Notepad, worklog, tasks, etc.

Yesterday was our eighth marriage anniversary. When I had prepared a big dinner and called Xudong to come back earlier, he told me he forgot the special day :(. Xudong is quite busy recently. He has a deadline in March. Can he remember the day if he is not so busy? I am doubting

When we got married in 2000, Xudong suggested to register on Feb. 29. So we only celebrate marriage anniversary every four years. I definitely refused. We spend all the anniversary days except the one in 2003. That year Xudong did his Post-doc research in France, and I worked in Shanghai. During the course of separation my best friend Hanjing helped me a lot. Whenever I felt sad, she’s always with me. I appreciate her friendship. I wish we could live in same city and play together.

I forgot how to celebrate our other seven anniversary days. Did I receive some gifts on the days? Did we go out for a movie or a dinner? Did we quarrel? I totally forgot. So that’s why I write down something for our eighth anniversary day. It is the third time for Lele to celebrate this special day with us. What Lele wants is Daddy coming back early to have dinner with him and Mommy making a dinner without vegetables.

Yesterday I found there are Chinese books in the library. I was so exited that I borrowed six books again. Now I have borrowed 24 books. Most of them are for Lele. There are so many choices for him that he hasn’t time to glance at some of them. All these Chinese books are from Taiwan. That means they are in traditional Chinese. It is little difficult to recognize traditional Chinese. The problem that annoys me is there is zhuyin besides every character. Zhuyin looks like Japanese character for me. I read the books slowly because it takes me more time to distinguish traditional Chinese charater from zhuyin. Anyway it’s a good news we can borrow Chinese books from the library. I need to keep the books under a reasonable amount.

It seems a little late for making new year plan until late February. Anyway, better late than never. I have been struggling to find my goal for a quite long time. I thought I was just like a moving body without a soul. That lets my life lack of colors. I became unhappy. I was not interested in anything. Xudong was worried about me, and he wants me happy. He didn’t push my anything. He just waited for me at my step. I know the only person who can help me is myself, but I need Xudong’s help. After talking with him last night, I made my 2008 plan. The most important is I need to execute the plan. So I just made a small and simple plan. Here is my plan.

English:
1. Keep on the ESL class.
2. 5 100-word blogs per week.
3. Be a volunteer in the retirement center.

Family:
1. Bake a cake/dessert per week.
2. Make a Chinese dumpling per week.
3. Go shopping in the weekday and go outside in the weekend.
4. Play a game with Lele per week.
5. Call father every week.
6. Stay alone instead of yelling if I get angry.

Work:
1. Add/update 2 tv stations for OnlineTVtools.
2. Stop reading the news of wenxuecity.com and mitbbs.com.

Today when cleaning up my notepad, I saw the list of MS contacts during our relocation. I have to clean up the list to save space for my notepad, but it is interest to take a note here on how many contacts were behind our relocation: my future boss, my recruiter, someone from MS Onboarding Logistics, two legal contacts, two background check contacts, one relocation coordinator, three contacts from transportation company, one from a Portuguese relocation company, one Portuguese tax consultant, two destination consultants. That’s a total of fifteen! During that time, I had to setup this list to manage who was asking for what on when, to whom I sent what on when, etc …