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This is a list of the following things I have been busy with just in the past couple of weeks. And I mean busy to the point of no sleep. Even when I do go to sleep, I wake every hour and even have to clean and do laundry in the middle of the night out of necessity which leaves me feeling as if I have not slept at all (many of you had no idea that Cybr was so messy, hehe).  So…tired…must…sleep…soon…

1. I have violin lessons once a week and practice everyday for at least 20 minutes, longer is preferred.
2. Mandarin class every Tuesday plus trying to study it, as if there is time for that.
3. I work at a bookshop two-three days per week.
4. I cook and clean everything in this home, ’cause Cybr works so hard and I don’t. At least that is how it started and now we need to talk about change since I am busting my bum everyday.
5. I volunteer to feed the ginormous feral cat population in our community once per week.
6. For the past two, maybe three weeks, I have had two humane traps to catch kittens with. There are over 25 kittens by our flat.
7. In the past two weeks I have trapped a total of 6 cats and brought them into our home until they get homes or go to the SPCA.
8. This cat rescue has taken up a HUGE amount of time and is why I no longer sleep. The other night, someone yacked and I was cleaning bedding at 1:30 in the morning and then spent another hour covering the bedding with plastic in case it happened again.
9. I feed the herd twice a day, change litter everyday, sweep floors everyday and try to pet everyone so they get used to human contact.

10. Meanwhile, I have this awesome new camera that I am hoping to use and make a career out of, or at least a job. This has been neglected due to all the other crap.

I will post more specific pictures of what has been keeping me so busy, as soon as I am not so busy! It has been crazy here and I am worn out. The kitties are going to the SPCA today, so maybe life and my blog will return to normal.

We had about five-six days of beautiful blue skies. With the blue sky comes the sun and the sun is what makes the heat so unbearable here. Compared to St. Louis, Hong Kong has a truly painful sun that beats down on a clear day. It must be that whole tropical thing, there have been UV Warnings lately, I truly believe that I would be beat red in about 15 minutes if I just sat in the sun. And that is if I had sunblock on!

Anyway, I have veered far away from my point…

In spite of it being Typhoon Season, aka the rainy season, we had gorgeous clear blue skies before and during our friends visiting. This is really lucky for them, it is somewhat rare to see a REALLY clear day here due to the pollution. Hong Kong is gorgeous when you can actually see it and they were really able to see it. Yay!

Well, all that is done. Back to typhoons, black rain (or so they call it), and gusting winds. I imagine we won’t see sun for at least a week. We had not seen it for almost two before our friends came.

It has been raining so hard this morning that my dogs won’t even go do their business. Within a few seconds we were all wet enough that if I had brought soap, then I could have bathed myself, Chini and Guinness…oh, and I had an umbrella.

If you are asking yourself how the hell I could get THAT wet if I was using an umbrella, then I have two reasons:

1. Rain gusts sideways here all the time.
2. Walking two dogs that are not happy and dragging me with their leases…umbrella, schmumbrella, I may as well leave it inside.

There is one REALLY good thing that comes with the rain…it cools off! I like rain. Rain is good. Especially if that means I will not have sweat dripping from everywhere for a few days. I would like to say I am one of those women who don’t ‘sweat’, but instead ‘perspire’. Yeah, try moving to Hong Kong in the summer, trust me that ‘perspire’ crap goes right out the window!

My hubby did the most romantic thing ever for me today…

He folded all the clean laundry that I had fallen behind on this week.

But wait, there’s more…

He did it while I took a much needed nap.

Now that is WAY better than flowers in my book.

Our friends came and they went, but not without a whirlwind tour of Hong Kong!

This is what we managed to accomplish in ONEday (if it doesn’t seem like much, I challenge you to come here and do the same in the summer heat of HK! I double dog dareyou, mostly because we like having visitors, hehe):

breakfast at Hotel Novotel Citygate in Tung Ching (mmm…waffles)
crazy bus ride to Poi O beach
missed stop for Poi O beach
continue on crazy bus to Mui Wo
hotter than hell, skip the beach in Mui Wo too
run to catch ferry instead
take ferry from Mui Wo to Discovery Bay (DB), this is the “local” ferry that most tourists wouldn’t see
walk to our flat
say hi to kids (puppies and Francois are very excited by having company and Chini acts like a tiny 60 lb. baby)
show them the Pixelator, he is all sleepy-eyed
show them the three sad little stray kittens in my spare room that I am fostering in hopes of them finding homes
quick tour of our flat
look at our view from the balcony
boys play Guitar Hero
take pictures on our balcony, some with the lovely crane/barge thingy in the background
DB bus #7 (our daily bus) to DB ferry pier
yummy bakery snack from our little bakery here in DB
ferry to Central District, Hong Kong Island
walk thru Central via IFC mall, escalator alley, Sanrio store (yay! Hello Kitty!)
hop onto escalator and go up, up, up thru city (outdoor escalator thru city, I will post about that another time. It’s pretty cool)
to Hometown Dumpling for late lunch/early dinner
includes dragon buns, pork and leek dumplings, shanghai-style noodles, rice with chicken/veggies and Coke with sugar
I learn that the sugar in soda is why I like Coke here, at home in St. Louis there is no sugar only high fructose corn syrup to sweeten it and I don’t like it at all
taxi to Queen’s Road East (main road in Central) to
go to Li Yuen Streets East and West for street market shopping
shop til we drop, almost. I am sure we all were ready to collapse from sore feet and heat exhaustion (but the street markets are worth it!)
take MTR train to Tung Chung so our visitors can crash hard at hotel after a bath *ahhh* so they can be ready for their big day on Sunday.

They are in for the day of a lifetime on Sunday! Check out why, if you want.
I am so glad they came to see us while on their journey, I hope they enjoyed even though it was probably a little painful.

This was the EXTREME whirlwind tour and they really got to see Hong Kong from a resident perspective and not a tourist perspective, which is what they wanted.

At Beck-Allen Cabinetry!

I dream about going to work at Beck Allen all the time. I miss being there and I miss seeing everyone every day.

I would think missing it would pass, yet my subconscience mind keeps sending me to work!

So, if anyone at B/A are reading this…I MISS ALL YOU GUYS and my little job, too

We are enthusiasticly receiving our first guests in Hong Kong tomorrow. We will be meeting them at the airport, I even made a dorky sign with their names and ‘Welcome to Hong Kong’ written on it. I even put Hello Kitty stickers all over it to make it more authentic to Hong Kong…and I, uh, really just wanted to use my Hello Kitty stickers.

Anyway, the point to my story is we are having friends visit and they want to see our view of the harbor overlooking HK Disneyland. Yeah, well, some jackass parked a giant crane-barge thingy (thingy with a hard ‘g’) in front of our view. If I would swim in our harbor, which I will absolutely not do, I would go out there and give them a parking ticket. As if they would care.

Dear friends who are visiting, sorry for the crappy view. It normally doesn’t include the giant obstruction.

Update on the dark hair color. It seems to have lightened a little, actually enough that I kinda like it. It is funny, my hair has grown about a 1/4 inch and my roots are not obvious. This is good, low maintenence just like I prefer it to be.

Ooh, here’s a bit of information I bet no one out there in inter(net)space knows…I was actually born with hair this dark. It was really dark brown and I had a lot of it when I first entered the world. It lightened up considerably as I got older, by the time I was three years-old it was medium-dark blonde with white streaks.

So, I have had hair this dark before. A long, long time ago…

Two nights ago, Francis alerted me to something happening in our office room. He was trying to catch and presumably eat a spider. The spider was the size of my hand. Yes, the size of my hand.

I freaked. I have never been one to get freaked by a spider, I just smash them. I am not afraid of them. However, if the spider is large enough to potentially kill my cat and eat my hamster…well, that makes me freak out!

I grabbed Francis and took him out of the room immediately, then I continued to wave my arms around to keep the spider in sight. Oh, if I had lost track of him, trust me, I would have taken the fuzzies and headed for a hotel. Plain and simple.  All the while I am herding the spider, I am waiting for Cybr to return from walking the dogs. Mind you, it is well after midnight and we are both tired because these types of things never happen when it is convenient.

He walks in the door and I say rather frantically “Uh, I think we have a bit of a problem! There is a spider the size of my hand in the office, Francis was trying to eat him. I can’t kill it, you have to”. 

Cybr is thinking ‘Sure it’s the size of her hand…‘ and walks nonchalantly into the room and freaks because, like I said, it IS the size of my hand!

Then the games commence. Each of us armed with a fly swatter try to sneak up on a spider that is large enough to see us coming way before we get to it. Not to mention it is extremely fast and can probably read our thoughts. Okay, maybe not the thought reading but you get my point. At this point in the game, I feel the need to mention to Cybr that if he loses it, then I am going to a hotel.

Cybr takes a swing and misses, but the spider heads downward which puts him in much better range so Cybr goes in for the kill. He swats, he kills!!! The spider is down for the count, but we need to confirm that it is dead. I think of getting a mirror to check for breath. Cybr asks me for the flashlight instead and I start frantically making a mess of the computer table trying to locate a flashlight, to no avail. He reminds me that it would be by the door where we always keep it. Hehe, oh. I was still freaking out, apparently. Oops.

So, once confirmed a goner, I took it downstairs to the trash bin. It was NOT going into our trash can just in case they can resurrect (clearly, I am playing too many fantasy games).

I came away from this situation having learned a couple of things. First, big spiders totally freak me out (as do roaches of any size). Secondly, I learned that I apparently have earned the reputation of exaggerating quite a bit. It seems Cybr assumes I am exaggerating a lot of the time…hmmm, I wonder why.