Author Archives: Christine

Thanksgiving already passed. Kids didn’t come back so Leo and I had a relaxed and easy turkey dinner. The grand kids looked so cute in their costumes. It is a wonderful time in their age, no worries only simple things to be happy.

My sister posted this on her facebook. This sounds so alien to me. We didn’t grow up together. I was given to my parents when I was a baby. Didn’t know it till later in life after dad passed away. He didn’t want me to know about this and I was kept in the dark.

Since then, I have met my sister and her family. It is nice to know there is a sibling in the world. I actually have a brother too. But I lost contact with him after our short first visit. To my knowledge, he and my sister don’t get along and my birth mom is with him. Life has a lot of bumps even in the family.

This family gave up a daughter, no father (I was told he died a long time ago), the daughter and son left do not talk to each other and the mom only stays with her son after

Parent and child relationship lies in the wisdom of letting go.

Such a nice way to describe parent child relationship. I heard this in a YouTube video by a producer in the wrap up special of a new Chinese drama 乘歡記. And I have to write it down.
It is so true. Especially for the parents, we need to learn to let go. No matter how much we want to stay close to our children, we need to respect their privacy and independence and only offer our help when asked.

Following the advice to merge all my lightroom catalogues, the first obstacle is in the pictures saved in different hard drives. Some on Promise, when it had a catastrophic fail, I started backing up the pictures with other hard drives and sometimes using them when I’m not at the desk. So the pictures imported were on one external drive, not copied to the promise drive and later on the eastystore 12 TB drive. My goodness, the file management is a big headache. This is all due to the small disk that came with the MacBook pro and my old Mac Pro. You have to be in constant battle between disk space and ports management. sigh.

So I got the Sync Folders Pro for the mac and now in the middle of syncing all the drives before I can merge the lightroom catalogues and straighten out the missing pictures in the lightroom. What a pain! This is going to be a long term project I think. But hopefully I only need to do it once and no more problems if I keep the hard drives in sync.

Right now, I have four places for my pictures. The promise drive with 10 TB, the easystore 12 TB drive, a LaCie drive with 4 TB and the newest samsung T7 Shield 4 TB drive. I am planning on using the Samsung drive for importing pictures and then sync it to the rest of the 3 drives. 2 portable and 2 stationery.

Inspired by Scott Kelby’s video, I’m going to combine all my lightroom catalogues into one. It’s a huge endeavor as I have old catalogues from 10+ years ago. We will see how it goes. I have copied all my picture folder to a LaCie drive a few years back. So starting there and will need to find the scattered newer photos and put them all in there once I got the old ones combined.

It’s a big project, and will probably take me weeks to finish. But it’s a good one to keep me on my computers frequently. These days, iPad has been my goto for consuming and since I haven’t taken photo walks recently, I haven’t touched lightroom for a while. Good to keep my skills up to date with this project.

It’s been a while since I worked on this personal site. Lately, I got an inspiration to purpose it for more personalized usage instead of a public facing, attention getting as I associated a website to for a long time. So here goes…

Tido passed away on March 11th. I was at Elim’s and Leo was home. He started having seizures the night before after a bit of improvements from a sickness a week ago. He has been blind for a while and when he was sick, I was up all night checking and taking care of him. Thought he was getting better when I left for Elim’s for my 2nd vaccine, but the next day he was doing worse and Leo had to take him to the vet.

It’s a big change for us now that we have no pets in the house. There is a feeling of loss all the time, missing the little noises he made and the constant checking on him we did. Although we have the freedom to travel now, we can’t shake the sadness and loss. I vowed not to have any more pets. The last stage of their lives are always traumatic to me. I really don’t want to deal with this kind of sorrow and sadness any more.

After a long hiatus from this blog, I found that instagram posts don’t show up any more. So I deleted all the auto posts I did with IFTTT. And realized that I haven’t written for two years. Not sure I should keep this site or not. Maybe it’s time. We will see.

Lunch at Wild Goats today. Leo tried the portabella sandwich and I tried the veggie melt. They are both excellent. We have decided that Wild Goats have great sandwiches. One of our gotta now.

Made the words and kept messing with them. In the end, I couldn’t decide if I want to get off the straight writing of the words.  So I posted both.  And action in motion happened.

This was yesterday. Leo came back from golfing famished, we went to Longhitano’s. I got the lobster ravioli and it’s pretty good. I wasn’t that hungry so half of it came home with me. Yesterday was close to an all veggie day for me.

Yesterday was a slow day. Didn’t get enough sleep the night before because of Tido’s 3 o’clock wake up meows. So I forgot to upload the word of the day here. Two words today then. This morning after Leo grumbly took Tido to his food at pre 5am, I finally gave up and put a rug in front of our bedroom door and left Tido outside the bedroom. He would tear up the carpet trying to get in, hence the rug. We were able to get a couple more hours of sleep this morning. It may need to be a routine practice from now on.

Life is temporary. Life is always changing. Life is unpredictable. Life is worth celebrating.  We tend to appreciate things when they are gone more than when they are with us.

We are missing Benny terribly.  Almost everything we do reminds us of him today.  He was a constant silent participant of our life.  Not having him in the house with us is not normal.