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Outdoor Ice Skating in Houston

It is doable!  Even in Houston, it’s doable to ice skate outside!

It’s available through January 18, 2010 at Discovery Green.  Sure it costs $10 per person (even for a 5-year-old kid!), but it’s an experience not easy to come by!  Especially for a hot place like Houston!  It was my kids’ first time on ice and skates at the same time!  I was unsure how they would respond to it but they responded phenomenally!  Sure it was crowded but JJ loved every minute of it!  He “skated” as if he was tip toe walking it (that’s because he did!) and Anna seemed almost natural!

This Friday, some families from our church will go to Galveston’s Moody Gardens for its Festival of Lights, a light show that is annual.  During my 11 years of life in Houston, we have yet to go!  So it will be fun I hope… and ice skate again!

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A Very Warming Story for Modern Cold Times

NPR has a weekly spot called StoryCorps.  This week, they ran a story of self-recorded interview on this one person.  He is a janitor.  Nothing extraordinary there.  However, he and his wife of 25 years do not have kids.  So Willie Jefferson feels that the kids at the school that he has served as janitor for 23 years are his kids.  He has had impact enough on these kids over the years so much that they think of him and his wife as their parents.

These days, I feel that our society is getting more and more distant and colder as technology and crime seem to distance us away from each other.  So I take these warm stories like Haagen-Dazs coffee ice cream: savor every word of such awesome story.  Stories such as this gives me hope that people can be trust-worthy…

I hope we all have people that we are fond of and love… Like in the words of DC Talk, “We all wanna be loved”

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For a Greener World

We have lived a life of ruining the world.  Pollution and waste are at the worst high and worst of all, we aren’t really aware of it.  We need to bite the bullet and strive for a greener world.  So where do we start, you ask?  Start using less gasoline.  Use re-useable bags for shopping instead of plastic bags.  Check sites like TreeHugger.com.  And here are some developments that could help.

There’s a company called Brammo which is producing a motocycle.  That’s nothing new.  But it’s an all-electric bike!  Currently, it only has about 42-mile range and requires about 4 hours to recharge.  That’s lame, you say.  But it’s perfect for commuting to work.  The downside is that it is expensive at $10K.  But you will practically pay nothing on fuel anymore.  And as it gets revamped, the cost will come down.  It’s this kind of progress and direction the world needs to make.

Another cool idea that’s coming around is making ethanol out of garbage!  That’s ingenious!  I do believe that alternative energy source is the future in saving the Earth from dying.  I hope we all try to contribute in saving the Earth.

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Soda Tax a Possibility

NPR Article

Why didn’t we think of this before?!  Government is thinking about and planning on taxing soda.  Soda is mostly sugar water.  And it’s one of the leading reasons why the Americans are so dang unhealthy, and the contributor to America’s health insurance cost.

It’s so simple.  Tax soda to let people know that you are paying extra because it’s known to make you unhealthy.  We do it to cigarettes and alcohol.  Why not soda?!  Heck, why stop there?  Tax other stuff like cakes and cookies!!  Ok, ok… some of you are probably freaking out.  But seriously, we are the fattiest country (by far) in the world!  We consume way more food than the rest of the world.  We need to be less selfish and strive for change.

As prices for such unhealthy products go up, perhaps it will wake us up to smell the coffee and strive for healthier lives… and lower the nation-wide healthcare cost.  \

Now my favorite sodas of Coca Cola (none of that Pepsi crap please) and Sweppe’s Ginger Ale will cost me more and will prevent me from drinking so much!  Actually, I have pretty much stopped drinking soda altogether.  I drink perhaps about 1 serving of soda per week or two.  Let’s do it America!

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A Story That Crossed an Ocean and Half a Decade

NY Times Article

Wow… this story definitely crossed several genres of walls for me.  A story of a US soldier who coincidentally picked up a drawing and a picture of a Japanese baby girl that transcended time to reunite them fifty+ years later.  That baby girl grew up not knowing her father at all but upon being reunited with the picture, she saw her father’s unspoken and unknown side:  that her father had adored her and carried her picture to his dying field.

War has never been pretty.  World War II was never an exception.  If anything, it seemed to bring that point out even more sharply with two big powers.  Iwo Jima was such a small island and losing several tens of thousands of soldiers seemed so tiny of a reason.  Yet, what this story was able to do was to make this war so much more personal for these 3 people involved.

I fought back a load of tears as I read this story.  Having allergies actually was a positive thing for once as it helped cover up the tears and the runny nose.  This story also softened my heart about wars because it showed that there’s always a personal side to something so tragic and terrible.