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Showing posts from August, 2010
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The House In two days, we will be moving to our new house. The feeling of excitement didn't emerge until this month after we started attending details such as choices of curtains, furniture and lighting. It has been a long and tedious search, yet as the list of to-do's is getting short, the more colorful the image of the home becomes. A couple of months ago when the house was still under construction, I did 3 sketches for the parking space outside the garden. The original plan that came with the project was rather plain and uninteresting: the entire space would be simply covered up underneath a thick layer of cement. I understand the convenience that a cement space would promise: much time would be saved from the labors of, perhaps, weeding, cleaning, watering, etc. However, I quite reisit the idea of living next to a lifeless space of cement for the future 30 years. My obstinacy then invited a challenge to visualize what I wanted. Giving colors and shapes to ideas on paper was...
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Photo: National Geographic Ball Lightning News about natural disasters has been flooding in since the beginning of the summer (or much earlier). I have just seen some pictures of a wildfire in Russian, which ravaged the landscape before anyone could possibly react. I suddenly recalled a natural phenomenon that I learnt from my Russian colleague: ball lightning. We were talking about weathers in the countries which we had visited. Her preference to minus 30 degree Celsius in Siberia than 30 degree Celsius in Japan was quite unbelievable to me. She then went on talking about a natural phenomenon, ball lightning, that is exclusively Russian. The cause and the formation of a ball lightning remain enigmatic to most scientists even today. It looks like a fire ball, basically. Its appearance, itinerary and explosion are never predictable, but dire consequences can easily be imagined. She once witnessed a ball lightning flashing into and exploding in a chimney, and the iron chimney immed...
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The Cement Garden by Ian McEwan Vintage, 1997.