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November 13th, 2007,  let’s remember this historic day.    After another 7 years, when we look back, you still should know what happened exactly on that day – Ron’s master bedroom shower was done and used again in 7 years.

The pain was not from the amount of the work that needed to be done but from the scorching feeling that the project would last forever and it just looked like it would never be done.   Every weekend we spent without any work being done on the shower, we felt guilty.   Even if Ron did spend a whole afternoon on the shower work, the progress was just so little and it made me feel hopeless on seeing the shower back to life.  When there is no hope, what else do people live for?  — FINISHING the shower!

November 13th, 2007, it was a sweet night for us.

The shower looked so done that I even told Ron that I wanted to have a shower in it that night.  Ron was a bit hesitatant, since he insisted there was still some final touch needed on the shower.  After knowing what he had to do, it still looked practical to me to use the shower that night.  What I didn’t know was the speed a perfectionist can work.  I fell asleep with my big belly during the wait for the final touch.  I don’t know how long had it been, I heard some noise in between… but by the time Ron was calling me up I was sure that I didn’t want to leave my pillow for that night.  He tried so hard to persuade me to get up, (usually he is smart enough not to do that)  I was not in a good mood when I was up and found out it was midnight already.  Ron was in his robe and he pulled the bathroom door… every inch of the tile was so clean and the whole bathroom looked shining.  I was so used to the dusty bathroom and the view really cheered me up.  The most fun part was that on our new shower door, there was a paper ribbon attached on it — apparently it was from the leftover of the Christmas wrapping paper!  I started to laugh, oh my cute Ronnie.   We decided to capture the joyful moment by the camera…  Believe it or not, we had the ribbon cutting ceremony for the shower!

There was an even bigger surprise for me inside the shower –  a bottle of sparkling grape juice sitting in a bucket of ice cubes.  Ron covered the bucket with a white towel just to make sure I wouldn’t see it through the shower door…When he opened the shower door, I was speechless….In the couple hours during my doze, he cleaned the place, went out and bought us a drink for celebration…. Seven years,  that was something eh. Although it was kind of late in the night, we happily toasted our new shower for a long good life.  After taking the precious virgin shower, we had a sound sleep and never felt so clean since the distance between the shower and the bed was never so close!  😀

Hah, it has been quite a while since I posted something on my blog.  Sorry to my dear readers, especially to those whom I have promised that I will keep writing funny stories about Ron.

I wasn’t dawdling, I have been busy and we got something done  — you  know it. :)  Not the shower, don’t get confused.  — I am now 6 months pregnant with a baby boy! 

Compared to the first trimester,  the second trimester has been treating me well — “knock on wood”.  Once I thought I was one of those luckiest of women who would suffer from morning sickness throughout the whole pregnancy because it just seemed to never end.  But on one Thursday in September,  suddenly I felt I was healthy again, energy level seemed to come back, digestive system seemed to work properly again.  But nothing is the same anymore.  The feeling that I am not living for myself anymore grows stronger and stronger, since the first day I knew I was pregnant.  When I saw the baby flipping his little body on the ultrasound screen – it made all my suffering worthwhile.  As can be imagined, the excitement and joy it brings to us is enormous.

But, people say, no pain no gain.  Every bit of sweetness comes with bitterness.  Isn’t that true?  I can still remember one of those terrible days during July or August.  After coming back home from work, having suffered from fatigue and nausea all day, all I wanted was to lie down.  At 9 PM, hunger drove me to the kitchen to make dinner.  One hour later I sat down and the food was not even enjoyable.  After dinner you would think you could go to bed and end the day in sleep, but nope, you have to throw up what you have just eaten first!  Lei at work had the same experience in her first trimester,  and she told me that she can not stop thinking why human beings can not breed offspring like the birds.  Lay an egg and all the mother needs to do is to sit on it to keep it warm.  Meanwhile, the mother can just watch TV, read novels or sleep!  You would think human evolution should have done something to avoid this suffering, huh!  But don’t get scared, gals.  The book says every woman and every pregnancy is different.  The truth is that many many women have very pleasant pregnancies.  

But if you are not in the lucky group, what else can you expect to worsen the experience?  Make your husband show you the movie “Rosemary’s Baby”.  The movie has spooked one of Ron’s pregnant friends long time ago.  He wanted to see how I react to this movie since I was not born in a culture that believes in there is a Satan.  The experiment result is that the movie frightens the pregnant women no matter what cultural background she is from.  So don’t make your wife watch “Rosemary’s Baby” when she is pregnant!

My belly is showing substantially.  The cleaning lady at work was amazed to find out I was pregnant not long ago.  She was pointing at my belly and smiling at me — she can hardly speak any English nor Chinese…

These days, my requirements for food are growing a bit.  One morning, I asked Ron to prepare 20 rice balls for me and it took him quite a while until he realized that the 20 rice balls were just for me not for both of us.  

Now, every morning I wake up and find out that I am STILL pregnant.  I am tired.  I am looking forward to the end of it but also truly scared of it.  No matter what, face it bravely!  I hope Daniel in the belly doesn’t get bored too much, we will take him to some rock concert soon!

Optical equipment is usually not cheap.  Photography is a kind of luxury hobby.  When your husband has nice photo equipment,  sometimes, your work will look somewhat talented as well.   Although clicking the shutter is all you need to do. 

It is the time.  We saw two new babies in a row on Saturday.   And there are more to come.  That is it! If you are not having a baby, get yourself one!

It is interesting, two new moms asked us same question.   When they were both holding their precious babies carefully, learning to satisfy the babies’ needs.  “When will you guys have babies?” with that questions, you can see a very happy face anticipating an answer.  I think there is one explanation for that:  having a baby is really a happy experience and people who are engaged with babies really want to share the joy with others.  But is it really a joy or pain? 

To most Western people, the Asian grocery shopping experience is more or less like going to the zoo.   They get the chance to see most animals they eat (or they don’t) alive but hardly ever see them in a Western grocery store display or the zoo/aquarium.  

We were in Toronto, we couldn’t miss the chance to shop in a nice big asian grocery store.   After several stops, finally we made the trip at around 8:00PM.   Unlike most Western shops, Asian stores usually close late.  We had full two hours to shop before it closed.   We went into every aisle and saw stuff we didn’t have time to look at before.   Ron was pretty happy and laughed at those English names on the Asian food.  Despite his laughing, we soon had many things loaded into our cart.  Here comes the seafood section.   Maybe it was late in the evening, the store was not as crowded as usual.   I had a peek of the seafood.  Knowing that seafood is a “forbidden” dish on our table, I wandered to the meat section.  On the contrary, Ron put away his cart, stood in front of the fresh seafood water tanks and started to inspect those creatures he would never eat in his life.

When I was in the vegetable section already, I turned back and found Ron was still there.   He started his inspectoin at the lobsters, then a sort of lake fish, snails, king crabs… He put both his hands in the pockets, looking at those shell animals quietly 1 minute, 2 minutes… 5 minutes without moving.  When I was wondering when he would stop his fascinated inspection, he took his left hand out of the pocket, and poked something in the tank!  That apparently satisfied him a lot.  After the poking, he quickly moved away, grabbed the cart and looked around for me.   He was amazed to find out that I was so far away and came to me happily afterwards.  I hope the sales people in the seafood section didn’t think he was retarded.

It is said this year is Chinese golden pig year.  Many many couples are in a rush to get pregnant and get their babies born in this year.  The theory behind it is that pigs usually have a very easy life.   They never need to work hard, just eat, sleep and play in the mud.   The reason why it is a “golden” pig year, I am not sure.  I dare not say superstition is stupid, but I think life would be easier if we have less things to worry about. 

St. Thomas is one of the U.S. Virgin Islands.   So when we were arriving at St. Thomas from the Bahamas, we entered the U.S. soil again.   Everybody on the ship was required to go through the U.S. immigration check shit before we can land in St. Thomas.   We were requested to get ready for the check last night.   The speaker started to announce the information again quite early this morning.   So we didn’t sleep in as we usually would do.   We went to deck 2 for the check,  the line for U.S. passport holders was quite long while for us, non-U.S., the line was shorter.   The check was routine and very quick. 

Benefited from the early waking,   we showed up on a busy street in St. Thomas around 10 o’clock.  Ron learned from the daily paper that there was a free shuttle bus which would go to downtown,  the bus stop was shown very close to the dock, so we didn’t take the cabs which were waiting right beside the dock.   We went around the place which was supposed to be the shuttle bus stop on the map twice.  No sign of bus.   We had to go back to the dock and took the cab. 

The cab can fit 20 persons or so.  It was like a pick up truck, but with rails and seats in the back.  We waited for a while until the cab was full.  Then we headed to downtown.   The roads were narrow, traffic was a bit crazy (If I am allowed to say that, I guess compared to Shanghai, this traffic was just nothing).   Soon, the cab arrived at a very crowded tiny plaza, with lots of simple sheds on the road side.  People were selling T-shirts, cultural clothes, bags and other miscellaneous things in those sheds.  I didn’t believe that was downtown, thought this might be one of the stops.  But after I saw all of the passengers had taken off, I guess that was it.  The driver pointed that we should turn right and go one more block.  Alright, followed his instruction, we saw a long street with lots of small stores right beside each other on both sides.  Some of them were decorated very nicely.  We went into the first one on the corner.  Very bright store, not sure the brightness was from the store lights or from all the shining exhibitions there.  Jewelry, stones and watches…  We saw the huge globes which Ron always wanted to put in our library.  They have different sizes there.  We admired them a bit but didn’t really think we were ready to convey a huge expensive commodity to Canada from this trip.  We went to the next store.  On the road, a ragged guy gave us some name card and pointed us to some store which would have 80% discount on the diamonds.  We took the card and said thank you to him,  but didn’t bother to look at the name of the store.  There was only jewelry in the second store.   In fact, most of the stores were just selling jewelry.  Normally I would enjoy jewelry window shopping,  but there is a term called visual fatigue.   I guess I got infected by that, strange.  But really nothing has ever caught my attention since I received my engagement ring.  :P  We had an excursion booked at 12:00.   At 11:30, we found a cab on the street and headed back to the ship.   On the cab, I saw most people that went through and out of the stores were tourists.   St. Thomas is very famous for shopping for luxuries since it is a tax-free place.    

Our excursion in St. Thomas was called sail boat racing.   Ron picked all our excursions in this cruise before the departure when we were still in Waterloo.   He booked those excursions with limited seatings which also sound interesting in case we won’t be able to get in later.   Anyway there were about 10 people for this race.  We were divided into two groups.  Ron and I were in the blue team.  Besides us, there were an old couple and an Asian looking middle-aged guy (I think he speaks perfect English) in the blue team.   There were three sailors on the boat.  It was the first sailing boat I was on but I would say it was a very nice one if only there was a nice kitchen and bedroom in the cabin.    Ron told me that this boat was designed for racing, so efficiency and speed were most important.  Oh, well, sailing…. that is just something far more beyond the imagination of a girl like me.   Ron was so into it.  He told the captain that he actually took a boat course to learn how to drive a boat.  I was worried that I couldn’t follow the instructions very well and would make our team lag behind so I told the captain that I wouldn’t be a part of the racing and I would just watch….

They started to practice, basically the work was tugging the rope and releasing the rope at a very quick speed to move the sails based on the wind direction.  It was a very strenuous job.   As the youngest work force in the group, I felt bad that I just sat and didn’t help.  It was said that telling the wind direction was the most difficult part.  Only very experienced sailor can do this job well.  And I had the impression that they can actually tell the wind direction by the color of the waves, amazing, but I am not sure whether I heard this right or not.  Anyway, the captain took charge of discerning how to move the sails, and instructed group members whether to tug or release the rope on either side.   During the whole sailing, most of the time, the boat was tilted badly either to one side or the other side.  At the first time that the boat was tilted nearly 60 degree,  I was so scared and felt the gravity was going to pull me down to the water.  I was looking for something I could grab on the boat.  One sailor noticed my anxiety and showed me that I should put my feet against the raised edge in the middle of the floor.  Alright, that helped a lot!  I found everybody else has done that already… I missed something once again!  During the race, the Asian looking guy got sea-sick and started to vomit.  Then the old guy got sick and left his position.  So only one old lady and Ron were still useful in our team.  Ron indeed worked very hard.  At the end of the race, one of the sailors shook his hand and called him brother.  Do sailors call each other brothers?  What do they call female sailors? I guess it would be sisters.  That sounds like a family.

After the race,  we were guided to a little shop near the dock where we saw our pictures which were taken on the race boat.  We bought one of the pictures in which Ron was steering the wheel and I was leaning against him. :D  But that was not a  cheap picture at all.

We were tired and hot.  We went back to the stateroom, cleaned up and had a rest.  The ship wouldn’t leave St. Thomas until 11:00PM.   Ron was interested in seeing some camera store nearby and he also said he wanted to buy me some jewelry in the trip as a souvenir.  I told him that I didn’t want any jewelry in short term.  But both of us know that is a little white lie.   So after a bit of rest, we disembarked the ship and amazingly found all the shops near the dock were all closed.  It was just around 7:00PM.  Well, as a tourism city, considering most ships would stay late, that clearly was a very bad move.

We didn’t want to go farther away from the dock, so we just headed back to our room.  I spent some time on the balcony alone.  In the dusk, from the view of our balcony, St. Thomas was quiet.  There were no skyscrapers, hardly any tall buildings.  Only sparkling lights in the trees,  from there I heard the very familiar sound made by the cicadas.  As one fell, another rose.  The exact same wonderful music accompanied me in the summers of my childhood.  At that moment, it brought back memories.   I wish I could just make time reverse, but I know even if I could, I wouldn’t feel the same anymore.  Mommy’s little girl has grown up,  that is just the way it is.   When we were in Kingston, Ron showed me around his neighbourhood where he grew up.  He pointed out to me several houses he lived in before.  I always envy him since I know I will never find the nice little neighbourhood I lived in before in Shanghai.  They are long gone.