transposable element

i’m bracing myself for 2009. even without the help of an astrologer, i can already foresee that this year is going to be challenging. no, not because of the global financial crisis (in fact the crisis’ effect on residential and commercial real estate might even work to our favor as we are due to renew the lease on our flat this year), but because of the changes in our daily rhythm now that jan has started school.

for one, i’ve never prepared lunch for anyone except myself for the last 6-7 years, and now suddenly i need to have lunch ready on the table when jan gets home from school. where do i squeeze in the time to fix lunch? and when do i get to do activities with mia? she’ll also need to start playgroup soon. how will i help jan with homework with mia around?

i have absolutely no idea how to juggle all that needs to be done without meltdowns (mine, not the kids’). i can’t imagine how other parents do it and manage to stay sane! there must be a secret, a key, a combination of buttons to push. if you have the code, would you mind sharing it?

most were having hangover from the holidays and january 2 was a friday, so you’d expect people to just take the extra day off eh? well, not us. january 2 was jan’s first day in school and the whole family trooped to the new school at 7:30am. in our previous life (until last year), we would still be asleep at this hour!

except for a few big yawns, the day couldn’t have gone better. jan was happy to be going to school and seemed very relaxed. it definitely helped that we enrolled him in a getting-ready-for-school program that was held in the school premises. it was like an orientation program, a taste of what “big” school is like. he was able to meet some of his classmates already and the school premises were already very familiar to him. so when the big day came, there was no trace of anxiety whatsoever. whenever we would see him from a distance, he would be chatting up someone, smiling and laughing. he once spotted me during recess and gave me the thumbs up sign, assuring me he’s ok and everything’s alright. he just had cookies and his water bottle for recess because we thought the first day will end after the recess, but when we figured out they were resuming activities until 1:45pm, hubby handed him some money to buy additional food from the canteen. his school buddy, a boy from the third grade, helped him buy his food: a spicy noodle soup from the indian food stall, haha! during dismissal, he boarded the schoolbus without any angst. hubby was there to make sure he got on the right bus (which he manged to do on his own anyway) and i went home to greet him at the end of his bus ride. as usual, he was chatting up his bus pals, and was still bubbly, considering he hasn’t had lunch yet and it was already 2:30pm!

it was a great start, the best any parent could wish for. i hope it’s a harbinger of what’s to come.

“We will open the book. Its pages are blank. We are going to put words on them ourselves. The book is called Opportunity and its first chapter is New Year’s Day. ” ~Edith Lovejoy Pierce

the first day of the year is like engagement rings– they’re full of promise. hope you all had a great start into 2009!

holidays are not yet over (we are invited for a turkey dinner for new year’s eve) but i’m already feeling the aftermath. i’m sleepy from all the late nights, stuffed and bloated from all the feasting, and hoarse from all the gabbing. holidays are bad for the health, haha…

how are you faring? i hope you haven’t maxed out your cash advance credit cards with all the shopping?

the idiomatic expression means something like losing your sanity, but for this entry, i mean ‘marbles’ in a slightly more literal sense. here’s an email i’ve been forwarded a while back, and though i didn’t realize it at the time, it made quite a big impact on me. more on that later, here’s the email first:

3900 Saturdays

The older I get, the more I enjoy Saturday mornings. Perhaps it’s the
quiet solitude that comes with being the first to rise, or maybe it’s
the unbounded joy of not having to be at work. Either way, the first
few hours of a Saturday morning are most enjoyable.

A few weeks ago, I was shuffling toward the garage with a steaming cup
of coffee in one hand and the morning paper in the other. What began as
a typical Saturday morning turned into one of those lessons that life
seems to hand you from time to time. Let me tell you about it:

I turned the dial up into the phone portion of the band on my ham radio
in order to listen to a Saturday morning swap net. Along the way, I
came across an older sounding chap, with a tremendous signal and a
golden voice. You know the kind; he sounded like he should be in the
broadcasting business. He was telling whom-ever he was talking with
something about ‘a thousand marbles.’ I was intrigued and stopped to
listen to what he had to say.

‘Well, Tom, it sure sounds like you’re busy with your job. I’m sure they
pay you well but it’s a shame you have to be away from home and your
family so much. Hard to believe a young fellow should have to work
sixty or seventy hours a week to make ends meet. It’s too bad you
missed your daughter’s ‘dance recital’ he continued. ;’Let me tell you
something that has helped me keep my own priorities.’ And that’s when he
began to explain his theory of a ‘thousand marbles.’

‘You see, I sat down one day and did a little arithmetic. The average
person lives about seventy-five years. I know, some live more and some
live less, but on average, folks live about seventy-five years.

‘Now then, I multiplied 75 times 52 and I came up with 3900, which is
the number of Saturdays that the average person has in their entire
lifetime. Now, stick with me, Tom, I’m getting to the important part.

It took me until I was fifty-five years old to think about all this in
any detail’, he went on, ‘and by that time I had lived through over
twenty-eight hundred Saturdays.’ ‘I got to thinking that if I lived to
be seventy-five, I only had about a thousand of them left to enjoy. So
I went to a toy store and bought every single marble they had. I ended
up having to visit three toy stores to round up 1000 marbles I took them
home and put them inside a large, clear plastic container right here in
the shack next to my gear.’

‘Every Saturday since then, I have taken one marble out and thrown it
away. I found that by watching the marbles diminish, I focused more on
the really important things in life.

There’s nothing like watching your time here on this earth run out to
help get your priorities straight.’

‘Now let me tell you one last thing before I sign-off with you and take
my lovely wife out for breakfast. This morning, I took the very last
marble out of the container. I figure that if I make it until next
Saturday then I have been given a little extra time. And the one thing
we can all use is a little more time.’

‘It was nice to meet you Tom, I hope you spend more time with your
family, and I hope to meet you again here on the band. This is a 75
Year old Man, K9NZQ, clear and going QRT, good morning!’

You could have heard a pin drop on the band when this fellow signed off
I guess he gave us all a lot to think about. I had planned to work on
the antenna that morning, and then I was going to meet up with a few
hams to work on the next club newsletter.

Instead, I went upstairs and woke my wife up with a kiss. ‘C’mon honey,
I’m taking you and the kids to breakfast.’ ‘What brought this on?’ she
asked with a smile. ‘Oh, nothing special, it’s just been a long time
since we spent a Saturday together with the kids. And hey, can we stop
at a toy store while we’re out? I need to buy some marbles.

assuming you’d live to be about 75 (quite a feat, nowadays!), how many marbles would YOU have left? i haven’t bought marbles myself (i’d need about 2000+), but ever since i read this email, i feel like i’m constantly being nudged to use my time left here on earth wisely. for every day i spend just sleeping in or doing nothing noteworthy, i feel like i’ve wasted yet another day of my life. i get this visual that my life time is dripping like sands in an hourglass. and in a macabre way, i’d imagine, “what if this would have been my last? i spent it doing nothing.” weekends are worse, because i feel weekends must be spent in a more meaningful way as those are the days that the family is together.

a new year is approaching. 52 marbles. 52 saturdays. how are you going to spend them?

i count myself lucky that i could easily avoid hitting the malls during weekends and after office hours. it’s one of the perks of being an unemployed stay-at-home, mom, i suppose. if i go shopping, i could get there as soon as the malls open and i make sure i’m out before the after-5pm hordes arrive. i hate crowds, especially those who walk at a snail’s pace, block escalator landings, queue up hours for the littlest freebie promotional items and most of all, those who block my stroller out for space in the lift when they obviously have two healthy feet and can very well take the escalator instead. arrrgh!

my feet have been hurting for the last several months and i’m suspecting it’s because of carrying mia around. she still hates the stroller, and would rather be in the baby carrier, which is also sometimes my preference when traveling with her. beats the stroller when using the public transpo, but i think it’s taking its toll on my soles. i don’t think it’s Plantar Fasciitis. either she’s just getting too heavy, or i need to to stop wearing flip flops and get me some real shoes. or some birkies. they’re an eyesore (perhaps except for the heidi klum collection), but miles better than crocs, which somehow don’t fit my feet well anyway. i’ve seen just one shop so far selling birkenstocks here, but i haven’t check the selection. i bet there’ll be a huge price mark-up, though. darn it. isn’t is ironic that now that i’m out of germs land, i yearn for stuff made in germany?!?

excuse the typos, but i’m fumblijng with mz new keyboard. hubby came home today with a new kezboard for me, and it’s taking me a whilke to get used to it. if you think it’s sweet of him, let me tell you that it’s just because i asked him to finish our newsletter which is saved in mz computer, and he just couldn’t stand the amount of organic matter that has accumulated in the old one. would have sustained a crop to fruition, haha.

this new kezboard is much more compact (so the kezs are closer together, thus the typos) but my biggest problem is that it’s an “english” keyboard, and darn it, i’ve been usign a german keyboard for the last 8 years now! i wonder how long it will take me to remember that the z is where the y is and vice versa! arrgh!

last week, a new flash drive. this week, a new keyboard. if we had the moolah, i’d love to have an entirely new machine, but for now, gotta be happy with new spare parts !

we were at a large newly opened electronics store last week, and looking at the wares on display, it’s amazing at how many new products are now available that were virtually non-existent, say, just 5 years ago. digital slr cameras, plasma tvs, dvd camcorders, ultra portable pc’s, new gaming consoles. it’s awesome to witness this exponential development in the technology, but at the same time, as a consumer, it’s a bit sad, too.

take for example our mini-dv camcorder. it was one of the latest models available when we bought it about 5 years ago. nowadays, i think nobody would buy such a camcorder at all. a dvd video recorder, which automatically saves your videos on digital format is naturally more convenient, because then you would no longer need to lug spare tapes with you and you can easily transfer files to your computer without the need for tape drives. but if we get one of those ultra modern video recorders, what the heck are we going to do with the old one? will we be more likely to take videos during important events then? will the quality of our videos really be better? will we ever find the time to edit them? and what if, 2 years from now, an even more advanced gadgets come up? how can one keep up?

on second thoughts, should one keep up?