MOVING ON

Depending on the composition and clarity of your personal goals, going back to school after you have been laid off may give you long term benefits later in your career and in life as a whole. Also, you may look forward to being rewarded more handsomely with better choices on which directions to take. Of course, pursuing your studies may not be among the most acceptable trail to follow on what we describe as "taking the path of least resistance" -it has its built-in difficulties to face-but those who pursue this path may encounter valuable lessons that are necessary in later stages in life. Please click here to continue reading.

We feel grateful we have lazy Sundays every once in a while. We work on what we can handle for the day, and we look forward to days when can do some unhurried, honest to goodness homestyle cooking. My roommates, including our landlord, and myself decided we’d like to have a stew for today. We gathered what we have got in the kitchen, and started making the stew. Here’s how I figured how the recipe was for what we have eventually come up for our main dish for the day: 2lbs beef cubes, cut into bite sizes 1 and ½ cups of olive oil ½ lbs all purpose flour 3 large size white onions (sweet variety), cut & diced 4 long stems of celery, cut & diced 2 lbs of peeled carrots, cut into bite sizes 10 medium sized potatoes, peeled, cut into bite sizes 1 can of peeled tomato with basil (1 lb) Parsly flakes 15 beef bouillons 1 & ½ cups pancake & baking mix to make dumplings 1 cup of milk 1 can of mixed greenpeas A very big cooking pot Dump the beef cubes in flour, making sure they’re ...

China: Empire of Living Symbols by Cecilia Lindqvist My rating: 5 of 5 stars Lindqvist's book, as translated by Joan Tate, is a superb learning book on Chinese characters. After having read it, I was reminded by a remark of a friend, who is Filipino Chinese, who snobbishly told me, "being able to write those characters would not actually mean much -- and that it's more important to be able to speak the language (he spoke Fookien, and I learned in subsequent talks that he really had to struggle learning to draw Chinese characters, as he was also studying Mandarin)." He was in a way, after some thinking, discouraging me, as doing so may gradually allow me to gain more access to a powerful language like that of Chinese, that's used by easily over a billion people. I was actually dumbfounded by his remark, as I was then studying Chinese character writing. I thought he would be excited hearing me talk about Chinese characters. I soon learned that there's an inhe...