While family is still in Hong Kong, I had a long honey-due list of things to fix around the house from patching the water-leaked ceiling, to finding out the water leak source, to vacuuming and cleaing the carpet, to cleaning and waxing the hardwood floor, to stripping and re-caulking the bathroom showers, to everything else in between moving the furniture around and fixing other things. It was not a three weeks away from the family and I am a free man kind of life.
However there was plenty of family and relatives that bring me meals or offer me to have dinner with them so I was well fed, for the most part. With the load of work that I needed to get done, I enlisted the big help from my cousin David Chang. Actually its more like that I want him to start learning how to fix things around the house. What I learned as David helps me is that he's never done any of these things in his life before, so first time to use a vacuum, carpet washing, floor cleaning and waxing, cutting up and patching dry wall, hedging/trimming bushes, and etc are new to him! I am glad he's willing to help out, plus he says he has nothing else better to do in the summer.
Lesson learned: wear a mask so I don't breathe all that fine dry wall dust. All that white nose hair are dry wall dust and not white hair.
I can not be doing all kinds of work and not have fun. I've been trying to schedule with my cousins to go biking since April but now they've started working, it took us three months later to schedule a day that works for the three of us! And of course it rained, pouring rain. Days before we went biking, we checked out the weather and it says it won't rain until after 3pm. The morning of biking says it'll rain at 10am. We were debating and debating but all of us wanted to go biking. We went for it anyways and we can see the dark clouds moving in very fast but I hope that it wouldn't rain. We pulled up to the park entrance, even the guard pitied us and let us pay $6 instead of $15 ($3 each person) because he knew it would rain. We were very determined to bike so we parked and took out the bikes. Immediately it thunder and rain just poured down. We all jumped back in the van while the bikes we getting soaked. We debated for a while to cancel, pack the wet bikes, and call it a day. Then we came to a consensus that we will pack and do something else. While we pack three of the bikes inside the van, the rain slowed down. We debated again. Then finally we all said let's not wasted the day and go for it. If it get's worse, we'll return otherwise we'll go as long as we can and we will be soaked. But none of us had any rain gear nor a change of clothes. Gladly as we biked, the rain eventually stopped and the sun came out and we even biked all the dirty muddy trails. All in all, this was on of the best biking experiences I've had. By the way, I out biked and had a much better stamina than all of my cousins: not bad for a old guy :)
Then back to the grind and do more home improvements. But this time with the help of Alvin, Simon, and Amy! First I conned them about coming to my house for BBQ but also asked them to help me re-caulk my bathrooms. They agreed to help but little did they know that it was harder then they realized. And little did I know, they've never caulked before in their life, except for Amy (well we come to find out, she caulked ONE TILE). And Amy even helped with seasoning the burger patties and even washed my dishes while the boys were stripping the caulk and/or cleaning the carpet. None the less, it was a great time at my house with waaaaaay too much laughter
