SQJ Taipei

just real quick…
been totally swamped lately.
I was glad to get to go on a bike ride last week and on a hike the week before. It is such a help to a weary body and mind.
Our summer intern, Kayla, is here now. She’s great… doing great… and going to do great. Her dad is on [...]

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How would your kids like to live in a house filled with puzzles, contraptions, and secret compartments which are just built into the house itself?
In our case… it wouldn’t just be my kids, but my kids’ dad too!
This article is about such a house. The parents were remodeling and asked the design firm to be [...]

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I’ve uttered those words from Whitman’s famous poem countless times the past 6 years. I suppose this will be the last time I do so for a while…
Although there is much to do… I need a bit of closure and I’m hoping this will help.

Captain - 隊長June 2002 - May 28, 2008
After spending 2 restless [...]

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A couple weeks ago, I discovered that one of my daughter’s dance teachers is weighing the girls every week, writing down their weight in the attendance book, and then pointing out how much fatter they got since the last class.
Besides physical abuse, I can hardly think of anything more destructive to an 11 or 12 [...]

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I’m not even going to try and answer that one… but if you are a cat hater… you’ll want to click away now…
Our 6 year old cat, Captain (Chinese name: 隊長), was just diagnosed with stage 4 renal failure - stage 1 would be the beginning stage… stage 4 comes just before death.
It is irreversible [...]

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…That I’ve found so far.
There’s so much good stuff out there and I’d love to spend a lifetime listening to it all.
The other day I was just looking at the Cornerstone 2008 lineup and wishing I could go.
GRRR…. OK… calming down…
But anyway…
I discovered Muxtape a while back. It is a really sweet idea. When I [...]

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So today I mourn the loss of my last wisdom tooth.
Surprisingly the emotional pain isn’t as bad as the physical.
The top ones were fairly easy and not so painful… but the bottom teeth are a totally different story.
WOW. THIS. HURTS.
Apparently the lower jawbone (or is there only one jawbone?) is much more dense [...]

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My goal was 40km.
Reaching that goal was seriously in doubt when, in my 2nd kilometer, I saw 2 dogs attacking a kitten. I have to admit that I really didn’t want to stop as I knew we couldn’t take another cat. We already have 1 which is probably twice as many as we should have.
However… [...]

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Long ago… on the detasseling crew… we’d eat bugs (mostly box-elder bugs) once in a while as part of our mind game strategy with the kids on our crew. It helped with discipline issues if they thought we were a little psycho.
But the most bugs I’ve ever eaten in my life was last Thursday night [...]

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Patrick Cowsill has a really interesting post about POWs in Taiwan during WWII. If you remember… Taiwan was under Japanese control until the end of WWII… so the POWs were Allied forces.
Patrick’s grandfather served in the Pacific and writes…
Actually, my grandpa hated the war; he rarely talked about it.
Same with my grandfather, who also served [...]

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