Monthly Archives: August 2008

Just watched the women’s Beam final.  It’s very hard to watch the 2nd place lady who did a flawless routine but still ended with the 2nd place.  What’s worse is what happened to her yesterday when she had the same scores as the Chinese lady and yet still ended up with the 2nd place at the end.  It’s heartbreaking to watch her.  She was very brave and maintained her composure but everybody knew it’s killing her inside.  It’s hard to watch it.  They put in so much effort and time, all the athletes, but only 3 people make it to the stand.  

How do these top athletes prepare themselves for the biggest event in their lives and maintain their calmness to perform a flawless routine?  I really want to know.  Why some crumble under pressure and others excel.  

I need whatever that is for my ballroom competitions.  My nerves always get the better of me and impedes my performance somewhat instead of propels me to the next level.

It’s a great day, blue sky with white puffy clouds so we decided to take a bike ride on the trail today.    We spent some time strapping the bike rack on to the car and mounting the bikes.  Man, I hope there is an easier way to do this.  Then the bikes hung wider than the car and you need to be careful not to cut too close to that side of the car.  But after conquering these obstacles, we had a good time riding to Puncho N Lefty’s for lunch and a beer.  It’s the longest ride we’ve done so far and we were both tired in the end and had to spent the afternoon resting and napping.  

While Leo’s snoring away next to me (hee hee), I fixed a few things in WordPress and was able to setup email posting and finish porting the email from gmail to the macbook.  Still can’t decide which email to be my main one, gmail, me.com or my own site.  Maybe the one that’s the easiest to keep a local copy of all my email would be the winner in the end.  Gmail has lots of features and tons of storage and you can access it anywhere that you have internet but it’s on someone else’s server and not so private.  Hmm, what to use.

The Olympics is in full swing and I’m glued to the TV like thousands others every night staying up too late.  The thing that amazes me is the determination and motivation of these athletes in their process of training for the competitions.  I compare my own inability to stay motivated and to grit my teeth through my own meager training sessions.  It takes days and calls from the trainer to get me back to the gym for another session while these people go everyday for much more grueling training sessions for hours and hours.  What determination and courage and perseverance!!!

More and more every day I feel lucky to be doing what and when I like to do .  Having a wonderful husband is certainly one of the reasons.  BTW, it’s our one year anniversary yesterday.  He sneaked home at lunch time and brought roses and a card when I took Benny out for grooming.  He’s such a sweetheart.  I can’t say how much I appreciate having such a wonderful person finally in my life.   I still love to do web stuff, getting wordpress to work was very satisfying and having an iphone to play is so much fun too.  I’m so blessed!!

Finally installed the new version of WordPress and enabled the email
posting, iphone posting in it. So far so good. Everything seems to
be working. This is fun playing with applications and making them
work for my own site. It’s not under a deadline or requested by
someone else. I can do it when I have time and ready. Retirement is
great!!

The showcase was here yesterday.  Elim also came home from Taiwan yesterday.  So the day started really early at 5am.  Thank God for Leo.  He got up and walked Benny while I got myself out of bed slowly.  I made coffee with the vacuum pot and just poured it into our mugs before they came home.  I was probably only half awake, so as I reached over for something, I knocked the vac pot down and the top part shattered into pieces right in front of my eyes.  There was a split second time that I saw it in slow motion and know that it’s going to break but I had no time to stop what’s going to happen.  At the same time, I knocked my mug down so I lost half of the coffee at the same time.  Well, that was the beginning of the morning.  I prayed that it won’t be the sign for the day and it actually wasn’t.  

We made it to the airport fine, we got Elim and Brandon fine, we went to breakfast and came home with some time to rest a bit before we got ready for the studio.There were lots of people there already when we got there.  I managed to change in the teacher’s room and also locked the door on our way out.  So no one was able to get in for a while till Tim announced not to lock the door if we use that room.  Ha, I didn’t even realize that he was talking about me till he came over to tell me that I did it.Things went pretty smoothly actually and quite on time.

 Before I knew it, it was my solo time.  I was a bit nervous but it turned out pretty well.  Lots of people came and gave me compliments.  I appreciated one of them the most.  I don’t know his name but I have seen him around with his wife/partner.  Very good dancers.  He said you did very well, there are certain things in dancing that you cannot teach, you either have it or not.  And you have it.  That was very kind of him and very encouraging to me.  I always have this anxiety over performing.  But I know I like to dance and I like to perform, it’s the nerve that I need to overcome to a point so it won’t impede on my ability to make the muscle obey my command.  But hearing something like that was very encouraging and gave me a lot of confidence.

Another lady came over and told me that someone standing by the entry way was watching my solo and said it was the best one so far.  That was also very nice to hear.  So all in all, it was a good day.  Dinner was good and we came home at 9pm.  Leo had to walk Benny again.  Without him, I don’t know how I can make it really.  As Elim always said, I’m royally spoilt.  Well, I do think I am very blessed.