Cow’s Life - Thinking Outside Of The Barn

This is my Halloween Costume take 3: Broncos jersey and snowboard outfit completed with my board. The only problem is that I am going to an Eagles Tailgate on Sunday instead of a Halloween party.

My pal Paco picked up two Eagles tailgate party tickets and asked me to join him. I am neither Broncos nor Eagles fan. I’d rather cheer for my hometown team Titans.

Well…what the heck! Are they really gonna squash me like a bug? It’ only a jersey…

Paco even posted a note on Eagles’ Fan Board:

“…she is not an enemy… she is just wearing A jersey to fit in…”

Response from the Eagles fans?

“She must be destroyed!!!”

Well.. I am going to try to survive the tailgate so I can finally watch my first live NFL game tomorrow afternoon. If you guys don’t see me posting in the next few days, call 911 and report the following emergency:

HELP! A Broncos snow bunny got squashed by bunch of Eagles.

Eagles fans are Mean! After seeing a guy with a Cowboy jersey got physically thrown out of the bar by some Eagles fans at the happy hour before the game, I knew that Broncos jersey outfit wasn’t such a good idea.

We pulled into the tailgate parking lot at 8 in the morning. There were only two Broncos trucks comparing with a dozen of Eagles’. Naturally, the green visitors claimed most of the parking lot as Eagles territory. The oranges/blues were not even allowed to walk by! They’d yell at you, boo you, calling you asshole until you moved your ass away. And there was no gender discrimination either because the Eagles fans don’t necessarily feel the need to be nice to the ladies. You’d be lucky if they don’t call you bitch.

Under the tremendous amount of pressure and the temptation of the juicy hamburger cooked by the Eagle’s tailgaters, I was too wimpy to put on the Broncos jersey. The steak and the hamburger were too good to pass, so I kept my Broncos jersey in the trunk until I had a few plates of the meat.

But when the Eagles fans went over to a Broncos truck to envy their breakfast eggs and onions, they were rewarded with the good smell from the grill and the friendly greetings from the “enemies”.

Some report say there were around 8000 Eagles fans in town this past weekend. Comparing with 67,000 Broncos fans, they were greatly outnumbered in the field.

If you’ve watched the game, you know Broncos kicked Eagles’ ass on Sunday. Instead of giving Eagles fans shit, some Broncos fans were actually showing sympathies to the green visitors for coming all the way here to see their team losing. No wonder Paco said that Broncos fans were the nicest ones.

I watch a lot of Pro basketball games at the Pepsi center and I’ve watched a few Bulls and Houston home games as well. Comparing with the Nuggets fans, those Texans are quite rough. Nuggets fans would never boo their own players. But the Rockets fans would talk shit about anybody and curse their own team. I guess it all comes down to the Denverer’s attitude. 2 years ago when I moved here to work, I noticed right away how laid back this crowd is, thanks to the mountains, trees and the 300 day sunshine the Coloradoans get to enjoy.

As of the distressed Philly fans, they were having a lot of fun stepping and jumping on a poor teddy bear wearing a mini Broncos jersey in the stadium. I know I am not going to Philly to watch any Eagles vs Titans game ’cause I would just get all pissed off!

Or worse: I pissed off my team leader.

I got a phone call from a client director last Friday afternoon about an emergency task we must complete early this week. So, I was heads down doing a bunch of stuff today while my team lead walked in and said, “Christine, I have big issue with you. Come with me. ”

Then, the guy started to get all upset about the work I took from the client director.

Him: You do what I tell you to do!!!
Me: blah blah blah
Him: Do you still not have a single idea how this management structure work?
Me: blah blah blah
Him: You are down there. You don’t talk to the client!!!
Me: blah blah blah..
Him: This is what you should do… (starting drawing charts)
Me: blah blah blah

If this conversation happened when I were in my 20’s, I’d go ballistic on him. And those “blah blah blah” would be

“Oh, don’t you tell me how to do my job! I am an architect too. I have the rights to talk to the client when there is an emergency. Did you check your emails? I sent you a few on the weekend regarding this issue. Don’t scream at me if you don’t check emails!!! Blah blah blah”

But now I am in my 30’s and I know being a hard head is a lose-lose situation for both of us. So, instead of confronting him, I tried to use questions. So back to that conversation:

Him: You do what I tell you to do!!!
Me: Oh. I thought we all work for the client. Is there any misunderstanding here?
Him: Do you still not have a single idea how this management structure work?
Me: Could you please elaborate on that for me since I don’t think we have ever gone through the charts.
Him: You are down there. You don’t talk to the client!!!
Me: How would you like me to handle this situation while the client executive was calling my personal phone on a late Friday afternoon?
Him: This is what you should do… (started drawing charts)
Me: If that is the case, it looks like there is a disconnect. Should we communicate with the client and our project management team to discuss our communication channels? You can let me know once the misunderstanding is cleared and how we should proceed in the future. As of now since we have done quite a bit of work already, how would you like to proceed?
Him: Ok, continue doing what you are doing if that’s what the client has agreed with his management

End of the story. And both of us went back to work afterwards.

I have to admit that I was trying really hard to keep my blood pressure low and my voice down. It was hard to do. But at the end of the day, everybody is just trying to get the job done. So there is really no need to get all worked up between the co-workers. I did find the “question” approach a lot more useful than using the “statement”. I get to direct where the conversation goes since my pissed-off co-worker was a lot more willingly to answer the questions than agreeing with me. Eventually, he said what I wanted to hear.

Ironically, right after my intense discussion with my team lead, Paco and I went ballistic on each other about the Eagles Tailgate post I did yesterday. The post greatly upsets the loyal Eagles fan which I totally understand. However, I completely forgot about my “question” approach and the “remain calm” advice.

A) Paco is a close friend. I can get away from yelling at him. B) Pissing off Paco today doesn’t mean I will lose my promotion or paycheck tomorrow.

I think we do this all the time to the close ones and we are much nicer to the strangers and the coworkers. Patience, logical reasoning, respect, and calm all get tossed out of the window when we are arguing with someone we are close to.

So what did I do after I pissed off Paco? I walked outside for about 20 minutes, came back and made peace with him.

I didn’t know Netflix got sued until I received a case settlement email from the company. Apparently, Netflix was sued by lying about “unlimited rental” and “one day delivery promise” in the marketing materials. The case is now settled and you can read about the benefits you can collect if you signed up before Jan 15, 2005.

I will not collect the benefits simply because I don’t think Netflix can do anything better than what they have been doing. You get “unlimited rental” as long as you sign up for their 2 or 3 DVD program and it is a one day delivery service in most of the metro areas.

I think this country has gone mad when it comes to lawsuit. “Just sue it” was printed on Tulane University’s Law school T-shirt a few years back when I visited the campus. Everybody can get sued by virtually doing or saying anything. If some people don’t like the way you look, they can sue you for “public appearance disturbance” and ask you to pay for their mental damage.

Just over a year ago, some students made cookies for the neighbors. They unfortunately rang the door bell of a professional suer’s house and got sued for scaring her. I don’t remember the details, but the students were fined around 900 bucks for the hospital fees the bitch claimed that she had spend on “calming down”.

If there are people who work full time to figure out the lottery wining algorithms, I am sure there are people out there who are doing absolutely noting but trying to figure out how to screw other people for money. Sick bastards!

Update:
Coincidentally, RJ pinged me this morning and sent me a story happened a few miles away from me. A home depot shopper sued Home Depot after he got stuck to a restroom toilet seat because a prankster had smeared it with glue.

Bob Dougherty, 57, accused employees of ignoring his cries for help for about 15 minutes because they thought he was kidding. …This is not Home Depot’s fault,” Dougherty said. “But I am blaming them for letting me hang in there and just ignoring me.”

Here is the full story.

As stated in a recent study conducted by a British geneticist,

… an unusually high prevalence of a particular set of genes in China has suggested that 1.5 million Chinese men are direct descendants of Giocangga, the grandfather of the founder of the Qing dynasty.

I am well aware of that part of the history so I wasn’t really shocked when I saw that number. Based on my knowledge acquired by watching TV shows with my parents in the earlier years, I know each emperor in the Qing dynasty was entitled to 72 official wives classified by different titles. You’d think.. “Gee, weren’t they gonna kill each other? How was the King ever going to remember every wife’s name?”

Well, he couldn’t. Again, based on my TV knowledge and a couple of trips to the Forbidden City in BeiJing, China, the Emperor never knew all of his wives. Some wives never even met their husband until the day they die. Except a handful of Queens, these wives were restricted in a section of the Palace. The higher the wife’s title was, the larger the living quarter she got. Every night, the Emperor was presented with a book of the drawings of all the wives (photos hadn’t been invented yet) so the Emperor could pick one or more wives for the bedroom fun. Every day, these wives would wait for their names to be called. The lucky ones would take bath. The servants then wrapped the naked wives in the blankets and carried them to the Emperor’s bedroom. Of course, if the Emperor was craving for some women outside of the Palace, there was never any problem to make that happen. Being said, with all of these women bearing his children, having 1.5 million descendants after hundreds of years is quite possible.

In today’s society, a guy probably gets headache when dealing with just one woman, let along trying to have 72 wives. So, if any guy wants to spread the seeds and have more than 50 people carrying his Y chromosome in 500 years, dream on!

Here is the full text of the study.

I had my worst climb at the gym last Thursday. My arms were literally spent after I struggled on a 5.10 route which I cruised through at least half a dozen times before. It was so bad that I didn’t even want to talk about it. I guess every climber hits one of those low points once a while.

I was pretty excited about today’s climb at Clear Creek since I have never been to the site. 9 of us showed up. Wow! That was the biggest crowd we’ve ever had. Comparing with other sites I have been to such as Independence Pass, Golden North Table, Castlewood Canyon and Boulder area, Clear Creek routes are a bit odd. The difficulty of every Clear Creek route I climbed was not quite evenly distributed. There were one or two really difficult parts and rest of the route was like a walk-up. So, a 5.7 route could start as a 5.9 or 5.10 and then the rest of it was like a 5.4. I personally like the route that sticks with its grade throughout the most part of it. But it was still a lot fun to climb the relatively long routes here.

The highlight of the climb was Shumin’s roof stunt shown in the picture above. It was a 5.12a with a huge roof overhanging. Nobody in the group pulled it off but him. It must be his KungFu power and his incredible flexibility.

Since I was the only photographer on site this time, I didn’t get everybody’s climbing pictures. But I managed to get Shumin’s roof climb and Aaron’s overhanging climb. Oh, I finally remembered Matt’s dog’s name: Tsavo! But this time, Tsavo stayed at the base the whole time instead of greeting the climbers at the top.

Here is the clear creek climbing album.

The only time I had pets for a while was down in Atlanta when I was working on an AT&T account. My co-worker bought me a small fish tank and 2 Mollies to keep my daytime job a little bit more interesting. I kept on feeding them and feeing them and one day the female got pregnant. She had her first baby and we named him Dobby. I was actually amazed to see that Molly gave birth to a live fish instead of eggs. Anyway, Dobby grew quite fast. After a few weeks (? I can’t remember), he was almost a quarter of his parents’ size. Then the mama got pregnant again. And this time, she kept on popping out little fishes from her tummy. Although the mama was only a fish, it was amazing to witness such a long birth. We waited there for a long time and she kept on popping out babies. On count 15, the baby fish was too big and got stuck in her tummy. We could see the baby fish’s tail but no matter what she did, the head wouldn’t come out. She gave a final push, jumped all the way to the surface of the tank, then sunk to the bottom and died. We were all shocked and stunned at what we saw. It was a very sad moment. But we were very happy to welcome the other 14 baby fishes to live with Dobby. Just a couple of weeks later, my co-worker’s husband killed my entire tank of fishes when he was exchanging the water for them. Dobby died too. I was quite upset for a while. Ever since then, I’ve never had another chance to have pets.

Maybe one day I will have a dog. But the thought of dealing with a dog’s death does scare me a bit. Oh well. In the meantime, I’d be happy to look at some cute baby animal’s pictures.

Check out today’s photoblog : Lovely baby animals. Thanks to Bib for the photos.

There are reasons why the dogs and all sorts of other animals should be naked.
Here is why:

“My owner is an idiot. I don’t even have boobs!”

“God Help Me!!!”

“I am hot and I can’t breath!!! ”

“My idiot owner makes me look like a dork too ”

Thanks to Kimmi for the pictures.

Have you ever asked yourself this question:
“I am doing everything according to the plans to pursue my goals. And I’ve achieved most of them. Why am I still not happy?” I asked this question many times in my 20’s.

I did a lot in my 20’s:

- Graduated with honor from college
- Attended Ivy League and finished grad school
- Got into a top notch IT Company
- Got promoted multiple times
- Bought a lot of houses
- Invested a lot of money
…

The list goes on and on. But, I felt miserable. I was so miserable that I even thought about life not worth living because of all the stress and the endless work. I didn’t have any friends; I had no time to think about what I liked to do and I absolutely had no hobbies other than digging into the financial books to make more money. After suffering a severe depression a few years ago, I backed down, ditched my goals and started goal-free living.

I no longer try to climb the corporate ladder. I don’t really care if I can get the job done perfectly or not. I do my best and tell my boss the truth if things can’t get done and deal with it. I no longer pursue the perfection in performance, stock market included. At age 30, I finally made a turn and started to search for things that truly excite me. That’s when I picked up my old time passions such as computer graphics and games and some new interests like mountaineering, salsa dancing and blogging.

I can’t explain this. But once I stopped chasing my goals and letting go of some expectations for myself, things start to pick up. I am a much healthier person now (mentally and physically) comparing with a few years ago. And my performance on the job is not necessarily going downhill. I recently took the “stress” test and I found out that I nearly don’t have much stress. Maybe it is because I am living in a “passion-driven” life instead of a “goal-oriented” life? Or is it because that I finally let go of other people’s expectations and live the way that I want to live?

Maybe Stephen Shapiro does have a point. In his new book titled “Goal-Free Living” which comes out the next month, he suggested to take your nifty five-year plan and your lifetime to-do list and throw them out of the window. In his words,

“The key to happiness lies in checking out the detours and back roads.”

Maybe it’s time to ditch the high paying job, grab $13000 and head down to New Zealand and Australia for 8 months like one of my co-workers just did. I don’t know if I am spontaneous enough to make such a move. But I certainly don’t mind trying something new every year… whatever my heart leads me to…

Ok, so goal-free living doesn’t really mean aimlessly living. And I don’t think anyone can live without a hope or a desire. Then what is it that we desire the most ? My answer? I want true happiness. Everybody has different perspective on what true happiness is. Some say power, some want money to retire early, many of us desire love, and a lot of guys think sex is the true happy moment…

10 years ago, I believed in achievement = happiness.

“If I could become this and that and make this and that happen, I’d be happy.”

So a few years later I did achieve “this” and “that”, however, I became depressed and illed. Forget about happiness, I wasn’t even healthy. So right there I proved to myself that money and achievement didn’t bring me happiness. So what is it then? It took me a few years to find some answers. So far, I’ve found two ingredients of my true happiness

Ingredient #1– Sharing

I met Jake, Jason and Ryan when I was working on a project in Richmond,VA. We all loved games, computer technology and graphics. So when Jake brought up the topic of the upcoming SIGGraph(Special Interest Group for Computer Graphics) conference in San Diego, we were pretty pumped. But getting there and staying there for a few days was just not realistic given the high cost associated with the trip. At that time, I have saved about half million hotel points and about 150K frequent flyer miles. When I suggested using my hard earned travel rewards to pay for the trip, everybody was shocked, myself included. In my life time, I have never ever given so much to other people. Yes, I volunteer and use my labor to give back a fair share to the society. But money wise? Sorry, no way!

Jake wouldn’t believe it until I picked up the phone and called American Airline to book the tickets. Actually, I couldn’t believe myself doing that either. I was really kicking myself for being an idiot after spending 75,000 miles and 180,000 Marriott Hotel points on a few people I had just met. The San Diego trip was awesome! I think we all bonded from that trip and found each other some true friends. Most importantly, my willingness to share made this wonderful trip possible. Everybody left the sunshine California with a great experience and a piece of beautiful memory.

Ever since then, I became generous with money and my possessions. I took a lot of people to NBA games last season and I am continuing doing it this year; I have organized a few trips and paid for the expenses so other people can also enjoy this wonderful place we live in; I left more tips than I should for the hotel staffs when I was living in the downtown Denver hotels. I am not too big on charity giving. I just feel happy to put some smiles on those ones whom I have encountered because these people are real to me. Sharing what I have with my friends and knowing that they are having a great time truly makes me feel happy too. This kind of joy is something money can’t buy.

I remember the Bible says that we can only serve either God or money. And somewhere in the Bible also says that the true happiness lies in giving. Well, I am not a hardcore Christian, but God does have a point here though.

It’s getting late… so I will write up my true happiness ingredient #2 when I have some time.