A Desk of One's Own

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Travelogue I: Kalamazoo 3-7/May/2006 I finished compiling the travelogue for this trip to the US yesterday afternoon. It's good to write everything down before my poor memory fails me in the near future, or before my anxiety about amnesia gets worse. The trip consisted of two parts--the academic and leisure--and both were fantastic. The conference in Kalamazoo went very well. I met some old friends and came to know a lot more enthusiastic medievalists from all over the world. There were plenty of neophytes--first time in Kalamazoo just like me, and a lot more well-established scholars who have been attending this annual event for more than 25 years. Every year, they would come back for this annual meeting and have developed a strong emotional tie between each other after all these years. The idea of "international conference" itself is still a bit intimidating, but I was amazed and moved to find how these medievalists keep returning to meet their old friends and su...
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Cats and York I am never a big fan of cats, but some of (or most of) my friends are. I do not dislike cats but always have partiality for dogs and still keep 2 doggies back home in Taiwan. It seems to me that dogs are passionate and very expressive of feeling, while cats are more reserved about their emotion and appear to be rather quiet. However, I found cats are passionate in a very different way. They seem to resist any living creature nearby but in fact attract more attention. I suspect it is this attention that cats always enjoy in secret. In a sense they are more like human beings. Dogs seem to be angels in fairy tales to me. There are some imitations of cats in the cityscape of York. I saw a picture of one of the imitations in A's guidebook to York last November. It's my first time to notice them, and I couldn't believe they are imitations. For example, that one on the roof after a pigeon on St. Michael's square, I thought they were real or at least the pig...
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Birthday party for 2 Ys Happy birthday to Yushan and Yuki, two pretty and kind girls! They had a very successful party last weekend, and every guest was amazed and pleased by everything that they had done to share their joy. *An anecdote about the cake: In the party, when the b-day girls were taking pictures of the matcha cake, I overheard a conversation between them. The one advised the other, "you should take the picture from another angle, did you notice that it is in the shape of an apple?" I was a little confused and therefore asked gentleman O by my side whether he thought it's shaped as an apple. He smiled embarrassedly and gave no answer. (He knew that I made the cake and might have thought that he had to answer my question with caution.) I murmured again to him, "do you think I should tell them that I have tried to make it look like a 4-leaf white clover?" He laughed and shook his head. Apparently I was not good enough at the design. It indeed ...
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