Gardenias

My love of plants and nature started early. I am by no means a Master Gardener, but I do enjoy spending time outdoors, taking care of plants, and watching things grow. As a child, I enjoyed coming home after school and spending nearly an hour outside watering the yard by hand. We planted tomatoes for fun one year, and I would water them everyday. I did make the unfortunate mistake of sprinkling too much fertilizer on them because I didn't understand that fertilizer was essentially poison in massive amounts. So the tomato plants that grew did wonderfully. And the ones that got too much fertilizer...died. Of course, gardening and taking care of plants takes an immense amount of work, and that didn't last too long for a teenager.

I did also compost in a 5-gallon bucket as a child. I put dead leaves and grass and a bunch of random things in a bucket and filled it with water. And then I left it there for years and years and years in our backyard on the patio, filling it with water every now and then. I think my dad finally realized one day that he needed his bucket so he dumped everything out and took his bucket back. What he dumped out though was a nice hunk of composted soil, perhaps a little too dry from lack of care, but it was compost.

Last night, Jonathan and I went to Lowe's just to walk around and take a peek at their plants. We browsed the clearance shelves and came across some bargain finds. Of course, with bargain prices come brown leaves and "seemingly lifeless" plants. However, with my love of plants and growing nature, I committed to reviving some plants with great potential. Here's what we found.

This larger friend was $3. He's got some good
green leaves and great potential. You can't tell from the
picture but there's small buds coming
out of the bottom. He has so much potential.

This little friend was $1. I know he's not the prettiest
plant in the pack, but he has potential! I see it in the baby
branches emerging.

They're gardenia plants. I absolutely love gardenias. The smell brings me back to my childhood when we used to go to my grandparent's house and I would cut the flowers off when they bloomed and put them into vases. Right now they're chilling on our back patio because they need partial shade. I'm hoping they can still grow with slightly less sunlight because the location I want to plant them is almost full shade. Of course, different sources say different amounts of sunlight, and a variety of people have had success growing in different locations, so, I won't know until I put it in. But I want to freshen them up first before transplanting. 

Ideally, I wanted azaleas to plant in my shady location, but once again, the different websites and plant tags say different amounts of sunlight requirements. So rather than taking a $30 risk, I went with the $4 risk. I actually want to plant Japanese Astilbe, but nurseries don't have any in season right now so I will wait until spring for that one.

Jonathan also found a nice bargain find last night. He got himself a cute little $4 succulent basket for his office.

What a cutie.

Unlike me, his little succulent basket will be much easier to maintain than my gardenias that need to be revived. But we'll see.

Stay tuned for future pictures and updates on my gardenia plants!

Gas Lights and Garters

My gas light came on this morning on my way to work. I just stared at it for a while as I waited as a red light. It's been a long time since I've let the tank get low enough for the light to turn on. The last time I definitively remember the gas light coming on was the evening of my junior homecoming.

We drove all over that night. I drove to the restaurant, and then we went to the mall next door to take photos and then to our high school for the dance. After that, I drove back home to surprise my date with the garter I ended up making him even though we had said we weren't doing the mums and garters. (But I had bought one for myself anyway because I thought they were so pretty and wanted one.) And then I drove to our church where we hung out with a campfire, which resulted in the police coming and telling us we couldn't have the fire anymore, which kind of fizzled the rest of the evening out. And then I drove my date home because he couldn't drive yet, and then drove home. And somewhere between all those trips through Plano and Frisco, my gas light came on, I freaked out a little, and then decided I could make it through the rest of the evening. Quite gutsy of me...

My junior homecoming mum

A year or two prior to my first homecoming as a junior, an older friend at church was making his date a mum after our Friday night fellowsip. His parents were there, and most of the youth stayed around to socialize and watch. I knew his parents, and his mom turned to me and said in Chinese, "Oh yeah, these aren't that hard to make. Cathy, you know how to make these right?" And I shyly nodded my head, even though I had never made one before. In theory, it just looked so easy, but I didn't have any hands-on experience.

My junior date's garter was the first time I had ever made one myself. I was young and naive at the time, and I hadn't a clue where to start, so I fell for the "pre-made backing" and paid about $15 for that piece to start with. Little did I know it cost less than $10 to make and wasn't even that difficult.

The garter I made for my date - junior year.

It's not the most impressive homecoming garter, but for a 17-year-old who tried her hands at a first-time DIY, it's not bad.

For my senior homecoming the year after, my date and I agreed not to do mums and garters as well. Again, I really wanted one, because you know, it was a white and silver one instead of maroon and white, so it would definitely look better on a mum and I just had to have one. But instead of buying one from the drill team mothers, I made my own. I went out and bought all the materials and taught myself how to make the military braids (Which they now sell for $7.99 each! Proposterous for mere yardage of cheap ribbon.) I like it better than my junior mum, but I think that's my own personal bias because I made it myself.

My senior mum which I made by hand. I
think it looks much more impressive than the one
I bought the previous year. Notice that military braid?
Yup, handmade!

Coincidentally, I am making garters with the girls I disciple tonight in place of our normal studies. I really wanted to encourage them to make their own garters instead of paying to outsource it for a number a reasons.

1. I want to challenge them to be able to take on a task that seems great at first and to work through it, especially when the stakes are still low. There's going to be a lot of things in their future that might seem like giant hurdles. And it's true, some of them are hurdles you may not want to attempt or are best left alone. But there are others that might be worthwhile, you try to attempt, and you fail, and that's okay. And then there are the rest that you try to attempt, succeed, and leave with a sense of empowerment knowing you did something and proved yourself wrong, in a good way.

2. I want to teach them to use their resources wisely. Personally, my opinion is that the homecoming marketing is ridiculous, and I don't believe it wise to spend hundreds of dollars on a mum or garter. However, I do believe that it is more special to spend more time on something handmade to give to your homecoming date, especially if you're actually dating the person and he/she is more than just a friend.

3. Their mentor happens to be me, and I love making mums and garters, so I would like to share my knowledge and expertise with them to help them make it and teach them something new at the same time. Also, when she can make mums that actually look good, how can you go wrong? :)

I'll have to ask them later for their opinions of my theory and process behind this and their overall experience. Perhaps they'll let me share with you after. :)

The Perfect Hard-Boiled Eggs

I can't remember anymore how I discovered this or who did it for the first time, but it was in China where I realized the secret to a perfect hard-boiled egg. Let's first define the perfect hard-boiled egg.

1. The shell has to peel easily. If the thin membrane underneath sticks even the slightest bit, you're going to lose part of your precious egg white. Or a lot of it.
2. There has to be no gray ring on the very edge of the egg yolk on the inside. If there is, you've overcooked it. Now, I know, for us Asians, there are many wonderful recipes out there for tea eggs and seasoned hard boiled eggs in stews, and you will see the gray ring in it. And that's just due to an extended amount of cooking time that the recipe calls for. And that's fine. But that's not what I'm talking about here.
3. The egg yolk is completely cooked through and opaque, not translucent. So we're not soft-boiling here. 

If you do a Google search or ask chefs or well-seasoned mothers, they'll tell you the tricks of timing it perfectly. They'll tell you to add vinegar to the water to make the shells peel easier. They'll tell you to dunk the eggs into ice as soon as you're done to stop the cooking immediately. They'll tell you to remove the pot off the stove and let it sit for x amount of time. But see, all these things require a very precise timing. Nobody tells you how to cook an egg in a kettle unless you ask them specifically about using a kettle.

When I was living in China, I discovered hard-boiling my eggs in my tea kettle. Here's the secret.
First, put however many eggs you want or can fit into a tea kettle with the automatic shut-off feature. This is key that it has the automatic shut-off feature.
Second, fill the kettle with enough water that all the eggs are submerged.
Third, flip the switch and boil the water.
Fourth, after the water boils (which is about 2-3 minutes), let the eggs sit in the water for at least 10 minutes. Anything longer than that is fine, AND, you will not develop the gray ring.

My five little eggs nesting after the boil.

You see, the reason why cooking hard-boiled eggs in the tea kettle is so much easier in my opinion than other techniques is that

a. you don't need to add vinegar to make it peel easily
b. you don't need to do any special timing methods. Once it's in, it's in.
c. If you have at least 13 minutes to wait, you're golden. If you have more than 13 minutes to wait, it won't ruin them either.

This came in handy last Sunday because Jonathan and I woke up earlier than normal for church. We had a good 30 - 40 minutes before we had to leave the house. So I suggested going out on a walk to enjoy the cooler weather. However, I also wanted to eat something decent for once in the morning instead of going to church on an empty stomach like we normally do. Conveniently enough, I popped three eggs into our kettle, filled it with water, and flipped the switch. We went out and took a stroll around our neighborhood for about 15-20 minutes. After coming back, I scooped the eggs out of the kettle, rinsed them under cold tap water to cool so I could eat it, and we had breakfast.

I will say, the one risk to doing this is that every now and then, I would say probably less than 10% of the time, you may end up having an egg explode in the kettle during the boiling process. This is more likely to happen if the egg already has signs of cracks along the shell (not actually cracked though). In my time in China, this happened once. The fortunate part is everything is cooked, so you just have to wash your kettle out.

Yolks cooked all the way through. No gray ring.

There really is no gray ring.

That's my secret to perfect hard-boiled eggs. :)

The Big Black Crow

When I was a child, my mother read a Chinese newspaper article to me. The article was about a little girl and how she despised practicing piano. She described its appearance as a black crow with giant white teeth. Eventually, they got rid of the piano and she stopped playing. The day the piano was moved out, she did cartwheels on their front lawn to display her joy that the crow was gone. She reflected back years later about how she wished she hadn't taken lessons with such disdain and that she actually missed her big black crow.

My story is similar. I really disliked practicing as a child. It was so hard to fork up 30 minutes to an hour of time to sit and devote toward practicing. So when I quit lessons, it was such a relief to not feel the pressure to force myself to sit and play. After a few months of hiatus, I realized I found myself choosing to go back and sit and play. Not necessarily for long periods of time. Maybe 10 minutes here and 20 minutes there. But I continued to play, no longer for myself but for others. I continued accompanying at music festivals for friends and through referrals. I continued to play piano at church for Sunday worship.

In college, I even continued to do so to the extent that I would drive home on the weekends solely for the purpose of rehearsing with students or playing at a festival. The money I was spending to drive home sometimes wasn't even made up by the money I earned. But I did it because there was something about it I loved. I loved playing music. I loved hearing the music and how the notes I was playing were flowing together in such a way to make melodies.

My dad never sold our big black crows. Thank goodness. And instead of watching mine be taken away and doing cartwheels on the front lawn, I stood watching it as the movers carefully maneuvered it down the front steps of my dad's house and rolled it into my very own living room while trying not to pass out from fear.

My 7'6" (not so baby) baby. 

I'm not the pianist I used to be, but I've slowly discovered to love the talent I possess. Six years ago, a friend asked me while on break, "Do you play piano a lot in your spare time?" At the time I responded, "Sometimes." I didn't have access to a piano very often, and it didn't occur to me to play when I had the chance. Things always got in the way. Here's what he said next.

"If I were you, I would spend hours playing."

That was the first time it really occurred to me that I had a talent not easily earned. And I've spent the last six years keeping my skills alive however I can. Now, with my piano in my very own living room, I hope I can continue practicing and revive some old classical favorites I used to so easily master.

And I hope that I can share with my own future kids, and that you can share with your children as aspiring musicians, a different story. My big black crow was moved into my own house in my own living room. And I still continue to play on it, (almost) every day.

Two Years a To

I wanted to get married as a young child because I wanted to change my last name. At the start of every school year, my teachers would always struggle with pronouncing my last name. I was more thankful for the ones who just waited for me to say it first before trying.

When I got married, I legally changed my name rather quickly for a number of reasons.

1. I was unemployed and had time to wait at the social security office on a weekday for 3 hours.
2. My driver's license expiration was coming up in a few months so it would make it easier to get that changed in one swift motion as well.
3. I always wanted to.

After legally changing my name, I realized that To wasn't necessarily better than Aur. Growing up, chances were I'd end up with a longer last name, because you know, the phonetics of the English alphabet don't allow for many words, much less last names, shorter than three letters. Somehow, I ended up defying all odds there. 

Then, I realized that To was "easy" to pronounce, perhaps too "easy" for most people. Being that it is an actual English word in the alphabet, people get overly confident and pronounce it to͞o. Usually I don't bother correcting them because it's a one-time interaction. I've gotten pretty used to it now, but every now and then if you catch me in the wrong mood, it'll irritate me more than it should.

One time when I was calling the doctor's office for information, I called before office hours so they gave me the option to type in the first three letters of my last name. Well, I typed in my WHOLE last name and hit # and got an error message....so I had to wait and call again after they opened to speak to a real person.

I haven't changed the name on my passport yet because at the time we got married, I had almost 6 years to go until it expired. So whenever we travel out of the country, I just have to remember to book the ticket under my maiden name. The only downside is that sometimes we don't get assigned seats next to each other and have to ask to switch. I've got just under 4 years left, and then my identity as an Aur will only remain in those who knew me as one.

Sometimes when I really think about my name, it' strange that it is what it is. Do I miss my last name? Sometimes. Would I have kept it the same without changing it? Probably not. I remember intentionally asking my students that summer before I got married to call me Ms. Aur instead of Ms. Cathy because I knew it would be the last time I could use that name.

Just before we were Mr. and Mrs. To

I was an Aur for over 23.5 years. I've been a To for 2. Perhaps we will revisit this topic again in another 21 years and I'll tell you how I feel then. :)

HGTV In Real Life: Kitchen Facelift

We thought the kitchen was going to be one of the first projects we would tackle and renovate as homeowners, and we got halfway done....but we ended up waiting over a year. It started out as an aesthetic problem, and we were able to compromise on the aesthetics of the kitchen to put it off and save money. However, when the dishwasher wasn't secured any longer to the underside of our crumbling wood-bits-smashed-together-and-covered-in-plastic counters, it was no longer an issue of aesthetics. Every time we wanted to put dishes in the dishwasher, it would tip forward and make my heart skip a beat.

One of my favorite parts of renovating has been that I can truly make it my own. I'm not overly particular about aesthetics to begin with, but when it comes to the biggest purchase and investment (probably) of my life, coupled with the fact that we bought an older house knowing it needed some renovating, I'm going to be picky. And having seen the results of our kitchen facelift, I am confident that no house we saw with renovated kitchens had one that came close to being my dream kitchen.

Before:



After round 1 of facelift:





During phase 2 of the facelift:





And finally, I present, my dream kitchen:





So...I wish I could say nothing was ever on our counters, but that would be a lie. So this is what our counters actually look like:

We're pretty clean...at least in the kitchen :)

I was in awe for a while after we finished our kitchen. Having lived with the outdated materials for so long, I got used to it. And then, I watched the contractors install pretty much every detail, so it wasn't a big reveal for me. To be honest at first, I wasn't sure if I liked it. Jonathan and I took FOREVER to pick our backsplash (like....almost a year if not more. Yes, we had been looking at backsplash for a LONG time) because I couldn't decide whether it was worth it to splurge on a fancy shmancy design or just to keep it simple and low-budget. In the end, we went simple and low-budget, and I'm more than pleased with how it turned out. I learned that visualizing an end product with just one representative piece is really difficult. Super props to interior designers who can figure this all out in their head instantly.

If you're curious on the materials we used, I've made a list below of every item we bought for the kitchen. I didn't include any of the appliances. All the current prices listed on the links are higher than what we paid for them.

Kitchen Sink - Kraus

Kitchen Faucet - Kohler

Backsplash Tile

Quartz Countertops

Cabinet Hardware

Range Hood Vent

Cabinet Paint: SW Pro Classic Satin Pure White 7005

Wall Paint: SW Marshmallow 7001

Jonathan and I don't splurge on fancy meals or new clothes on ourselves very often if ever, but we do spend the time and money to have a nice house, not only for ourselves, but to share it with others. One thing I've enjoyed most about having our home is being able to open it up to others and have them come over for dinner, host friends who are in town for the weekend, and to share our lives with others. We hope you can enjoy our house as much as we do :)

An Unexpected Water Feature

It started on a Thursday evening. I had just gotten home from a long day, about 8:15 pm and saw that the garage door was open - hubby was working outside. After I parked my car, I walked with my stuff to the front of our house to say hi and saw him talking to our neighbor who was in the middle of walking his dog. I greeted Allie and was letting her lick my hand and was in my own little world of relaxation when I heard the words, "You've got a leak." Suddenly, my attention left Allie and immediately focused on the problem at hand. We had a water leak, and water leaks are pretty high up on my list of "worst things that can happen" list.

To make things more complicated, the leak was at our water shutoff valve in front of the house, AND, our meter shutoff by the street was so snug that none of us could turn it off. So, being a Thursday night, and that the leak was still rather small, we let it slowly drip and went on our evening as usual. Our neighbor joked with us, "You've got your very own water feature now in your yard." Yup, I always wanted that landscape fountain...

On Friday morning, I walked outside to check on the leak before heading to work. The water had risen almost to the top of the valve box. Trying to make the most of my situation, I grabbed a cup and scooped out the water, pouring it around the flowerbeds. (If you don't know, we have a broken sprinkler system, so any kind of watering our lawn and flowerbeds can get is a good thing.)

That's a nice little pond there we had.

Once I got to work, I called the city and asked them to come out and turn off our water at the meter. They told me there would be a $20 service fee (as stated on their website), and I tried protesting it. I told the lady, "We are not trying to be lazy. We've tried multiple wrenches and even tried our neighbor's water meter key. It didn't budge." She then told me that if their guys went out there and found it hard to turn, they would waive the fee. Thank goodness.

Friday afternoon, Jonathan got off work early and went home. He and our neighbor tried to find the problem and fix it if it was easy enough. However, we realized yet another problem - there was still water leaking from the valve. And yes, the water was supposedly shut off at the meter. I called the city once again and asked them to come out and shut off the water a second time, because clearly it wasn't shut off. About two hours later, he came out, unhooked the entire meter because he said the angle stop was bad, and then told us to fix our leak first and then he would come back and fix the meter.

By then it was almost 7 o'clock, dinner was half cooked, and we had no water in the house. We made the call to pack up dinner, wash whatever dishes we could with reservoir gallon water (which is saved from our shower every evening while waiting for the water to heat up), and spend the night at my dad's house. After arriving at my dad's, we finished cooking dinner and ended the night with a movie.

Despite the chaos, we had stuffed bell peppers for dinner. It was pretty tasty!

The next morning, we called some plumbers to see if anyone could come out that afternoon. We had a plumber who said he could come out early afternoon, which worked out great because I was supposed to cook lunch for my dad as a late Father's Day lunch. After we ate and cleaned up, Jonathan and I packed up our stuff again and headed home, not sure if we could stay at our own house again, but hopeful.

Once we got back to our house, the plumber arrived shortly after and came out to look at the leak. He was very puzzled why the city had disconnected our meter and was rather annoyed. He said he had to have the water on to see where the leak was coming from in order to fix it. So he reconnected the meter, looked at the leak, tightened one nut, put the valve back together, and called it good. I was almost in disbelief as to how easily it was that he had fixed the problem. And on top of that, he didn't charge us anything. But it wasn't all fixed yet.

Our water was back on at this point, but there was still water leaking....now at the meter by the street. On the one hand, it was leaking water that shouldn't have been leaking. On the other hand, it was leaking before the meter so we weren't actually being charged for it. Once again, I called the city and told them about our situation and asked them to send someone out to fix our meter. In the mean time, rather than sit back and relax, Jonathan and I took advantage of the water that was overflowing at a rather fast rate out of our water meter box. It very easily could have just overflowed into the street and drained into the sewer, but he and I worked outside for an hour before the city guy came to fix it. One of us sat on the curb and scooped water out with an empty salsa jar into two 5-gallon buckets as well as our watering pail while the other carried the water and watered the flowerbeds, lawn, and wherever else needed it (which was pretty much every square inch of our property that wasn't our physical house.) Every so often we'd switch roles and do the other task. Yes, we did this for an hour.

Once the city guys came, we finally took our break and let them do their thing outside while we lay in our hammock inside and perused Facebook on our phones.

So there you have it. The most unexpected water leak that was resolved in possibly the best way ever...with a complimentary 20-30 gallons (at least) of water from the city that we conserved and reused.