Gosh, it’s been over a month since John Wooden passed away. I wish I had gotten a chance to shake his hand…
During graduation weekend, people came by and left bouquets and leis in memory of John Wooden.
Click for a larger version to read the sign. Also note the Daily Bruin featuring him.
John Wooden was an alum of Beta Theta Pi, so they hung up a sign for him.
Branching off from my description of generational gaps in my family…
For my parents in particular, my maternal grandmother heard of my dad through the wife of a professor at the local university, which is where my parents both went to school. My maternal grandfather was also a professor at the school and his professor buddy had my dad as a student. Through the women talking, my grandmother learned that this young man was the professor’s star student and first in his class. My parents were introduced to each other and my grandfather approved without ever meeting the young man. All he had to know was that he was a hard worker and an excellent student. My grandmother, on the other hand, wanted to meet and get to know this potential suitor. As the legend goes, she sat him down for an interview (probably mostly asking about academics and his professional future) and liked him as well. My mom decided that of the guys she’d been introduced to, she liked this one the most, and so they were married. Or something like that.
It turned out to be a great decision, since my dad was smart enough to be allowed to leave China, which was a bit of a mess back in those years. The country had been in lock down and it was extremely hard to get out. My dad got into a PhD program at Penn State, which is what took him abroad. About six months before I was born, he left for the land of the free and began his studies. A year later, when I was a few months old, my mom followed suit, going to Penn State for her Master’s. I was left with relatives in China and I believe my paternal grandmother was mostly in charge of raising me those years. By the time I was three and a half, my parents had saved up enough money to fly me over.
I don’t remember much from those years, but I did have one strong memory from the plane ride, about the lady who escorted me from my family in China to my parents in America. I have also been told by my mother that when I first arrived, I refused to let my dad sleep in the bed. After all, it really was like meeting them for the first time – my dad had never seen me before and my mom had only been with me for about half a year. My mom attributes this behavior to a child’s need to cling to one adult they trust. Apparently between my parents, I chose my mother. So I clung to her and slept with her, but initially wouldn’t allow my dad to share the space. Poor guy must have had a couple of rough nights camping out on the couch or something.
And so that is how I spent the first couple of years of my life. Most of it’s a blur and photography was too expensive back then to have many pictures capturing my toddler years. The few I do have are quite amusing, with me all bundled up in winter clothes with a red dot on my forehead, or hanging out in a crib with my cousins standing around me. Perhaps I’ll dig those up someday and share them too.
Yesterday I actually meant to post a video, but Vimeo was doing maintenance and I couldn’t upload the videos of this little mouse, mousing around. So here you go, an encore presentation:
field mouse scurrying from Mary Qin on Vimeo.
wobbly mouse from Mary Qin on Vimeo.
mouse scampers off from Mary Qin on Vimeo.
I love wildlife of all kinds, so it thought this field mouse-looking critter was quite cute, but I must admit that tail isn’t a very pretty sight… maybe it’s a deer mouse?
He walks/runs with this awkward sort of gait, bouncing off the tips of his toes.
This positioning looks very much like the toy mice I would buy my cats...
He was less than a foot from my feet and I was squatting, so I could have reached out to touch him!
Panda’s building had a lot of fire alarms this year, seemingly due to a broken panel board? Well, the last time it was fortunate that I had just gotten a crepe at Crepes Bonaparte, which was parked in Westwood. I happily munched away as I waited for the firefighters to take a look inside. Thank goodness for that!
I spent a lovely holiday with Panda’s family having a BBQ, then going home to enjoy the night with my mom, but along the way, some strange things caught my attention.
It all started on my drive back home after spending the day at his family’s. I noticed on the opposite side of the freeway, a silver/gray Honda type vehicle on the side of the road, left side tilted up and that front wheel still spinning. Apparently it had hit a pole of some sort, which seemed to be the thing propping it up at that strange angle. The front of the car had a dent in the middle, with smoke coming out of the hood. It was a bizarre thing to see and I almost didn’t believe it, what with all the TV show crime and accident scenes I’ve been seeing. As I passed by, the driver’s side door opened slowly (remember that the car was tilted on its side, so gravity was working against them) and I saw an arm or a leg push out. As I contemplated whether or not I should exit and turn around, I noticed an SUV type vehicle pull over. It looked like they were getting help, so I continued on my way, but puzzled about that incident the entire drive home.
Then when I exited from the freeway and began to drive through my town, I noticed groups of people camped out on the lawns of businesses. It seems that they wanted to get a really good view of the fireworks that night, which I think were coming from the town center or the nearby amusement park. A couple of lanes of the road had been blocked off, which made no sense to me, since there was nothing there. The right-turn lane of the street I was on was blocked off, but traffic going in that direction wasn’t stopped, so I couldn’t figure out why coned it off! How bizarre. Were they saving room on the streets for patrol cars to use later? Were they actually going to block off all the roads in that area closer to the time the fireworks were due to start? Were they going to allow people to use the road to camp out too? Or maybe they were getting ready to set up traffic stops and sobriety checkpoints? Who knows.
Finally, I passed by our postal office and noticed that the flag was at half-mast. Pondering the situation, I couldn’t come up with any explanation as to why that could be. Independence Day is a holiday of celebrations, not commemoration, like Memorial Day would be. So it couldn’t be due to that. I figured someone must have died, but I wondered if it was a local thing or national thing. When I made it home, I did some digging around and discovered that President Obama ordered flags at half-mast for a couple of days, to commemorate the late Senator Robert Byrd. I hadn’t really heard of the man, so I wonder if they always lower the flag for Senators or if this man was a particularly special one. Apparently it was supposed to be raised to full mast for today (after all, it is a happy holiday), but seeing as postal workers are all off, it’s no surprise they just left it. Makes it easier, since it’s to be half-mast for Monday and Tuesday anyway.
And there you have it, a 50-minute drive full of peculiar things that I just about managed to figure out. This is how my curious mind works.
The first finals week after Undie Run at UCLA was cancelled, one of the many ways that students chose to rebel included this performance:
rooftop band performance from Mary Qin on Vimeo.
With 4th of July celebrations coming up, I thought that this would be a cool way to celebrate holidays too. Too bad you can’t always get a band together!
Panda’s been a bit sick lately, so last night we went to get pho. There’s something about drinking hot soup that clears the sinuses and wards away sickness. At the pho place, they have fortune cookies at the counter, so we grabbed some for after our meal. When it came time to open them, the first one he had fell on the floor, so we considered it invalid. Then he opened up the second one and it was the same exact one I had gotten! Shall we call it serendipity? 🙂
So then I went on to talk about the 11 or so lottery winners I read about, who all won a large sum of money in a drawing many years ago. To have so many people win that level was suspicious, so the lottery people went about to investigate. These people seemingly had nothing to do with each other. As it turns out, they had all gotten a fortune cookie about money and decided to keep it for use in the lottery. Some had had the fortune for ages and others had gotten it more recently. It’s still a major coincidence, but considering the limited number of fortune cookies fortunes about money and the large amount of people who play the lottery, it kind of makes sense.
Then today I found that a bunch of my friends made a last-minute decision around dinnertime to go out to Vegas for the long weekend! Talk about spontaneous (and they got an AWESOME deal of $40 for a room for two nights – I’m awestruck). Well, as it turns out, much of the decision seemed to hinge upon a fortune that one of the guys got at dinner, which was about a sudden change of plans being a good thing. Being that he LOVES Las Vegas, it comes as no great surprise that he immediately took that as a sign to go (I’m sure he’d been thinking about it already). It’s nice that he was able to get a bunch of people to go with him too! That’s the benefit of living in a residential hall with people you work with – you all know each other, you’re all friends, and you’re all in close proximity!
Funny what a slip of paper can do, no?
Took a stroll around the UCI campus one night and look what we found! UCLA only gets squirrels. :-/
Hummingbirds are the most fascinating birds… they’re like the helicopters of the plane world. I’d never seen so many at once, and in the middle of the UCLA campus nonetheless! Out of all that concrete and brick, they were able to find these feeders. Cool, huh?
flitting hummingbirds from Mary Qin on Vimeo.
