Tuesday, May 30, 2006

New Toy

Yeah, finally ended a half-a-year long struggle and bought an el-drumset! Brian and I went to a drum shop introduced by one of my colleagues to get a new drumset on last Friday. Even it was still expensive I got a special "Bartek-price" for it which means I got a drum seat for free. It was not a super good deal but nice enough. It took me 4 hours to set that up. It was the biggest "toy" I have ever seen! Inside the big paper box lay someting like 12 boxes! After unpacking my whole living room was stuffed with paper boxes. Don't even need to listen to the sound, the look of it is cool enough to be a part of the apartment. I have been spending quite a lot of time playing on it since then trying to make it more worth while of course. :-)

Thursday, May 25, 2006

I AM BACK!!

Hello everybody. After leaving my blog for 6 months now I am back. I hope my blog has survived through the winter and now wakes up nice and fresh. Still remember when I first started blogging it was also around this time of the year. Probably because it is related to my female hormone cycle, well, not really, more likely to be related to the weather.

Sorry to tell people who prefer to read Chinese that I am going to stop blogging in this artistic looking language and start using this plain and boring one. The main reason is my good friend Anders complaint I didn't have a blog which he could read. Hum... Sorry Anders putting you on the chopping board but you did give me motivation to start blogging again with an easier language. Blogging in Chinese always took me too long time, perhaps because my Chinese is deteriorating which is a shame. A good thing is I am not totally giving up my mother language. I am still trying to write Chinese, just not on my blog.

Pretty busy at work lately. Lots of deadlines. Today is the first day of my 4-days-in-a-roll public holiday. I spent a few hours rearranging the furniture in the living rooms and I have got a broken waist now. I think the place looks better now though. Planning to buy a new drumset tomorrow, woohoo~ Finally the evil has successfully beaten up the angle on my shoulder and ended my months long struggle. Evil Brian has been a part of it that is probably why. Next time when you visit me I can give you a private drum show, lalala~~

One nice thing to tell, well, this is also what Anders suggested me to blog about. I have recently joined the Online Volunteers programme runs by the United Nation Volunteer organisation (http://www.onlinevolunteering.org/). If you know me good enough you should know I couldn't live without volunteering. Once upon a time I was an ultra active volunteer for 7 years. Due to various reasons I was not able to continue and it has been almost 3 years now since I stopped. I was so excited when I first bumped into this website. It offers oppotunities for people like me who cannot involve in first line volunteering to play a part in the volunteer world. This is so great! Exactly what I have been hopping to do. I enrolled and I got my first assignment approved. I am going to translate a brochure for the Internation Poverty Center (http://www.undp-povertycentre.org/) from English to Chinese so they can spread the mission to China. See, I told you I have not given up Chinese! The brochure is longer than I expected though, this is my first assignment so I have to do it well. For people who cannot participate in frontline volunteering but are enthusiastic on helping people, I strongly recommend you to have a look on the OV website.

Apart from OV, I have also been donating on the UN World Food Programme (http://www.wfp.org/english/). My trip to the Gambia in Dec 2005 drew my attention to this issue very much. I realised people in Africa and some other places really need the attention of the rest of the World. They do require help. I have also got an idea that from now on if any of my friends are going to borrow my/Brian's DVDs, they are kindly asked to donate some money to Frances's Charity Fund. The fund I just set up 5 seconds ago. I will donate the collection to WFP. So, the next time when you borrow something please bring along some money, amount is up to you! Thank you! I hope I am not breaking the copyright by doing this.

That's all for now. I will try to keep this blog updated more frequently then it used to be.