, and systematic in her presentation. She used clear and easily understood words and phrases to summarize the process of what she was doing in her 4 years of intensive lab work.

Shortly after 11:00 am, we left her with the grilling committee and went out of the auditorium, together with her close family consisting of her boyfriend, parents, younger sister, and future in-laws. We toured Rockefeller University, a private university founded in 1901, neighboring with Weill Cornell and Sloan Kettering to make a tri medical research center on York Avenue. After the tour we gathered at the open outdoor patio of the cafeteria and waited for the results of her defense.  It was one of the longest two hours that I had ever undergone in my life, all but like the birth of a child or country. My anxiety was triply shared by her mother and mother in-law to be.

Eventually, a text message was relayed from the boyfriend, "Wendy is Doctor!" We all cheered and then joined her in their lab kitchen for sandwiches, cake, and champagne. We met her PI (Principal Investigator) and lab colleagues, an unusual group devoid of jealousy and competitions, because of the abundance of opportunities and diverse research foci in this particular environment. The campus seemed to be a true oasis not only for us humans but also for animals. A miniature mouse scuttered around us on the floor for food, so did a couple of fearless sparrows invite themselves later on our picnic table. Such an oasis is not impossible to reach. It takes near-perfect scores all the way through one's high school onwards. In our niece's case, it also needs intellectual dedication and parental nurturing from a dedicated Cornell father and Regeneron mother.

Go, girl! There are more challenges awaiting at Cornell. But there will be more opportunities as well.

A Quiet Goodbye to Jack O'Neill

Right after Sunday dinner at 8:00 pm, Paul and I said in unison that we should take a walk since it was still light. Where to? Either Capitola Village or East Cliff? As we did not manage to see the ocean over the weekend, with the First Friday event downtown and Saturday dinner at a friends' in Felton, we need to breathe more sea air, so East Cliff was decided upon.

Pleasure Point was unusually moody with the rolling fog and eerie quiet after the busy celebration of Jack O'Neill's life in the morning at eleven. We did not make it for various reasons. Perhaps we preferred a quiet goodbye to the local legend.

As usual, we passed by Jack's oceanfront house. But unlike our usual walks, we stopped by and recollected ourselves to pay our respect to Jack O'Neill, one of the celebrities who have done their utmost to benefit people and environment.

Courtesy of Paul Titangos Photography

O'Neill was born on March 27th, 1923 in Denver, CO and died on June 2nd, 2017 in Santa Cruz, CA. In the span of 94 years, he was a surfer, wet suit inventor, and founder of the world renowned O'Neill surf company. The proudest invention to him is the founding of his O’Neill Sea Odyssey, a marine and environmental education program. So far, the program has educated over 100,000 school children, to continue O'Neill's belief that, “The ocean is alive and we’ve got to take care of it.”