Happy Birthday to Jean

#2014-0327

"Happy birthday to you, Dear!" I said.
"Happy birthday to you, Mom!" Anita said.
"Happy birthday to you, Grandma!" Little Bee said.

It's a little pity that Antony my son (Little Bee's dad or Anita's husband) is not at home today, when we're celebrating Jean's birthday. But it's surprisingly exciting to us that Anita's parents have come and joined us in the celebration!

We cheerfully sang Sheng Ri Kuai Le (Happy Birthday) several times, both in Chinese and in English. After that, we enjoyed chatting -- Chatting, chatting, chatting; we each had just a small piece of cake, but we had a long, long piece of conversation!

The Location of Our Celebration

#2014-0325

Our church, Taiwan Episcopal Church (台灣聖公會), will celebrate its 60th anniversary next month, on the 26th day of April. The location for this special celebration will be at the auditorium of Chung-Shin Elementary School (忠信國小), in Taichung City.

This morning a small group of us including the principal of St. James' Preschool and the director of St. James' Language Institute, led by Rev. Philip Lin (our rector), went to see and study the auditorium. Together with us were Rev. Peter Chen and Rev. Elisabeth Wei, who both came from Taipei, spending almost all day giving us good advice and practical help. Well, we're planning to rent this auditorium for the April 26 event, and of course it goes without saying that we must familiarize ourselves with the location of our celebration.

May everything we do is sensible and, more importantly, acceptable to God our Lord!

May all glory and praises be to Him, our creator and redeemer and comforter!

A Field Trip (戶外教學)

#2014-0322

There's no need for Jean and me to create a teaching plan; the nature will be a much better teacher than us!

And what we did, what we're doing, what we think we'll do again, is all nothing but taking our little boy outdoors. Once he is in the nature, he can really learn something -- something valuable! Something more interesting, more fascinating, and even more important than what we can give or teach!

Look! Our little boy has had another field trip today. And Jean and I, his grandparents who are both retired teachers, have had a wonderful time walking around The Memorial Park of the Provincial Assembly together with this curious and quick-learning boy, Little Bee.

A Real Map: 「蛋花湯」地形圖

#2014-0320

Between four-thirty and five-thirty in the afternoon I took a walk near my house. The sunshine was bright and warm enough to make me comfortable this whole hour.

I was pleased about the sunshine, which made it possible for me to "see" such attractive scenes as "real maps" -- See each of the photos below. Can you distinguish the land from the water? Do you know how the water was really formed? . . .

Well, the waters, or the parts in gray or light blue that you see in each photo, are not made of water! While I was taking a walk this afternoon, I saw a huge concrete mixer (also commonly called cement mixer) parking near the spot where I halted and took a few photos as "real maps." Then I realized that this concrete mixer must have been parking there often, and that it must have been "cleaned out" before parking there for the night. In my imagination, the waste stuff removed from the mixer has formed the brooks, the rivers, and the seas or oceans!

But Jean said to me, "I see egg yolk and egg white! Where did you get these scrambled eggs?"

烏溪橋上暫停靠 -- Waiting for a Tow

#2014-0317

Antony and Anita were taking their son Little Bee back to Yuanlin, where this three-year-old boy would stay for another three days with his mom's parents. And now Jean and I felt a lot more relaxed, thinking that it might be a good idea to have an "outing" ourselves. (In the past few months I had been troubled by my waist problem and therefore she and I had rarely gone far from home for recreation.) I suggested that we should visit Xitou Forest Area or Sun Moon Lake again. But the telephone in the living room rang. We got the news that Antony had pulled his car somewhere out of the freeway exit because . . . . Oh! His car broke down and was now waiting for a tow! At the very first moment, Jean and I thanked the Lord for all of them, our offspring, were safe from a "possible accident" on the freeway. Then, as quickly as we could, we hurried to where they stayed. We wanted them to use our car for the rest of the day, and tried to drive his car back to a car-repair center run by our good friend Ming-Xun Zhou. But we failed to take the car all the way back by ourselves. We did need to hire a tow truck to pull it from Wuxi Qiao (the Bridge across the Black Stream) to Zhou's Repair Center.