Yo-Yo Gomm

Random has been playing the cello now for 3 months. He has rehearsals every Tuesday and Thursday mornings at 7:20 which is quite early for all of us. He practices regularly and loves to whip out his cello for all the people who come to visit.

Last week we finally got to see him perform! As you can see from this picture he's the Principal Cellist of the Boeckman Creek Primary School Beginning Orchestra. WOOHOO!

The concert was combined with the Middle School and High school orchestras. The Middle School sounded a lot like the elementary school but without the muting power of parental pride. The High School was pretty impressive although Troy and I were confronted with our age when the boy we thought was some polite and helpful student when we saw him in the hallway turned out to be the director.

Random did really great and Troy and I gained a new appreciation for our parents who sat through years and years and years...and years of these fine performances. All I can say is, Mom, Dad, thank you and I'm sorry. :)

Sleeping Beauty

Those of you that know Scout know she never stops. Sleep only comes when she's used up all that energy that she normally focuses on talking, dancing, talking, skipping, talking, running...oh and did I mention...talking. Last night I went in to check on her after she had been quiet for long enough that the only explanation was that she was unconscious. Here's what I found:


When Random asked Scout why she put on the crown she said very matter-of-factly, "Because I was a Princess" and off she danced.

I thought I should explain that we do have pillow cases for TheScout but she prefers the feel of the pillow itself and takes them off whenever we try to put them on. Also, I have no idea what that pen is doing there but I'm thinking it has something to do with the writing on the pillow and yes, I'm going right now to confiscate it.

Halloween 2007

Now that it's December I think it's finally time to take the lid off of the closely guarded Gomm Halloween photos!

This was our first Halloween in Oregon and it was great! Last year (in Michigan) we had to all wear thick coats and drive around trick-or-treating in a nice warm car. The temperature here was GREAT and there were plenty of autumn leaves swirling around to make it very spooky.


Scout dressed as a fairy princess, Savannah was an über-goth vampire, and Random was Link. The fabulous Link costume was tailored by Grandma Bryan!

I wore my warmest shirt which doubled as my costume. In case you're curious I'm a Totoro from Tonari no Totoro - a great Japanese movie. (By the way, I highly recommend all films by Hayao Miyazaki).

At the first door, Scout came running back to Amanda with wide eyes saying, "Mommy! They gave us CANDY!!" The kids all had a lot of fun and scored about 13 tons of candy. By the end of the evening, Scout was so tired she couldn't hold her bucket anymore. All the sugar lasted them until mid-November.

Happy Halloween!

Trip to Chinatown - Singapore Style

Last Saturday I took a trip to Singapore's Chinatown. This was also my first Singapore subway trip, so I looked up the route and hit the subway (called the MRT here). Luckily there's an entrance to the MRT across from my hotel:


The Singapore MRT handles tickets different from other subways I've used. Here they have a vending machine that issues you a temporary card credited with the amount you put in plus a deposit. Here's the machine:

and here's the ticket:


The ticket has an RFID in it to buzz you through the gates, then you return it at your destination to get your deposit back.

A couple of stops and a line transfer later, I emerged in Chinatown - and I really mean emerged. The escalator from the MRT comes right out into the middle of hundreds of little shops. Here's what you see when you first come out:


One thing this picture doesn't communicate is how hot it was. Not only was the air sticky and thick with the near 100% humidity, but the sky was clear, allowing the sun to stoke the air into a furnace.... it was really really hot :P

Oh, and here's a vid:

Once you get into the shops a bit (where those yellow and red umbrellas are in the picture), the shops get very crowded. It's elbow to elbow from one shop overlapping the next, and little space from one side of the street to the other. It may sound terrible, but it was fun - you could really lose yourself in the crowd and just take it in.

I spent quite a bit of time browsing the shops, and I bought a few things for the family. For Amanda, I bought a jade ring and a tiger eye quartz bracelet because they're the color of her eyes! ^_^

Singapore Tidbits: Part 2

While in Singapore, I heard this song. It's a Mongolian Folk style song called "My Three Treasures". It was written by a Mongolian guy in China. He saw how a lot of Mongolians were moving to the large cities in China and the next generation was losing their mother tongue. He wrote this song so that Mongolian kids growing up in the cities would at least know some of their ancestral language through the words to a Mongolian song. The song is about Mother, Father, and Child (the three treasures). The song was extremely popular and stayed at the top of the Mandarin pop charts for over a month. I also saw a show about the little girl singer in the song on the Discovery Channel Asia (the show was called "Mongolian Idol").

Next tidbit. I've been buying a lot of baked goods at a Japanese bakery across the street from my hotel (most of my meals have been from there. oops! ^____^). Here's a picture of my sweet sweet candy:On the left is a curry donut - donut dough with chicken curry inside, fried like a donut. On the bottom is a chocolate and custard bun. On one side it has a vanilla custard inside, on the other side it has a chocolate paste. On the right is a soy bean & cheese roll. Soft bread, soy beans inside, toasted cheese on top. Yuhm Yuhm Yuhm!

Singapore Shrine Hunt

Since it's Sunday today, I figured it would be appropriate to go on a shrine hunt.

I looked up the closest subway station by the shrine and just took off. When I got off at the station (Raffel station I think), I found a couple of vague locality maps that showed the shrine just off of Church Street, but not how to get to Church Street. So I walked in the general area and stopped and asked people for directions.

I did end up finding it and it was pretty interesting. The whole area smelled strongly of incense. The shine was a very old walled structure, right next to high-rise buildings. The contrast was pretty neat.

I had my little camera and snapped some photos, but I also tried to grab some video. Here's my first attempt at adding video to this blog:

Here's an attempt to add some video of the hunt:

Video #2:

Video #3:

Here are some photos of the shrine. From the outside:



On the inside. The spiral things are incense sticks. There were probably 30 or so of them hanging all around and all of them were lit. Check our the details on that roof!

Video #4:

Video #5:

Well, that was my quest for the shrine! I hope you liked it, I did ^^

Singapore Tidbits

Here's a couple random tidbits:

The paper money in Singapore comes in different sizes for the denominations. I don't think I've seen that before. Here's a pic:
Amanda and I have a friend who goes by "Milo" online, so I had to pick up these:


There are just tons and tons of trees everywhere in Singapore, more so than any other large city I've been in. Some of the trees are really striking. I asked some local people about them, and apparently one of the old Prime Ministers had them brought in from overseas. I was told that when they're kids, Singaporeans learn all the names of the trees in the city. I think this one is called "flame of the forest" (maybe, my Singaporean colleagues were a little fuzzy on that ^__^ ). Here's a pic!

My Malaysian Excursion

One of the suppliers I'm visiting is in Senai Malaysia, so on Friday the 5th, I had my first trip there. One of the Xerox people who lives in Singapore came and picked me up and drove me, and let me say, PHEW!

Singapore is really big, metropolitan, and clean - it's like the nice downtown area of most large cities, except it covers the entire country (Singapore is the city, the country, and the island). The down side of that is that traffic is crazy. Now, I've lived and driven in large cities before (Detroit, Toronto, Fargo, Portland, Seattle, etc.), so I'm not a total n00b, but here, not only are there a lot of cars, but they also seem to ignore lane markings on the road. So, I say PHEW! I'm glad I didn't have to drive myself around.

The other part of my PHEW! is that Customs at the border between Singapore and Malaysia is a lot more rigorous than the US/Canada border. You have paperwork to give them along with your passport on both the Singapore and the Malaysia side. Coming back is the same: paperwork and passport. Thankfully I was with these guys who do this at least once a week, so they had all the paperwork for me to fill out, and they knew all the right lanes to be in. (I said, "PHEW!", right?)

I'll be going through again on Monday and Tuesday, but here's my passport now, stamp-o-icious:

Malaysia is very different from Singapore. The climate is the same, but that's about it. First, the official language there is Malay (Singapore's is English) so all the signs are in Malay - but in roman characters. That means that when you see a sign out of the corner of your eye, you think you should be able to read it, but when you try to sound it out, it just doesn't work out.

Another big difference is that since there is more land in Malaysia, it's not all urbanized. So there are big stretches of palm farms (for the palm seed oil - very cool), small towns, and such. The city I visited was Senai - about an hour and a half drive from my hotel in Singapore. It's got a TON of huge industrial manufacturing sites for large companies whose names you'd recognize (Mitsubishi, Hitachi, etc.).

The non-industrial areas seemed really rural - yet crowded, and not as well kept up (at least on the outside) as Singapore. I say that it seemed not well kept up, but when we went in to one of these little places for lunch, it was very nice.

The people at the site I visited were very nice and accommodating. There was a big sign on their plasma TV that said "XEROX VIP:" with my name on it. It is a massive facility with a ton (literally many thousands of tons) of injection molding equipment, plus a very capable tooling shop. But from here I'll have to leave out the supa-secret, uber-proprietary details of the visit, but I will say that these guys are VERY competent and really great to work with.

While I was at lunch I had a crazy drink called Chendol. It was really funky. It was coconut milk, red beans, brown sugar water slush, and minty green gummy wormy things. It was really sweet (kick you in the teeth sweet) with Lovecraftian textures. Pretty good though.

Off to Singapore

I'm off to Singapore!

A couple of suppliers for parts I'm designing at Xerox are in Singapore and Malaysia. So from October 2nd through October 12th, I'll be staying in Singapore!

I flew out on Tuesday October 2nd (Happy Birthday Tom!). Amanda was super sweet and bought me a ton of magazines, some video games, etc. for the grueling flight. I flew from Portland to Narita (Japan) and then to Singapore. I ended up getting really sucked in to the book I started and ended up reading it cover to cover in one sitting. It's Storm Front by Jim Butcher (Book 1 of The Dresden Files). It was really good, I highly recommend it.

There's a picture of me holding the finished book on the air plane. If you look closely, you can see the crazy amount of leg room available on international business class. ^__^

It was an 11 hour flight to Japan, and even with too much leg room, it gets REALLY old. I tried to break it up by looking for Dutch Harbor as we flew over the Bearing Strait.

Also, I played a lot of Final Fantasy III for the DS. If you have a DS and liked the old FF games on the original NES, then you should definitely go pick this up.

I stopped in Japan for an hour and a half. I haven't been there in 12 years, so it was pretty nostalgic.

By the time the flight left to Singapore from Narita, I was really feeling the jet lag. I slept pretty much the whole way (about 7.5 hours).

I was worried about Singapore Customs, because of all their VERY strict import laws. But it was a snap. Two checkpoints, very little hassle.

The cab ride to the hotel was a little nuts. The driver apparently views the lane markings on the streets as rules of thumb - he was weaving all over the place while using both hands to describe to me the difference between flat and round noodles. Interesting conversation though.

So, now I'm here in the Marriott on Orchard Road. Here's my hotel (yep, the tall one with the roof of destiny):

Here's a view out of my window (this was pretty early in the morning):


Orchard Road is apparently the main shopping district. There's just tons and tons of shops. I walked around for a bit this morning - I'm trying to not sleep during the day to get over the jet lag quickly. It's hot and humid enough to feel exotic, and has that not unpleasant smell that reminds me of Japan (I think it's a combination of the humidity, the concrete, bamboo, and the cigarettes).

Tomorrow I'll visit Malaysia. Wish me luck!

Scout's 4th Birthday

August 8, 2007 Scout turned 4 years old! We celebrated in our little apartment in Oregon on Wednesday and that weekend drove up to Washington to visit Grandma and Grandpa Bryan and have a barbecue.

Mom (Diane, Grandma, Illustrious Goddess of Puyallup) and I (Amanda) worked long and got really really sticky making the cake (yep that Fairy-Tale Castle is the cake). We had Balloons (pink), table cloths (pink), streamers (pink), plates (pink) and a My Little Pony Pinata (duh...PINK). Princess Scout was in heaven!

Thanks to Grandma and Grandpa; Opah and Gigi; Emily, Shannon, Jerred and Brooklyn; Margaret (still pregnant... welcome baby Xander!) and Mike; Random and Savannah for coming, eating, bringing presents but most of all laughing and talking. The Gomms had a great time!

Our Trip to the Pacific Ocean

Gomms Go Pacific

Saturday, September 8, 2007

Saturday morning Troy and I decided we probably ought to get out the ocean before it got too late in the year and the weather went south for the winter. It turned out to be a lot of fun and pretty memorable for our family.

The water was FREEZING cold but we had fun running from the waves, flying kites and finding smelly things on the beach.

One thing we realized as we plunged our feet into the water...aside from what an ice cream headache in your toes feels like...is that Random and Savannah are now Coast-to-Coast travelers!

Next time we'll try to remember our thermal wet suits and hot cocoa ^^

First Post on our new Blog :P

OK, here's our first test post on the startlingly bereft OreGomm!

Here's us testing a picture post >.> noobs!