Busy Spring And Summer

Have not posted for ages! Cannot believe that it has been almost 4 months since my last post. Life has been busy. And Facebook takes over most of the social network. Wonder if anybody still writes blogs nowadays.

Smoke In The Air By Wildfire From Minnesota

Due to the cold front, the smoke of the wildfire in Minnesota gets to blow hundreds of miles down over to SE Wisconsin area. The sunny sky becomes like a cloudy day and you can smell the buring in the air. Of course, I just had to go outside to jog and get my nose and eyes all irritated.

You can see a satelliate picture here.

Hawk Came To Visit

It is already March but there is absolutely no sign of spring at all. As a matter of the fact, several waves of snow storms are on their way to this region in the next several days. Talking about the long depressed winter. Within all the frozen and white ice and snow, a hawk flew to the tree branch outside the office and wandered around for a while. We have a bird feeder around that area so it must be coming to see if it can grab some birds as food. Unfortunately, most of birds had escaped so it just sat there for a long time and left with empty stomach. Wish spring comes soon (actually, not for another 2 months).

Foxes Come To Visit

Happy new year! It has been snowed more this week. Two foxes decided to come to play around outside my office! I have never seen live foxes so close before and it was really cool! They were actually more orange even though people called them "red" foxes! Hope that everybody has a wonderful year 2011!

Deer Hunted

It is still the deer hunting season in Wisconsin and co-worker got a big doe. It still sits on his truck on the parking lot at work now. Hope that all my blog friends in USA had a good Thanksgiving. I made several desserts for the Thanksgiving and I will post them soon.

Gluten Free Chocolate Ganache Cake

It will be my best friend's birthday on this coming Sunday so I made this gluten free chocolate ganache cake for him. It is a 2-layer chocolate cake covered and filled with chocolate ganache. The cake is based on a recipe from Ina Garten. I made several changes to adapt it to be gluten free and more moisture. Of course, the secret ingredient, brewed coffee, definitely makes this cake even more chocolaty!

There was a big flood caused by record rain here in Milwaukee last Thursday night. You can click the link to see some slide show of the flood. It flooded most of the main streets, highway, houses and created a big sinkhole in the middle of the road with a car falling in it. My basement got flooded as well and the cleaning and drying work are still on going. It is really tiresome to go through this again. Aw, well, forget about it and let's go eat some cakes instead!

Palm Leaves Weaving

Spring is finally here! Today is just a beautiful sunny day with breeze and the temperature is around 60 degrees (15'C). Lots of flowers such as Crocus have started to bloom and the Daffodil and the Tulips have started to grow leaves and flower buds too. Today is also Palm Sunday and my best friend's mom got palm leaves from her church and asked me to help weave them based on an old instruction she got from a book. It took me about 40 minutes to learn and get it done! They turned out great and almost look like wheat! Hope that the nice weather stays since you never know in Wisconsin this time of the year.

Moon Cake And Autumn

This coming Saturday will be the annual Moon Festival again! It also means that fall should be in full swing now. Went to the Cleveland Chinatown and bought some moon cakes. Most of the moon cakes have the salty egg yolks which I really do not like. I still remember to get spanked by digging yolks out of the moon cakes and throwing it away when I was a kid since egg yolks were the expensive part of the moon cakes. So I bought the kind with only lotus paste in the moon cakes. That small piece of moon cake costs almost $5. The package is just too beautiful to eat and I suspect half of the cost goes into the package instead of the real cake.
Hard to believe that it gets quite chilly here in Cleveland too. And almost 60% of the leaves have changed the color if they were not knocked down by the heavy rain and gusty wind early this week. By the way, I found this in the Chinese supermarket! What a surprise! It brings back so many childhood memories. The economic condition of my family was not too good when I was young. We could not afford to buy any candies and snacks. But my mom would always try her best to get something besides the daily meals for us. This was one of the snacks we ate. Mom boiled them and we would wait anxiously next to stove for them to be done. And we were so happy to eat them. It brought us more joy than going to the theme park or having all the candies. It is amazingly how simple and cheap things could bring so much fun back to those poor days.

Deer At The Parking Lot

Where did the summer go? Hard to believe that it is almost the end of the summer. Have been quite busy with lots of things. I went to the annual Wisconsin state fair last week and was grossed out by all the fry food on the stick. Can you believe that they even had a fry bacon covered by chocolate on the stick this year? Disturbingly bad. Besides that, we finally get some rain. It has been a dry summer and most of the lawn is yellow due to the lack of the rain. Work has been very busy and quite some late night. While I left one of the local hospital for work around 7pm yesterday, we noticed a bunch of deer hanging around the parking lots. There were 3 bucks and 2 does. Each buck was at least a 8-point one. I waved at them and they all just ran away. Guess the summer is coming to an end and the hunting season will start soon! And it will be the volunteer working time for Mexican Fiesta on this coming weekend!

Garden Tour And Graffiti

Finally, the summer warm weather is here after the long nasty winter and chilly spring. All the flowers are blooming like crazy. My family is visiting me now so I took them to the local botanical garden which was famous for the several acres of Peonies they grew there on this past Sunday. The weather was just perfect, sunny and around low 70'F (20'C). There were hundreds of different kinds of Peonies blooming. It looked like a colorful flower river in the garden. We had a nice picnic in the garden as well.

And all the summer festivals have started since this past weekend as well. However, it also means the school is off and lots of boring kids start to wander on the street in the late night and cause some damages. My condo building just got a big ugly graffiti on the entrance wall, which is 2 floor high. Someone climbed to the 2 floor high fence next to wall in the late night and spread-painted some stupid nonsense words. It has never happened in this good neighborhood before and it is too bad that the security camera did not face that direction to catch the video of who did that. The condo association has hired contractors to clean it but they just could not completely remove it. I guess that's the downside of nice summer weather.

Chilly Spring

It has been a chilly spring this year so far. The temperature is still around 60'F (15'C) during the day and 40'F (4'C) at the night. This causes some strange growing patterns of lots of flowers. Most of them have grown enormous amounts of leaves in a short time but the flowers seem to have rot or wilt problems. Fortunately, it is sunny most of the time so it is actually great. The geese babies around the work have grown like crazy! They are almost twice bigger than they were merely 2 weeks ago. Their parents just guard them everywhere and several families actually wander around to find the food, etc. Not a bit of afraid of human beings at all!

Back To Wisconsin - Spring Is Here

It has been a while since my last post due to my trip back to Asia. I have flown thousands of miles in the past 3 weeks back and forth between US and Asia. And all the hassle in Asian airports for the H1N1 passengers check made the trip even longer to reach almost 35 hours each way. On my way to Asia, it took almost 2 hours after my flight landed at Tokyo-Narita airport to have the fully medical staff on board and take the body temperature of all 300 something passengers. The same process was repeated when I waited at Tokyo for the flight back to US. the same airplane was from US and needed to deplane all the passengers from US first so we could board and head back to US. For the same reason, the flight was delayed 2 hours or so and we completely missed the connection flight when we finally got to Minneapolis. I saw these interesting battery powered toys at the Tokyo airport as shown in the picture. Their head will slowly swing around and sing music.

The real strange thing is that it seems that the rest of the world are treating this H1N1 like the death plague but nobody seems to care back to US. Anyway, it is quite a different scenery to come back to Wisconsin after spending 2 weeks overseas. All the trees have leaves and there are flowers blooming everywhere. Of course, that just means the bad allergy is back and big time of sneezing. There are even lots of new geese hatched and walk around the parking lots. They are really cute until they start to grow up and poop everywhere.It looks that lots of people had a great Memorial Day at Chicago. Too bad that I was adjusting the jet lag and could not go to meet some bloggers I have communicated on line for a while. Aw, well, maybe next time!

Birthday Drawing From A Friend

It is nice to have some friends to remember my birthday. I got a virtual gift on LJ from Cory. In addition, I got this nice hand drawing birthday picture from Joel. Really nice! :)

Warm Spring St Patrick's Day

What a nice warm day today! It is about 71'F (20'C) outside and everybody is wearing the short sleeve summer clothes! Hope that spring is really here since it still can snow in this area even in May. Had a nice walk outside after lunch. It has almost been 6 months since we have such a warm sunny day. Happy St Patrick's Day!

Happy Ox Year!

Today is the Chinese new year! And this is the year of ox. The Ox is the sign of prosperity through fortitude and hard work. Hope that the economy will recover in this year and make a bull market!

First Big Snow

It started to snow late last night. We got the first official big snow today. It is white everywhere. Even though it is only about 2 inches, it has already caused quite some traffic problems. Fortunately, lots of people have started the vacation either go deer hunting or leave for Thanksgiving. It is a quiet week in town. I have not quite decided what desserts I will make for the Thanksgiving dinner when I go to my friends' house. So far, it seems that I will make a German Apple Pie and Peanut butter Chocolate cheesecake.

Waited 2 Hours In Line But Could Not Get In To Vote

I waited in line for 2 hours this morning since 6:20am but still could not get even close to the poll place. There were almost another 100 people in the front of me when I had to quit and went to work around 8:30am. The line moves so slowly due to the problems of lots of unprepared people for registering to vote the first time. The preparation work of the poll place is really not good. They should have a separate line way outside the poll place for on-site register so the rest of the pre-registered people can just get in to vote and get out. I will try to leave work around 2:00pm to see if I can get in to vote.

Note: Got back to vote after work around 6:30pm. Got in and got out in less than 30 minutes! And Obama is our next president! Yay!

Stressed

All the mums in garden are in full bloom now since it has become very cool. The temperature is only about 55'F (12'C) in Wisconsin now. I have been back from Taiwan for almost one and a half week. However, I have been worked almost 14 hours per day since I came back. Really stressed. By the way, thanks for the nice comments about my mom's health condition. She is doing very well now. The doctor was able to remove the infection area and said that my mom should recover fully. She just has to go back to hospital every 2 months to get checked to make sure no more possible cancer cells are there. I will try to find some time to post some pictures taken back home.

Bomb Stand-Off In City Hall Close To Work

There is apparently a stand-off in the local city hall cross the street from my work office here. No wonder multiple helicopters have been circled above in the air for almost 2 hours. We went out for lunch and the police blocked the main road so we had to make a big detour to get to the lunch place. We check on local news website and it seems that a person has locked himself in the city hall bathroom and claimed that he has the explosive device on him.

OK, they just report that the person has been taken into custody. And we just saw the police cars drove away and removed the road block. Good that nobody got hurt.

Update

Took a better picture of mom raccoon nursing the babies yesterday. They were gone this morning when I checked again. I guess they were just passing by then. The basement has gradually dried out but the dry wall is still very wet. The weather forecast reports that more possible severe thunderstorm is heading this way today. What a nasty spring this year.