Why is it so hard to say goodbye...

... to an old cardboard box!?!? I just unpacked the last box that solely held my stuff - it was my last box. I've had this box since 1999. Nine years!!

Today, I bid it farewell. I'm surprising sad about it... not the contents in the box, but saying good bye to the box itself. This box has been with me since the beginning of my post-college days and now we part. It goes to the recycling bin to be morphed into something else. For a box that has been shuffled through four states, it's still very sturdy. I guess that's why some people make furniture out of the FedEx boxes. They hold up very well!

The items that were in the box, so many random things. Random decorations that we hung in our dorm room during my FRESHMAN days! Items that I somehow deemed too valuable to throw away... I'm not sure why a free poster from a free movie preview of a movie that I only mildly liked is something that I needed to move from Austin to NY to Denver to Dallas to Austin to NY.

I've always known that I tend to be a pack-rat. I don't know if it's the sentimental values or it's just pure laziness. Living in Colorado and Texas, my apartment was always large enough that I can just have random boxes pile up somewhere. The lack of square footage in our current home has forced me to evaluate my pack-rat tendencies. Some of it is easy; some of it is really hard. I've had to really think about why I want to keep things since everything I keep, I've had to find a home for it. I think I'm getting the hang of it. I keep postcards; I throw away stubs from our vacations - I mean, honestly, I'm not going to make that scrapbook of that last vacation. I have the pictures and that just needs to be enough.

It's on.

After months of browsing, we did it! We've just made our first purchase towards our home renovation. We now have a bathroom faucet and a bathroom accessories kit coming our way. My heart was actually pounding when I was completing the online purchase process.

Man, there are some ugly faucets out there; there are also some expensive faucets out there. I mean, I realize that quality and material contributes to the cost, but $800 for a faucet?!?! A faucet?!?! It's a faucet!

After a lot of browsing and debating (for two people that have similar taste, we can have some drastically opposite opinions on faucets that we love/hate), we found a faucet we both really liked at overstock.com and most importantly, it was in our price range. A few of our friends have used overstock and have raved about it, so our fingers are crossed.

So, it's on. This is our first official step towards home renovation... Sean joked that if we chicken out of the renovation, we can always just install the faucet :)

Bye bye furniture!

You know... after living in NY for two years, one of the things that truly makes me giddy with happiness is whenever something is removed from the apartment. I'm not picky - it can be a bag of trash, a pile of magazines, a pair of shoes, basically anything.

Today, 3 pieces of furniture left our home: a coffee table, a desk, and a hutch. These three items have been leaning against our bookcase for months now, but now they're gone! Bye, bye!

We posted the items for sell last night on Craig's List and today, less than 24 hours later, they're sold and the new owners have come and picked them up. Yea!

The money was just enough for us to order dinner :)

Taking back the streets

Sometimes I groan and moan about living in New York... the unbelievable amount of money we pay in rent and mortgages and taxes and grocery... the lack of space (I wish everyday that we have just one more closet)... the wafts of spoiled garbage during the summer... and well, the list just continues and continues.

Every time I get to a point where I want to move away, something really great happens that makes me appreciate being a resident of the Big Apple.

Today, it is the Summer Streets event. For three Saturdays in August, the city opened up 7 miles of streets to pedestrians, cyclists, skaters, skateboarders, basically anything that's not a car. Today is the first Saturday. Let me just say, it is all kinds of wonderful and just an absolutely amazing experience.

It's sort of surreal to walk around the street without having to worry about cars. The roads are quiet. No one was in a hurry, everyone ambled along... the number of smiles I encountered, the friendly mood shared by everyone... is this what our lives could be like if we removed cars from the equation?!?!

In addition to closing off the streets to pedestrians, there was a myriad of events - helmet giveaways, live music, and a little fitness. My favorite part of the walk is stumbling upon a Crunch class. Imagine a crowd of pedestrians that's willing to pause for a few minutes and shake their booty. It was a diverse group of people - young, old, male, female, all races... and everyone was having a blast... even the crowd was smiling on the sidelines and shaking their tush a bit too :)

This is the first year NY is doing this event... I really hope this not only become annual tradition, but maybe this will also impact city planning in NY. For those of you living in other cities... this is so awesome!!! I hope other cities follow suit and everyone can experience this!

Better than any superfluous adjective can describe

Wow. Wow. Wow.

There is no word adequate enough to describe the opening ceremony. I think this is the first time that I've ever gotten choked up watching any Olympic-related events. As goofy as I think some of the TV commentators were, I think one of them eloquently summarized the ceremony: it was better than any superfluous adjective can describe (something along those lines, since my short term memory is basically non-existent).

We haven't turned on our TV since our Pakistan vacation. I rushed home around 7:25 and had 5 minutes to turn on the TV and try and find a somewhat acceptable rabbit-ear reception. It's been so long that it took me a few minutes to figure out how to switch from DVD to TV mode and then I couldn't figure out how to turn on the sound. I mean, we have 4 remotes, which one does what?!?! I miss the days where there was one power button, one volume button and one little knob to switch among the 4 channels. There's something to be said about a very simple UI.

Okay, getting off track... so I finally found the channel, figured out how to turn on the sound, and finagled with the rabbit ears enough that we had a tolerable reception.

I kind of figured that the ceremony was going to be a pretty special show. I mean, this is really the first time China has had then ENTIRE world's attention since it started popping on everyone's radar and become rumored as the next dominant country. The Chinese gov't won't tolerate anything less than absolute perfection. They certainly didn't disappoint. Everything was executed with such brilliance. Oh my gosh, I felt so proud. These are my homies! Did you see the precision during the drum act!?!? Or the perfect circle in the tai chi piece. The former marching band geek in me can't help but admire such incredible synchronicity.

While I was beaming with pride that my homies are putting on a show that is going to make its mark in history as one of the most brilliant and beautiful ceremonies ever, I was also angry and sad.

I was angry that the government has enough power to fundamentally change people's lives just so they can put on a good face to the world... this is everything from forcing citizens to attend behavior classes to forcing non-Beijing residents to leave the city to reduce the population. I really do despise the spitting and cutting in lines, but I also accept it as part of the culture - it is all part of what makes each society unique and different. It just seems so wrong to force all these people to change their behavior so that it's more acceptable to the Western culture. What gives?!?!? I also read a story that this old couple that spent all their savings to travel to Beijing so that the wife can get specialized treatment for her illness. All the doctors they visited said that they were too busy prepping for the Olympics to help the wife. This kind of attitude and mentality... this superficial mask that is donned by China to itself appear bigger, better to the rest of the world - it makes me so mad!!!

This is also related to what makes me so sad. I think China has this magnificent, absolute intriguing history and culture. Granted, I'm a little biased, but they have thousands of years of history that is unique and so ridiculously awesome and special. This embracing of the Western culture and discarding the Chinese past - it's really sad. I'm hoping that soon, the good people of China will realize that they don't need to be become completely Westernized to be regarded with respect and they'll learn to embrace both the old and new and create an all new synergy of the past and the future.

Hmm... this started as a post about our crappy TV signal, but it ended up being a long Lily rant. Sorry! Hope everyone enjoys the Olympics!

Fortified with expert advice and insight…

Sean and I have been attacking this home renovation project quite blindly... we've been using the knowledge we gathered from watching HGTV for four months as our guiding light. So as we're making decisions and plans and setting our budget, we actually had no idea if we were on the right track or if we've completely veered to the no-man’s-land of home renovation.

Luckily, Sean’s godfather is a retired contractor. We had a long chat with him Monday night. To say this man is so good and knowledgeable is an understatement. He asked a basic question regarding the age of our building and then started stating what we probably had in our home – the kind of tub, the size and type of medicine cabinet, etc – and he nailed each one. He gave us advice on just everything – how / where to spend our money, recommendations on approaches to the renovation, advice on when we should engage the contractor, approximately how long our renovation should take, etc.

Now we feel loads better knowing that we’re approximately on the right track and armed with a concrete set of next steps.

Thanks Dieter!

Baby's first boo boo

We never use our built-in A/C unit, because it doesn't work very well and we have a little portable A/C that does the job using 10 times less power (literally). But about 2 weeks ago it was really, really hot and we decided to turn it on for the night.

The next afternoon, the superintendent called us to let us know our A/C was drooling into the neighbors' below. We shut it off; the A/C people happened to visit the building the next day, so they looked at it.

"Can't be fixed," they said. "New ones cost $2500 to $4000." For one air conditioner? I could buy 30 air conditioners for that much! Maybe I should put 6 or 7 in each window. "Oh, and here's a $70 bill for our services." Thanks.

That was 2 weeks ago. Today, the super called again. "So, we need to talk about having the water damage fixed downstairs..."

Looks like we'll be out another $400 or $500 so that someone can repaint part of their room. I said, "Wow, uh, That's a lot of money. Can't I just come down with a paint brush? " No. Workers must be insured, blah blah, sigh grumble wallet.

This place suffers from a severe lack of normalishness! What the heck!