A well-balanced weekend with learning and workout

Since the loss (or theft) of the license plate of our minivan occurred over the weekend, its replacement would have to wait until Monday, which is today. But I still have to send our D to her school early in the morning, before the license tag office opens. That means another day of car rental, this time without any consideration for cargo space. So we settled for a full-size car, from Avis, for a reason that would become clear in a minute.

Early on Sunday my wife left in Yu Huei’s car for a Buddhist session at St. Pete. And the Budget rent-a-car outlet closes at 1pm on Sunday. My plan was to return the rented car after 3pm the next day (in order not to incur an additional day of rental unnecessarily) at the end of Our D's school day. So that leaves the Avis outlet, which closes at 4pm on Sunday, within a manageable walking distance from our home.

That was the contingency plan (by foot) in case Yu Huei and her entourage could not be back in time to give me a lift to the outlet. And I was right. So I started walking from our home at 2.55pm, across the entire breadth of the USF campus, about diagonally. Kind of like a self-guided tour, taking in all the academic buildings, the green, the lake, TV9 station broadcasting a baseball game just next to the Sun Dome, with spectators cheering on, parents chaperoning their children for Sunday Chinese Schools at Cooper Hall, some tailgating exchanging tall tales perhaps, some students heading toward the library, minds afloat pondering issues of the day, the gentle breeze helping to evaporate the light veneer of perspiration on my body, and my feet brushing and crushing the dead leaves strewn on my path, a rather zig-zag one as can be seen from the approximate track traced out in red on the aerial map below.


I arrived at the Sear Auto Center where the Avis outlet is located after 35-min of rather brisk walking, though still giving me some time to smell the roses, so to speak. While the clerk was completing the paperwork, I could see the sheen of sweat on my exposed arm, a sight I have not seen for quite a while. But I did not feel short-breathed, the ambulatory aerobic workout was just what the doctor ordered.

Guess what I got this time? A white Dodge Caliber, from the Grab Life by the Horns people. It’s a dainty car, and our D even remarked that she would like to make that her first car. However, the engine noise was a wee bit loud for me. Also, the acceleration was on the under-performing side, even for an auto shift, a case of the noise output being not commensurate with the torque output. (I forgot to take a photo of the one I rent, so this one downloaded from the Dodge Caliber website would have to do.)

I returned the car this afternoon. But got a free lift to get home from Avis. A nice gesture from the We Try Harder people.

But before that and earlier in the morning, I made a beeline for the downtown County office building where the license tag office is located, resigning myself to a long wait in a crowded room. And boy was I ever wrong. I left the office about 7.45am, got myself in a little gridlock in downtown, but was lucky enough to find a metered parking space just when I was burying myself in regret for being indecisive in grabbing an earlier vacant lot.

From there it was a brief walk across the road, then up the elevator to the 14th floor. And I found myself to be the first customer of the day. Here’s the ticket as proof of my Uno position just as the clock struck eight, the magic opening time. And I left with a brand new tag complete with decal, without spending a dime for the replacement, and I had not even warmed my seat yet. Because I have the police report case number, courtesy of the Hillsborough Sheriff Department last Friday. My colleague was amazed at my good fortune after undergoing a loss of sort. So next time if you happen to lose a license tag, you know what to do.

The only “loss” of the day was I put in two hours worth of quarters in the parking meter when one was adequate, after the fact. But I did make somebody’s day, whoever chanced upon the “paid-for” parking lot that is.

On balance, it turned out to be quite a balanced weekend. We incurred some unforeseen expenses, but I got a great workout, not to mention test-driving two American automobiles, and learning something about replacing license plates, literally as well (we spent some time in the Ace Hardware store looking for the two screws for fastening the license plate and thanks to a lady helper there who alerted us that we should look for metric sizes since our Minivan is a Japanese import after we could not find an Imperial size (the politically correct term should be British) that matches the hole exactly, the license plate was secured). I guess for the next few days I would be checking my license plate regularly.

The Long and Short of Our Brief Charge of A Road Monolith

Friday was a kind of bizarre day for me. First, I discovered that the license plate, which was supposedly bolted tight, has vanished from its usual spot at the back of our minivan. In all fairness, it just might have dropped off on its own, precipitated by the constant rattling motion transmitted from the wheel in contact with the rough road surface, not to mention going over speed bumps, rendering the fastening loose.

Yu Huei’s friend has a even more bizarre experience. Somebody switched his car’s license plate with a faked one, and he did not even know it until he was pulled over by a traffic cop. And he had to appear in court to vouch that he knew nothing about the “sleight of hand”.

To be on the safe side rather than sorry, I made a police report, no doubt nudged along by the fact (from surfing the Department of Motor Vehicles website) that a replacement decal would cost nothing if it is reported lost with an official police case number.

Since we have been “immobilized” (I don’t think one can drive an automobile without a license plate around town without being noticed, nor it is legally pardonable to do so, notwithstanding that it is lost/stolen. Its absence, I mean the license plate, from the back of an automobile is actually quite conspicuous, come to think of it.

Then I realize that there is such a thing called jurisdiction even in police matters. Not knowing better, Yu Huei first ferried us to the Tampa City Police Department located on the south side of Fowler Ave because that’s the one she remembers around her neighborhood. When the lady officer manning the counter found out that we actually live on the north side of Fowler, she politely steered us to the Hillsborough Sheriff Department whose jurisdiction it is. And she gave us the Sheriff Department number to call.

The lady officer who answered (there must be something about a lady’s voice why invariably it’s the voice of the fairer sex one hears when calling on official matters, the ability to calm a frayed nerve I suppose for who else would have called an emergency number except those whose nerves have been jarred), after taking down my particulars, informed that a deputy would get back to us. It seems that reporting a loss of a license plate can be made through phone. And the deputy called back within half an hour. After verifying my particulars and that I’m the rightful owner of the said vehicle (I have a feeling the various law enforcement and emergency agencies must have shared their respective databases, electronically, for cross-checking), the deputy gave me the case number, his name, and his tag number. That’s it. All in a jiffy. And I don’t even have to be interviewed in person.

That changed our plan to pick up our S from UF at the start of his summer break, which was today. And he had to check out from the dorm, leaving nothing behind. That means some cargo space, which my minivan is eminently suited for. Then its involuntary grounding.

So last night, I spent some time surfing for the cheapest car, or rather minivan, rental rate. We needed it only for the day trip, not willing to spend unnecessary expenses on non-essential items. Enterprise, Avis, Budget, National. Enterprise had its minivan sold out. And National only delivers from the Tampa International Airport (TIA), and Avis’s rate is higher. So Budget it is, a Ford WindStar. For 8am in the morning.

So this morning, we dutifully reported to the Budget rental place near our home, courtesy of Yu Huei again. The lady told me that the minivan was being delivered from their distribution center at downtown (or was it the TIA?) and was on its way. On further interaction, she didn’t seem so sure about the delivery time, which I have reserved, and duly acknowledged, for 8am (our S has to check out at 11am).

She first offered me a replacement, a SUV, seeing my fidgeting in the office, from the ready stock of rented cars in the premises. It’s a Jeep, but the headroom in the cargo compartment (i.e., the back of the car, trunk would be less appropriate as part of it is for seating too, the third row) seems too small to accommodate some furniture pieces, actually only one book shelf with doors and I don’t think it needed to come to the stage of dismantling it into its original components for ease of transport).

So I went back to fidgeting in the reception area. Then her male colleague, who actually wanted to start me on the paperwork while waiting for the promised minivan to arrive, realized that there is a full-size SUV available there and then. It’s a Ford Expedition, a huge road monolith, even taller than our Toyota Sienna. And he offered that to us at the same rate. After judging the headroom (it’s bigger than the Jeep’s) to be adequate, we gladly took charge of it, our decision made easier by the casual remark by the man that the minivan, even after its arrival, might still need to be cleaned, which meant more fidgeting.

The Ford SUV is a very enjoyable drive along the Interstate, with lots of headroom, legroom, elbowroom, buttroom, etc. The only problem seems to be getting into and out of the vehicle because of the height of the seat, and for the fact that we missed the step panel below the doors. Even with the step, one needs to know which leg to put on it first, otherwise the body will be awkwardly launched, for want of a better word, into the vehicle. The same with getting out, the body seems to slide down from the seat, the calf abrading, or is it being abraded by, the step panel.

Anyway, we arrived at Gainesville on time, and the Ford SUV was just big enough for the entire transient possessions of our S as seen from the images below. And S has his first look of his new room, and his reaction would be the fodder for another blog.

This is not the final arrangement as yet, not with the glass bowl unsecured, the bed sheet piled high and blocking the back view, and more stuff to emanate from Our S's dorm room. Trust me, by the time it's done, it's fully packed, nary an unfilled space to spare and with an unobstructed view through the back. Even the center seat on the second row was filled to the brim. Well done, troops! My wife remarked that our stuff is nowhere near that of a girl student, from Lakeland, whose father my wife interacted while he was loading her daughter's stuff on to a minivan.

This is the front of the full-size SUV, which dwarfs our minivan (that was discovered upon our return to our home when parked next to our minivan). Today, being the last day to check out, there was a long line of vehicles parked along the bicycle lane (?) which is usually off-parking. All manners of parents were seen (ourselves included) lugging and lurching their children's prized possessions into the over-matched vehicles. One parent remaked to me, "It had to be a hot day". I responded with two thumbs up, silently saying to myself that beats a rainy day any time.

My Dabble with Artistic Expression: The Drawing Kind

Have I mentioned that my wife is a natural when it comes to drawing? Well, you could have guessed that if you are a frequent visitor to our blogs. You would hardly miss the scanned image on the top right of every blog article (just like this one), usually of flowers and trees, but sometimes of some docile animals of the feathery kind and aquatic species. She is endowed with a keen sense of proportion and within minutes (sometimes seconds if fewer strokes), she could sketch out a stalk of flower complete with details of the leafy stem, adorned by shapely petals and crowned with a sprouting display of filamentous pistils and anthers (I had to refresh my botanical knowledge by googling “parts of a flower” for these terms.), straight out from her creative mind.

On the other hand, I’m better with patterns, or things of a repetitious nature like a motif. But really, I’m more of a verbal person, in contrast to my wife who is obviously a visual person. Perhaps verbal may not be the right word here as I prefer words to drawing, but more so the written word and conversely, less so the spoken word. Being a visual person that she is, my wife likes to interact with people, face to face, not exactly mano a mano but close. But not public speaking though, which is decidedly one way. I don’t relish that either, unless it’s absolutely necessary like giving a technical presentation or deputized by a superior (while working in Malaysia). I rather prefer asking a question, a probing one, from the floor, and see the speaker stumped. Just kidding.

Who would have thought that I actually went one up on my wife in the eyes of our Arts teacher when she was dishing out the final grade for the Arts class in a certain middle (then termed as lower secondary) school (and yes, my wife and I had been classmates since middle school)? Maybe it’s about time I let out the secret of that lone victory over my then (and still is) more illustrious artist in the family as far as the school Arts subject is concerned.

I’m not sure how Arts examinations are conducted in other places, but from where I come from the teacher would hand out the question, or rather the subject matter to be drawn, one day ahead of the examination. In other words, the students have plenty of time to agonize over the setting, the characters, the scene, the color combination and so on.

I forget the subject matter now (probably something to do with an outdoor event like a picnic or something) but I do remember how my preparation went. Unlike me, my elder brother is very good at drawing (I even recall that he once prepared a cartoon show for us with his hand-drawn cartoon script, you know, those when flipped in successive sheets can simulate motion) and he kept a drawer-load of those drawings. So all I had to do was to go through his creative expressions, pick the one that is closest to the subject matter that I was expected to produce in theme, and commit it to memory. And I do (or rather I did) have an elephant of a memory that had served me well through my pre-college and college days (not the grad schools though for then understanding was the emphasis, not rote learning, a necessary survival technique in the days of examination-centric and result-oriented syndrome back home and back then, which has become more acute if anything).

So while I did the drawing part, the “inspiration” actually came from my brother. It’s no different from memorizing a fact and regurgitating it for the occasion, I rationalized then. Of course I know better now, and have since been following a strict attribution code in all manners of my writing. Why not drawing? Because that was the very last time I took a drawing class in school (I did have technical drawing in college but those were restricted to sectional views of bolts and nuts in the mechanical drawing class in Year 2 and design drawing of columns and beams with dimensioning in the civil engineering class in the final (4th) year).

But I can safely vouch that all the drawings that add that much ambience, balance, and elegance if you will, to our blogs are the creations (I wanted to use original as a qualifier but that would seem redundant) of my wife, every stroke.

And yes, the human portraits. Here they are, a contemporary head shot, followed by a full body shot of a girl dressed in traditional Chinese garb (the pear-shaped face seems to be the universal preference for a girl). Great Job, don’t you agree?

From Speaking Muar Chinese to Freeing All Malaysians: The Rap Video Way

Muar is a coastal town along the west coast of the State of Johore, my home state, which borders Singapore to the south. Muar is also the very first place that I worked, then a freshly minted civil engineer (i.e., with a recognized first degree) thrust into the University of Hard Knocks. That was way back in 1978. And I was still driving my varsity companion, a 125cc Honda motorcycle with a booming exhaust.

I first lived in a small rented room tugged at the end of the 5th road, I think, as it is known colloquially. My first impression of the Muar town is it has many cinemas for a town its size, five in all. So that’s as much as entertainment went. And every other night would find me in one of these, whiling away the time in the cool comfort of an air-conditioned environment, alternating with watching the movie as the primary driving force for the visit, with my then girl friend by my side.

Then there was what fellow Muarians affectionately referred to as the Glutton Street, right in the town, where hawkers’ food lined both sides of the street, enticing would-be patrons to fulfill their gastronomic urge. Our two favorite dishes were fried oyster omelette and otak-otak, a kind of grilled fish wrapped in leaves as shown in the image below, a mosaic of images taken from here and here. [Muar is encircled in red while the two blue boxes denote my home town (YongPeng, literally meaning peace forever in Chinese) and my wife's (Paloh)]


The thing that I did not understand was despite the throng of people practically rubbing shoulders looking for a table to retire to an evening of delicious platter of culinary delight and tables/chairs spilling on to the road, the road was never closed to automobile traffic so as to be turned into a pedestrian mall for safety. I had had some harrowing experience, either while seated with cars brushing by inches away from my back or me inching along the congested road in the car [yes, you would thought I had the good sense to avoid the street at all cost. But most of the town roads in Muar are one-way streets and sometimes as a result of the lack of either foresight or decisiveness, or both, a driver could easily be led by the flow of the traffic into the wrong street] with pedestrians sauntering nonchalantly from one side of the street to the other or alongside the crawling cars.

The last place that I had any memory of, other than my work office, is the Tanjung Club located next to the Muar river mouth. This is a favorite hangout for government officers with pool tables and pinball machines. But it’s for members only. I was not a member but some of my colleagues were. After some time the novelty wore off and I think I just kind of stopped going to the place.

Oh, yes, I almost forgot about the Rest House. The rest houses are government run hotels making use of old-styled buildings that were built by the British Administration and usually perched on top of a knoll with a commanding view of the surrounding. Stories have it that there were also used by the Japanese Army during the Japanese Occupation during the 2nd world war as detention and torture centers for POWs or local informants. And some of these lost souls still linger on to these days, looking for closure at their untimely and perhaps inhuman demise, which translated into haunted houses.

My first two nights were spent in a room of the Muar rest house, a designated accommodation for government officers invariably those days. The thought of gossamer apparitions pirouetting in the room did cross my mind, but I soon dozed off, and woke up none the worse the next day. Later I learned that the ‘spirits” were wont to dwell in certain rooms and it so happened that mine was not among these.

Two years later, I moved on transfer to Raub, another town rich with its local folklore as regards government rest houses in the State of Pahang, but this time nestled in the thick of jungles accessible by winding roads. But that will be the subject of another blog, laced with its individual allure and unique adventure.

Since then, I have made several trips back to Muar, but never staying for the night. And it has gradually regressed into the deeper recesses of my mind, until I came across this self-made song video, performed to a rapping beat, several months ago, Muar Chinese (accessible at YouTube here). The lyrics are crude no doubt, but it does bring back memories of my two-year sojourn there, including the idiosyncratic Chinese and Hokkien (Fujian) dialect spoken locally, marked by the infusion of several less than flattering terms from the latter into the former, yielding a peculiar blend of street-smart lingo that is distinctly, eh, Muarian, or Muaresque. One must admit that there is certain poignancy to poking fun at one’s own heritage, and yet displaying a pride that is unmistakable.

More recently, the same guy, who claims to be a Hainaese, has come up with another rap video, Muar Chinese II – My Friends (accessible at YouTube here), with its trademark blend of Muar languages, six in all (actually 3, English, Malay, and Chinese, the remaining three being dialects: Cantonese, Hokkien, and TeoChew). Its theme has also evolved into one of social concern, lambasting the racial polarization that has split Malaysia down the middle, and then some. However, the video took pain to explain that the brunt of his castigation is not race-based, but rather all his friends who hail from different racial backgrounds.

This is a political statement of sort. The problem is, being the rap genre that the performer has seen fit to adhere to, including the use of uncouth language, albeit rhyming, it may remain as a street-wise personal ranting that is unlikely to be taken seriously, much less so as a mustering call for change. However, it does hit a chord, a rather discordant one, in me. Can we take it that the disenfranchised has spoken? Are we ready to change lest the country continue on its downward spiral to the point of no return, to the dogs, and what have you?

A Trip Down Memory Lane (Part 3B [Concluding]): A Mentor-Colleague-Friend During my UF Days and Thereafter: Prof. Robert G. Dean

This is the concluding part of the recollection of my interaction with Prof. Dean, which I penned at the occasion of his retirement from UF in 2003. It continues from where I let off here, chronicling events that occurred after I returned to Malaysia in 1995. Read on.

Since my return to Malaysia upon my graduation with a Ph.D. degree in early 1995, I’ve maintained an e-mail link with Prof. Dean. One of these culminated into the very first visit of Prof. Dean to Malaysia in Oct 1999 during which he delivered a keynote address in the Conference on Coastal Environment, despite his tight schedule. In fact, his visit was concluded in very short notice, much to my surprise and noting then that I was just trying my luck.

During his 3-day stay in Malaysia, I had a lot of one-on-one opportunity with him, especially on the field trip in my car to look at some of the beaches and shore development taking place along the west coast of Peninsular Malaysia. We talked about the old times at UF, the shape of coastal engineering to come in the future, and UC Berkeley from where Prof. Dean obtained his first degree, in 1954, the very year I was born. I just realize this is another link between us, in addition to the UF and Association of Coastal Engineers (ACE) connections, me having graduated from UC Berkeley with a Master’s degree in 1987, more than three decades later.

One of the spots we visited was a coastal resort development fronting the open sea
(Straits of Malacca) with two breakwater arms extending into the sea and enclose a yacht marina. I remembered showing to him a desk-top model of the proposed future development that displayed proposed houses built on the two breakwater arms and was making comments to the effect that it was sheer folly trying to build on breakwaters that bear the full brunt of the wave attack. To my totally unprepared mind, Prof. Dean, with his vast experience in coastal development, especially his 3-year stint as the Director of Shores with the State Government of Florida, started to expound on a different philosophy to coastal development, one that provides added values to coastal protection and blends it into coastal tourism. In this paradigm change from one of separating the coastal protection function from economic activity to one on integrated development, all uses of the coast are merged to facilitate a systematic development of the coastal resources.

I met Prof. Dean again in Cardiff last year [2002] at the occasion of the 28th International Coastal Engineering Conference during which he gave a touching thank-you speech to Prof. Billy Edge. More exchanges of coastal engineering matter took place during the conference.

Till this day I still have a guilty feeling when his name crops up, be it during a conversation or more likely during a technical discussion. It is then I remember that I’ve yet to send him the profile data that I promised when Prof. Dean posted an e-mail in the Coastal_List requesting for profile data for his continuing work in the analyses of beach profiles, to which I readily e-mailed back my commitment but have yet to send in the Malaysian profile data to him [To my embarrassment, this remains outstanding]..

Not too long ago, I e-mailed him again to act as a reference for my US job application and in his usual helpful manner, he replied back, “I enjoyed hearing from you. I would be pleased to provide a reference for you.” Concise and warm as usual.

As Bob Buford said in his book, Half Time: Changing Your Game Plan from Success to Significance, “One characteristic of a person who is nearing the end of the first half is that unquenchable desire to move from success to significance.” Here I note that Prof. Dean has already marched into three-quarter time, perhaps taking comfort in knowing that he has achieved both success and significance. To my mortal mind, I really cannot visualize what further legacy Prof. Dean will leave us with. But knowing Prof. Dean, I won’t be surprised that he already has something cooking.

I would always remember Prof. Dean, a mentor, a colleague, and a friend. And I would like to take this opportunity to wish him a happy retirement from UF, and a happy beginning to whatever he chooses to do in his post-retirement life.

(Penned in Malaysia, April 2003 to commemorate the retirement of Prof. Dean from University of Florida.)

Post Script: I met Prof. Dean once more, soon after I moved to US at a conference organized by the Florida Shore and Beach Preservation Association held in Orlando in 2004. He remained his smiling self, always eager to impart his vast store of coastal engineering knowledge and to interact with the next generation of coastal engineers, yours truly included.

A Trip Down Memory Lane (Part 3A): A Mentor-Colleague-Friend During my UF Days and Thereafter: Prof. Robert G. Dean

Continuing along my trip down memory lane (here and here), I have two outstanding academicians to thank for my successful journey along the Ph.D. route at the end of which I could proudly declare, I’m Phinally Done, yet without the trauma often associated with Permanent head Damage, both being plays on the word, Ph.D.

The first is Prof. Ashish J. Mehta, who served as the Chairman of my Ph.D. supervisory committee. And the other is Prof. Robert G. Dean, then the Chair of the Coastal and Oceanographic Department at University of Florida (UF). In a way, I had the best of both worlds in the continuum of coastal sediment dynamics. While Prof. Mehta is renowned in fine-grained and cohesive sediment research, Prof. Dean’s expertise in coarse-grained and cohesionless sediment transport as applied to sandy beach processes is legendary.

Today’s segment will be devoted to Prof. Dean, as a mentor, a colleague, and a friend. And there is a very simple reason for that choice of order. Back in 2003, I became aware of the Coastal Engineering Today meeting organized to honor Prof. Dean on the occasion of his retirement from UF. I also noted that a commemorative collection of letters and photos would be prepared for the meeting. The image, taken during the Waves 2001 conference, shows Prof. Dean to the extreme right with Prof. Tony Dalrymple, the organizer of the Coastal Engineering Today meeting and now with Johns Hopkins University and from whose personal web page this image is taken with thanks, to his left.

I realized then that I do not have any memorabilia concerning Prof. Dean in my possession, except a cherished memory of interaction with him in a variety of ways. Therefore I decided to pen this memory in the form of a written recollection of our interaction in appreciation of his kind assistance along my chosen path of becoming a competent coastal engineer and researcher.

Along with others, Prof. Dean has been invaluable and instrumental in imparting to me a firm grounding on the fundamentals of coastal engineering in particular as well as living the life of a decent human being in general, and the recollection is my way of expressing my gratitude.

I have contacted the organizer recently and was informed that the commemorative collection has been handed to Prof. Dean but is not part of the proceedings of the meeting, which comprised technical presentations on coastal engineering advances inspired by the works of Prof. Dean. Since this recollection is my thoughts on my learning process, both professionally and personally, I have decided to blog it here, both as a life impacting experience to be shared, and perhaps as a benchmark to gage the progress of my writing skills, seeing that what follows represents my way of writing circa 2003, verbatim.

It is noteworthy that were it not for the Internet and an online mail account that I’m still keeping today, I would not have been able to locate the following article, which has stayed stored in virtual space all these years.

Since it is a lengthy piece, my recollection will appear in two parts, conveniently separated by the time I left UF. Here, then, is Part A.

Prof. Robert G. Dean, Professor Emeritus, University of Florida (A Mentor, A Colleague, And A Friend) [Part A of 2]

I first came across the name of Prof. Dean in the beginning of a counterpart attachment to the consortium of international consultants commissioned by the Government of Malaysia to undertake the National Coastal Erosion Study in late 1984. That 15-month attachment under the tutelage of the late Mr. Neill E. Parker, the project manager of the study, opened my vista to the fascinating field of coastal engineering, and the pioneering work of Prof. Dean.

At the end of that study period in mid-1985, and as a preparation of the Government of
Malaysia to staff the proposed Coastal Engineering Technical Center, I was offered a
Federal Government Scholarship to pursue a graduate degree in Coastal Engineering. Mr. Parker was then kind enough to write three letters of recommendation on my behalf to three US universities well-known for their coastal engineering education: one to Prof.
Robert L. Wiegel of University of California, Berkeley, CA, the second to Prof. Bernard
LeMehaute of University of Miami, Coral Gables, and the third to none other than Prof. Dean of University of Florida, Gainesville. Unfortunately, I could not locate my copy of the letter of recommendation to Prof. Dean; otherwise it would have made a nice memorabilia. That was my first “brush” with the legendary Prof. Dean, but I doubt he remembered the brief encounter as it was done through a letter, albeit from an old friend of his.

As it turned out, I never made it to University of Florida then. Instead, I’ve had the good fortune of landing in UC Berkeley where I studied under Prof. Wiegel, Prof. Joe Johnson, and others. It was during this sojourn that I suspected I first met Prof. Dean in person. That was the occasion of the symposium held at UC Berkeley to honor Prof. Morrough O’Brien in March 1987. I’ve no recollection of this personal encounter, but a check of the proceedings of the symposium (Shore and Beach, July-October 1987) confirmed his attendance as a speaker, and hence my presumption.

During my 18-month academic journey into the more theoretical aspects that underpin much of the practice of coastal engineering, Prof. Dean’s name popped up more often, much like a beaming beacon guiding the uninitiated like me in deep forays into the complex realm of coastal engineering. His much celebrated textbook that he coauthored with Prof. Robert Dalrymple, Wave Mechanics for Engineers and Scientists (a.k.a Dean & Dalrymple to the initiated), was a constant companion as a supplement to the comprehensive lecture notes of Prof. Rodney Sobey in the Wave Mechanics course.

I had to wait until the spring of 1991 before I could meet Prof. Dean in person when I enrolled into the graduate degree program of the Coastal and Oceanographic Engineering Department at University of Florida. His gentle smile behind black-rimmed glasses, his affable disposition, his firm handshake, and his never-failing words of fatherly concern left a lasting impression on me.

Through my four years at UF, I took every course offered by Prof. Dean, three in all
(Littoral Processes, Non-Linear Ocean waves, and Numerical Modeling of Beach System). The assigned text during the course on Littoral Processes was the draft copy of the now published Coastal Processes with Engineering Applications (Cambridge University Press, 2002), which he co-authored with Prof. Robert A. Dalrymple. Those days some of the texts were still hand-written, including most of the questions, and I would like to think that I had a small part in beta-testing some of the questions. And thanks to Prof. Dean, I’m now a proud owner of the “zero” edition of the soon-to-be-known-as Dean & Dalrymple II, as distinct from the Dean & Dalrymple referred to earlier.

Despite having spent more than three decades on the subject, Prof. Dean still managed to maintain his curiosity in the field. That was, to me, best exemplified on one field expedition that the class (Littoral Transport) made to the Atlantic coast. There he frolicked in the surf, coming in and out of the white waters, like a teenage boy going after his priced collection (to feel the undertow tugging perhaps), leaving me, about two scores in years younger, eyes dazed, agog, and on the shore, safe from the turbulent churning. While the surf image below is not along the Atlantic seaboard where our field lesson took place but rather the Clearwater Beach facing the Gulf of Mexico at the location of the St. Pete Municipal Pier, it suffices to demonstrate the peril of a high surf condition.


Prof. Dean also sat on my Ph.D. supervisory committee as my research topic of interaction of mud profiles with waves has some analogy with his well-known work on sandy profiles. I too derived a close-form profile equation for an alongshore-uniform mud shoreline with additional consideration of wave dissipation due to wave-soft bed interaction. This consideration leads to a different profile modality, one which is able to migrate from a concave upward to a convex upward form, depending on the wave dissipation characteristics of the substrate, as opposed to a monotonically concave upward form of the Dean’s profile.

I used a similar approach to evaluate the cross-shore sediment transport, and hence, the temporal profile evolution, it being a function of the degree of deviation from a target profile based on the equilibrium beach profile concept.

One other activity that has etched into not only my own memory, but my wife’s too (I guess my kids were still too young to cherish the memory, but not too young to relish the moments though), is the annual Christmas get-together in his house, which we attended without fail. I especially enjoyed the occasion as it fostered an atmosphere of “letting one’s hair down” that facilitated “getting to know you”, especially for new graduate students who may have left the comforts of their home countries and were thrust into this strange and unfamiliar, both physically and culturally, land for the very first time.

(Please stay tuned for Part B.)

Buddhism and Christianity: A Cross-Faith Exchange, Part 1

I used to read Chinese comic books when I was young, way back when I was still in elementary school. But I have to admit that my first encounter with comic books, or rather magazines, is with the English genre, courtesy of my elder brother’s collection such as the Superman and Charlie Brown’s series. Then I was just enjoying the drawings and sketches, concocting the story in my own mind as I leafed through the pages as English was not my mother tongue.

Then I got hooked on to the Chinese comic books when I attended Chinese primary school. I remember spending a few afternoons a week in a teacher’s room, devouring his collection of comic books on the famous Chinese characters of yore, the ever loyal Ye Fei of the Sung Dynasty and his achievements in the battle field and his untimely death in the hand, or rather machination, of the number one villain in my book then, the heroics of the female warriors from the Yang family, and self-contained excerpts from several epic Chinese literary works such as the Annals of the Water Margin and the Romance of the Three Kingdoms. Probably the seed of my writing hobby was sown then.

Then I migrated to the works of the written word with sporadic reading, more like scanning/skimming, of other popular English comic series such as Archie, Shonen Jump, and the Japanese Anime that I happened to pick up around the house. And yes, they belonged to my kids.

Along the way, I chanced upon the works of the great manga master of Japan, Tezuka Osamu. Previously I have come across his works but did not associate his name in Chinese to him. And my curiosity was piqued when I learned that he has created a manga series on the life of Buddha.

From the Tezuka Osama at World website, I learned that the original serial works that encompassed Tezuka Osamu's biography of Buddha based on his unique interpretation commenced in September 1972 and continued until December 1983 variously in "Kibo-no-tomo," "Shonen World" and "Comic Tom".

The problem with reading manga works is obviously the language barrier for a non-Japanese like me. Granted I know kanji, the Chinese characters that have been incorporated into written Japanese with essentially the same meaning most of the time. But as can be seen from a preview page below taken from the above website, kanji is used sparingly indeed (examples from the preview page include emptiness, respect, death, practice) and it would be a huge leap of imagination to be able to “connect the dots” so to speak. Also, the limited collection of hiragana/katagana words that I picked up when I spent two months in Japan in 1985 under the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) training program have deserted me entirely, relegated my grasp of the Japanese language to mere greetings.


While I was contemplating a search for a Chinese translation of Tezuka Osamu’s Buddha, my old friend, Peng Leong, emailed the following to me, all the way from Singapore, and more important, he has agreed to share his thoughts with the visitors to this blog (Thanks, Peng Leong) [save for some editorial corrections, the following has been reproduced verbatim from his email where Tezuka Osamu has been abbreviated to OT by him, including the multiple dots]:

"I just came back from a company sponsored "Energy Workshop" in Mumbai ... it is amazing how 18 million people squeezing into such a small piece of real estate ... a land of extremes ... of a few extravagant and almost obscenely rich scattered among the millions of homeless poor ... almost like the OT stories I read when he wrote of Buddha's life in India...

I love OT drawings and telling of the Buddha story in his unique way ... Buddha sacrificed a lot in his pursuit for meaning in life ... even near the end Buddha was disappointed that his closest disciples, Ananda, and the rest could not grasp the essentials of his teaching ... but everything turn out OK in the end...

Reading these 8 books is like reading the book of Eccelesiastes which is credited from King Soloman ... everything in the "material world" is "vanity of vanities" it is like "chasing the wind" sigh!!! if you read Eccelesiastes again, you will find a lot of similarities in what Buddha is teaching ...

Many years when I was still in school, it was this book of Eccelesiastes that provoke me to think about the meaning (or meaninglessness) of life ... I seek and after a long journey I finally in 1979 made a decision to believe that in Christ I can have eternal life (which is not the same as my life on earth). when I discourse with my Buddhist friends over the years, they said that I was in fact practicing the Buddha way of life from my sharing of the gospel taught by Jesus ... I believe there are many similarities except for the concept of sin and the divinity of Christ Jesus ... Buddha never claims to be God and the books showed that in the end all living souls (whether man or animals or birds or insects" will return to the "source" and be reincarnated again.

I will continue to read the teaching of other religious teachers as there is much wisdom in them and it is helpful in our journey on earth ... and one day we will return to our eternal home and there will be no more tears, no more suffering ...”

While a devout Christian, Peng Leong is not averse to learning the teachings of other religions, Buddhism included, though some could argue that reading OT’s Buddha may not be the best source of Buddha’s teachings as even the above website acknowledges that "In the story, many people surrounding the hero, Sittarda, are fictitious, and historical figures are significantly dramatized.”

But I have no qualms in recommending OT’s Buddha to followers of other faiths if that is what it would take to propagate the teachings of Buddha so that others could benefit, notwithstanding the fact that I am yet to read them.

So my next reading project will be OT’s Buddha, the English translation, eight volumes of them. But first I would have to lay my hand on them. A search at the local public library turns out empty. Perhaps the USF library ... Then there is always eBay, Barnes and Noble …

Since this blog is already quite lengthy by my normal standard, I decided to blog about my response to Peng Leong's musing in the next installment. So stay tuned.

DIY: The Way to the Upkeep of Our Own House

Our D’s adventure into DIYdom (see here) has prompted our efforts to translate thought into action. Since we bought our house as-is, there are several non-structural “defects” that we have to attend to on our own. Also, in the midst of moving by hired help, we have found some of our furniture pieces to be less than satisfactory, stability-wise. On further examination, we found the following wanting:

1) Some cracked tiles on the stair steps.

2) Two missing vertical blind pieces for the sliding glass door in a 2nd floor bedroom.

3) Missing screws from the affixed wooden frame mirrors to the dressers.

4) Missing bolts from the affixed backboards to the beds.

Item 3 was addressed early on by a trip to the hardware section of Target with the purchase of boxes of nails, long screws, and a hand-held power drill-cum-screw driver. Single-handedly, I moved each dresser around, made a pilot hole with a nail and hammer at each location of missing screws, and tightened each screw using a Philip screw-driver. I did try to use the power drill that I just bought but the clamped screw seemed to turn eccentrically. Perhaps the screw is not meant to be clamped by the drill directly. So much for my DIY experience with a power tool.

And to be on the safe side, I decided to use the human-powered Philip screw driver, still DIY, but now with some perspiration. And yes, my D did help by holding the gingerly attached wooden frame, which was held on to the dresser by two screws only on the vertically aligned connecting metal piece (there are 24 such perforations), one on each side, while I screwed on the missing screws, seven on each compared to just two before. The result: a non-shaking (almost anyway) mirror on top of the dresser, which hitherto just seemed about to topple over at the slightest touch. See the right image for the attachment details. Yes, the thought of completing all the 24 screws did cross my mind. But in the end practicality convinced me that it would be an overkill in redundancy, though the fact that I was running out of screws did help nudge me toward that decision, vindicated by the ultimate test on completion.

After the heavy duty DIY, my wife attended to the less physically demanding but intrinsically more challenging chore of fixing the cracked tiles (item 1). Being clumsy at household repair, primarily because of the lack of experience as our first abode was a rented apartment where all repairs were just one call away and all the associated costs were included in the monthly rental anyway, we decided to try out a patch job instead of a full-blown remove-and-replace (which means breaking the cracked tiles, very carefully so as not to damage any adjacent tiles, re-lay the cement base to present a level surface at the same height as that of the surrounding tiles, emplace the replacement tiles, though finding tiles with the same texture/design/shine, or rather a kind of faded shine because of the passage of time thorough use, may prove next to impossible, and caulk the joints) operation. The solution: look for a self-adhesive plastic sheet with a surface design that mimics that of the tiles and thick enough to bridge over the cracks.

Scouring from memory, we tried our best to match the available surface patterns/designs of the plastic sheets on sale at Target to what we thought is the one we have been stepping on in the past week. Truth be told that we did have some disagreements over which presented the best match but as any loving husband will do, I deferred to my wife for the final choice.

Upon return, my wife did the patch work for the first step and then only it hit upon us how unreliable our supposedly differentiating and discerning eyes and memory recall can be (a classic refutation of Seeing is Believing?). See for yourself.

But I doubt anyone can do any better under the circumstances. At least the utility part has been met: now the covered tiles do not present any risk of injury to a bare foot that comes into contact with them. But the rest of the cracked tiles (there are several more) would have to wait for a better match of the surface design.

To address item 2, my wife first did some preparatory work involving measuring the length of the door blinds. But since we could not find the tape measure, suspected of being thrown away as trash with other kitchen items during the move, my wife decided to use the papers from a note pad cellophane-taped together to represent the actual length.

Thus armed, we sourced the Internet for the nearest Home Depot, and found one along Bruce B. Down, a couple of miles distant away. This is like a huge warehouse, with rows and rows and stacks after stacks of a variety of building and household materials. It took us some time (we went one full round the premises but to no avail) plus some inquiry (the Home Depot helper was most helpful and knowledgeable about the whereabouts: aisle 4) before we were at the right spot.

However, we could not find one that equaled the crude paper measure that we had prepared. It’s either too long or too short. Naturally, we went for the longer one. While my wife preferred to have the right length cut there and then, I confidently demurred, saying that nothing cannot be fixed with a pair of household scissors. After all, how tough would it be to cut aluminium foils? But at the back of my head I was already planning a contingency plan of buying a pair of metal cutting scissors.

My contingency plan soon turned out to be unnecessary when my wife called me from upstairs to look at her handiworks, using the household scissors for the work at hand. Now there is no more two gaping slits along the whole length (or height since it is vertical) of the blinds while in a closed position.

My mental perception of size again failed me when we approached the last item on our weekend to-do list: the missing bolts. The bolt diameter I had in mind was one size too big (5/16” compared to ¼” after the fact). But the length was spot-on (2.5”). So was that of the threaded part (to my credit, I did remember it is a partially threaded bolt). Also I have had the good sense (a common one?) to buy just one (we needed six for the three beds) because of the uncertainty that I had realized early on.

Moral of the story? Always measure when it comes to sizes (length, width, height, diameter, etc.) as it has been proven again and again that human perception of dimension can be way off. A handyman’s motto perhaps?

So two down, two more to go, I mean the to-do list, which means a revisit to Home Depot today (my wife is definitely not a procrastinator in this respect). Then the Home Depot’s Flyer that came with today’s St. Pete Times announced their giving away of free CFLs (which I blogged here) today in conjunction with 2007 Earth Day, which falls on today (April 22). So Home Depot it is.

The 3rd MWBA Meditation and Dharma Talk Session: Zen and Liberation of the Mind

Today we had our 3rd meditation cum dharma talk session organized by the Middle Way Buddhist Association and held at the St. Pete venue, but conducted and delivered by Brother Shieh as Bhante Dhammawansha is away in Asia. In the first session on meditation, Brother enumerated the following steps for beginners to heed:

a) adjust body position to achieve a physically stress-free state so as not to affect the focus (hence minimizing the benefits of meditation) by first bending the body, while in the single lotus (left leg on right or right leg on left) or double lotus sitting position, so that the bottom is partly suspended, then sitting back, thereby attaining a stable foundation.

b) Take care of the environment by having free air circulation, but not having the air stream directed at you, and placing shower towel over the legs to keep the knees warm.

c) Exercise minor adjustments by relaxing progressively various parts of the body, starting with the head, forehead and moving toward the bottom.

d) Focus on the breathing action.

e) Keep eyes slightly open to stay awake, mouth slightly agape and tongue touching the top of the teeth to facilitate air flow.

f) Other ways of keeping focused are staying fixed on one thought, though it’s better to try not to think, chanting Buddha’s name (Amitabha), and focusing on Buddha’s statue that evokes respect.

g) If the mind starts to drift away, stop and bring the wandering mind back. The most important thing is to realize where your mind is.

h) While any time is a good time to meditate, doing it in the early hours of the morning does have its advantages such as the environment is likely quiet and we just start on a new fresh day.

i) The length of time considered enough depends on the individuals. For Brother Shieh, his focus is beyond the sitting moment as meditation is one mechanism to help one to learn.

j) There is inherently more challenges to doing individual meditation as then a conducive environment may be at a premium.

In his introductory remarks during the ensuing Dharma talk, aptly named Wisdom Class, Brother Shieh explained that while Buddhism acknowledges the importance of self in the sense that we are to find the solution to our own problems, it also points out the problem of self attachment.

After writing down several terms associated with Zen: silence, still, and stasis, without elaborating further "of what", he invited the attendees to name the first thing that came into mind when the word Zen was heard. The candidates include: calm, peace, floating/suspended, question, lost connection, peaceful meditation. This diversity of views reflect the works of individual minds, each being a response born out of past personal experiences and conditioned by individual circumstances. In other words, each exhibits awareness of his/her own mind.

In the material world, we see things in the binary mode, a dichotomy of good and bad, of right and wrong. However, the essence of Zen, which is the heart of Buddhism, is non-dichotomy, or undichotomized dharma. We should distinguish, but without attachment.

Buddha teaching can be likened to a vessel/boat that would enable us to cross the ocean. However, once we reach the other shore, a proxy term for enlightenment, we should let go of the boat and not carry it onshore.

To learn Zen requires thinking. Therefore Zen is silence, stillness, and stasis of the mind, a state of being that is not restricted to when we are not in motion.

In the same vein, wisdom is free from annoyances and afflictions, a state described as the liberation of the mind manifested by having no attachment to the past, the present, and the future. This is Zen as enunciated by the Sixth Patriarch of the Zen School through his verses: Detachment from external appearances; Not to be disturbed internally.

Conversely, sin in Buddhism is that which leads to annoyance/affliction. It’s all in the mind, and the way to attain wisdom is to change the way we think.

Tolerance, which connotes a disparity in status between one who tolerates and one who is tolerated, is not a concept in Buddhism because all are considered equal in Buddhism. We do not heap accolades on the good nor do we condemn the bad. We just accept without enforcement or doubt.

The Buddhist worldview is one of connection as nothing occurs just from this moment. While the past has gone, we should learn from the past.

Detachment is understanding that all occurrences/disappearances are based on “conditions”. There is no need to point fingers in a relationship that has gone sour, but we do need to work hard to improve the conditions, and to stay away from the wrong/bad conditions. In this respect, it’s imperative that we observe the Five Precepts, the basic Buddhist Code of Ethics, which stipulates no killing, no stealing, no misconduct, no false speech, and no taking alcoholic drinks, so as not to generate bad karma.

Before adjourning the 3rd session, Brother Shieh reiterated that Buddha nature is in all of us, and that what differentiates us, the laymen, from Buddha, the Enlightened one, is that we have not eliminated all illusions and attachments.

Great Beings, Great Master, and a Great Teacher

In place of Bhante Dhammawansha, the resident monk of Dhamma Wheel Meditation Society, who is on an Asian trip, Brother Shieh has started his series of Dharma talk on the Sutra of the Eight Realizations of Great Beings at the Clearwater venue last Sunday (April 1). But we were unable to make it to the talk then as we were in the midst of moving. After settling in, and armed with the ensuing peace of mind, we drove to Clearwater to attend the second one in the series this Sunday evening (April 8), not worrying about continuity as we had earlier attended the same opening talk but in Chinese delivered by Brother Shieh as blogged here.

At the outset, Brother Shieh reiterated that while we are layman Buddhists, we should strive to do what Buddhist monks and nuns do. Then continuing with the First Realization, he explained that while the five skandhas (or aggregates), they being form, sensation, perception, mental formation, and consciousness, occur in a definite sequence, i.e., thought follows feeling, the ascension from one step to the other is instantaneous. In addition, while the notion of self is important since only I can make it happen, it is also a barrier in the sense that any sense of control that it engenders is illusory at best.

In Buddhism, “unreal” connotes impermanence, but does not imply non-existence as Buddhism does not deny anything.

On the difficulty of drawing the young generation to Buddhism as they tend to be concerned only with the present circumstances, Brother Shieh advised that everyone has the potential to learn Buddhism and we just have to keep providing the conditions that would nudge them along in the right direction. But in order to help others, we have to take good care of ourselves by helping ourselves to learn. And this is far from being selfish. Brother Shieh then quoted the Sixth Patriarch of the Zen School, Master Hui Neng, whose Altar Sutra (or sometimes termed as the Platform Sutra) is a comprehensive compendium of his Buddhist teaching, “while I’m in illusion, I still need help from my Master. After I’ve realized, I will be able to help myself.”

Of the Five Aggregates, the first, form, relates to the body, while the other four are functions of the mind. Therefore, we should not try to discriminate between the mind and the body. According to Master Hui Neng, Zen can be succinctly characterized as “Detach from external appearances; and not to be disturbed internally”.

Another oft-repeated phrase from Master Hui Neng is “Affliction is wisdom.” And negative condition can lead to progress in a person as well.

Brother Shieh then related a famous story of how Zen Master Hui Neng, at the age of 17 and being an illiterate, was recognized for his ability to realize the teaching of Buddha as manifested in his spontaneous response to the following Chinese verses written by a brother Buddhist monk, Master Shen Xiu, who was widely acknowledged for his depth of understanding the ways of the Buddha (however, in order to do proper justice to the translation, I've elected to quote from here):

'The body is the tree of enlightenment,
The mind is the stand of a bright mirror.
Wipe it constantly and with ever-watchful diligence,
To keep it uncontaminated by the worldly dust.'
- Zen Master Shen Xiu

'Originally there is no tree of enlightenment,
Nor there is a stand with a bright mirror.
Since everything is primordially empty,
what is there for dust to cling to ?'
- Sixth Patriach Hui Neng

And a great Buddist monk had come of age.

Before the Dharma talk was adjourned, interspersed with a lively exchange of views among the attendees, Brother Shieh spent some time on elucidating the concept of “wu-wei” as introduced in the Second Realization. It’s not No Action, but acting without following the condition. For me, this is one instance where word starts to fail me. So the best I could do is to reproduce the excellent annotation by the Buddha Gate Monastery:

Wu-wei : free from forced effort (but not necessarily no-action), free from clinging and attachments, unconditioned, absolute. It also means inner peace obtained by having no desires, understanding that we are intrinsically complete and lacking nothing.

And Brother Shieh will continue with his third Dharma talk in the series on the coming Sunday (April 15) at the same time, i.e., 6pm. See you all there.

A Solar Blast From the Recent Past

Three years two months and some change. That’s how long we have lived near Old Hyde Park. During the last week of stay there at the end of March, my wife took pictures of the different hues of sunrise along the Bayshore Boulevard. And as a memento of us ever setting foot on this place on earth, we would like to dedicate this blog to the many moods of nature as a befitting montage (though in separate pieces) of images that we would like to remember our brief visit there by.

Now that we are no more living next to the Bay’s edge, we will have to drive some distance to experience a similar visual tapestry at the distant horizon. But we can always revisit this blog, the vivid mood swings of the skyscape, sometimes azure, sometimes darkened, and at times cloudy captured in still form, frozen in time, and yet dynamic when viewed in succession. Here we go, in no particular order, chronolohically or otherwise:

At day break, a gradual transition of the orange shrouding the land boundary layer to the azure sky as the backdrop to the sentinel lookalikes, seemingly standing guard over the automobile stream.

The sunrise just about to break loose from below the horizon, streaking the cloud formation and backlighting the sea gulls on their morning forays.

This is a rare occasion of (barely concealed) calm before the tempest,
the lone centurion steadfast against the intricate interplay of gossamer apparitions.

Then it's back to the white fluffy softness underscored by linear horizontal tracks of gray, evincing a rather mixed emotional state.

The still linear but increasingly thicker gray gradually angling upward,
now enveloping more of the sky but failing to block out the ever penetrating sun rays.

The ensemble of lights: artificial, the dawn, and a speck of moon.
And yes, that's the moon and the other grains are raindrops.
There was a light drizzle in the air, a rare sight in the morning.

Have had enough of the sunrise? How about a sunset just for contrast?

Going west toward St. Pete on an overcast day dominated by the low level gray clouds,
with sun rays streaking through fan-like.

So there you have it. The vagaries of nature, the vicissitude of life, and the mutability of life's fortunes.

Adjustments and Transformation

The recent moving further away from my office, but just next door to USF where my younger D will be enrolling this fall, has necessitated some changes to my routine. Gone are the days of leaving the home JIT (as in just in time).

For the past four days since I started the longer commute, I’ve been taking the Interstate 275, leaving our new home just before 6.30am. And the journey so far averages about 25 minutes for a travel that is best described as free flowing but at a controlled speed.

Here is a morning shot from our complex across to the USF campus. You can barely make out the name USF at the entrance pedestal.

The return trip, on the other hand, is a different story. I’ve tried three different routes, leaving the office around 5pm, and they all took at least 45 min. People are all just anxious to get home, clogging all the lanes at the same time. The I-275 way is shorter, but is a grid lock at several places where feeder roads join it, debouching near endless streams of cars into the over-stretched I-275.

The city road has too many traffic lights, ensnarling the traffic into a frequently idling mode. It seems a better solution could be to change the time of travel and not fight with the first wave of traffic, during both the morning and the evening rush hours. At the moment, I’ve no choice because my D has to get to school before 7.25 am. But she will soon be done with high school in another one and a half months, and counting whence I will experiment with the new time slot.

After more than three years of enjoying a single digit minute commute, I’m really not about to spend more time on the road than I absolutely need to. The aggravation of traffic woes, the increased chance of accident exposure, not to mention the apparent waste of valuable time and burning fuel. Except when this glorious vista comes into view, kind of driving (though galloping would be preferable) into the sunset.

Since school is off today for Easter, I arrived at the office about 10 min before 7am. So I was able to leave proportionally early, a practice known as flexi-time, which I did at 4.40pm.

And to my surprise, the I-275 route was relatively free-flowing. In fact, it seemed to be slightly better off than the morning’s commute. Then again it could be because the school is off and also because of the long Easter weekend. So it’s premature to generalize today’s ease of travel as being the rule.

I also located the nearest public library, which is my favorite book haunt. Actually, it’s even closer to our home than before. Then there is the huge USF library, which provides free access to the public, even though the loan facility is not likewise extended.

So tomorrow will be a busy day of exploring the neighborhood, which we first did by foot around the perimeter of our complex yeterday. It was around 7pm and the neighborhood road was quite deserted, save for another woman walking her dog across the street. So serene.

As for unpacking, just witness what the lady of the house has done, transforming an empty house into a comfy abode where many hours will be spent in leisurely pursuits.

The Gators is the Best Collegiate Basketball TEAM Two Years in A Row

The game plan of Billy Donovan was brilliant and superbly executed by the Gators on April 2: Put different bodies on Oden but no double team; the result: a tired Oden, and a spent force toward the end. Play zone defense and restrict the Buckeyes to outside shooting; the result: 2 of 23 from long range. And both Donovan and the Gators believe in their perimeter shooting, grudgingly but wisely acknowledging the prowess of territorial Oden, but only in the paint.

As is often said, the lack of raw talent is more than made up by the team chemistry, putting the team before self. Most importantly, the players believe the basketball sense of the coach who sees the whole court and dissects the opponents’ weaknesses while leveraging on the strength of the Gators to exploit these exposed foibles.

Basketball is a team sport. Therefore, it should not surprise anyone that a well-balanced team would always trump one with one or even two star players.

Now both the coach and the “Oh Four” group have a decision to make: the former whether to go for a three-peat, but in all likelihood with a different Gator team makeup or to try to duplicate the same success over at Kentucky while the latter whether to turn pro, having reached the pinnacle, twice, in their collegiate career and having understood the truism that there is no I in TEAM.

We have been riding high on the shoulders of this special unselfish group of Gators for the past two years and I say let’s leave them alone to make their next moves. Whatever it is, their contribution in putting the stamp of the Gator Nation in the American sport scene is the tallest order one can expect and certainly the highest honor, academically or otherwise, that one can garner as well. Thanks Billy and company for the excitement and for the memory.

Even the post-game interview was conducted in a TEAM fashion.

Same (Gators) Team, So Same (Beating the Bruins) Result

We spent our first night at our new home last night. Actually it was already past mid-night when we went to bed after all the setting up of the new home following our moving earlier in the day, with hired help.

And it was an auspicious day for the Gators when its semi-final game against the Bruins was the very first collegiate basketball game that we watched in our new home. This time, though, we have basic cable, which means we got to watch the game in clear picture and vivid color (we had to depend on a TV-top aerial for reception in our previous home). Same Gators team, and what else but the same result.

Jeff Goodman has this to say in his piece entitled Florida better not expect same UCLA team “The Gators could very well still come out with a victory, but this one definitely won't be a double-figure win.”

After the Gators came up top tonight 76-66 and a double-digit lead for most of the second half, one can say Jeff Goodman is only half right, that the Gators was victorious, but with an exactly double-digit margin.

In comparison, my prediction seems to have fared better, that the Gators won with sort of a mini runaway triumph. The Gators team has simply too many weapons for the Bruins to handle despite the latter's reputation for playing stifling defense. And tonight is Corey Brewer's turn to do damage. And the Gators' big men were phenomenal on the offensive board.

As for the final on Monday, the Gators have already handed the Buckeyes two landslide defeats: one on the basketball court in last December despite that the game was played in Gainesville, and the other one on the football field early this year, so it would not surprise me at all if history is repeated come Monday, given the balance, the depth, the chemistry among the players, and the championship game experience, not forgetting the coach.

Moving and Strength Training

After toying with the idea of getting friends to help out in our moving mission, we decided on a combination of self help and hired help.

The self help part started early this week when we made daily trip to our new home in our loaded minivan. My wife did the packing into boxes marked by different letters/numbers to signify different destinations in the house, e.g., K for kitchen, 2L for second floor left bedroom, and so on. And I do the heavy lifting, loading the boxes onto and unloading them from the minivan. I am very careful so as not to hurt my back: knee bent, and using the thigh and hand rather than the back muscles. And one box at a time, maybe two if they contain light materials such as clothing. So yesterday was the fourth strip, and each trip is like the image below so you get an idea of the efforts involved.


My wife commented that despite my not exercising as much as she does, I am still able to undergo some “hard labor”, thanks to my “grounding” during my earlier years.

My late father was a rubber dealer, buying and selling rubber sheets and scraps, the former from small holders and the latter, to rubber smoking factories (a literal translation) where they smoke-dry the machined rubber sheets made from rubber latex (a sap/secretion from rubber trees) into high quality rubber products. Since it was basically a family business, all the male siblings had one time or the other helped out in the rubber store.

Basically we would cycle every weekday (after school and lunch) about half a mile to the store. There the small holders would deliver their machined rubber sheets or scraps (these are remnants of rubber latex that have dried up overnight and are pulled from the cut grooves on the rubber trunk, sometimes containing some of the tree barks, and hence, are of lower quality and would fetch a lower price) in bicycles, motorcycles, cars, and small trucks/pickups.

Our job is to carry the rubber products by hand to a weighing machine. Each load could run from tens of katis (one kati is more than a pound but less than two, I’ll have to look that up) to over 100 katis, shared by two persons. And we started doing this while in elementary schools (aged 11) but on a graduated scale starting from smaller loads in proportion to our (growing) physique. And this weight training for me lasted until my Junior High when I had to skip town for further schooling but would still be around to go through the same drill during holidays. So I have had really good physical training that would last me a life time of strength and health as I’m enjoying now.

But the physical toil did take its toll on my blogging, which has become a case of mind willing but body failing. So the past few nights I’ve been going to bed earlier than usual and I’m getting worried that I would fall victim to the very thing that I have ranted about, the virtual cobwebs, here. And not at a time when the same blog article has inspired our D from Oregon to start dusting off her blog site. There’s where the hired help comes in.

And I let my finger do all the walking, thumbing through the Yellow Pages, under the Movers section. After a few phone calls, I had our reservation. It so happened that we wanted to move on Friday (March 30), an auspicious day for conducting such a business as moving according to the Chinese calendar, and moving services are hard to come by on weekends. So University Moving it is.

The mover’s truck with two men came right on time at 9.00 this morning. And even as I was blogging, stuff was gradually disappearing from my view. And it looks like this would be my last blog from this house that has been our home for the past three years.

So long Post Hyde Park. And USF/MOSI here we come.