Movies Watched So Far

Just watched The Dark Knight, the latest Batman flick, yesterday. Wow! Big Wow!! Reshuffled my "Top 3 Movies Watched This Year" list:

1. The Dark Knight (a perfect 10 - great story, flow, action, acting, ending)
2. Iron Man (just missed a "10" with that weak ending fight)
3. Wall-E (another great Pixar movie, could have used more fleshing out but who could resist that robot)

Others watched but didn't make the list (either only OK or just plain bad):

• Jumper (could have been great if there was more character development rather than emphasis on the special effects. Samuel L Jackson was wasted in this movie)
• Hellboy 2: The Golden Army (lacked the omph of the first movie)
• Wanted (Angelina Jolie and the terrific ending saved this movie)
• The Incredible Hulk (predictable but still OK)
• Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (George Lucas should have been banned from writing sequels after he made a mess of Star Wars Episode 1)

Photos of the House

Lee Kiang just posted a bunch of photos of the house in her blog. Thanks! Also, she'll be writing about her visit to my place, so keep reading her page!

Taking Care of My Lawn (with more square footage than my house)

My annual Mad Month of May is finally over. So I can now get back to updating this sadly neglected blog. One of the things I had to do after moving into this new place was find out how to take care of a lawn. A very large lawn. 7000+ square feet!!! That's more than 3 times the square footage of my house! Thankfully, April was still too cold for grass to grow so I had some time to settle in. Naturally, I first consulted my colleagues who have lawns. Their recommendation was to get a self-propelled lawn mower, with mulching capability. This has a small single-cylinder petrol engine that will move itself, and spin the blade underneath, of course. This is a very good thing because the mower weighs about 40kg. Pushing it up and down a rough, grassy, slightly sloped surface would not have been easy. Mulching is just keeping the cut grass in the cutting path of the blade a bit longer to chop it up fine, which basically means I can leave it on the lawn. It is barely noticeable and the decomposing grass helps to fertilize the lawn. Another saving in effort and time. Lee Kiang helped me cart one back from the store. US$288 plus tax. Hiring a lawn service to do the mowing would cost about US$20 each time, average once a week. I would earn it all back in the first year. The consumables of petrol and engine oil doesn't cost that much, even with higher petrol prices. Actually taking care of the lawn would take more than just cutting the grass. I never realized just how lawn-obsessed U.S. culture actually is. There are literally whole libraries of material, both in actual libraries and online. One excellent resource is the web page of a popular home improvement show, This Old House (e.g. watering the lawn). There are also many others, some more useful than others. Anyway, enough of the research, preparation and agonizing, I had to actually do it and figure it out myself. Turns out.... not too hard. Mowing the entire lawn takes about an hour. Other than slightly sore hands from keeping the machine going in a straight line, wind-blown dust and grass on my face, it wasn't too bad. I'll eventually need to get to the maintenance chores with the mower but it should be OK. Lots of help from guys in the lab.

Busy Busy March. Busy Busy Life.

The month of March is usually the calm before the storm of April when we start to prepare for our annual conference in May. This year, January to March was also very hectic due to a National Science Foundation (NSF) site visit to evaluate our qualifications for a NSF Engineering Research Center. In short, if we get this center, it's job security for 10 years. Good stuff if we can get it. I can handle hectic. However, March became a madhouse for me because I bought a house. Signed the closing papers and got the keys on March 21st. Slight pause. Still in a partial daze at the thought of homeownership. Anyway, I've been moving boxes and stuff I could drive over in my car for the past few weeks. Yesterday was the big move with a moving truck and friends to help load/unload the large, the heavy and the numerous. It is amazing what I have accumulated over the last 8 years, after arriving in the US with 3 pieces of luggage. Thankfully, the house is in prime condition, so practically no renovation work needs to be done. I'll finish moving sometime in the coming week. Busy busy.

How Cold is It?

You may have seen it on the news: an arctic cold front is moving/moved through the northern states of the US last weekend and temperatures dropped to -15 degrees Celcius and below. To illustrate how cold it is, here is a little story: I flew to Minnesota to join Jia Nin for Chinese New Year. I parked my car near the airport at an open-air parking lot. When I got back this morning, the doors on the driver's side were frozen solid! The lock won't open, the windows won't wind down. The cold wind blowing on that side of the car caused water vapor to condense on the mechanisms and froze everything into one immobile piece of metal. Luckily, the passenger side was warmed by the sun and was operable. By the time I drove from the airport back into Ann Arbor (a 35min journey), the car had warmed up sufficiently that the door could be unlocked. Moral of the story: when living in temperate climes (i.e. you get winter), there are many more excuses of not going to work other than "car battery died". (grin)

Heavy Snow, Four Wheel Drive (Or Lack Thereof) and The Kindness of Strangers

There have been much snow these past few weeks in the northern USA. Both Jia Nin (in Minnesota) and I (in Michigan) have been liberally sprinkled with 20-30 cm on some days. I have a Honda CR-V in Ann Arbor with four wheel drive so I was able to drive around OK as long as I was careful. Jia Nin's car, however, only has front wheel drive and no amount of electronic traction control would allow it to climb an icy slope. We were trying to get out of her condo complex and the exit was an uphill climb. Not a particularly steep slope, but the patchy ice that has formed due to partially melted snow (from vehicles driving over it) refreezing (it was below freezing after all) made it very difficult. We almost made it 3/4 of the way up the slope, but a pickup truck towing a trailer made a wide turn into the complex, blocking the entrance and forcing us to stop. Darn. Since we lost momentum, the car couldn't make it up the rest of the way so I started to drive backwards down the slope to get to a flatter section so that we can accelerate back up. No luck. A garbage truck came in and I was forced to back down again. But since it was much wider than the pickup, I edged closer to the side of the road to give it more room; right into a snow bank. #$%^&*! No damage but we were stuck. Wheels couldn't get traction and the "rock back and forth" method of getting out of snow wasn't working since the car was on a slope. We got shovels from the condo complex and started to dig the car out. Thankfully, two gentlemen who were driving by in a pickup stopped to help. They were thinking of towing the car out but the Volkswagen GTI is not what you would call a sturdy car. Attaching a tow rope to the bumper is more likely to tear it off than move the car (this example comes to mind!). Instead, they made short work of the snow behind the car and helped push the car sideways to prevent it from sliding back into the snow bank as I backed down (did I mention that the slope was also slightly curved?). We're out! We thanked the two very, very helpful gentlemen and went back home to wait for the snow plow to clear the road some more. Thanks again guys! P.S. Yes, we made it out after the road was plowed around noon.