1 Feb 2022 Tuesday Chinese New Year Day; unusual times

Traditionally, this year is a year of mourning for my father who passed away less than one year ago (in April) which means that we do not celebrate the lunar new year. No visiting and since mom is living with Ni now, we will meet for a simple dinner tonight instead of the usual morning visits to relatives' homes.

So - I went for long run, I ran for more than an hour and it felt good - with less difficulty than expected. I will do it again soon. Of course it is unusual to go for a morning on the first day of the new year, and I got some looks but these are unusual times.

 

I came home and started cleaning the garden, including some chopping and leaf-burning - an unusual activity but  these are unusual times and we find ways to take our minds off the situation and get over the hump. In any case, I have been wanting to build planters for the dragon fruit along the fence, we have a surplus. Good to tick things off my list of things to do. 

70m run 7.2k

24 Jan 2022 Monday HJ sends wedding photos

 HJ kindly asked her own wedding photographer to take pictures of Sam and I after learning that we have never had our wedding photo taken. Not that we couldn't afford it at the time, we did not see the point of it; we had known each other for so long and had taken so many photos of each other already. 

But we consented, and sat down on a roll of reinforcement wire (they were fixing the pavement) and asked the photographer to shoot, just shoot and don't try to pose us (we won't listen to your instructions). And to everyone's surprise, this turned out really nice - an un-posed shot; spontaneous and capturing Sam's spirited nature, something which no amount of 'free-style' posing would be able to achieve. Personally, I felt that he should have kept the shutter going when shooting HJ and Tim, it is digital after all - to capture the spontaneous moments.

One of the drawbacks of accidental gardening, this is a good view of me