Dan and I were waiting outside of Thanh Son’s tofu while Dung and Dao went in to by some sweet treats. I witnessed once again the lady (in her 40s) who sells banh it scamming people. The victims where two young teenagers. The guy was carrying a flower pot and waking with a girl. The lady pulled the girl over and asked her to buy so banh it. The two teenagers appeared to speak very little Vietnamese. Out of sympathy, the girl asked how much for a buddle of banh it. The lady said $8, but sell for $5. The girl agreed to get $5 worth of banh it, but the lady demanded that the girl give her $20. The girl pulled $20 out of her purse. The lady took two more bundles of banh it and gave it to the girl without giving back her change. The girl said in Vietnamese, “The whole $20?” She replied yes and tried to change the conversation about the flower pot. Then the two kids walked away. I shook my head in disbelief.

The lady pulled this exact scam on me before. At first I was intending to help her out because the weather was cold and she was standing there all alone on a Wednesday evening. She caught me after I bought some hot, fried tofu from Thanh Son. Unlike the kids, I took my money back and walked away. Now she leaves me alone every time I go to Thanh Son.

Still I was upset that she tricked the two kids. Fortunately the kids brought back their aunts and mom and demanded the refund. The lady gave back everything. She could have made a $5 sell instead of scamming people and got nothing at the end. If you go to Eden Center, don’t fall for this scam. There are people who sells other things like hot peppers, vegetables and herbs. They are pretty decent. You can negotiate the price, but they don’t scam you like that one lady.

I kind of missed the lady who sells goodies outside of Hai Ky Mi Gia. Her goodies and prices were decent. She always played with Cu Dao when he was around one or so. She isn’t there any more.

Bây giờ chữ thường xuyên của Cu Đán là “đi”. Sáng mở mắt ra là đòi đi cho đến lúc đi ngủ. Hôm nay đi chơi cả ngày mệt quá nên đang ngủ sai sưa.

Cuối tuần này đi thăm bà nội. Cả gia đình đi ăn sáng ở diner rồi đi chợ nông dân mua trái cây và râu. Rồi đi thăm người bạn của bà nội mới ở bệnh viện về. Bà bị mổ vì bị ba cái xương cá trông ruộc. Nếu đưa đi nhà thương chậm trể thì chắc là bà đã không kịp thời cứu chửa. Thấy bà ốm đi rất nhiều sau khi mổ. Bà lại cảm xúc khi thấy cả gia đình của má đến thăm. Thật cảm động.

Sick, stressed, sleepless and secluded. Those are the four words describing my state of mind. I don’t want to be trapped inside these moods, but I can’t seem to emancipate. Each day I feel the deterioration in my strength. Each day I feel extremely exhausted, lack of motivations and guilty. I no longer have the desire to communicate. Writing down these words is my only therapy.

For a while now my wife has been telling me that my RSS feeds take almost twelve hours later (from the time I posted on my site) to arrive to her email. I knew something’s up with FeedBurner, but I didn’t want to let it go because I have 113 subscribers. Now’s the time to make the move because FeedBurner APIs will be shut down next month. FeedBurner is redirecting back to my WordPress’s original feed for 30 days. So if 112 of my loyal readers would like to continue to subscribe to my feed, please update to this address: http://www.visualgui.com/feed/

Thank you for reading.

These past few weeks had been crazy. I am back to 3-5 hours of sleep. The kids were sick over the weekend and throwing up all over the house. Dao got Croup and Dan got a little cold. My graduate classes are exhausting. My days had been going to work, going to class, eating dinner, putting the kids to sleep, doing homework until 1 or 2 in the morning. I feel bad that Dana had to look after both kids while I attended classes and had to do most of the work around the house while I spent time on the computer all the time.

I talked to my mom yesterday and I apologized that I haven’t called much or visited much on weekends because of my workload. Her first respond was “If you can’t handle school just quit. You have two kids and a full time job. Besides, what is that degree going to benefit your career? You’ll still do the same thing you do now.” I was like, “Thanks for the encouragement, mom.”

In the Advanced Typography class tonight, we presented a bunched of existing restaurant menus for a redesign project. One of the menus I selected was from Hủ Tiếu Mì Lacay Chợ Lớn. The professor looked at the menu and said “Lacay Cho Lồn.” Me and another Vietnamese girl laughed our ass off. The professor looked at me and said, “What did I say?” I told him, “You don’t want to know.” But he insisted so I told him, “You said, ‘give me pussy.'” The entire class laughed. He asked me to say the proper name as well as the one he pronounced. He couldn’t believe just a slight change of sound could change the entire meaning.

Trịnh Công Sơn’s “Mưa Hồng” has been translated to Chinese and it sounds quite Chinese.

My hosting provider Lunarpages notified me that they will be upgrading default PHP 5 instance from the version 5.2 to the version 5.3.16 on Wednesday September 12th. Not sure if the upgrade will take Visualgui offline, but the server migration, which will happen on October 8th at 5:00 PM PST, will for about 4 hours.

We have a few plumbing jobs include replacing the water pressure valve and the main water valve. If you know any good plumber with reasonable rate around Fairfax area, .

I took off work yesterday to do my homework and I spent the entire day working on one assignment. I still have to write an essay for another class. This week had been insane. When not working fulltime, I am catching up with freelance projects and doing my school work. I hardly have time for the boys and that’s just killing me. I tried to wrap up everything today and then spend the next few days with the kids, but I am still not done what I needed to do. I am also trying to rebalance my time and make a few changes to my priorities. As much as I love to follow the election and writing about it, I am going to put the blog on hiatus once again. Since I have to write an essay for my class every week, I am going to post those instead. We’ll see how things go.